Category Archives: Media watch

Carbon Neutral Investments’ Trail of Disaster: How Carbon Credit Con Artists use Google Adwords to Work the Recovery Scam

Carbon Neutral Investments and the ‘recovery room’ scam

The Careless Organizers of Gumball 3000 are Hooked Up with Boiler Room Scam “Servicers” Carbon Neutral Investments (CNI)

The Gumball 3000 event is helping a deeply dodgy British firm with its marketing.

FBI Raids, Lord Heseltine’s Haymarket Media Group, Financial Regulator “Crackdowns”, “What Car” Magazine…and Carbon Neutral Investments Limited

How two wide boys with shady pasts snared a leading British publisher that has major political connections.

The Glam and The Scam: Sauber Formula 1 Team and its Partner, Carbon Neutral Investments, Limited

The Sauber F1 team and their dodgy partners, Carbon Neutral Investments

How Novice Eco-Warrior Michael Bloomberg Ended up Looking as if he Endorses Carbon Credit Scams

Mayor Bloomberg stitched up by Italian Vogue and a dodgy financial firm: his image and words are being exploited to market carbon credit scams

Glenn Greenwald Starting His Own News Organization

This is major.

Glenn Greenwald on the NSA, GCHQ, and Spying

Yves here. This BBC NewsInsight interview is a remarkable little piece. Greenwald confronts a clearly hostile set of questions from the BBC interviewer. He is not amused and comes pretty close to giving her a dressing down. Go Glenn!

Yanis Varoufakis: No Signal – An Intimate, Personal History of ERT

Yves here. Varoufakis’ post may seem a bit off topic for this blog, but he has provided a history of censorship in Greece as seen through his personal relationship with the recently-shuttered state broadcaster ERT. And that is a more useful reference point for Americans (and likely most Anglo-Saxon readers).

Bill Black: Not with a Bang but a Whimper – the SEC Enforcement Team’s Propaganda Campaign

The New York Times has one of those “inside” stories that unintentionally demonstrate the collapse of justice and financial reporting. This genre involves the media reporting gravely (and uncritically) the administration’s claims that its failure to prosecute any elite for the largest and most destructive financial frauds in history actually demonstrates the exceptional ethical rectitude of the non-prosecutors and non-enforcers.

Taking the Rhetorical Bias Out of Economists’ Discussions of Income Taxation and Public Spending

Yves here. Mirabile dictu! A VoxEU article discusses, admittedly in suitably dense economese, how economists create and enforce biases against taxation by using terminology that presupposes that it’s bad. And as Lambert noted after he saw it went up here: “That post got Tyler Cowen really ticked off, so it must be good.”

Quelle Surprise! Administration Lied About Mortgage Fraud Results, Numbers 4 to 10 Times Too High

Normally I’d relegate a good job of news spadework to the daily Links feature, but Bloomberg caught out Attorney General Eric Holder in such an egregious lie that this failed con job merits ample, widespread publicity and well-deserved derision.

Obama Starting to Lose It Over Snowden

Thanks to Obama’s famed “no drama” coolness, it’s hard to detect when he’s breaking a sweat. But if you look at the substance of his actions, it’s clear the President is losing his famed poise, at least as far as Snowden and the surveillance state revelations are concerned.

An Open Letter to the Media – #Snowden and Latin America

Yves here. This letter from Chicago Public Media (hat tip martha r), signed by a number of prominent scholars and Latin American professionals, sets out to correct the record of the American media’s depiction of Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela in their discussion of Edward Snowden’s situation. I hope our readers south of the border will be able to add to this discussion.