Category Archives: mind-control

Rajat Gupta: Goldman Footing Legal Bills, Says Anonymous Source

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The WTF quotient of this bizarre case shoots up even higher.

Someone from Goldman is leaking anonymously that Gupta’s bills –  to the tune of $30 million and counting – are being footed by Goldman itself. With Procter & Gamble picking up the rest.

Startribune:

Goldman foots bulk of Gupta’s $30M legal bill

For Goldman Sachs, the insider trading case against former board member Rajat Gupta which ended in a conviction Friday, was distracting and embarrassing. It has also been very expensive. Goldman Sachs has paid for the bulk of Gupta’s legal defense, which has cost nearly $30 million, according to two people with direct knowledge of the case who requested anonymity because they were unauthorized to discuss it publicly. Procter & Gamble, on whose board Gupta also served, has picked up the balance of the bill. A jury found Gupta guilty of leaking Goldman’s private boardroom discussions to the former hedge fund titan Raj Rajaratnam. He was acquitted on a count related to divulging secrets about P&G. Gupta plans to appeal.”

Comment

[Lila, June 19, 2012. This has since been confirmed as factual and not a rumor or PR]

Hmm. We don’t think too much of anonymous leaking.  Sounds like Goldman PR. The guy is coming off sympathetically, so maybe some one wants to stir up a little bad feeling. Kind of obvious.

They figured they’d axe the guy and everyone would be dancing in the streets and asking for blood. But most people seem to realize that even if Gupta did what he did, insider trading is a small time side-show on Wall Street.  Not the really bad stuff. Most people get that.

And the Indian business world didn’t break down and sob with contrition either, which also flummoxed the ruling class. I mean what good is a psyop, if your target holds up his middle finger back at you?

Reuters ran a piece telling the Indian business community to get a better cause.

The Financial Times (pretty much a mouthpiece for the financial establishment) scolded them for showing support for Gupta.

Then it trotted out various Indian chamchas to pontificate about how corrupt Indian business is, which is true but irrelevant, since Indian business culture has nothing to do with what went on here.

Rajat Gupta lived all his life in the West. He graduated  from Harvard Business School, for pete’s sake. The guy is a product of Western business culture. Go wag a finger at Harvard.

They even had one Gurcharan Das – must be a pretty naive guy – to come out with the proper attitude the wogs are supposed to take about all this. Notice that Gurcharan Das has a website that shows him speechifying at Tahrir Square (US Intel-led revolution)and advising Indians not to let a good crisis go to waste

(this is pure globalist-speak).

[June 19: Further conspiracy note: when I got up today and checked, I noticed that the reference to Tahrir Square etc. had been cut out from my blog post, even though I clearly remember saving it.  I must be confused right? But then, when I checked Gurcharan Das’s website this morning, the video on the home page was no longer about Tahrir Square. It had been switched to something else. The Tahrir Square video had got tucked away inside. Hmm-mmm.]

“It’s the classic problem of status anxiety. It’s what we all suffer from in some form,” said Mr Das, who is the author most recently of The Difficulty of Being Good, a book that draws on the philosophical lessons of the Hindu epic, the Mahabharata.

“As head of McKinsey he was associating with CEOs and billionaires earning very large sums. His job was to advise people with a lot of capital, not to be an owner of capital. He got new ambitions.”

You’ll recognize the  “greed” meme which the establishment pushed heavily to explain what happened.

Fool's Gold: How Unrestrained Greed Corrupted a Dream, Shattered Global Markets and Unleashed a Catastrophe

That’s to distract from the rather obvious origins of the financial crisis in government policy abetted by the criminal actions of connected firms, and not in some generic evil capitalist greed curling around Wall Street like a miasma.

Mr Das also highlighted the “glaring” contrast between an erratic and slow-moving Indian legal system that often protects the well-connected, and the swift and harsh punishment handed out by the powerful US courts. “We sometimes catch [people] but we don’t convict,” he said.

“What the US system is saying is that no one is above the law.”

Poor dear Mr. Das. He must have been struck blind and deaf in the past decade if he believes that “in the US system no one is above the law”.

But I guess, even though Das is doing the talking, he’s really a sock puppet, for his masters.

Like this chap, remember him?

But back to Goldman footing Gupta’s bills. Say it’s not just clever PR from Goldman. Say it’s true.

Why would they do that?

Probably because they really wanted Gupta to get off?  If he’s been a corporate wise man all these years, he’s bound to know where some bodies are buried. Lord knows what he’s going to start saying around sentencing time.

[Or maybe they want to make sure the crowd gets someone to pay for all the excesses of the last few decade.  At Forbes, Richard Levick apparently thinks Gupta deserves the harshest sentence possible just because he didn’t make money on the tip, but wanted to become a bigger player..]

Still, I had no idea that criminal defense teams were part of the severance package at these places. Maybe it has to be.

Given what we know about Wall Street culture,  an individually-wrapped securities lawyer is a non-negotiable perk, like stock options, or something.

Or maybe, I wonder if it doesn’t tell us something else.  May be if they’re footing the bill for Gupta, they’re also picking the lawyer. (Naftalis and Bharara are old friends (I originally wrote Rakoff, but I now read that Bharara is a friend of Naftalis, as well, and I can’t find the place I read the reference to Rakoff, so I’ve deleted it))

And maybe if that’s the case, this is even more of a set-up than I thought.

Fighting Our Pornified Culture

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Mercator Net has an interview with one of the authors of the new book, Big Porn Inc.

