Category Archives: Empire

BREAKING NEWS: Google CEO Charged With Criminal Conspiracy

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Breaking News:

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) in India has announced that following on secret multi-year wire-tapping of American-born CEOs with companies operating in India, Larry Page has been charged with multiple felonies, including criminal conspiracy, conspiracy to defraud, racketeering, invasion of privacy, espionage, theft of intellectual property, and copyright violations. Mr. Page has surrendered at his house to Interpol..

A spokesman for Google said that the charges were related solely to Mr. Page and had nothing to do with the company, which is cooperating with the Indian government.

Mr, Page was alleged to have used subordinates to alter and delete posts, engineer google results, and other wise harass bloggers, such as Daniel Brandt,  critical of the power elite.  Unfortunately for him, the bloggers kept a file on him worthy of the CIA itself, and he is now looking at a class-action suit in the millions.

I guess he should have followed his own advice – don’t be evil….

[This is satire intended to mock the “justice” administered to Rajat Gupta by the  kapos of the ruling mafia.  On the other hand, it’s perfectly true that Google does engineer its results,  has harassed and shut down Mr. Brandt’s “Scroogle” site,  has invaded the privacy of millions of people through Google Streetview, and many of its other applications, has been credibly alleged to be involved in espionage for the state,  and does violate copyright continuously.  We urge Mr. Page to reform his company and think a bit about how he and his family would like it if the kind of  harassment his Frankenstein monster enables were turned on him, just for a moment.] 

Preet Bharara – Overhyped and Toothless

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Gary Weiss in Salon

“Yet nowhere in Gabriel Sherman’s well-researched piece in New York is there even one mention of Preet Bharara.

There’s a simple reason for that:  Preet Bharara is not busting Wall Street. He’s not collaring the masters of the meltdown. He’s done nothing to even slightly discomfit Wall Street’s still-ferocious money machine, or has yet to bring to justice the architects, enablers and continuers of the 2008 financial crisis — the bankers who got us into that mess, and the ones who are continuing to extract pain from foreclosed homeowners, in the New York area and beyond.

As a matter of fact, his over-hyped insider-trading prosecutions, the main focus of the Time piece, are doing the Street a favor, by targeting people who actually ripped off Wall Street — individuals like hedge fund managers Raj Rajaratnam and Danielle Chiesi, who functioned a bit like the goons who used to dope race horses in the old days.

Bharara’s insider trading targets rigged the game for their own profit by illegally misappropriating information, in effect stealing from their employers and other investors, just as the horse-dopers cheated racetracks and other betters. Another analogy, also from the racetracks of old, would be to the scam artists who used to “past-post”: bet on races after they knew the outcome.

That’s how insider trading works. It’s a form of theft and cheating. It’s bad. Bharara was right to prosecute them, just as he has aggressively pursued drug gangs in the outer boroughs. But let’s be clear on something: The big players, the Goldman Sachses, Merrill Lynches, Banks of America and so on, don’t like insider trading any more than Preet Bharara does.

And none of his criminal prosecutions to date — including his recent bust of three high-ranking former Credit Suisse execs, accused of rigging the value of mortgage bonds they held in 2008 — had any connection to the pain being felt by Americans today, which can be directly traced to the misconduct of mortgage bankers and derivatives traders in the run-up to the financial crisis.

The real perps of the financial crisis haven’t been in Bharara’s — or the Justice Department’s — cross hairs for a single moment since Barack Obama took office three years ago. It’s one of the most troublesome failings of his administration.”

Rajat Gupta Verdict: Insider-Trading & IP Theft By The Govt

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“Anyone can benefit from insider information but not anyone can afford a supercomputer. They may both provide – with fair certainty – a market advantage but only one advantage will be prosecuted.”

–    Anthony Wile, The Daily Bell

Rajat Gupta: The N****** Of Wall Street

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(Source: Jury Representativeness: It’s No Joke In the State of New York http://papers.ccpr.ucla.edu/papers/PWP-DUKE-2011-001/PWP-DUKE-2011-001.pdf)

Ash Jen comments on an article at The Economist, “An Unlucky Man,” on the Rajat Gupta verdict:

1. David Sokol, an executive of Berkshire traded on his own account based on information available to Berkshire executives. There was NO case bought against him even when there is 10x more evidence available against him and who [sic] made couple of million dollars directly.

[Lila: Did they wire-tap Warren Buffet and Sokol?]

2. The other Goldman guy who provided information to Rajaratnam still works for Goldman. There was no case bought against him either.

[Lila; Commenter is referring to David Loeb. He doesn’t mention, mind you, Henry King and Mr. X, as well as a possible fourth person at Goldman tipping Galleon, and the multiple employees who had worked at both Galleon and Goldman. He doesn’t mention Blankfein and Gary Cohn who were named publicly by their own senior manager, Greg Smith, in March this year as being the source of Goldman corruption. Rajat Gupta was not mentioned by Smith.  Was Smith wire-tapped? Has he been subpoenaed. Of course, Smith, who joined in 2000, wants us to believe Goldman was just bouncing corporate babies on its knees until then. Haha, as the financial press, belatedly points out, and toldja! since we pointed this out repeatedly much earlier.

