By Nat Worden
JULY 23, 2009
NEW YORK (Dow Jones)--Valassis Communications Inc. (VCI), a marketing company for consumer goods, said Thursday that it won $300 million in damages from a lawsuit alleging unfair competitive practices against News Corp. (NWSA) unit News America Marketing.
News Corp., owner of this newswire, said it was "disappointed" with the jury's verdict in a county court in Michigan, and it intends to appeal the decision.
The lawsuit, one of three against News America by Valassis, alleged that News America used its dominant market position in its in-store marketing business to undercut Valassis in its freestanding insert, or newspaper coupon, business.
News America denied the charges and said the Valassis lawsuit was "merely part of a larger strategy to get News America Marketing to raise its prices, a move that would have affected both our clients and their customers by reducing the number of coupons available - a consequence that would be extremely unfortunate in this economy."
News America also said its case was hampered by the court's decision not to allow a complaint against Valassis filed by the Federal Trade Commission in 2006 that said the company made "an effort to induce collusion" when it announced a new pricing policy on a public conference call with investors.
Valassis Chief Executive Alan Schultz said the pricing announcement he made was relevant to the investment community and that it wasn't an effort to collude on prices with anyone.
News of the jury's decision in its favor sent Valassis shares sharply higher, up 23%, to $8.63. News Corp.'s A shares rose 2.1%, to $9.87, amid a broad market rally.
Valassis's profits had been dented in recent years because of lost pricing power. Segment profit in its newspaper coupon business has fallen from $185 million in 2001, when it made up 93% of its overall profits, to $1.8 million in 2008, when it made up less than 2% of its profits.
The Michigan jury found News America liable on both counts of Valassis's suit. Meanwhile, Schultz said the company was looking forward to moving ahead on two other cases against News America Marketing - a federal antitrust case and a state unfair-competition suit in California. He said the company could triple its damages in federal court and double them in California.
A News America spokeswoman disputed Valassis's ability to win additional damages.
Elsewhere, shares of Insignia Systems Inc. (ISIG), which competes with News America in the in-store marketing business, rose over 20% in Thursday trading in reaction to the court's decision. Insignia - which has some business relationships with Valassis - also has filed suit against News America for unfair competition in federal district court in Minneapolis.
News America has responded with a motion to dismiss the case and said Insignia's case is unrelated to Thursday's verdict.
-By Nat Worden, Dow Jones Newswires; (212) 416-2472; nat.worden@dowjones.com
http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20090723-721447.html
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
MediaBistro.Com and Organized Crime
MediaBistro.com founder Laurel Touby ... MediaBistro.com, the Hollywood jobs listings, tart "conservative" punditry & celeb news web site, was founded with seed money from MARTIN PERETZ and his business partners. (For details, scroll to the name "Peretz" here.)
Excerpt from: Dendreon & Deceit: Jim Cramer, Pequot Capital
By Mark Mitchell
www.marketrap.com
July 19th, 2009
Financial analyst Jim Cramer "had once planned to run his hedge fund out of the offices of Ivan Boesky, the famous co-conspirator of the criminal stock manipulator Michael Milken. When Boesky was indicted, Cramer instead went to work with Michael Steinhardt, the Boesky-Milken crony and “prominent” hedge fund manager whose father was the “biggest Mafia fence in America” and who was financier for the fugitive billionaire Marc Rich, for whom Steinhardt later arranged a pardon from Bill Clinton. ... It is worth noting that Cramer’s financial news website, TheStreet.com, had several founding partners. One was Cramer. Another was Marty Peretz, a Milken-Boesky crony who was–along with Marc Rich, Boesky, and the Genovese Mafia—a key limited partner of Michael Steinhardt (the hedge fund manager who gave Rocker his start and also incubated Cramer’s hedge fund). ... "
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Editor Says a Murdoch Paid to Settle on Phone Tap
By TIM ARANGO
NYT
July 22, 2009
The editor of News of the World, a London tabloid, told a parliamentary committee on Tuesday that James Murdoch, the son of the media baron Rupert Murdoch, had approved a $1.1 million payment to settle phone-tapping allegations against the paper.
The case — in which the payment was made to Gordon Taylor, the head of the Professional Footballers’ Association — was settled at a 2008 meeting among James Murdoch; Colin Myler, the editor of News of the World; and Tom Crone, a company lawyer, Mr. Myler told a committee of the House of Commons, Bloomberg News reported.
“It was an agreed collective decision,” Mr. Myler told the committee, according to Bloomberg. “It’s how newspapers work.”
The testimony on Tuesday followed a report in The Guardian newspaper two weeks ago that suggested two tabloid newspapers owned by the News Corporation, the media conglomerate controlled by Rupert Murdoch, had engaged in the widespread use of private investigators to illegally hack into the cellphone messages of public officials and celebrities in Britain. News Corporation has denied the allegations.