Melinda Tankard Reist: The aim of Big Porn Inc. was to blow apart the myth that porn is just about ‘naughty’ pictures of consenting sex between adults, that it is just a bit of ‘harmless fun’. We wanted to expose that pornography is a multi-billion global industry profiting from commodifying sexuality and selling it back to us as industrialised, commercialised, plasticised porn sex. We also wanted to demonstrate the way pornography is colonising the public space, how everything has become pornified. We believe pornography is a public health hazard of major proportions and it’s time to address it.

How has this industry been able to grow so big? Who else is profiting from it?

The industry has a lot of power. This power has bought off law makers, regulators and enforcement bodies around the world. They know how to gain new users, how to get men (the primary users of pornography) using their product and wanting more. The internet has been a massive boon for the porn industry, estimated to reach $US100billion by 2013. There are so many who profit from it, from traffickers who sell women who are used to make pornography, to the porn companies who make the porn, to the hotels who profit more from pay-per-view porn that they do selling rooms and the mainstream companies who profit from carrying porn brands, such as Diva, a jewellery store chain for girls 8-13, which is currently pimping Playboy brand products to them.

A review notes the following:

Here are just a few, with the total Web pages for each: teen sex – 82 million pages; animal sex – over 50 million; bondage – nearly 30 million; crush sex (which involves the killing of small animals) – 8 million; vomit sex – 4 million; wired porn (involving electrical shock) – 1.7 million; snuff sex (involving actual death) – 1.3 million.

So much for porn being all-American and indispensable for freedom from that terrifying bogeyman of modernity – repression….

Who Guards The Guardian?

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Gate-keeper of the left, The Guardian, has been attacking Gilad Atzmon for the “anti-Semitism” of his book on Jewish identity “The Wandering Who?” which tackles controversial questions about origin myths, race, and religion. It’s not the first time, and Atzmon is not the only one.

Wikileaks and Assange, as well as Chomsky, Hermann, and others, have come in for bashing.

Of course, I, like others, have had my problems with Assange and with Chomsky too. But for altogether different reasons.  Both seemed to me to be engaged in a kind of misdirection. Others whom I respect have agreed with that take.

But The Guardian‘s criticism, especially of Assange, seems to stem from professional rivalry.  I say that because The Guardian supported the intervention in Libya, while Assange, though he has distanced himself from NATO’s bombing, takes credit for inspiring the rebels.

So it is likely not really a difference in ideology that’s split them.

Wikispooks explains:

“The Guardian’s discrediting of the “left” – the left being a concept never defined by the paper’s writers – is far from taking place in a fair battle of ideas. Not least the Guardian is backed by the huge resources of its corporate owners. When it attacks dissident writers, they can rarely, if ever, find a platform of equal prominence to defend themselves. And the Guardian has proved itself more than reluctant to allow a proper right of reply in its pages to those it maligns.

But also, and most noticeably, it almost never engages with these dissident writers’ ideas. In popular terminology, it prefers to play the man, not the ball. Instead it creates labels, from the merely disparaging to the clearly defamatory, that push these writers and thinkers into the territory of the unconscionable.

A typical example of the Guardian’s new strategy was on show this week in an article in the print edition’s comment pages – also available online and a far more prestigious platform than CiF – in which the paper commissioned a socialist writer, Andy Newman, to argue that the Israeli Jewish musician Gilad Atzmon was part of an anti-semitic trend discernible on the left……..

….As is now typical in this new kind of Guardian character assassination, the article makes no effort to prove that Atzmon is anti-semitic or to show that there is any topical or pressing reason to bring up his presumed character flaw. (In passing, the article made a similar accusation of anti-semitism against Alison Weir of If Americans Knew, and against the Counterpunch website for publishing an article on Israel’s role in organ-trafficking by her.)

Atzmon has just published a book on Jewish identity, The Wandering Who?, that has garnered praise from respected figures such as Richard Falk, an emeritus law professor at Princeton, and John Mearsheimer, a distinguished politics professor at Chicago University.

But Newman did not critique the book, nor did he quote from it. In fact, he showed no indication that he had read the book or knew anything about its contents…..

… the Guardian was happy to offer its imprimatur to Newman’s defamation of Atzmon, who was described as a conspiracy theorist “dripping with contempt for Jews”, despite an absence of substantiating evidence. Truly worthy of Pravda in its heyday.

The Atzmon article appeared on the same day the Guardian carried out a similar hatchet job, this time on Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks. The paper published a book review of Assange’s “unauthorised autobiography” by the Guardian’s investigations editor, David Leigh…..

…..The low point in Leigh’s role in this saga is divulging in his own book a complex password Assange had created to protect a digital file containing the original and unedited embassy cables. Each was being carefully redacted before publication by several newspapers, including the Guardian……

….Some of this clearly reflects a clash of personalities and egos, but it also looks suspiciously like the feud derives from a more profound ideological struggle between the Guardian and Wikilieaks about how information should be controlled a generation hence. The implicit philosophy of Wikileaks is to promote an ever-greater opening up and equalisation of access to information, while the Guardian, following its commercial imperatives, wants to ensure the gatekeepers maintain their control.”

OWS-Connected Manifesto Calls For Global Government

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From the October 14 Manifesto endorsed, apparently, by Eduardo Galeano (socialist), Naomi Klein (socialist), Noam Chomsky (allegedly left-anarchist) and Vandana Shiva (environmentalist):

“Undemocratic international institutions are our global Mubarak, our global Assad, our global Gaddafi. These include: the IMF, the WTO, global markets, multinational banks, the G8, the G20, the European Central Bank and the UN Security Council. Like Mubarak and Assad, these institutions must not be allowed to run people’s lives without their consent. We are all born equal, rich or poor, woman or man. Every African and Asian is equal to every European and American. Our global institutions must reflect this, or be overturned.