3. John Edwards clearly violated the rules of election fund [sic]. He got away scot free.

[Lila: He should have. It was a stupid vindictive case]

4. Mr. Corzine is another name.

[Lila: Now we’re talking]

All, I am saying is Indians are blacks of white collar crime in this country. For same level of evidence, they are prosecuted at a much higher rate than white guys. This is exactly what happens for blacks for low level criminal activity.

Black defendants are convicted at an 81 percent rate and white defendants at a 66 percent rate in an all white jury.

When the jury pool includes at least one black potential juror,conviction rates are almost identical.”


(Source: Jury Representativeness: It’s No Joke In the State of New York http://papers.ccpr.ucla.edu/papers/PWP-DUKE-2011-001/PWP-DUKE-2011-001.pdf)

Rajat Gupta Trial: The Other Goldman Insider Ring…

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Just wonder what would happen if Gary Naftalis, lawyer for Rajat Gupta, the former Goldman manager on trial for alleged insider-trading, asked Lloyd Blankfein if he’d ever shared confidential Goldman information himself….you know, with one of his swanky neighbors in New York, say, Daniel Seth Loeb (Mr. Pink of feminine hygiene fame), who manages billions for hedge-fund, Third Point LLC..

Loeb, allegedly part of the network of sometime Sith Lord, Michael Milken (also of insider-trading fame),  is what’s called an activist hedge-fund, which is a nice way of saying he actively influences the price of the stocks he shorts/buys (all for the greater good, of course, but fortunately it coincides precisely with Mr. Loeb’s good too, which is so nice, especially when your hedge-fund is down).

Of course, one guy’s activism is another guy’s market manipulation, but I came not to quibble.

Daniel…Danny to his friends…is also good at digging up… er…doing research on the companies he shorts and employing public message-boards to intimidate company officers with information both relevant to their duties and relevant only to the purpose of intimidation (see also, harassment) .

He employs for that purpose the very interesting corporate intelligence firm of Julius Kroll, which every 9-11 researcher knows…

Kroll has ties (would you call those insider ties?) with Maurice (Hank) Greenberg through its purchase in 2004 by Marsh & McLennan, an insurance brokerage firm owned until 2005 by Jeffrey Greenberg, Hank’s son. Greenberg has been chief of C.V. Starr (CIA-linked), of Starr International, and until 2005 of AIG (also CIA-linked)…..

but I digress…

Where was I? Oh yes. Insider trading.

I just wondered about it in my little ole way, because digging (just like Kroll!)  through my archives, I ran into this note about how…sort of like biorhythms or crime-waves following the phases of the moon… there were a string of exits, literal and figurative, among some of these Goldman- Third-Point-activist-outsider-insider-letter-writing types at certain opportune moments. To wit.

“Goldman’s chief hedge-fund manager, Pierre-Henri Flamand (chief of GS Principal Strategies), retired in February after 15 years at Goldman. Flamand was with Principal Strategies from 2002 -2007, and then turned it into a hedge-fund in 2008, is starting his own fund. He’s being replaced by another manager from GSPS. Goldman has been accused of conniving with select hedge-funds to conduct bear raids on banks and governments.

Meanwhile, Adam Sackett, co-chief of trading at Third Point Capital, died on March 11, March 10, Wednesday night, apparently from a sudden bacterial infection. Third Point is one of the hedge-funds accused of colluding with David Einhorn’s Greenlight and SAC’s Steven Cohen in manipulative activities. Sackett had previously worked at Jim Chanos’ hedge-fund Kynikos (suspected by some to be part of that group), according to this death notice in the New York Times.

Note: Bankruptcy examiner Anton Valukas’ report on the demise of Lehman came out on March 11, 2010, the day after Sackett died.

Our condolences to the family.

In a letter to investors, posted at scribd, Daniel Loeb, Sackett’s co-chief at Third Point, called him “brilliant, kind, and funny, ” says the WSJ.

Last year, Third Point lost three senior officers, its chief operating officer, Brian Wilson, chief risk officer, Devin Dellaire, and head of investor relations, Tom Kratky.”

Tut. The last thing you want at activist hedge-funds is inactive  officers. But there — happens to the best of us.

And Loeb  is among the bestest of the best, we hear. So good that he gets to be neighbors with big shots from Citigroup and Goldman “we don’t do insider trading” Sachs at 15 Central Park West.

That’s this swanky place in New York:

15 central park west residents

And, dang, if  that isn’t a nice picture of Lloyd Bankst – I mean, Blankfein. Guess if you have to do God’s work, you might as well do it in a duplex worth $26 mill, huh?

