The academic at the centre of the ‘Climategate' affair, whose raw data is crucial to the theory of climate change, has admitted that he has trouble ‘keeping track' of the information. Colleagues say that the reason Professor Phil Jones has refused Freedom of Information requests is that he may have actually lost the relevant papers. Professor Jones told the BBC yesterday there was truth in the observations of colleagues that he lacked organizational skills, that his office was swamped with piles of paper and that his record keeping is ‘not as good as it should be'. The data is crucial to the famous ‘hockey stick graph' used by climate change advocates to support the theory. Professor Jones also conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now – suggesting global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon. – Daily Mail

Dominant Social Theme: Inaccuracies are anomalous?

Free-Market Analysis: The drumbeat for financial damages seems to have stepped up its pace as regards the failure of evidence surrounding global warming. It is not something that for the most part has been contemplated in the past – the idea that power elite and its allies could be subject to litigation over their phony dominant social themes. Since we are not especially litigious here at the Bell (as supporters of centuries-old common law), we are shy about mentioning this (though not too shy). Given how litigious society is generally, we've always found it a bit surprising that the idea of suing over the more egregious lies of the elite hasn't found more traction. Here's a feedback that can be seen in the Daily Mail, regarding the above article, cleaned up a bit:

Al Gore (pictured above) and these shyster scientists should have to pay back the trillions of dollars they've cost the world to WASTE on this tax hoax! Then they should be flogged in public as an example. The leaked emails PROVE that this disgusting man as his cohorts PURPOSELY destroyed the careers and livelihood of those GOOD scientists that based their studies on facts not LIES. They should be stripped of the livelihood, their grants, and their university positions given to the so-called skeptics who are in fact the ones with ethics. Al Gore should be forced to publicly retract the utter nonsense presented in his propagandist flick and if he were a man of integrity (which he is not – just look how he's stuffed his bank account as a result of his LIES). He should return his farcical Noble prize and apologize for all the needless economic suffering and personal angst amongst nitwit liberals he's caused!

Our perspective is that there is a good deal more potential litigation awaiting the ambitious lawyer who wants to sort through the detritus of failing and failed dominant social themes. There is plenty of evidence for manipulation of all sorts throughout the West including gold and silver markets, defense spending, health issues (vaccines), all sorts of environmental scare tactics, on and on. Here's some information on financial manipulations as related to us by Bill Murphy of GATA during an interview with the Bell:

Bill Murphy: The Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee's basic assertion for the past 10+ years is that there is a Gold Cartel out there suppressing the gold price. It consists of the US Government, including the Fed and Treasury, various other central banks, and bullion banks like Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase. Bullion banks such as Goldman and Morgan became The Gold Cartel's hit men, trading the gold market from the short side and bombing the market in coordinated anti-trust fashion at the beck and call of our government, making a great deal of money in the process. It seems to have all started with Robert Rubin:

Before he was CEO of Goldman Sachs and then US Treasury Secretary, Robert Rubin worked as the top dog in London for Goldman Sachs. One of his duties was to oversee their gold trading operations. We know this because the CEO of Kirkland Lake Gold, Brian Hinchcliffe, whose firm is a staunch GATA supporter, worked in London back then for Goldman Sachs and reported directly to Robert Rubin.

This was many years ago (late 80's) and interest rates in the US were very high, say from 8 to 12%. Rubin had Goldman Sachs borrow gold from the central banks to fund their basic operations, doing so at about a 1 % interest rate. Then they sold the physical gold in the marketplace, using the proceeds as they so desired. This was like FREE money, as long as the price of gold did not rise to any sustained degree for any length of time.

Soon other major financial institutions realized what Goldman Sachs was doing and copied them. Rubin continued these operations as the overall Goldman Sachs CEO in New York and then took it to a new level as US Treasury Secretary. That is how the gold price suppression became the lynchpin of his widely acclaimed "Strong Dollar Policy." GATA's Reg Howe caught onto this notion by finding a paper titled, "Gibson's Paradox and The Gold Standard," co-authored by Lawrence Summers in 1988. Summers, a professor at Harvard at the time, succeeded Rubin as US Treasury Secretary. The bottom line of Summer's analysis is that "gold prices in a free market should move inversely to real interest rates." Control gold and it will help to control interest rates.