Shortly after The Guardian article was published, Rupert Murdoch told Bloomberg News that he was unaware of any such payment. “If that had happened,” he said, “I would know about it.”
A News Corporation spokesman declined to comment on Tuesday.
The case involving Mr. Taylor emerged after the 2007 conviction of Clive Goodman, then the editor responsible for News of the World’s coverage of the royal family, on charges that he had hacked into the cellphones of three of its members. Mr. Goodman received a four-month prison sentence. Glenn Mulcaire, a private investigator hired by News of the World, received a six-month sentence. Andy Coulson, who was editor of the paper during the hacking, resigned.
When The Guardian article was published, it caused an uproar in Britain and shined a light on the practices often used by British tabloid journalists. For example, a 2006 report published by the British information commissioner concluded that newspapers commonly hired private investigators. After The Guardian article, Scotland Yard said it would not reopen the matter, adding that it conducted a thorough inquiry three years earlier.
Many editors in London say that newspapers have largely ended the practice. Since the Goodman case, News of the World has enforced a code of conduct that prohibits reporters from hiring private investigators.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/22/business/media/22murdoch.html
NYT
July 22, 2009
The editor of News of the World, a London tabloid, told a parliamentary committee on Tuesday that James Murdoch, the son of the media baron Rupert Murdoch, had approved a $1.1 million payment to settle phone-tapping allegations against the paper.
The case — in which the payment was made to Gordon Taylor, the head of the Professional Footballers’ Association — was settled at a 2008 meeting among James Murdoch; Colin Myler, the editor of News of the World; and Tom Crone, a company lawyer, Mr. Myler told a committee of the House of Commons, Bloomberg News reported.
“It was an agreed collective decision,” Mr. Myler told the committee, according to Bloomberg. “It’s how newspapers work.”
The testimony on Tuesday followed a report in The Guardian newspaper two weeks ago that suggested two tabloid newspapers owned by the News Corporation, the media conglomerate controlled by Rupert Murdoch, had engaged in the widespread use of private investigators to illegally hack into the cellphone messages of public officials and celebrities in Britain. News Corporation has denied the allegations.
Shortly after The Guardian article was published, Rupert Murdoch told Bloomberg News that he was unaware of any such payment. “If that had happened,” he said, “I would know about it.”
A News Corporation spokesman declined to comment on Tuesday.
The case involving Mr. Taylor emerged after the 2007 conviction of Clive Goodman, then the editor responsible for News of the World’s coverage of the royal family, on charges that he had hacked into the cellphones of three of its members. Mr. Goodman received a four-month prison sentence. Glenn Mulcaire, a private investigator hired by News of the World, received a six-month sentence. Andy Coulson, who was editor of the paper during the hacking, resigned.
When The Guardian article was published, it caused an uproar in Britain and shined a light on the practices often used by British tabloid journalists. For example, a 2006 report published by the British information commissioner concluded that newspapers commonly hired private investigators. After The Guardian article, Scotland Yard said it would not reopen the matter, adding that it conducted a thorough inquiry three years earlier.
Many editors in London say that newspapers have largely ended the practice. Since the Goodman case, News of the World has enforced a code of conduct that prohibits reporters from hiring private investigators.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/22/business/media/22murdoch.html
The Washington Post's Aversion to the Word "Torture"
Excerpt from: "The WaPo Takes The Next Step In Condoning Torture"The Daily Dish
27 Jul 2009
" ... The Washington press corps still refuses to call the Bush techniques torture, adopting the lies of the government as truth, allowed brazen defenses of torture on its op-ed pages, has one columnist, Charles Krauthammer, who has pioneered and championed the torture of prisoners, fired anti-torture columnists like Dan Froomkin, and now want to cast a blessing on the torture program by singling out just a few who went beyond it. So they get the appearance of actually caring about the subject while protecting their friends from any unpleasantness caused by brutally torturing hundreds of prisoners. I mean: how can one invite Don Rumsfeld for a salon at Lally Weymouth's house if he is, gasp, a war criminal? But Rumsfeld is a war criminal, and he should be treated as such in Washington. He isn't. Because he is of their class. Lynndie England, doing what Rumsfeld told her to do? She went to jail. Rummy gets a fat book contract and invites to Washington parties. ... "
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/07/crossing-the-line.html
Monday, July 27, 2009
Dendreon & Deceit: Jim Cramer, Pequot Capital
By Mark Mitchell
www.marketrap.com
July 19th, 2009
“SELL! SELL! SELL!” shouted Jim Cramer on March 28, 2007.
The CNBC “journalist” assured his viewers that the FDA advisory panel would vote that Dendreon’s treatment for prostate cancer was neither safe nor effective (notwithstanding the fact that the FDA had given the treatment “priority review” status because Provenge had shown strong trial results and was destined for critically ill patients).