[I have to say me..being a wog schwartze ‘n all…I couldn’t quite get the hang of what could’ve possibly cost $26 big ones in the place…but as they say, if you got it, flaunt it..]

And here’s Sandy Weill (former chief of Citigroup) flaunting his digs – worth $46 mill – at 15 Central Former Citigroup CEO Sandy Weill bought a full-floor penthouse in the front section of 15 CPW. He paid $43.7 million for the place in 2007, then a record price per-square-foot.

Park West.  (Love the smile, Sandy).  And then there’s Daniel Ochs (hedge-fund manager) and …but I digress, again.

Danny (to his foes, Senor Pinche_Wey – look that up) Loeb paid nearly as much as Sandy for his 8 bedroom apartment (45 million in 2008). He  wants to sell it for 100 million this year.

Nice.

But what I was really getting at, in my clumsy way, is could Mr. Gary Naftalis please inquire if Mr.Lloyd  Blankfein, in his neighborly walks from his apartment ($26 million) to the lobby and back, and up the elevator, and down, and in the door, and out..and waiting to catch a cab, or go to a restaurant, ever run into Mr. Loeb?

And if he did, did he chat? And if he chatted, as I hear he did, did he ever say anything about Goldman? And if he did, did he ever…just accidentally…let on about something that was confidential? I mean, I know how Mr. Blankfein is so big on confidentiality and how careful they are with even the appearance of wrong-doing at Goldman Sachs.

So careful, that their senior executives have begun jumping ship on the front pages of the international press.

Here’s how one of its clients, Marvell Technology Group, saw Goldman’s impeccable culture:

“Dr. Sutardja and Ms. Dai founded Marvell Technology Group, a worldwide semiconductor company in 1995. Goldman Sachs managed the IPO for Marvell and put the two executives into its Private Wealth Management Group. It is alleged that once the two executives’ personal wealth was under the financial management of Goldman Sachs, the firm abused the two executives’ trust, manipulated their relationship, and ultimately defrauded them of several hundreds of millions of dollars.”

And if Mr. Blankfein, like Brer Rabbit, jes’ lay low ‘n didn’t say nuffin’, how should we understand a passage like this one:

“Multiple media stories (such as this one in “Investment News”) have speculated that Goldman Sachs actually designed these CDOs in such a way that they would be certain to implode, delivering large profits to Goldman and preferred hedge fund clients. Those CDO could not have been created without Einhorn and his allies inside New Century delivering the mortgages that went into them. And there is no doubt that Goldman Sachs delivered the knock-out punch that put New Century out of business, ensuring that the CDOs would, in fact, implode. This constellation of facts may be coincidental, of course. Or not. This essay lays them out, and leaves it to the reader to decide.

New Century’s problems began in December 2005, when board member Richard Zona drafted a letter in which he threatened to resign if senior executives did not agree to sell a greater percentage of the mortgage loans on its books to various banks, such as Goldman Sachs. In his letter, Zona explicitly stated that he was making this demand in league with David Einhorn and Dan Loeb.

Unfortunately, according to the bankruptcy report, New Century’s executives never saw that letter. Zona stashed the draft letter on his computer and instead submitted a letter making a similar demand, but omitting all mention of Einhorn and Loeb. In all likelihood, Zona changed his letter because he knew that New Century’s executives had good reason to doubt whether Einhorn and Loeb, who had recently reported large shareholdings in New Century, were acting in the company’s best interests.

As Deep Capture has thoroughly documented, Einhorn and Loeb are part of a network of hedge fund managers and criminals who use a variety of dubious tactics to destroy, seize, and/or loot public companies for profit. It is not unusual for money managers in this network to appear as long investors in the companies they are attacking, and sometimes they seek to obtain a seat on a target company’s board in order to be better placed to run the company into the ground for their own private profit.

Essentially everyone  in this network – including Einhorn and Loeb — are connected in important ways to Michael Milken, the infamous criminal who specialized in loading companies with debt, looting them, and then profiting still more from their inevitable bankruptcies.”

Most of all, could Mr. Gary Naftalis find out why US Attorney Preet Bharara hasn’t charged David (no relation to Danny, we hope) Loeb, who was also leaking confidential Goldman information to Galleon?

“The logs showed calls from Loeb’s phones to numbers associated with Rajaratnam and Galleon trader Adam Smith on dates when Gupta is alleged to have tipped Rajaratnam, bolstering a defense claim that it was Loeb or others who leaked data.

Loeb, whose job kept him in regular contact with hedge funds, hasn’t been accused of wrongdoing, and Frankel didn’t present other evidence that he was the source of Rajaratnam’s information.”

And why  didn’t he charge Henry King, the technology analyst, another Goldman leaker, and how did he overlook the mysterious “Mr. X,” a third Goldman leaker... and why was it he zeroed in only on the luckless Mr. Gupta?