Today, more than ever before, global forces shape people’s lives. Our jobs, health, housing, education and pensions are controlled by global banks, markets, tax havens, corporations and financial crises. Our environment is destroyed by pollution in other continents. Our safety is determined by international wars and international trade in arms, drugs and natural resources. We are losing control over our lives. This must stop. This will stop. The citizens of the world must get control over the decisions that influence them at all levels – from global to local. That is global democracy. That is what we demand today.

Comment:

If this weren’t so serious, it would be funny.

“Global Mubarak, Assad, and Gaddafi,” eh? All brown-skinned Muslims? No mention of  Barak Obama or George Bush or Bill Clinton? No mention of Paul Wolfowitz?

The Global Wolfowitz Is At The Door has a nice ring…..

Global Netanyahoo? Too polysyllabic for comfort.

And George Soros, many megawatts more powerful than some Middle Eastern dictators? But Global Soros sounds too much like a disease….

Talking about Soros, check back this to post of mine from June 2010, which analyzes a Soros proposal for global democracy, from 2009. This adds weight to what I said about the push-back against the Tea Party starting in 2009.  When he talks about  “demagogues” in the piece, he means the middle-class that rose up against the bail-outs.

Oh dear. A bunch of professional activsts, westerners all (Vandana Shiva notwithstanding), sharing the same old world view (all leftists), speaking for the six billion plus people of this planet, hundreds of nations, hundreds if not thousands of languages and dialects, scores of religions, ethnicities, millions of companies and associations, most of whom are going about their business and have nothing to do with OWS.

How’s that for Global Chutzpah?

Here is Vandana Shiva calling for global democracy and name-checking George Soros and Mikhail Gorbachev (ANC.net/au):

“And you might remember Gorbachev was a very keen free marketer, and he was speaking with me at the opening plenary of this meeting and said “it’s turned out to be very different from what I had imagined. I thought it would bring democracy; it brought mafia rule.”

And then the person who’s really won out in this game of globalisation — George Soros — he was there too, and this is what he said. (my italics and emphases throughout)

He said: “free markets were supposed to have created open societies, free societies, but we cannot speak of the triumph of democracy. Capitalism and political freedom do not go hand in hand. We cannot leave freedom and democracy to market forces. We need to create our own institutions and different institutions from those that serve capitalism to take care of it.

“And anyone,” this is not my words, it’s not your words, it’s George Soros’, “who thinks they can leave freedom to free markets is a market fundamentalist, that’s not how societies work”.

Ms. Shiva, we love your work.  But don’t be taken in by this Hegelian dialectic, this Mighty Wurlitzer of media manufactured global consensus between faux free-marketers (Soros) and faux -anarchists (Chomsky). The missing term from both adjectives is “state”. Soros is a state capitalist and Chomsky is a state socialist. It is the capitalist-communist convergence.

State-capitalists fund the think-tank circuit and foundation activism. The corrosive effects of this on democracy have been established many times by serious analysts.  In what sense then can foundation activists call for democracy? A polarised dialectic is created by the state-capitalists to co-opt reform, and people like Ms. Siva are there to put a diverse face on the resolution of the dialectic and make it acceptable to the non-western world.

Step back and think about the invisible hand here.

Who is this George Soros?

Even Magasaysay Award-winning Medha Patkar, according to renowned anti-globalization activist Arundhati Roy, has allowed herself to be bamboozled by the Wikileaks-blessed Anna Hazare circus.

Now, it is becoming clear to many that behind the attractive “anti-corruption” agenda, which is dear to many, many ordinary Indians, the globalists are showing their hand, by trying to hustle through legislation favorable to them (the Janlok Pal Bill) in the hubbub of the cynically named so-called “Second Indian Independence.”  The government must be “transparent,” but foreign-funded non-governmental organizations promoting chauvinism and wedge-issues, mixing legitimate grievances with bogus accusations, must be exempt from transparency requirements.

False Dissent: Gatekeepers From Ron Paul To Noam Chomsky

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Zahir Ebrahim:

“Virtually one hundred percent of what is deemed respectable Western dissent espouses this foundational axiom. It works well because it draws upon selective empiricism couched in omissions to demonstrate its veracity. But a half-truth is still only a full lie. That full lie works like this:

‘The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing. Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects, by lowering what Mr. Churchill calls an “iron curtain” between the masses and such facts or arguments as the local political bosses regard as undesirable, totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have done by the most eloquent denunciations, the most compelling of logical rebuttals. But silence is not enough. If persecution, liquidation and the other symptoms of social friction are to be avoided, the positive sides of propaganda must be made as effective as the negative.’

— Aldous Huxley, Preface (circa 1946) to Brave New World, 1931, Harper, pg. 11

Both sides of propaganda are thus put into effect. The mainstream chiefs enact the big lie and repeat it endlessly for the positive side of propaganda. The dissent-chief enact the negative side of propaganda by calculated omission of certain subjects, and by omitting to draw logical conclusions from them because they no longer have to — the facts have been omitted from the “respectable” discourse space altogether. It is wonderful how this is used to provide the illusion of the free press and free society by both the mainstream press and the so called alternate press:

“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum – even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.”

