<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">Dear Corporation Watch subscribers,<div><br></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>In the interest of providing Corporation Watch list subscribers with more and better-presented information, we are in the process of converting it to a web-based log (blog). </div><div><br></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>We have chosen to use the free and open-source WordPress service to host the Corporation Watch blog. (If WordPress proves unworkable for some reason, we will move the blog to another host, possibly including the soon-to-be-revamped CounterCorp website itself.)<div><div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>To maintain the existing functionality of the Corporation Watch list, we will continue to send e-mails of the articles/posts to list subscribers.</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>These messages will be slightly different from the previous ones you've received, however, because they won't consist of a single, entire article. Rather, they will comprise one or more postings to the Corporation Watch blog, with links to the articles referenced in the posting(s).</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>You can use the e-mails to read the blog posting(s), or use the links in the e-mails to read the articles (which were previously were sent out to the list in their entirety) on which the blog postings are based, or just use the e-mails to prompt you to go to the blog itself and read (and comment) on everything there.</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>The new e-mail format is itself a work-in-progress, as we work to find the best way to deliver blog updates to our subscribers. Below is an initial effort to provide the first two postings to the Corporation Watch blog.</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Please feel free to send your feedback about the changes to us at <a href="mailto:editor@corporationwatch.org">editor@corporationwatch.org</a>. And we invite you to go to the Corporation Watch blog and comment on the posts themselves. <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px; ">Thanks for your interest and support,</span></div></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: medium; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; "><div bgcolor="#FFFFFF" style="color: rgb(63, 74, 80); font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; "><div style="font-size: 13px; "><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Helvetica"><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000"><br></font></font></div><div style="font-size: 13px; "><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Helvetica"><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000">Corporation Watch Editor</font></font></div><div style="font-size: 13px; "><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000" face="Helvetica, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><br></font></div><div align="center"><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="708" style="position: static; z-index: auto; "><tbody><tr><td style="color: rgb(63, 74, 80); font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; "><div align="left"><p style="color: rgb(63, 74, 80); font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; "><br></p><a name="575965_title" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; "></a><p style="color: rgb(63, 74, 80); font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; clear: both; "><a href="http://corporationwatch.wordpress.com" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; "></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(74, 98, 121); font-size: 20px; font-weight: 800; ">"<a href="http://corporationwatch.wordpress.com" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; ">Corporation Watch</a>" - 2 new articles</span></p><ol style="clear: left; "><li><a href="#575965_0" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; ">Cherry-picking bad apples in a broken barrel</a></li><li><a href="#575965_1" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; ">Fox Security, Inc: Myth of supply and demand enables corporate plunder of economic henhouse</a></li><li><a href="http://www.feedblitz.com/f?Search=575965" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; ">Search Corporation Watch</a></li></ol><h3 style="color: rgb(74, 98, 121); font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-weight: bold; clear: both; "><br></h3><h3 style="color: rgb(74, 98, 121); font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-weight: bold; clear: both; "><a name="575965_0" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; "></a><b><a href="http://corporationwatch.wordpress.com/2009/06/26/madoff-client-enjoyed-improbable-returns/" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; ">Cherry-picking bad apples in a broken barrel</a></b></h3><div class="snap_preview"><p style="color: rgb(63, 74, 80); font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; ">Investigate journalism website Pro Publica posted a<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><a href="http://www.propublica.org/feature/madoff-client-jeffry-picower-netted-5-billion" target="_blank" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; ">June 23 article</a><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>about uber-fraudster Bernard Madoff’s most remunerated client, lawyer/accountant/investor Jeffry Picower.</p><p style="color: rgb(63, 74, 80); font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; ">Picower was among a group of eight super-investors who received special treatment from Madoff. In Picower’s case, this meant annual returns at 100% and above (at a time when most stock indexes were offering returns that hovered around 10%), amounting to a total of about $5<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em>billion</em><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>— which Pro Publica speculates is more than Madoff himself made.</p><p style="color: rgb(63, 74, 80); font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; ">Leaving aside the difference between Madoff’s Ponzi scheme and the generally Ponzi-esque nature of Wall Street and stock markets in general (i.e., the need to bring in ever more investors to pay off the investments of those who’ve already bought in, or the whole things collapses), this bring up a recurring theme in the Madoff scandal and corporate crime in general — the difference between the “bad apple” and “broken barrel” theories of malfeasance.</p><p style="color: rgb(63, 74, 80); font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; ">The bad apple theory says that certain individuals — or occasionally, specific companies (e.g., Enron) — are rotten apples that spoil the rest of an otherwise unblemished barrel. By laying the blame on one person or a small number of wayward individuals or companies, the bad apple theory helps corporate apologists avoid having to confront, explain, and remedy the recurrent and systemic nature of corporate crime.</p><p style="color: rgb(63, 74, 80); font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: 'Lucida Grande', Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px; ">In contrast, the “broken barrel” theory says that it’s the <em>barrel</em> itself that caused the rotten apple to go bad, and thus there are likely to be many more rotten apples in a broken barrel. They can’t simply be explained away as the isolated failings of a few individual apples, which couldn’t be addressed by repairing or replacing the barrel. A broken barrel demands change</span>.</p><p style="color: rgb(63, 74, 80); font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; ">When politicians, the media, and members of the public seize on Bernard Madoff as a uniquely greedy and manipulative individual who acted in his own self-interest, they exclude the system that encourages and enables that behavior, and benefits from it. Anyone who thought that Madoff alone benefitted from his ongoing swindle ignores people such as Picower who were right there alongside Madoff, cramming the ill-gotten gains into their own pockets.