By the time it caught the attention of the Feds, Goldman – if we’re to believe the charges – had sprung more leaks than the Titanic…

Which leads to some interesting speculations.

Marvell Technology, we can safely assume, falls under the tech sector.  That would be the sector in which Henry King, the leaker, worked.  Marvell, with its Singapore offices, would also probably be of interest to David Loeb, head of Asia Equity sales, the other known leaker.

The one with all those ties to hedge-funds.

Would those hedge-funds include Daniel Loeb’s well-known Third Point? Especially, since, on looking up Mr. Loeb’s holdings, we find he has over 40% in technology including holdings in Marvell and in Apple.

Dan Loeb’s Third Point Offshore fund returned 3.7% during the first 5 months of 2012. Here are his top 10 holdings at the end of March:
Company Ticker Value ($000s) Activity
YAHOO INC YHOO 1,073,016 26%
DELPHI AUTOMOTIVE PLC DLPH 417,990 New
SARA LEE CORP SLE 221,221 32%
APPLE INC AAPL 217,037 New
UNITED TECHNOLOGIES CORP UTX 182,468 New
GOOGLE INC GOOG 179,547 New
MARVELL TECHNOLOGY GROUP LTD MRVL 145,503 -8%
MEDCO HEALTH SOLUTIONS INC MHS 140,600 New
FAMILY DOLLAR STORES INC FDO 136,052 New
CAPITAL ONE FINANCIAL CORP COF 119,841 New

It looks like he lost on Marvell, at least the shares he bought this year, but we don’t know what was bought in 2008…or sold…and what with all the long-short, up-down, outsider-insider, black-white, pump-dump, on-shore/off-shore, high-tech low-class complexities of hedge-funds, inquiring minds would like to know….

[June 20. I checked Einhorn and I see that he bought Marvell Technology in 20011 in the 3rd Q
“David Einhorn initially invested in Marvell Tech Group, a semiconductor company, in the third quarter of 2011. He bought 16,640,000 shares at an average price of $14. Then, he added more shares in the next two quarters and owned a total of 18,372,247 at March 31, 2012, making the holding 5.2% of his portfolio and his fifth-largest holding.

Marvell temporarily went above Einhorn’s highest average purchase price of $15.63 in the first quarter, but dropped to open Tuesday at $11.98 per share”

—

Back to Marvell. The co-founders claim that Goldman forced them to sell their holdings in  companies at a loss, through margin rules, and then turned around and bought those shares for its own holdings and those of its related hedge-funds.

One instance, was in the case of tech stock, NVIDIA:

Citing clear conflict of interest, the FINRA Claim alleges no one from Goldman ever disclosed to Claimants that Goldman was increasing its holdings in NVIDIA shares, while simultaneously forcing Claimants to sell their NVIDIA shares at a loss. Indeed, according to the FINRA Claim, no one from Goldman ever disclosed to Claimants that it was trading in NVIDIA at all or that it provided investment banking services to NVIDIA.

Another was in the case of their own company, Marvell. Their lawsuit against Goldman, though, doesn’t show any evidence of Goldman or hedge-fund purchasing Marvell.

If it did,  to a layman’s eyes, the scheme would seem as bad as a pump-and-dump operation.

Pump-and-dump operations often go hand-in-glove with naked short-selling, even though bashers and pumpers like to face-off on the message-boards with ripe invective.

And now we know that there’s been  naked-short-selling at Goldman Sachs since documentary evidence emerged accidentally in Overstock’s lawsuit with Goldman Sachs.

That  brings us back to the alleged insider trading ring Goldman had going with Third Point and its associates.

Which, again to our layman’s eyes, seems just as bad…if not a good deal worse..than the shenanigans of “Big Raj”‘s Galleon Group.

Besides, Big Raj is not on trial here. He’s already in the slammer. The trial is about Rajat Gupta, whose main mistake in this case seems to have been picking Big Raj for a friend….at least, for the time they were friends.

Which wasn’t long, by the account of Berkshire Hathaway’s No. 2 man, Mr. Ajit Jain.

Raj had gypped Rajat by 2008 says Mr. Jain.

Which means that if you’re looking for insider-rings with high-up connections to Goldman, Gupta might not be the highest up connection. Or, at least, not the only one.

I mean, it seems like if Mr. Bharara, another proud New Yorker, really wanted to know what was going on at Goldman, it would have been a lot less work to just stop by for a neighborly chat at  15 Central Park West….

Or has he?

Eaten By The Japanese: The Memoir Of An Unknown Indian Soldier

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In “Eaten by the Japanese”  Richard Crasta has collaborated with his 86 year old father John Baptist Crasta to give us an amazing account of his experiences as an Indian soldier in the Allied army, who became a Japanese POW,  experiences completely ignored by the majority of academic historians and writers.