On the following day, when the FDA advisory panel voted unanimously that Provenge was safe and overwhelmingly that it was effective, Cramer said, once again, that he had made “a mistake.” By way of explanation, Cramer said that he had mixed up Dendreon’s treatment, Provenge, with Provaisic, the fictional drug from the 1993 Hollywood movie “The Fugitive,” in which Harrison Ford plays a doctor trying to expose an evil pharmaceutical company called Devlin MacGreggor.
But Cramer, again drawing upon his vast medical expertise, continued to insist that Provenge remained unlikely to gain FDA approval.
By this time, a number of bloggers and stock market observers had noted that Cramer, a former hedge fund manager, had recently made a video available to a limited number of high-paying subscribers to his financial news website, TheStreet.com. In this video, Cramer advised his viewers – mostly Wall Street operators — to illegally drive down stock prices.
“Maybe you need $10 million capital to knock [a stock] down,” Cramer had said. “It’s a fun game and it’s a lucrative game…By the way, no one else in the world would ever admit that, but I don’t care…Now, you can’t foment…You can’t create yourself an impression that a stock’s down. But you do it anyway because the SEC doesn’t understand it…This is just actually blatantly illegal…But I think it’s really important to foment…You get [the CNBC reporter]…talking about it as if there’s something wrong [with the stock]…Then you would call The Wall Street Journal and get the bozo reporter…if you’re not doing it maybe you shouldn’t be in the game.”
The bloggers and observers who pointed to this video as evidence of Cramer’s skulduggery also noted that Cramer had once planned to run his hedge fund out of the offices of Ivan Boesky, the famous co-conspirator of the criminal stock manipulator Michael Milken. When Boesky was indicted, Cramer instead went to work with Michael Steinhardt, the Boesky-Milken crony and “prominent” hedge fund manager whose father was the “biggest Mafia fence in America” and who was financier for the fugitive billionaire Marc Rich, for whom Steinhardt later arranged a pardon from Bill Clinton.
By 2007, I had (while working as an editor for the Columbia Journalism Review) spent close to a year studying the work of Cramer and a clique of influential journalists, most of whom had previously worked in high-level positions for Cramer’s website, TheStreet.com. I had discovered that the existence of short-side stock manipulation was denied by these journalists (including Cramer, when he was communicating to general audiences, as opposed to when he was explaining to select groups of Wall Street operators how to do the thing he was publicly saying does not exist).
The journalists were especially keen to whitewash the crime of naked short selling, and given the threat that this crime posed to so many companies and the very stability of the financial system, it seemed to me that these journalists were engaged in a cover-up of immense proportions.
I had also discovered that these journalists routinely reported negative stories that contained bias, falsehoods, and well-timed “mistakes.” The vast majority of these stories were sourced from one particular network of hedge fund managers and miscreants. Invariably, these stories were about public companies that the hedge fund managers had sold short. And, invariably, these stories were aired right at the time that the target companies were getting bombarded with phantom stock.
Moreover, most of the hedge funds and miscreants in this network seemed, like Jim Cramer, to be connected in important ways to the criminals Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky, or their close associates. One of them was David Rocker.
Last year, Rocker’s hedge fund, Copper River (previously known as Rocker Partners), was shut down. Soon after, Carol Remond, a Dow Jones Newswires journalist who had close ties to Rocker, revealed that Rocker’s most important trading strategy had been to abuse “the Madoff Exemption” allowing market makers to engage in naked short selling (see “Carol Remond Tells a Joke She Doesn’t Get” for details) .
According to Remond, when the SEC closed this loophole, making it more difficult for Rocker Partners/Copper River to work with option market makers to manufacture phantom stock, the hedge fund went out of business. What she left unexplained, however, was that such exploitation was illegal. Therefore, Dow Jones reporter Carol Remond was in fact bemoaning the tragedy that a hedge fund had to close because it was not able to break the law anymore.
Rocker had previously worked as a top trader for Michael Steinhardt, the Boesky and Genovese Mafia crony whose offices had also housed Jim Cramer’s hedge fund. In later years, Rocker became the largest outside shareholder in Cramer’s financial news website, TheStreet.com.
In 2006, staff at the Securities and Exchange Commission suspected that Rocker and other hedge funds in his network were working with an “independent” financial research shop called Gradient Analytics and a select group of journalists to disseminate false information in order to drive down stock prices. The SEC issued subpoenas to Rocker, Gradient, TheStreet.com, Jim Cramer, Herb Greenberg (a founding editor of TheStreet.com who was then working for MarketWatch.com and CNBC), and that Dow Jones reporter, Carol Remond.
In response, Cramer famously vandalized his subpoena on live television. Other journalists (most of them tied to Cramer) went berserk, claiming that Rocker had done no wrong and the SEC’s subpoenas had violated the media’s first amendment right to free speech. Soon after, the SEC said it would not enforce the subpoenas it had issued to journalists. And a year later, the commission dropped its investigation of Gradient and Rocker.