— Noam Chomsky

This is exactly the same controlled-dissent genre of lauded pontiffs of dissentstream spanning the gamut from Messrs. Ron Paul ( http://tinyurl.com/RonPaul-NWO-Asset ) to Noam Chomsky himself ( http://tinyurl.com/Hegelian-Dialectic-Dissent ) et. al. on the Left-Liberal-Libertarian nexus, to Foxnews-Right-wing-Religion-Intelligence-State-worship-Patriotism nexus.

I am not sure which compartment Francis Boyle ( http://tinyurl.com/francisboyle-2011-humanity ) falls into but it is just as systemic there as elsewhere.

I invite Truthdig to publish the examination referenced below written by a Muslim, yours truly, belonging to the ‘untermensch’ civilization bearing the full brunt of Chris Hedges’ admission that “We became terrorists too,” and “We Are What We Loathe”.

Such banal statements can perhaps win Mr. Hedges multiple Pulitzer prizes for their profundity — precisely because these neither inform nor educate to the degree necessary for unraveling the entire Hegelian Dialectic, lest it spawn a real resistance movement with teeth singularly focused on the puppetmasters orchestrating the “clash of civilizations”.

This style of dissent-lite only enables introducing and sustaining beneficial cognitive diversity for the purpose of defocusing the energies of conscionable peoples – its primary objective – until fait accompli.”

The Case Against Wikileaks – I

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Posted at Veterans Today:

Let me first say that harassing Julian Assange for having published leaked government documents is completely wrong. There’s no evidence so far that anyone has been injured directly because of the leaks. National
security (even as understood by mainstream statists) hasn’t been damaged. As for the embarrassment some officials might be feeling, tough. Governments routinely subject their citizens to much worse for no valid reason.  As for diplomacy, there’s none worth the name.  All we have is blackmailers, bullies, and outright bandits in high places. Some outing and shaming of their public actions is in order. Exposing the crimes and blunders of the state is not only a right of citizens, but a
duty.

As enough people have argued, Assange is obviously not guilty of treason, since he’s not a citizen of the US. And, although some people think he’s guilty of espionage, that’s doesn’t seem true either.  He didn’t hack any state computer or blow any agent’s cover to get his information. It was mostly given to him voluntarily by whistle-blowers and leakers.  All he did was publish it. And, since New York Times Co. v. United States (1971), US law has protected the right of publishers to publish politically sensitive information without “prior restraints,” as long as it doesn’t cause “grave and irreparable damage”
to the public.

Having said that, though, I must admit that for almost a year now, as I’ve
blogged, I’ve found the whole Wikileaks operation strange, if not a bit fishy. Let me recount the ways.

1. Most of the documents seems to cover material already fairly well-known to informed people.  The new material is mostly embarrassing stuff, nothing truly revelatory, say dozens of critics. Now, mainstream critics might just be trying to do damage control, but why would
respected alternative investigators who are outspoken critics of war and the police state, people like Wayne Madsen or co-founder John Young or Chris Floyd, among many others, also come to that conclusion? [Floyd seems to have “gone
wobbly” since then].

By Assange’s own account in the  Australian, here are the most important revelations from Wikileaks:

“The US asked its diplomats to steal personal human material and information from UN officials and human rights groups, including DNA, fingerprints, iris scans, credit card numbers, internet
passwords and ID photos, in violation of international treaties. Presumably Australian UN diplomats may be targeted, too.

King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia asked the US Officials in Jordan and
Bahrain want Iran ‘s nuclear program stopped by any means available.

Britain’s Iraq inquiry was fixed to protect “US interests”.

Sweden is a covert member of NATO and US intelligence sharing is kept
from parliament.

The US is playing hardball to get other countries to take freed detainees from Guantanamo Bay. Barack Obama agreed to meet the Slovenian President only if Slovenia took a prisoner. Our Pacific
neighbour Kiribati was offered millions of dollars to accept detainees.”

Now, these disclosures would be nothing to scoff about on any activist’s resume.  But is Assange telling us anything  we didn’t already know? What has really been added so far except specifics and
details? Then why are the revelations being called a
new 9-11 ?

2. An overblown media story is not the only difficulty with Wikileaks.Consider that in all this welter of damaging information, whatever you think of it, there’s nothing that really damages Israel.

Justin Raimondo, a right-wing libertarian, has tried to suggest there is. He says there’s material in Wikileaks that reveals the sinister activities of the Israeli mafia. Big deal. Everyone knows the
Israeli mafia is everywhere, not just in Israel. The Russian mafia is a euphemism for the Russian and Ukrainian Jewish mafia, which has strong ties to Israel. The Colombian drug trade is run by this mafia. So is the Eastern European sex trade. According to Mark Mitchell, Wall Street is run by it. A leak about the
world’s most dangerous mafia, that everyone already knows about, doesn’t really damage Israeli foreign policy, does it? It even carries a good guy flavor about it.

That means what we really have in Wikileaks is a document dump slanted a particular way. So says at least one establishment figure, Zbigniew Brzezinski,  former Secretary of State under President Carter.

Say what you will about him, Brzezinski, master-mind of the policy of luring the Soviet Union to its destruction in Afghanistan, is nobody’s fool. He spots the hand of an intelligence agency in all this.

Could this be a calculated subliminal “prepping” of the collective pysche by a state intelligence outfit, masquerading as an expose of states?