Atrocities committed in Asia have never received  more than marginal attention until now, even though the death rate of Indians who were Japanese POWs was higher than the rate for victims of the Nazis.

Excerpts from Pragati:

“From “The Second Voyage of the Torture Ship”:
Dysentery broke out on the ship. The few latrines were being used by both unfit and fit men. In our own party of one hundred and fifty, three or four deaths occurred daily. The corpses were wrapped in a worn-out blanket and lowered into the deep ocean, unwept for and unsung. I could see hardy men prostrate with dysentery, unable to move, without any clothes. The Japanese did not pay any heed to what was going on. Dysentery spread to other holds of the ship, killing seven to eight daily. But the ship was not stopped, nor was an attempt made to evacuate the victims.

Insanitation and squalor increased. There had been cases of men dying from dysentery within a day of getting sick. Except for separate accommodation being allowed, no treatment was given to the men, and the disease spread anyway. The scene was pitiful and heart-rending. Brave, virile soldiers who would have defied anybody in battle were now helpless like babies and were groaning and rolling naked on the floor presenting a weird spectacle. I could not bear it and tears started trickling from my eyes as nothing in my life had moved me to that extent. Was this the penalty we were paying for being honest and principled?

From “Koga the Devil”:
…..Owing to agonizing pain, my temperature did not subside. I and the four others requested Koga to shoot us as it was better to die than to remain as their prisoners. He jokingly gave us shovels and spades, asking us to prepare our own graves so that we might be shot the next morning.

Basanta was the one most cruelly mistreated. For some trifling offence, he was tied with live battery wires; and when the unfortunate man cried for mercy, all the Japanese laughed. He fell down. They kicked him and made him get up, again tying him up with the torturing wires. Besides Basanta, there was another Sikh, Kartar Singh, with us. Koga ordered them to shave off their beards as, according to them, the beards made them ill. For disobeying him, they were beaten.

One day, Basanta was standing by. Koga, like a dog, came upon him and passed urine on him. On another occasion, Basanta was spat upon.

We again pleaded with Koga to shoot us all. He warned us not to repeat this request. We were their prisoners and must obey them. Even the British General Percival was being ordered about by a Japanese soldier. We had been defeated in the war and must not speak anything out of the way.

From “Killing to Eat: or Calling Upon the Japanese to Face their Dark Side”:
And though I believe all of us have within us a dark side, and that in a profound sense we are also the Other, it is also important, in the illusory everyday world that we call Reality, that we append the stories of the weak and the voiceless to the histories written by the mighty and the once-mighty, and that each us of register our horror, our personal footnote, to the Official and often Sanitized Communal History. Any lingering doubts I may have had about the title disappeared after I met Roger Mansell, an American war historian who had been examining the Japanese record in World War II. Mansell was horrified by the lack of remorse in a recent Japanese compendium of World War II recollections called Senso. He explained that American G.I.s had been cannibalized simply as an act of demoralization; these acts had nothing to do with the nutritional needs of the Japanese. So I decided to retain the title for this second, public edition, even allowing in a moment of optimism that the book might receive attention in Japan and persuade the Japanese to confront and admit to their widely observed racism and start a national campaign to tackle it, making it less possible for a future Pico Iyer to say, “In Japan, an Indian is the lowest of the low.”

Comment:

What a gift the internet has been. I posted this excerpt not to provoke racial/national animosity or to endorse requests for national apologies or recriminations. But just to add to public knowledge, and to show how much of our real history has been suppressed, ignored or distorted. All these years of reading WW II history, and even reading about the cannibalising of George Bush’s comrades by the Japanese, I’d never heard about the experiences of Indian solders.

Indian Opposition Says No To Wal-Mart

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Bloomberg reports on Indian opposition to corporate giants forcing open the lucrative retail market:

“Opposition parties and government allies rounded on Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s bid to open India’s retail sector to foreign companies like Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT), stalling parliament for a fifth day with their protests.

In a rare concerted attack on the ruling Congress party, Singh’s two largest parliamentary partners joined the opposition in criticizing the policy approved by the Cabinet last week, forcing both houses of parliament to adjourn. Overseas retailers stand to be barred from opening stores in at least 19 of India’s 45 largest cities with state assemblies set to veto their entry. “

I’m glad to hear this.   Even though it’s too little too late. The spineless Manmohan Singh has already opened up local mutual funds to foreign investment, with all the economic and other dangers of cross-border financial flows and hot money.

Of course, the globalist mouthpieces, (Time: Jyothi Thottam, “Why India Should Stop Fearing Walmart”), are anxious for it to happen.

The big media outlets like to put a local face on the policy (“India’s Wobbly Walmart Embrace’), but astute readers aren’t fooled.

