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To: IngotWeTrust who wrote (72216)	6/22/2001 2:41:41 PM
From: Ahda	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 116900

The rebirth of the commodity market, food is a commodity. The only thing we are sure of is we have to eat. To:ahhaha who wrote (2507) From: ahhaha Friday, Jun 22, 2001 2:25 PM Respond to of 2508 There is only question on investor's minds: When do you GET OUT.

To: IngotWeTrust who wrote (72216)	6/22/2001 3:06:02 PM
From: long-gone	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 116900

Hey tutor, we've been told the "big boyz" are also watching close very hard. Why would this be going on? Thanks for bringing forward info that there is(was?) a net long position, and that the net long position is rather small. It does seem rather damn tight between bid/ask & between spot & futures.

To: IngotWeTrust who wrote (72216)	6/28/2001 12:53:14 AM
From: long-gone	Respond to of 116900

House Leadership Turns Up Heat on Privacy Wes Vernon Thursday, June 28, 2001 WASHINGTON - House Majority Whip Tom DeLay has urged the Bush administration to cut the U.S. from any participation in an international privacy-invading program being promoted by Europeans. In a letter to Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, DeLay congratulates the Bush administration for refusing to go along with an attempt by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to sanction low-tax nations for their supposedly "unfair” competition against the high tax welfare states. NewsMax.com has written extensively about this. Now the House leader wants the secretary to "extend that opposition to the anti-privacy information schemes being advocated by the OECD and the EU" (European Union). That is a reference to a proposal by the Paris-based OECD for each of its 28 member nations to increase bank surveillance of customers through "Know Your Customer” practices. To Lisa Dean, a privacy specialist at the Free Congress Foundation, this is an old battle that has to be refought in the public arena yet again. In 1999 the federal government proposed a "Know Your Customer” program that would have jailed your banker if he did not keep close tabs on your deposits and withdrawals and report any "unusual” transactions. This was met with a howl of protest by the public, resulting in the plan’s demise. But like Dracula, it keeps returning from different directions. "For an international organization to twist the arms of democratic nations in order to get them to adopt policies that conflict with the rights and freedoms of their citizens is no surprise. But the fact that these countries, including our own, are considering them is,” Dean writes. President Bush’s economic affairs adviser Larry Lindsey has repeatedly denounced "Know Your Customer” as an ineffective program. As NewsMax.com has reported in the past, many of the so-called "suspicious” transactions have dealt with amounts of less than $10,000, the limit required by law enforcement to begin investigations of citizens. Bottom line: Banks have been forwarding to the feds financial information of citizens that could not legally trigger an investigation in any case. DeLay in his letter to O’Neill says the OECD's and EU's proposed "assaults on privacy and due process legal protection are driven by a desire to thwart international tax competition.” "So far, O’Neill has not calmed the fears of [those Americans] who are concerned that this potential [privacy invasion] could become a reality,” says Dean. It is hoped DeLay’s letter will serve as a nudge in a positive direction. No sooner was the ink dry on the Texas Republican’s letter before the House Financial Services Committee approved legislative provisions to protect the privacy and security concerns of bank customers. The committee voted Wednesday to pass H.R. 1408 — the Financial Antifraud Network, which directs regulators to create an antifraud system to combat fraud in the financial services industry. The bill was improved by the addition of stronger safeguards to protect the civil liberties of financial services customers. J. Bradley Jansen, deputy director for technology policy of Free Congress, singled out Reps. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., and Mike Oxley, R-Ohio, for working to add privacy protections limiting the data-sharing. The new legislation does not permit relying on unconfirmed or "unadjudicated” information. Misuse of the information would draw a penalty. Jansen said Rogers and Oxley should take their experience as former FBI agents "and turn their attention to the information-sharing boondoggle being promoted” by the OECD. newsmax.com

To: IngotWeTrust who wrote (72216)	7/2/2001 8:37:48 AM
From: long-gone	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 116900

OT(?_ It only gets worse: news alert! -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- By John Berlau and Stephanie K. Taylor jberlau@InsightMag.com and staylor@InsightMag.com -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Cash to Buy Postage Makes You Suspect at Post Office Since Insight exposed the U.S. Postal Service’s customer-surveillance program “Under the Eagle’s Eye” (see “Postal Service Has Its Eye on You,” July 2-9), the eyes of many privacy advocates have focused like a laser on the agency. “Warning! The Post Office could report YOU as a drug dealer or terrorist,” reads a press release from the Libertarian Party, which helped generate some 300,000 letters that helped defeat the government’s proposed “Know Your Customer” surveillance rules for banks two years ago (see “Snoops and Spies,” Feb. 22, 1999). Until the Postal Service drops its orders to postal clerks to report certain legal financial transactions as “suspicious activity,” the Libertarian Party and others are urging consumers to purchase money orders, wire transfers and cash cards elsewhere. But now Insight has learned that it’s not just purchases of these financial instruments that the post office reports as suspicious. A training video and manual obtained by Insight indicate that you also could be reported as a “suspicious” customer when you put money on a postage meter, particularly if it’s in cash. In the video, after a jewelry-store owner hands a postal clerk $50,000 cash to put on his postage meter, the clerk is told to report this as a suspicious transaction. Even though it may be perfectly legal, using this much cash is “strange,” the video says. But what is “strange” to privacy advocates is why the Postal Service reports postage-meter transactions at all. Treasury Department regulations that next year will apply Bank Secrecy Act provisions to sellers of money orders and other financial instruments, which the Postal Service uses to justify “Under the Eagle’s Eye,” say absolutely nothing about purchases of postage as a “suspicious” activity. “If putting a lot of money on your postage meter is a sign of criminal activity, I’m afraid we’re going to have to have a little talk with our own office manager,” says George Getz, spokesman for the Libertarian Party, which uses a postage meter to send mass mailings. “I don’t know how somebody would go about laundering money like that. It seems preposterous. Do you launder money 32 cents at a time? That’s crazy.” According to the Postal Service, even transactions of a few thousand dollars in cash should arouse suspicion. “If they [customers] wanted $5,000 on their postage meter, they wouldn’t pay for that in cash,” says Gerry Kreienkamp, a Postal Service spokesman. “That’s just not the way business is done.” But privacy advocates say it’s not unusual for small retail-business owners to pay for mailings with large amounts of cash. It is normal, for instance, for restaurant or store owners who want to send out promotional mailings to go to the post office and put the cash receipts for that day on their postage meters, says Brad Jansen, deputy director of the Free Congress Foundation’s Center for Technology Policy. “It would not be unusual that a retailer would, one, be using cash and, two, have to put out a great deal of postal mailings.” Kreienkamp says that “Under the Eagle’s Eye” does not apply to purchases of stamps and “philatelic” items. But why, then, does the program apply to postage on meters, which is merely “electronic stamps,” asks Rick Merritt, executive director of Postal Watch. Jansen cautions that consumers should assume that any products they purchase at a post office could get them reported as a “suspicious” customer. “The intent is to make this as all-encompassing as possible,” he says. insightmag.com