3. Now comes a
report that Julian Assange cut a deal with Israeli officials to keep anything damaging to Israel out of  the revelations. I don’t know how well-sourced or credible this report is. But then there’s also Assange’s citation of  Benjamin Netanyahu, the hawkish Israeli prime minister who’s praised Wikileaks. And there’s Assange’s statement in the Australian crediting Rupert Murdoch, a hard-line
Zionist and one of the biggest promoters of war with Iraq, as his inspiration. That alone should make people think twice . It’s not just that Israeli isn’t damaged by Wikileaks. A lot of the material on the site actually helps Israel’s global objectives.  We now know that neighboring Arab states are alarmed by the idea of a nuclear Iran. We learn that the Saudi rulers are in bed with the Israeli government and are thoroughly corrupt. Pakistan is treacherous and a threat. There’s a hornet’s nest of terror in South India. This is news? And even if you think it is, who benefits?

Doesn’t all this simply amplify Israel’s hardline attitude to the Islamic world and justify the recent introduction of the biometric ID into India, Afghanistan, and the Af-Pak border? Don’t the revelations reflect most poorly on the Arab states and on America, but not on Israel? Don’t they channel global attention and anger away from the global economic collapse master-minded by Zionist financiers and their supremo, the Federal Reserve? Don’t they redirect anger at Israel for the slaughter in Gaza, for the massacre
on the Mavi Marmara, and for the AIPAC espionage case, as Gordon Duff, at Veterans Today points out? Even
liberal commentator Juan Cole writes that Assange is being tarred and feathered for giving to the public what AIPAC routinely gives to Israel.

And what is the ultimate result? Israel now claims that the US is too distracted to broker a deal on settlements.

Again, who benefits from that? Israeli hard-liners, of course.

4.  But maybe all this is just the price Assange has to pay to get wide coverage in the Western mainstream, largely dominated by Zionist editors, writers, and publishers?

Maybe.

Is it also part of the price that he has to bash the 9-11 movement? If you’re against empire and exploitation, as Assange says he is, then shouldn’t you be interested in uncovering the truth about the attack that was the explicit trigger for the unjust
war on Iraq, the global war on terror, Homeland Security, and every police state measure since?

And if you’re not, what’s your excuse?

It’s not just that Assange is not interested in 9-11. He’s gone out of his way to mock people who’ve devoted countless unpaid hours of work to investigate it, with none of the media attention that follows every step Assange takes.

5. And that brings me to my fifth point. The fate of whistle-blowers and tellers of dangerous truth is rarely rock-star celebrity. Count them. Mordechai Vanunu, who exposed Israel’s nuclear program – imprisoned for nearly 20 years. Gary Webb, who exposed the CIA connection to the distribution of crack cocaine in the US –  probably murdered. Russian journalist, Anna Politkovskaya, who criticized Putin’s policies in Chechnya -assassinated. Lebanese journalists Samir Qassir and Gebran Tueni, who criticized the Syrian government –
killed in car bombings. In 90% of such cases, says the Committee to Protect Journalists, the killers are never brought to justice. Yet, Assange, “the
most dangerous man in Cyberspace,” according to the faux-alternative
magazine Rolling Stone, lives to tell the tale of his persecution from the cover of Time magazine and the podium of TED conferences, weighted down with awards and honors from such establishment worthies as  Economist, New Statesman, and Amnesty International.

And now he is the center of an international man-hunt. Here too, the claims are bizarre. If Wikileaks hasn’t put lives at risk or seriously damaged “national security,” by even the government’s own account, what to make of all these feverish cries for prosecution under the espionage act, for imprisonment
and torture, even for execution?

Are they for real, or does any one else detect an element of theater?
The Wikileaks disclosures have been called cyber-terrorism by many. When before have we seen an international man-hunt for a rag-tag band of terrorists headed up by a charismatic mystery man with a striking appearance and a personal life shrouded in mystery? Now we have Osama-bin-Assange and Al-Wikileaks at war with Joe Lieberman and Sarah Palin, on one hand, and cheered on by David Frum, on the other. Notice that Frum points out that the disclosures actually support George Bush’s rationale for invading Iraq.

This is box-office gold. As some wide-awake journalist has noted, the big winner in all this is the establishment media. Before, it had one foot in the grave. Deservedly. Now it is a  “truth-teller.” Readership is up, resurrected by proxy. And the major alternative press, the foundation activists, are bolstering the conclusions of the New York Times. How convenient.

I dearly wish Julian Assange were exactly as he seems – a brilliant iconoclast delivering the death blow to imperialism. But my memory is not so dim.  I remember another media circus besides the one around
Osama. I recall the mass adulation of  a man who exuded brilliance, youth, hope, and salvation. That was in 2008, and he was a young law professor from Chicago. How did that turn out?

6.  Then again, if Assange’s message is so subversive to the state, why are the state’s most reliable mouthpieces plastering his message everywhere? Why did Assange himself choose the New York Times, the Guardian, and Der Spiegel for his initial exposes?

These are left-center outlets, statist to the core.  And Assange, the self-proclaimed libertarian chooses them? Perhaps, one could argue, the left-center is where the most powerful and influential media organs are located. Assange is just being a savvy marketer in picking those outlets.

Perhaps.

But perhaps not.

Perhaps, instead, he could have thrown in one libertarian or conservative newspaper, at least, to show even- handedness? How hard would it have been to send material to, say, the Independent?

7. But he didn’t, so again I ask you,  how libertarian can he really be? And if he isn’t a libertarian, why does he go out of his way to proclaim he is? There’s nothing wrong, after all, with  being a
socialist or even a communist, at least in most places outside the US.