One writes:

Let’s say our law says that Walmart will source 30% from small players. What about the rest, the 70%? Is it going to source 100% of it from India or is allowed to import the rest, i.e. 70%? According to the WTO you cannot stop them from importing.  The example the writer gave was from Bharti-Walmart which is a wholesale cash and carry store (like SAM’s) not Walmart – it is the consumer side which will kill the Kirana business and the Indian manufacturers. She talks about the food supply and global chains without even knowing what it means. …..

They are in the business of making money and lots of it for their US shareholders. They are not in the business of reducing cost for Indian consumers. If it happens that they buy in bulk in China and flood the Indian market with imports, so be it.  Today India is a net Export-Import deficit country with $85 Billion per year. This is the contribution of Dr. Singh…from a few billion a year trade deficit that we had before to having to borrow $85 Billion a year to pay our imports minus exports. So what do you think will happen when Walmart imports $100 Billion dollars worth of goods into India every year?

Now you have to somehow find current $85 Billion net deficit + $100 Billion = $185 Billion dollars PER YEAR.  In the case of the USA, it was simple. The USA borrowed $3 Trillion to pay the deficit. It has the luxury of printing dollars. So if China demands money, they can print it. They just recently printed $600 Billion. India can not do this and India will ultimately be screwed.  In the 17th Century, India was a net exporter. Then the Britishers came and India became a net importer and in turn a poor country. That will happen after a few years if our appetite for imports continues to grow and our exports dont keep up with the rise in imports as happened in the last many years. Today, we borrow soft money and hard money from the IMF, bonds, FDI in other sectors etc. to pay the difference of $85 Billion of dollars that we have to pay to import more than what we export. How long do you think this is sustainable? How long do you think we can continue to borrow either via the FDI route or via IMF loans to pay for our imports. India is one of the few countries where you can allow all these things, including changing our nuclear policy, allowing FDI, etc. without discussing this in Parliament first.

Remember also that Walmart started putting in RFID tags into their clothes from last year, August 1, 2010, making it possible at some point that you could be tracked anywhere you went, because of your clothes. This is incipiently fascistic.

India FDI Watch has a detailed report on what really happens when foreign lobbyists get big retail giants into the market, monopsony:

“Industrial licensing had brought monopolies to India but monopsony is a new phenomenon for India which has recently come to the forefront in the manufacturing goods sector due to the increased specialization in the global process of production. This has led to the concept of a single supplier to a large producer who obtains the goods at a ransom. The larger the amount of any commodity a large retailer can purchase, the greater the concession on price, delivery, it can extract. This is a demonstration of monopsonistic procurement and the awesome monopsonistic purchasing power which comes with it. This is unique to the modern world of digital instant communication (branding, streamlined logistics distribution can drive down prices still further) and hugely affects the agricultural commodities market also, as shown. The more of a commodity large retailers purchase in bulk, the lower the prices growers of agricultural commodities obtain!”

More in this report on how the globalists at WTO would like to destroy the decentralized production of food:

“The Bank has identified laws such as the Essential Commodities Act (1955) the Agricultural Produce and marketing Act (APMC 1972) and the Prevention of Black Marketing and Maintenance of Supplies of Essential Commodities Act (1980) which have defended the rights of farmers to a just price and the rights of the poor to a fair price for food, as having “prevented the free mobility of agricultural produce and thus segmented the Indian domestic market into many smaller markets.

The government has also imposed restrictions on foreign investment in the retail of agricultural commodities, and on both foreign and domestic private investment in wholesale. These restrictions have collectively discouraged and/or prevented the private sector from undertaking large-scale investment in agricultural storage, marketing, or processing activities – an example of horizontal fragmentation preventing desirable vertical integration. The result is that today there is no large, organized, efficient pan-Indian supply chain in the agricultural sector, including in horticulture. What the Bank defines as “fragmentation” is in fact self-organized local systems of production and trade which are not controlled by a centralized store or by centralized, monopolistic corporations. And the repeated attack on India’s “geography” shows how anti-nature World Bank’s basic economic thinking is. Not only the World Bank like to wish away India’s diversity and geography, it would like to destroy India’s food sovereignty.

Thus, the Bank takes apples grown in Himachal and says it would be cheaper to import them for Chennai. This was exactly the argument the trade liberalisers had used to justify wheat imports. However, the imported wheat turned out to be twice as costly as domestic wheat. Navdanya has filed a case in the Supreme Court against wheat imports.”

Note:

I’ve shopped at Walmart, and they have great prices, true. But in the US I don’t have that much of a choice of smaller shops.  In India, however, there are plenty of choices….and it should stay that way.  Anyway, I don’t think I should be shopping at Walmart, even if the prices are low.  It’s a question of choosing smart self-interest over self-defeating self-interest. I like cheap prices, but I also want to live in a country of small shops and farms, not one of huge commercial farms and supermarkets.

It’s time to buy from local retailers, wherever possible.

The American-made Retail E-guide features over 2500 American-made products from over a dozen popular retail stores like Dillard’s, Home Depot, TJ Maxx, and Costco.