From GATA's standpoint it is a serious bummer that Summers is now the Director of the White House's National Economic Council for President Obama. Our energetic new President has the architect of America's economic demise as his key advisor.

I met with Bart Chilton, an outstanding and receptive commissioner with the CFTC, on December 19, 2008 and laid out GATA's evidence of the gold market manipulation. There were three others at our meeting from the CFTC, including their senior counsel. Bart took copious notes …

Daily Bell: What motivates those who do this in your estimation?

Bill Murphy: The motives of "the cabal" are to give support to the dollar, keep US interest rates lower than they should be, and to tone down the widely watched US barometer of US financial market health, that being the gold price. After all, whenever the price of gold soars, it congers up talk of too much inflation, a sinking dollar, or a crisis of some sort … all negative for Wall Street and the incumbent administration. That's exactly the sort of commentary you will be reading about in the weeks and months ahead as the price of gold soars.

Bill Murphy is fairly articulate about these manipulations and we have no doubt that he is correct about at least some of it. We believe this to be true because Wall Street is evidently and obviously a mercantilist institution – as are all great financial centers these days. There is, unfortunately, great interaction between private enterprise and government in the 21st century, and the elite has gone out of its way to ensure that these interactions are in a sense justified. In fact, such interactions are virtually mandated by legislation which has set up a plethora of overseeing bodies both in the EU and in the United States (and of course China, too).

Yet legislation, as the powers-that-be well know, in these large marketplaces is always subject to regulatory capture. That is, the most powerful players eventually gain sway over the regulators themselves, usually by hiring ambitious regulators and making the regulatory authorities beholden to them through a "gaming" of the political process. The game is only for those with the deepest pockets however, and in the process smaller players get squeezed out. This is why large entities in a regulatory democracy seek more regulation – which then concentrates power and removes competition.

What seems to escape the understanding of many is that not much in a regulatory democracy is offered for the betterment of the "people" or their lives. Instead, almost all legislation passed provides some advantage to some deep-pocketed private entity somewhere. This is why government ought to be restrained to the bare minimum (if it cannot be done away with entirely). The problem, as we have explained in the past, is MERCANTILISM, the deliberate conflating of private self-interest with the so-called public interest for personal and corporate gain. It is much easier to pass a law mandating a private-market profit (if one is wealthy enough) than it is to obtain an edge through competition.

The examples are seemingly limitless. When the autism/vaccine controversy was at its height some years ago, Big Pharma sought and received various federal protections against lawsuits. When the economy was collapsing in 2008, the American Treasury Secretary bailed out most of the biggest banking players through a US$700 million TARP program. When GM and Chrysler were on the way out recently, they applied to the US government for help and both companies received generous subsidies.

All of these private/public programs and more are mercantile by nature and therefore, by definition, dishonest. In fact, there is almost no corporate business these days that goes on that does not partake of some sort of government advantage – and is therefore not manipulated at the expense of an individual or groups. Who is going to compensate gold and silver holders, for instance, for the deliberate price suppressions over the years. And who is going to compensate those who have lost their homes because of government/private market bailouts of the current, corrupt Western central banking economy.

To see the full Bill Murphy interview with the Bell, click here.

Our point is that while government likes to trumpet the supposed market failures embodied by Enron and Madoff, the largest manipulations take place within government itself at the behest of PRIVATE PLAYERS. To say it is legalized larceny (amounting literally to trillions) is to put too fine a point on it. Much of it is immoral and even criminal on its face, only it is never investigated and never comes to light. However, as the Internet increasingly brings mercantile double-dealing to light we wonder if the public will eventually realize how badly it has been duped, and how costly the damage is. The debate over damages would be a most interesting one to observe and probably mount into the tens, if not the hundreds, of trillions.