Why doesn’t Assange just declare himself a left-wing peacenik and leave
it at that?

Ah, now things get even more interesting. Dig into Assange’s writings –  most of it very engaging and thoughtful –  and contradictions emerge.

On June 18, 2006, he writes:

“Rights are freedoms of action that are known to be enforceable. Consequently there are no rights without beliefs about the future effects of behavior. Unenforcable general rights exist only insofar as they are argumentation that may one day yield enforcement. Hence the Divine Right of Kings, the right of way, mining rights, conjugal rights, property rights, and copyright. The decision as to what should be enforced and what may be ignored is political. This does not mean that rights are unimportant, but rather, that politics (the societal control of freedom) is so important as to subsume rights.”

I will repeat that. Assange places societal control above the exercise of rights.

This is not libertarian. And it’s not an isolated statement. It’s repeated elsewhere.

“Technical people, good at stacking houses of abstract cards often look at the law and see rules, but this is a shadow, for law hangs from the boughs of politics, that branch of behavior involved with the societal control of freedom of action. Always consider the real politik
of law; who will push for change and who will resist.”

And then about global warming (Assange seems to believe in anthropogenic global warming), he says this:

“The bottom line is, as Benford notes, “we’re going to have to run this planet.”

Some libertarianism. One critic has pointed out that at the core of Assange’s philosophy is not openness and freedom so much as a left-leaning concern with “justice.” Nothing wrong with that. So why the dress-up in American-style libertarianism? At whom is the repackaging, if it is that, directed?

Authoritarianism emerges also in Assange’s work at Wikileaks, where he is technically the chief editor and spokesman. His associates complain of egotistic, autocratic behavior, much different from his anarchist professions.

Some have left to start their own sites. Others complain about the secrecy he maintains about his own work, also at odds with the transparency he advocates for others.

This secrecy might, at first, seem justified. Wikileaks, after all, is a private, not a public outfit. Maybe so. But that distinction hasn’t stopped the site from publishing the secrets of other private organizations, like the Christian Scientists and the Mormons. It’s also published the hacked private emails of Sarah Palin and the financial information of private clients of the Swiss bank, Julius Baer.

Wayne Madsen has argued that this ultimately benefits Democrat financier George Soros.

This is a performance that seems not only hypocritical but curiously partisan and parochial, especially when set against the generous intellectual sweep of Assange’s theoretical writing.

And that’s exactly the taste left in your mouth after a sampling of Wikileaks‘revelations.

After all the hype about “scientific journalism,” the conclusions Wikileaks
supports are downright provincial: our government lied us into war in Iraq; Hillary Clinton’s a bitch; Arab regimes are corrupt and deserve regime change; private contractors are bilking tax-payers; corporate corruption is the real conspiracy, not 9-11.

This is stuff that could have come out of the computer of any
government propagandist.

More to the point, some of us are wondering if it really did.

(To be continued)

The Extremists Who Founded America….

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Right Wing Extremists: Saving America Since 1776

With the 233rd Independence Day celebration on it’s way in America, we thought it would be a good idea to honor the radical extremists that founded this country.
Now, it might be true that calling Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin “right wing” is a bit historically questionable within the original context of the old Left-Right paradigm laid out in the French Assembly in the late 18th Century. We understand that technically the founders had more in common with what would historically be deemed the “left” than anything. ……”

Edward Bernays On Self Interest And Propaganda

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It’s a mistake to think propaganda is solely something “they” (the power elites) do to us (passive viewers). It’s just not so.

While propaganda can often be so subtle that the viewer cannot recognize he’s being manipulated, it isn’t true that the viewer is completely helpless to resist it.

The reason for this is that contemporary propaganda is rarely a direct command. Instead, it’s couched in language that appeals to viewers’ self-interests. So, anything that flatters our self-perception or claims to fulfill our desires should alert us to the fact that manipulation might be going on.

The father of modern propaganda, Edward Bernays, described this process at length:

“The leaders who lend their authority to any propaganda campaign will do so only if it can be made to touch their own interests. There must be a disinterested aspect of the propagandist’s activities. In other words, it is one of the functions of the public relations counsel to discover at what points his client’s interests coincide with those of other individuals or groups.
In the case of the soap sculpture competition, the distinguished artists and educators who sponsored the idea were glad to lend their services and their names because the competitions really promoted an interest which they had at heart—the cultivation of the esthetic impulse among the younger generation.
Such coincidence and overlapping of interests is as infinite as the interlacing of group formations themselves. For example, a railway wishes to develop its business. The counsel on public relations makes a survey to discover at what points its interests coincide with those of its prospective customers. The company then establishes relations with chambers of commerce along its right of way and assists them in developing their communities. It helps them to secure new plants and industries for the town. It facilitates business through the dissemination of technical information. It is not merely a case of bestowing favors in the hope of receiving favors; these activities of the railroad, besides creating good will, actually promote growth on its right of way. The interests of the railroad and the communities through which it passes mutually interact and feed one another.
In the same way, a bank institutes an investment service for the benefit of its customers in order that the latter may have more money to deposit with the bank. Or a jewelry concern develops an insurance department to insure the jewels it sells, in order to make the purchaser feel greater security in buying jewels. Or a baking company establishes an information service suggesting recipes for bread to encourage new uses for bread in the home. The ideas of the new propaganda are predicated on sound psychology based on enlightened selfinterest.”