</p><p style="color: rgb(63, 74, 80); font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; ">As the Pro Public article observes:</p><blockquote style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier; font-size: 12px; "><li><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'Trebuchet MS'"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;">In 14 instances between 1996 and 2007, a group of Picower trading accounts experienced annual returns of more than 100 percent. On 25 occasions, the annual return exceeded 50 percent. During this same period, the biggest annual gain in either the Dow Jones Industrial Average or the S&P 500 was 31 percent, for the S&P in 1997. The S&P 500’s annual average for that period was slightly under 9 percent.</span></font></font></li><li><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'Trebuchet MS'"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;">The annual rate of return for two of Picower’s regular trading accounts in the four years between 1996 and 1999 ranged from about 120 percent to more than 550 percent annually.</span></font></font></li><li><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'Trebuchet MS'"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;">In 1999, one account earned 950 percent.</span></font></font></li></blockquote><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: 'Lucida Grande', Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 14px; "><p><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;">No one — especially not a professional investor, accountant, and lawyer such as Picower — could possibly have believed that those kinds of returns were the product of normal investments. The profits Madoff generated for his clients were nothing short of financial alchemy, and Picower and others must have known it.</span></font></p><p><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;">To act as if they were not complicit at some level in his fraudulent scheme is to deliberately ignore the condition of the barrel.</span></font></p></span><p style="color: rgb(63, 74, 80); font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: 'Lucida Grande', Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px; ">And, sure enough, the Pro Publica report cites a May 18 <em>Wall Street Journal</em> article, indicating that federal investigators are looking at Madoff’s special investors, who are being sued by a trustee overseeing the bankruptcy liquidation of Maddoff’s firm, saying they knowingly took a substantial portion of Madoff’s ill-gotten gains for themselves.</span></p></div><br><h3 style="color: rgb(74, 98, 121); font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-weight: bold; clear: both; "><a name="575965_1" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; "></a><b><a href="http://corporationwatch.wordpress.com/2009/06/26/fox-security-inc-myth-of-supply-and-demand-enables-plunder-of-henhouse/" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; ">Fox Security, Inc: Myth of supply and demand enables corporate plunder of economic henhouse</a></b></h3><div class="snap_preview"><p style="color: rgb(63, 74, 80); font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; ">Radio commentator Jim Hightower has posted an item on Alternet debunking the orthodox economics explanation — floated by Big Oil (to cover their butts) and parroted by the media (because they’re essentially “embedded” in the corporate economy) — to justify the recent and utterly manipulative rise in gas prices.</p><p style="color: rgb(63, 74, 80); font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; ">Hightower’s June 25 article <em><a title="Open article in new window" href="http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/140889" target="_blank" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; ">Gas Pump Thievery: Who’s Really Behind the Rising Prices at the Pumps?</a></em><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>notes that the standard supply-and-demand cover story makes no sense:</p><blockquote style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier; font-size: 12px; "><p style="color: rgb(63, 74, 80); font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: left; ">Supply and demand? The supply of crude oil has risen this year to its highest level in nearly two decades, even while the demand for gasoline has dropped dramatically, having fallen this month to a 10-year low. Let’s see — supply up, demand down. That’s a classic market formula for <em>cheaper</em><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>prices at the pump. Yet our prices have steadily moved up, rising by two-thirds since the beginning of the year (and by 60 cents a gallon in the past two months alone).</p></blockquote><p style="color: rgb(63, 74, 80); font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; ">This kind of basic analysis always seems beyond the abilities of college-educated journalists, who rarely question the conventional wisdom — which they themselves help to create by mindlessly repeating whatever corporate PR flacks, business analysts, and orthodox economists tell them.</p><p style="color: rgb(63, 74, 80); font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; ">Hightower then goes on to give a far more plausible explanation for the recent run-up in prices:</p><blockquote style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier; font-size: 12px; "><p style="color: rgb(63, 74, 80); font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: left; ">What might surprise you, though, is that the wheeler-dealers now jacking up our pump prices don’t operate under the BPExxonMobilShellChevron brands — but the logos of Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and other Wall Street traders that have been placing vast, unregulated, secretive bets on the future price of oil. They’re playing an electronic casino game in a global “dark market” of exotic derivatives and credit swaps.</p><p style="color: rgb(63, 74, 80); font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: left; ">If this sounds vaguely familiar to you, it’s because this is the same game that Wall Street played with sub-prime mortgages, leading to the present crash of our economy. And, yes, these are the exact same banksters that you and I are presently bailing out with our trillions of tax dollars.</p></blockquote><p style="color: rgb(63, 74, 80); font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; ">And finally, he provides the names of those responsible for creating a system whereby companies that don’t actually buy or sell any oil — or even put down much (if any) money — are able to distort the prices of basic commodities such as oil and food:</p><blockquote style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier; font-size: 12px; "><p style="color: rgb(63, 74, 80); font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: left; ">Among the enthusiastic backers of this legalized thievery were [former Goldman Sachs senior executives] Robert Rubin, the Wall Streeter who was Bill Clinton’s Treasury secretary, and his protege, Larry Summers, who is now Barack Obama’s chief economic advisor.</p></blockquote><p style="color: rgb(63, 74, 80); font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; ">Which is why Obama’s recently announced deckchairs-on-the-Titanic economic “reforms” are more chump change than real change …</p></div></div></td></tr></tbody></table></div><div align="center" style="text-align: -webkit-left;clear: both; "><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"><i><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px; font-style: normal;"><br></span></font></i></span></font></div></div></span></div></div></body></html>