In May of 2006, shortly after the SEC announced that it would not enforce its subpoenas, a recently dismissed SEC attorney named Gary Aguirre wrote an eye-popping letter to the United States (USO, X, USL) Congress in which he stated that he had led an SEC investigation into allegations of rampant naked short selling and insider trading at a hedge fund called Pequot Capital.
Aguirre said that his rank-and-file colleagues at the SEC believed that Pequot’s naked short selling had the potential to “seriously injure the financial markets,” but before he could complete his investigation, Aguirre’s superiors at the SEC, captured by powerful Wall Street interests, had fired him for political reasons.
Since then, a U.S. Congressional Committee has investigated and issued a lengthy report noting that there seemed to be evidence that Pequot was indeed engaged in “stock manipulation” (naked short selling). As for the SEC’s failure to fully investigate Aguirre’s allegations, the Congressional Committee concluded that the “picture is colored with overtones of a possible cover-up.”
The SEC inspector general also issued a report that backed up all of Aguirre’s claims.
Late in 2008, the SEC re-opened its investigation into Pequot Capital. And in May, 2009, Pequot manager Art Samberg shut down the fund, noting that the investigations had made the “situation increasingly untenable for the firm and for me.”
But from what is known publicly, the SEC is only looking into insider trading at Pequot. As for Aguirre’s investigation into Pequot’s alleged naked short selling – the crime that had the potential to “seriously injure the financial markets”—the SEC has said nothing.
Remember, as far as the SEC is concerned, illegal naked short selling is a big secret – “proprietary trading strategies.”
At any rate, it is worth noting that Cramer’s financial news website, TheStreet.com, had several founding partners. One was Cramer. Another was Marty Peretz, a Milken-Boesky crony who was–along with Marc Rich, Boesky, and the Genovese Mafia—a key limited partner of Michael Steinhardt (the hedge fund manager who gave Rocker his start and also incubated Cramer’s hedge fund).
A third founding partner of TheStreet.com was famously alleged to have engaged in rampant illegal naked short selling, just as David Rocker, once the largest outside shareholder of TheStreet.com, was reported (by Dow Jones reporter Carol Remond, unwittingly) to have engaged in rampant illegal naked short selling in cahoots with options market makers.
The name of this third founding partner of Cramer’s website, TheStreet.com, was…Pequot Capital, the hedge fund whose alleged naked short selling and insider trading were the targets of Gary Aguirre’s SEC investigation — the investigation that got quashed, leading to one of the greatest scandals in SEC history.
So it goes almost without saying that Pequot Capital was the fifth of seven “colorful” hedge funds that held large numbers of put options in Dendreon at the end of March, 2007 – right at the time when Cramer was shouting “SELL! SELL! SELL!” and criminal naked short sellers were flooding the market with at least 9 million phantom Dendreon shares.
* * * * * * * *
In addition to Cramer’s rants, there were other indications that Dendreon might be in the sights of some powerful players, and might therefore be in trouble – despite the fact that its treatment for prostate cancer seemed to be on the fast track to FDA approval.
On March 22, 2007, CNBC’s Mike Huckman wrote in a blog that he remembered “sitting at a table at a rare Dendreon analyst meeting a few years ago and someone from a Connecticut hedge fund leaned over and whispered in my ear, ‘It [Provenge] doesn’t work.’” Huckman made no indication of questioning whether the hedge fund might have had a motive for saying that.
There were odd mutterings from other quarters as well. On the day before the FDA’s advisory panel met to vote on Provenge, Matthew Herper of Forbes magazine published an article casting doubts on Dendreon’s prospects. He wrote that “researchers, statisticians and Wall Street analysts are fiercely debating whether there is enough data about [Dendreon’s] radical new treatment.”
In fact, there was no “fierce” debate at all. For most Wall Street analysts, the calculation was rather simple. Given that Dendreon’s trials had shown that Provenge was safe, and given that the treatment was destined for end-stage patients (hence its “priority review” status), the advisory panel was likely to vote in its favor. In 97% of all cases, the FDA had followed the recommendations of its advisory panels. And when FDA advisory panels recommended approval for drugs destined for dying patients, the FDA had accepted its panels’ recommendations 100% of the time.
When the FDA approved treatments, the companies that developed them almost always saw their stock prices go up. So from the perspective of most Wall Street analysts, the future for Dendreon looked bright.
As for those “researchers and statisticians,” most agreed that Provenge was not only safe, but also effective. However, a small number of researchers and statisticians were, along with the hedge funds, whispering in reporters’ ears. They were saying that Provenge doesn’t work.