—    Edward Bernays in Propaganda (1928)

13 Strategies Of Mass Psychic Control

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Bill Ross at NaziSociopaths.org:

“I do not share the stated opinion (lie) of the Powers That Be (PTB´s), that mankind is inherently irrational and incapable of rational behavior. The past accomplishments of mankind, in the areas of law, international agreements and limits on organized power (which are currently being destroyed) argue otherwise. There are simple, provable causes of why people do not make rational choices and stand up for what is right, or even their own personal survival:

1. People are overly taxed, directly and indirectly by the time and energy it takes to survive and deal with pervasive government and law to achieve anything, resulting in little time or energy to consider the larger picture of their own lives or where trends are leading.

2. People have been wrongly convinced that their personal opinion is irrelevant and critical issues pertaining to survival and their own lives are therefore best left to self-proclaimed “experts”, who claim, but are unable to prove that they know best as evidenced by the results of their enforced opinions being social/economic failure and war.

3. People have been wrongly convinced that they have no control in their own lives, let alone the direction of their societies.

4. People have been wrongly convinced (manipulated and mis-educated) that “something from nothing” and therefore “causeless effects” are possible and that “shit happens” or “Gods will – predestination” is a valid explanation for what is not understood. It is believed that some things in the real world have no factual, rational explanation and it is pointless to try to understand. This was the whole point of the Renaissance (birth of western civilization), the rejection of mysticism and those who used it as a pretext for slavery. The Renaissance was social and legal acceptance of the fact that proven fact, knowledge and thus objective reality are supreme and will prevail, independent of contrary opinions. The truth is that everything that happens in the real world, including human actions, can be rationally explained in terms of causes and provable relationships to observed effects.

5. People have been mis-educated to believe that large events such as war are a indivisible thing rather than the large sum of many small, easily addressed causes. As a consequence, solving such problems is assumed to require blunt force as opposed to intelligently addressing the causes.

6. To accept and live according to fact and reason is a difficult path, resulting in conflict with those who believe you are judging them, when, in reality, you are defending yourself from others imposing their opinions on you or trying to bully, use and manipulate you.

7. Because we cannot read each others minds and life appears so complex, confusing and overwhelming, people are not sure what is right or wrong. Taking a position on issues leads to disagreement which has the potential of conflict requiring time and energy to deal with, detracting from life. To be left alone in peace (basic human need) is believed to require following the herd and conformance, since the alternative is taking a position and engaging in conflict with all who claim to disagree, including those who claim the right to exercise force in support of their position and do not acknowledge fact, reason or law.

8. If you choose to live according to fact and reason, you will inevitably be proven wrong on some points. You must possess enough humility to admit this and the ability to adapt your entire reality and belief system to accommodate the newly proven facts. In other words, you must be adaptable enough to handle life´s changes and not seek boring comfort and security, since it is an illusionary trap, leading to stagnation.

9. People are trapped in the perceptual paradigm of their functionand social class (environment) and are unable to see or acknowledge the possibility of other realities or the validity of other opinions from other environments.

10. People have been subverted into believing that the problems of the human condition are intractable and are caused by inherent flaws in humanity, requiring coercive force to be exerted by those who claim moral superiority or control the apparatus of state.

11. People have been mis-educated to believe that mankind and civilization is not a part of the natural order of things and therefore, we are special, not subject to the immutable laws of action and consequence, as enforced by the laws of nature. Neglecting the role of those who have subverted education, this requires people to be stupid enough to not question their education and the opinion of the “experts”. It also requires people to be stupid enough to continue trusting these expert opinions, despite overwhelming contrary evidence. We therefore believe we are immune to facing the consequences of our actions or that government or the law will protect us. They cannot and thus will not, for the simple reason that they are also subject to the laws of nature. Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans has shown the folly of this. Government was actually an impediment to those who tried to help.

12. As a consequence of the arbitrary exercise of force, unchecked by objective law or democratic will by states and other organized powers, the best personal survival strategy is assumed to be to keep a low profile and hope you are not noticed or targeted. This strategy may be able to delay when you are targeted, but will not change the fact you are on the target list. The more you have to take or the more you interfere with power´s whims and methodology, the higher you are on the list. Those who insist that the equality provisions of the “rule of law” be honored and manage to have an effect on social awareness, such as Martin Luther King Jr. are at the top of the list

13. Knowledge regarding mankind appears to have been destroyed (not really, just made to appear ineffective) by those who exercise power enforcing different relationships between action and consequence than natural forces and un-coerced people would choose. This results in people being unwilling to choose, since to act according to the knowledge of objective reality is invariably in conflict with what those in power demand (your servitude). If people make a firm choice, on the one hand the laws of nature will dictate consequences and on the other organized force will dictate different consequences. The obvious rational choice under these contradictory conditions is to not or appear not to make any choice, or to make choices which are consistent with both the laws of nature and the will of our self proclaimed masters. The laws of nature say you should make pro-survival choices, the will of our masters says you should make choices consistent with their short term survival agenda under penalty of non-survival should you fail to comply. The result is that people are in contradictory environments, constantly trying to balance between the contradictory demands of power and personal survival.

It is psychological warfare against the people, placing them in artificially created environments where correct choices are dangerous to immediate survival at the hands of arbitrary power. In other words, people are terrified of the fact that acknowledging and acting according to fact and reason puts them on a direct collision course with very dangerous powers who do not acknowledge any fact, knowledge or reason, only the circular logic of their claimed right to keep people in servitude and to possess and use the wealth and power of nature and civilization for purposes of their own.”

    Which “Bastards”? More Discrepancies In Wikileaks “Revelations”

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    Maximilien Forte at Zero Anthropology:

    “Which Bastards?