How Americans Can Buy American
Post Office Box 780839, Orlando, Florida 32878-0839
Tel: 1-888-US OWNED (1-888-876-9633)
Emergency Backup: 407-234-4626
Email the Author: Roger Simmermaker
Web: http://www.howtobuyamerican.com

On this issue, I agree with OccupyWallStreet.

If we can’t lower taxes to bring companies back, we can boycott multinationals with predatory practices. Giant corporations of this kind have nothing to do with the free market.

From TowardFreedom:

“The shiny happy people featured in Wal-Mart advertisements, as well as the company’s continued PR claims of corporate responsibility (“We at Wal-Mart take an active interest in conserving the environment!”), simply doesn’t match the frustrating reality of their corporate behavior. Even the largely toothless Environmental Protection Agency, for example, a federal regulatory outfit that sometimes seems to exist simply to provide permits for giant corporate polluters, has managed to prosecute Wal-Mart for Clean Air Act violations in nine states, due to the company’s stubborn insistence on storing lawn fertilizer and other toxic chemicals in parking lots located near local watershed areas.

Greenwald even takes us to Wal-Mart’s global factories in where Wal-Mart workers put in 14 hour days 7 days a week and brush their teeth with fireplace ashes because their salaries don’t allow them to buy tooth paste. Implicitly in this global tour is the fact that, while wrapping itself in the American flag and a shallow sham version of patriotism, Wal-Mart cares very little for the health and well being of its workers, the environment, or the health of the U.S. economy as a whole, beyond the short-term dollar value it can extract to increase its profit margin.

While all of this is deeply sobering, Greenwald wisely chooses to end the film on a powerful high note, spotlighting and interviewing several citizen/activists – normal people just like you and me – who have chosen to organize their communities to oppose Wal-Mart’s predatory behavior and fight for more just and sustainable local economies.”

Globalists Subverting Liberal Arts Discourse In India

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Rajiv Malhotra discusses why Hinduism, despite being a religion of around a billion people, has never been understood or defended in the same way as Christianity and Islam. He calls on Hindus to understand and reproduce today the ancient tradition of purva-paksha (Sanskrit for ‘the first objection to any assertion in a debate’), that is, understanding the ideology or belief-system of another culture on its own terms.

While Christianity has produced an enormous range of texts to explain its world-view and to defend it and “place” it among other religions and traditions, modern and ancient, Hinduism has failed to do so, subscribing to a quietistic belief that possession of knowledge or truth within oneself is sufficient.

Thus, among all religions, Christianity, in all its variants, has produced the greatest quantity of discourse, and the most widely dispersed, allowing it to colonize intellectual discourse across the board.

This is true, even while it’s true that orthodox Christianity is under attack from secularists. Many Christians indeed feel themselves singled out for attack, among all religions.

However, that feeling is misleading. The real problem is that secularism (an outgrowth of liberal Christianity itself) is creating the friction.

It is not that other religions are attacking Christianity so much as that secularism, while still attached to its parent religion, Christianity, is colonizing the intellectual spaces of other cultures. Secularism uses the symbols and beliefs of Western Christianity as a target, although the real social ills under attack (consumer culture, racial or gender oppression etc.) belong to the societal structure of post-Christian Europe.

The globalist agenda, which involves the export of cultural Marxism to other cultures, draws the people in those cultures away from producing an effective discourse of their own real indigenous traditions. Instead, it seduces them to take up the globalist cultural Marxist discourse because of the opportunities for advancement that discourse offers through the international network attached to it.

Thus, a young Indian in school will be told that India has no “liberal arts” or “libertarian” tradition. He must get it all from the West. And when he does, thanks to foundation funding, it comes wearing the friendly face of “universal human rights”, “democracy”, “women’s rights’ or “gay rights”, under which lies a dominant secular discourse that in turn disguises an imperial and colonial agenda.

The colonialism is not the old-style colonialism of occupying land and taking over homes, although that too can be found in one of the cockpits of the globalist project, Israel.

The other cockpits in Europe and in America content themselves with propagating ideology that permits the colonization and domination of other people’s homelands through transnational state-capitalism, but they also try to protect they own homelands from reciprocal movement, by restricting and demonizing third-world immigration. They want freedom for their businesses, to put it bluntly, but no freedom for other human beings. That not only preserves the power of the Western establishment, but enhances it.

The new colonialism is cultural colonization. The subversion and destruction of civlizations, not simply Islam, but any civilization in the path of the globalist agenda.

In that sense, the Hindu civilization in India and orthodox forms of Christianity or non-European Christian communities, are also under attack.

The only difference is that the Christians have an enormous tradition, a dominant media and academic presence, and considerable wealth behind them.

So far, argues Malhotra, Hindus have not had anything similar. They build temples and endow charities, but they have not spent the same time or money defending and exposing to the public their own intellectual and cultural heritage. It might be time for them to do so aggressively.