But there were excellent reasons to doubt the words of the researchers who were critical of Provenge. And, as we will see, the most prominent of them were preparing (with the possible connivance of a criminal “philanthropist” named Michael Milken and seven “colorful” hedge fund managers) to cash in on one of the stranger occurrences in the FDA’s 80 years of existence.
http://www.marketrap.com/article/view_article/91110/dendreon-deceit-jim-cramer-pequot-capital
www.marketrap.com
July 19th, 2009
“SELL! SELL! SELL!” shouted Jim Cramer on March 28, 2007.
The CNBC “journalist” assured his viewers that the FDA advisory panel would vote that Dendreon’s treatment for prostate cancer was neither safe nor effective (notwithstanding the fact that the FDA had given the treatment “priority review” status because Provenge had shown strong trial results and was destined for critically ill patients).
On the following day, when the FDA advisory panel voted unanimously that Provenge was safe and overwhelmingly that it was effective, Cramer said, once again, that he had made “a mistake.” By way of explanation, Cramer said that he had mixed up Dendreon’s treatment, Provenge, with Provaisic, the fictional drug from the 1993 Hollywood movie “The Fugitive,” in which Harrison Ford plays a doctor trying to expose an evil pharmaceutical company called Devlin MacGreggor.
But Cramer, again drawing upon his vast medical expertise, continued to insist that Provenge remained unlikely to gain FDA approval.
By this time, a number of bloggers and stock market observers had noted that Cramer, a former hedge fund manager, had recently made a video available to a limited number of high-paying subscribers to his financial news website, TheStreet.com. In this video, Cramer advised his viewers – mostly Wall Street operators — to illegally drive down stock prices.
“Maybe you need $10 million capital to knock [a stock] down,” Cramer had said. “It’s a fun game and it’s a lucrative game…By the way, no one else in the world would ever admit that, but I don’t care…Now, you can’t foment…You can’t create yourself an impression that a stock’s down. But you do it anyway because the SEC doesn’t understand it…This is just actually blatantly illegal…But I think it’s really important to foment…You get [the CNBC reporter]…talking about it as if there’s something wrong [with the stock]…Then you would call The Wall Street Journal and get the bozo reporter…if you’re not doing it maybe you shouldn’t be in the game.”
The bloggers and observers who pointed to this video as evidence of Cramer’s skulduggery also noted that Cramer had once planned to run his hedge fund out of the offices of Ivan Boesky, the famous co-conspirator of the criminal stock manipulator Michael Milken. When Boesky was indicted, Cramer instead went to work with Michael Steinhardt, the Boesky-Milken crony and “prominent” hedge fund manager whose father was the “biggest Mafia fence in America” and who was financier for the fugitive billionaire Marc Rich, for whom Steinhardt later arranged a pardon from Bill Clinton.
By 2007, I had (while working as an editor for the Columbia Journalism Review) spent close to a year studying the work of Cramer and a clique of influential journalists, most of whom had previously worked in high-level positions for Cramer’s website, TheStreet.com. I had discovered that the existence of short-side stock manipulation was denied by these journalists (including Cramer, when he was communicating to general audiences, as opposed to when he was explaining to select groups of Wall Street operators how to do the thing he was publicly saying does not exist).
The journalists were especially keen to whitewash the crime of naked short selling, and given the threat that this crime posed to so many companies and the very stability of the financial system, it seemed to me that these journalists were engaged in a cover-up of immense proportions.
I had also discovered that these journalists routinely reported negative stories that contained bias, falsehoods, and well-timed “mistakes.” The vast majority of these stories were sourced from one particular network of hedge fund managers and miscreants. Invariably, these stories were about public companies that the hedge fund managers had sold short. And, invariably, these stories were aired right at the time that the target companies were getting bombarded with phantom stock.
Moreover, most of the hedge funds and miscreants in this network seemed, like Jim Cramer, to be connected in important ways to the criminals Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky, or their close associates. One of them was David Rocker.
Last year, Rocker’s hedge fund, Copper River (previously known as Rocker Partners), was shut down. Soon after, Carol Remond, a Dow Jones Newswires journalist who had close ties to Rocker, revealed that Rocker’s most important trading strategy had been to abuse “the Madoff Exemption” allowing market makers to engage in naked short selling (see “Carol Remond Tells a Joke She Doesn’t Get” for details) .
According to Remond, when the SEC closed this loophole, making it more difficult for Rocker Partners/Copper River to work with option market makers to manufacture phantom stock, the hedge fund went out of business. What she left unexplained, however, was that such exploitation was illegal. Therefore, Dow Jones reporter Carol Remond was in fact bemoaning the tragedy that a hedge fund had to close because it was not able to break the law anymore.
Rocker had previously worked as a top trader for Michael Steinhardt, the Boesky and Genovese Mafia crony whose offices had also housed Jim Cramer’s hedge fund. In later years, Rocker became the largest outside shareholder in Cramer’s financial news website, TheStreet.com.