    When asked by Larry King on Monday, 26 July, who he meant to call “bastards” when he told Der Spiegel “I enjoy crushing bastards,” Assange specified he meant U.S. forces. Assange must also believe that those studying these documents will not focus as much on the atrocities committed by the Taleban, such as the devastating carnage caused by their IEDs and suicide bombers, and their apparent disregard for the scores of civilians that are killed as a result of going after one target with a massive bomb–The Guardian, with what is arguably the best coverage of the three newspapers to have obtained the documents a month in advance of their public release, has already covered this aspect quite quickly. In these same reports, the Taleban appear to be using hammers to kill mosquitoes. Left at that level of discussion, we have data, but not much understanding–for example, of why the Taleban have nonetheless gained strength and support, or why we may view their deadly attacks as something for which the U.S. and NATO share partial responsibility, for having overthrown and persecuted the Taleban after invading and occupying their country, thereby provoking a hostile and asymmetric reaction. It would be a silly or wicked person who would argue that Afghans have no right to fight back.

    While I generally agree with Assange’s sentiments, to the extent that they are knowable, I do not share his optimism about the impact of these documents. Information is not power, and it is not meaning. To make sense of these documents requires interpretation and argumentation that goes beyond and outside the limits of what are, after all, reports reflective of an American optic, produced by combatants. Source criticism and cross checking will be paramount, and to the extent that is not done, Wikileaks may witness members of the public using the same documents to not only bolster the arguments to support continuation of this war, but even an escalation to direct hostilities with Iran (see The Guardian, and see the justified alarm expressed by Marc Lynch at Foreign Policy). There is also debate between The Guardian and The New York Times over the extent to which the reports can be trusted when it comes to Pakistan’s supposed role in aiding the Taleban and conducting covert operations against the government of Afghanistan and western forces–that dispute happened within the first day of reporting on the documents, and disagreement over their credibility did not stop the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan from verbally thrashing each other in public, again within 24 hours of the documents’ release. These reports overall contain enough to hurt those who are critics of U.S. foreign policy, as much as they will hurt those who support it. They contain as much potential for escalating and expanding conflict, as they contain for mobilizing popular support to stop it. I also understand that my commentary here may well be premature, but then so are all the current commentaries.
    What Should Matter to Social Scientists?

    To bring this discussion closer to the concerns of anthropologists and social scientists generally, there are a few points that I feel need to be made. One concerns the extent to which these records are only a partial selection of all records produced by the U.S. military. That is a significant problem, because we cannot know if the items excluded would in some way modify any conclusions we reach about the records we have. Wikileaks received a total of about 110,000 records, and released about 92,000. It is hard to believe that a period covering six years of war could have produced only this amount. To my knowledge, Julian Assange has not been asked any questions about this issue. We therefore also do not know why these records were included and others excluded. This issue will come up again when I speak about what the records reveal about the workings of the Human Terrain System.

    A second problem, and it is a major one, concerns Assange’s assertions that the items were redacted to minimize the risk of harm to the sources indicated in the records. From what we have seen already, just with reference to Human Terrain Teams alone and their sources, that is completely untrue. There is no evidence whatsoever of any kind of redaction. Moreover, when one deletes information for a record, one is supposed to mark the text in some way to say either “name deleted” or “sentence deleted,” etc., and I see no evidence of that. In addition, who comprises Wikileaks’ team of redactors, and on the basis of what knowledge and expertise, as either war fighters, or people with experience and knowledge of Afghanistan, could they make calls about what was “harmless” versus “harmful” information? Which specialists did they consult, and for how long did they have the records to study? Not a word about this, merely bland and general assurances.

    Indeed, Assange’s statements about Wikileaks’ “harm minimization process” seem to only focus on the safety of his “bastards,” noting that the documents “do not generally cover top-secret operations” and that they “delayed the release of some 15,000 reports” as “demanded by our source” (source). This is an exchange Assange had with Der Spiegel on this issue:

    SPIEGEL: The material contains military secrets and names of sources. By publishing it, aren’t you endangering the lives of international troops and their informants in Afghanistan?

    Assange: The Kabul files contain no information related to current troop movements. The source went through their own harm-minimization process and instructed us to conduct our usual review to make sure there was not a significant chance of innocents being negatively affected. We understand the importance of protecting confidential sources, and we understand why it is important to protect certain US and ISAF sources [emphasis added].

    SPIEGEL: So what, specifically, did you do to minimize any possible harm?

    Assange: We identified cases where there may be a reasonable chance of harm occurring to the innocent. Those records were identified and edited accordingly.

    A third problem has to do with source criticism, source confirmation, and Assange’s call for crowdsourcing. Anthropologists should relate to this issue personally. Imagine that someone gets hold of your fieldnotes, and releases a part of them. No analysis, no contextualization, no doubts about the veracity of what an informant told you is in those notes. They are released, and then members of a broad public take hold of their interpretation, and take what is reported as the truth of a situation. Wouldn’t this make you freak out? Are any of our books and journal articles a mere transcription of our fieldnotes? So who is this “crowd” that will make solid arguments from these notes? How will they check their veracity? Do they know who wrote these reports, under what conditions, under what limitations, and with what motivations? Will they travel to Afghanistan and cover the ground covered by these military units? What other documents will they use to confirm these reports, or will they trust them blindly? These are already some of the issues being raised about the alleged Iran-Al Qaeda connection, and Pakistan’s role in supporting the Taleban.”