In 2006, staff at the Securities and Exchange Commission suspected that Rocker and other hedge funds in his network were working with an “independent” financial research shop called Gradient Analytics and a select group of journalists to disseminate false information in order to drive down stock prices. The SEC issued subpoenas to Rocker, Gradient, TheStreet.com, Jim Cramer, Herb Greenberg (a founding editor of TheStreet.com who was then working for MarketWatch.com and CNBC), and that Dow Jones reporter, Carol Remond.
In response, Cramer famously vandalized his subpoena on live television. Other journalists (most of them tied to Cramer) went berserk, claiming that Rocker had done no wrong and the SEC’s subpoenas had violated the media’s first amendment right to free speech. Soon after, the SEC said it would not enforce the subpoenas it had issued to journalists. And a year later, the commission dropped its investigation of Gradient and Rocker.
In May of 2006, shortly after the SEC announced that it would not enforce its subpoenas, a recently dismissed SEC attorney named Gary Aguirre wrote an eye-popping letter to the United States (USO, X, USL) Congress in which he stated that he had led an SEC investigation into allegations of rampant naked short selling and insider trading at a hedge fund called Pequot Capital.
Aguirre said that his rank-and-file colleagues at the SEC believed that Pequot’s naked short selling had the potential to “seriously injure the financial markets,” but before he could complete his investigation, Aguirre’s superiors at the SEC, captured by powerful Wall Street interests, had fired him for political reasons.
Since then, a U.S. Congressional Committee has investigated and issued a lengthy report noting that there seemed to be evidence that Pequot was indeed engaged in “stock manipulation” (naked short selling). As for the SEC’s failure to fully investigate Aguirre’s allegations, the Congressional Committee concluded that the “picture is colored with overtones of a possible cover-up.”
The SEC inspector general also issued a report that backed up all of Aguirre’s claims.
Late in 2008, the SEC re-opened its investigation into Pequot Capital. And in May, 2009, Pequot manager Art Samberg shut down the fund, noting that the investigations had made the “situation increasingly untenable for the firm and for me.”
But from what is known publicly, the SEC is only looking into insider trading at Pequot. As for Aguirre’s investigation into Pequot’s alleged naked short selling – the crime that had the potential to “seriously injure the financial markets”—the SEC has said nothing.
Remember, as far as the SEC is concerned, illegal naked short selling is a big secret – “proprietary trading strategies.”
At any rate, it is worth noting that Cramer’s financial news website, TheStreet.com, had several founding partners. One was Cramer. Another was Marty Peretz, a Milken-Boesky crony who was–along with Marc Rich, Boesky, and the Genovese Mafia—a key limited partner of Michael Steinhardt (the hedge fund manager who gave Rocker his start and also incubated Cramer’s hedge fund).
A third founding partner of TheStreet.com was famously alleged to have engaged in rampant illegal naked short selling, just as David Rocker, once the largest outside shareholder of TheStreet.com, was reported (by Dow Jones reporter Carol Remond, unwittingly) to have engaged in rampant illegal naked short selling in cahoots with options market makers.
The name of this third founding partner of Cramer’s website, TheStreet.com, was…Pequot Capital, the hedge fund whose alleged naked short selling and insider trading were the targets of Gary Aguirre’s SEC investigation — the investigation that got quashed, leading to one of the greatest scandals in SEC history.
So it goes almost without saying that Pequot Capital was the fifth of seven “colorful” hedge funds that held large numbers of put options in Dendreon at the end of March, 2007 – right at the time when Cramer was shouting “SELL! SELL! SELL!” and criminal naked short sellers were flooding the market with at least 9 million phantom Dendreon shares.
* * * * * * * *
In addition to Cramer’s rants, there were other indications that Dendreon might be in the sights of some powerful players, and might therefore be in trouble – despite the fact that its treatment for prostate cancer seemed to be on the fast track to FDA approval.
On March 22, 2007, CNBC’s Mike Huckman wrote in a blog that he remembered “sitting at a table at a rare Dendreon analyst meeting a few years ago and someone from a Connecticut hedge fund leaned over and whispered in my ear, ‘It [Provenge] doesn’t work.’” Huckman made no indication of questioning whether the hedge fund might have had a motive for saying that.
There were odd mutterings from other quarters as well. On the day before the FDA’s advisory panel met to vote on Provenge, Matthew Herper of Forbes magazine published an article casting doubts on Dendreon’s prospects. He wrote that “researchers, statisticians and Wall Street analysts are fiercely debating whether there is enough data about [Dendreon’s] radical new treatment.”
In fact, there was no “fierce” debate at all. For most Wall Street analysts, the calculation was rather simple. Given that Dendreon’s trials had shown that Provenge was safe, and given that the treatment was destined for end-stage patients (hence its “priority review” status), the advisory panel was likely to vote in its favor. In 97% of all cases, the FDA had followed the recommendations of its advisory panels. And when FDA advisory panels recommended approval for drugs destined for dying patients, the FDA had accepted its panels’ recommendations 100% of the time.
When the FDA approved treatments, the companies that developed them almost always saw their stock prices go up. So from the perspective of most Wall Street analysts, the future for Dendreon looked bright.
As for those “researchers and statisticians,” most agreed that Provenge was not only safe, but also effective. However, a small number of researchers and statisticians were, along with the hedge funds, whispering in reporters’ ears. They were saying that Provenge doesn’t work.
But there were excellent reasons to doubt the words of the researchers who were critical of Provenge. And, as we will see, the most prominent of them were preparing (with the possible connivance of a criminal “philanthropist” named Michael Milken and seven “colorful” hedge fund managers) to cash in on one of the stranger occurrences in the FDA’s 80 years of existence.
http://www.marketrap.com/article/view_article/91110/dendreon-deceit-jim-cramer-pequot-capital
Family Group Compares Homosexuality to Nazism
by Michael A. Jones
http://gayrights.change.org
July 27, 2009
Wow. That's pretty much all I can think of as a response to this. But it's true ... a staff member at the Illinois Family Institute (IFI) has penned a screed that not only compares LGBT people to Nazis, but urges the Christian Church to fight homosexuality as if it were akin to nazism or slavery.
The article, written by Laurie Higgins, IFI's Division of School Advocacy Director, describes how since the Christian Church acted too late in combatting nazism, it shouldn't be haste in acting to defeat homosexuals. After reading that, and reading Laurie Higgins's bio (where you'll see she's a former school teacher), I can only be thankful that someone with this much hate in their system isn't in charge of teaching children anymore.
Here's an excerpt, and prepare to be horrified:
What is alarming about the account of the German Evangelical Church's reprehensible failure [to fight nazism] is its similarity to the ongoing disheartening story of the contemporary American church's failure to respond appropriately to the spread of radical, heretical, destructive views of homosexuality. Don't we today see church leaders self-censoring out of fear of losing their positions or their church members? Don't we see churches criticizing those who boldly confront the efforts of homosexual activists to propagandize children and undermine the church's teaching on homosexuality? Aren't the calls of the capitulating German Christians for "a more reasonable tone" and a commitment to "honor different views" exactly like the calls of today's church to be tolerant and honor "diversity"? Don't pastors justify their silence by claiming they fear losing their tax-exempt status (i.e. government assistance)? Don't they rationalize inaction by claiming that speaking out will prevent them from saving souls?
What is even more reprehensible in America, however, is that church leaders don't currently face loss of livelihood, imprisonment, exile, or death, as they did in Germany, and yet they remain silent.
Someone give this "religious" writer a history book, and maybe let her know that LGBT people were also victims of the Holocaust. But beyond the historical point, isn't this disturbing? It's literally a call to action to churchgoers to combat homosexuality as if it were akin to the threat of one of the worst, most violent movements ever to exist in the history of the planet.
I say this goes beyond even the Fred Phelps level of hatred and anger toward LGBT people. And the scarier part? The Illinios Family Institute is relatively mainstream within the conservative movement. ...
http://gayrights.change.org/blog/view/family_group_compares_homosexuality_to_nazism
http://gayrights.change.org
July 27, 2009
Wow. That's pretty much all I can think of as a response to this. But it's true ... a staff member at the Illinois Family Institute (IFI) has penned a screed that not only compares LGBT people to Nazis, but urges the Christian Church to fight homosexuality as if it were akin to nazism or slavery.
The article, written by Laurie Higgins, IFI's Division of School Advocacy Director, describes how since the Christian Church acted too late in combatting nazism, it shouldn't be haste in acting to defeat homosexuals. After reading that, and reading Laurie Higgins's bio (where you'll see she's a former school teacher), I can only be thankful that someone with this much hate in their system isn't in charge of teaching children anymore.
Here's an excerpt, and prepare to be horrified:
What is alarming about the account of the German Evangelical Church's reprehensible failure [to fight nazism] is its similarity to the ongoing disheartening story of the contemporary American church's failure to respond appropriately to the spread of radical, heretical, destructive views of homosexuality. Don't we today see church leaders self-censoring out of fear of losing their positions or their church members? Don't we see churches criticizing those who boldly confront the efforts of homosexual activists to propagandize children and undermine the church's teaching on homosexuality? Aren't the calls of the capitulating German Christians for "a more reasonable tone" and a commitment to "honor different views" exactly like the calls of today's church to be tolerant and honor "diversity"? Don't pastors justify their silence by claiming they fear losing their tax-exempt status (i.e. government assistance)? Don't they rationalize inaction by claiming that speaking out will prevent them from saving souls?
What is even more reprehensible in America, however, is that church leaders don't currently face loss of livelihood, imprisonment, exile, or death, as they did in Germany, and yet they remain silent.
Someone give this "religious" writer a history book, and maybe let her know that LGBT people were also victims of the Holocaust. But beyond the historical point, isn't this disturbing? It's literally a call to action to churchgoers to combat homosexuality as if it were akin to the threat of one of the worst, most violent movements ever to exist in the history of the planet.
I say this goes beyond even the Fred Phelps level of hatred and anger toward LGBT people. And the scarier part? The Illinios Family Institute is relatively mainstream within the conservative movement. ...
http://gayrights.change.org/blog/view/family_group_compares_homosexuality_to_nazism
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Oh, the Irony: Swift Boat Funder Pickens Blogging for The Huffington Post
http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/politics/stories/oh-the-irony-swift-boat-funder-pickens-blogging-for-the-huffington
Billionaire oilman has greenwashed his reputation enough to write for a notoriously liberal blog despite funding the Swift Boat campaign.
By Stephanie Rogers
Jul 14 2009
How did T. Boone Pickens, a conservative billionaire who made his fortune in the oil industry, manage to reinvent himself in the public eye as an environmentalist?
Pickens, who admittedly jumped onto the wind power bandwagon purely for financial reasons rather than environmental ones, was set to build the world's largest wind farm before economic turmoil and a lack of transmission lines prompted him to postpone the project.
Now his name and photo are prominently displayed alongside an entreaty for the passage of a natural gas act in Congress in the Green section of liberal media powerhouse The Huffington Post. And it's hardly the first post that he's written there – he has contributed no fewer than 15 times since January, covering energy-related topics including, of course, The Pickens Plan.
Gawker points out the irony in this, considering that Pickens was a major funder of "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth," which has become virtually synonymous with dirty, slanderous smear attacks after its campaigns against Democratic candidates including former presidential candidate John Kerry.
The New York Times sums up the fallacy of the Swift Boat attacks, saying "Extensive media accounts undermined the Swift Boat charges in 2004, pointing out that some of the Swift Boat critics had written statements during Vietnam lauding Mr. Kerry for extraordinary bravery in the incidents they later said he made up."
"And you know," Gawker says, "we could find some examples of Arianna Huffington and everyone else on that site decrying the Swift Boat attacks of 2004, or even just using 'Swift Boat' as a shorthand for incredibly underhanded smear campaigns that are hurting America."
As a matter of fact, a search of the term 'Swift Boat' at The Huffington Post returns 71 pages of results including an editorial that asks, "Will John Podesta and Carl Pope a) greenwash a Republican operative oil man who funded the swift boat vets and has plans to make billions selling natural gas and exploiting our water supply? or b) do the right thing?"
Considering that T. Boone Pickens is one of America's most successful oily salesmen, giving his reputation a green makeover is just another day at the office.
http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/politics/stories/oh-the-irony-swift-boat-funder-pickens-blogging-for-the-huffington
Billionaire oilman has greenwashed his reputation enough to write for a notoriously liberal blog despite funding the Swift Boat campaign.
By Stephanie Rogers
Jul 14 2009
How did T. Boone Pickens, a conservative billionaire who made his fortune in the oil industry, manage to reinvent himself in the public eye as an environmentalist?
Pickens, who admittedly jumped onto the wind power bandwagon purely for financial reasons rather than environmental ones, was set to build the world's largest wind farm before economic turmoil and a lack of transmission lines prompted him to postpone the project.
Now his name and photo are prominently displayed alongside an entreaty for the passage of a natural gas act in Congress in the Green section of liberal media powerhouse The Huffington Post. And it's hardly the first post that he's written there – he has contributed no fewer than 15 times since January, covering energy-related topics including, of course, The Pickens Plan.
Gawker points out the irony in this, considering that Pickens was a major funder of "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth," which has become virtually synonymous with dirty, slanderous smear attacks after its campaigns against Democratic candidates including former presidential candidate John Kerry.The New York Times sums up the fallacy of the Swift Boat attacks, saying "Extensive media accounts undermined the Swift Boat charges in 2004, pointing out that some of the Swift Boat critics had written statements during Vietnam lauding Mr. Kerry for extraordinary bravery in the incidents they later said he made up."
"And you know," Gawker says, "we could find some examples of Arianna Huffington and everyone else on that site decrying the Swift Boat attacks of 2004, or even just using 'Swift Boat' as a shorthand for incredibly underhanded smear campaigns that are hurting America."
As a matter of fact, a search of the term 'Swift Boat' at The Huffington Post returns 71 pages of results including an editorial that asks, "Will John Podesta and Carl Pope a) greenwash a Republican operative oil man who funded the swift boat vets and has plans to make billions selling natural gas and exploiting our water supply? or b) do the right thing?"
Considering that T. Boone Pickens is one of America's most successful oily salesmen, giving his reputation a green makeover is just another day at the office.
http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/politics/stories/oh-the-irony-swift-boat-funder-pickens-blogging-for-the-huffington
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