Obama: Normalizing The Police State

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Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic asks the liberal faithful (Ezra Klein and David Remnick, specifically) to stop marginalizing peace and civil liberties by defending Obama and blaming criticism of him on Republican partisanship and a bad economy he had no hand in creating:

“These are the sorts of treatments that permit well-educated Obama supporters to evade certain uncomfortable truths, like the fact that the president to whom they’ll give campaign contributions and votes violated the War Powers Resolution when he invaded Libya; that in doing so he undermined the Office of Legal Counsel, weakening a prudential restraint on executive power; that from the outset he misled Congress and the public about the likely duration of the conflict; that the humanitarian impulse alleged to prompt the intervention somehow evaporated when destitute refugees from that war were drowning in the Mediterranean.

In saying that Obama has “awakened to the miserable realities of Pakistan and Iran,” Remnick elides an undeclared drone war that is destabilizing a nuclear power, the horrific humanitarian and strategic costs of which Jane Mayer documents at length in The New Yorker; “Obama is responsible for an aggressive assault on Al Qaeda, including the killing of bin Laden, in Pakistan, and of Anwar al-Awlaki, in Yemen,” Remnick writes, never hinting that al-Awlaki was an American citizen killed by a president asserting the unchecked write to put people on an assassination list that requires no due process or judicial review, and that the administration justifies with legal reasoning that it refuses to make public. “He has drawn down forces in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Remnick writes, obscuring the fact that there are many more troops in Afghanistan than when Obama took office, and that in Iraq he has merely stuck to the timetable for withdrawal established by the Bush Administration, after unsuccessfully lobbying the government of Iraq to permit US troops to stay longer — instead, he plans to increase the presence of American troops elsewhere in the Persian Gulf, and to leave in Iraq a huge presence of State Department employees and private security.

Klein’s piece relies heavily on the reality that, for all his hope and change rhetoric, Obama was constrained in dealing with the economic crisis when he took office. Quite right. Only unjustifiable extrapolation permits Klein to reach the larger conclusion that GOP opposition and a bad economy explain his broken promises. Had Klein tried to come up with a control group to test his hypothesis, he might’ve looked to the policies over which Obama has substantial or complete control. Is Obama’s war on whistleblowers, also documented in the New Yorker by Jane Mayer, something that Republicans and a bad economy forced on him? Are they responsible for the White House’s utter failure to deliver anything like the transparency that Obama promised, and its abuse of the state secrets privilege? How does the economy explain the escalation of the drug war and federal raids on medical marijuana dispensaries in states where they are legal, or the Department of Homeland Security’s escalation of security theater to the point that Americans are being groped and undergoing naked scans in airports?……

Is Obama better than all the Republican candidates on these issues? Certainly not. He is worse than Gary Johnson and Ron Paul; arguably worse than Jon Huntsman too. Is he better than anyone likely to win the GOP nomination? Perhaps. Does it matter?…….

..What few of us saw in 2008 is that Bush Administration wasn’t “a temporary detour from our history’s long arc toward justice,” and the Obama Administration wasn’t a vehicle for change — it was the normalization of the post-9/11 security state.”

The ISI And 9-11

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Abid Ullah Jan, Pakistan Tribune, July 14, 2006

“With CIA backing and massive amounts of U.S. military aid, the ISI developed [since the early 1980s] into a parallel structure wielding enormous power over all aspects of government… The ISI had a staff composed of military and intelligence officers, bureaucrats, undercover agents and informers estimated at 150,000.6

The ISI actively collaborates with the CIA. It continues to perform the role of a ‘go-between’ in numerous intelligence operations on behalf of the CIA. The ISI had, and still has, access to considerable funding from the CIA. According to Selig Harrison, a leading American expert on South Asia with access to CIA officials, distribution of these funds has been left to the discretion of the ISI itself with whom “The CIA still has close links.” Harrison spoke to an audience of security experts in London at a conference on “Terrorism and regional security: Managing the challenges of Asia” in the last week of February, just before the Taliban’s destruction of the Buddha statues of Bamiyan. As a senior associate of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace from 1974 to 1996, he had been in close contact with the CIA.7

The ISI directly supported and financed a number of operations and organizations without realizing the seeds of destruction it was sowing for Pakistan. Mossad (the Israeli government’s intelligence agency) also became involved in these operations, in order to have access to the structure and operations of the ISI and Pakistan’s military. These are the lesser well-known facts.

The growing body of evidence suggests that the ISI was actively involved in part of Operation 9/11, where it was required to use its intelligence assets to frame Osama bin Laden for the planned 9/11 attacks. An elaborate operation was undertaken to develop evidence, linking Arabs to the 9/11 attacks, to pave the way for the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. A transfer of funds to the lead hijacker on the orders of the ISI chief is just one piece of the bigger picture. The FBI had this information—they knew exactly who was transferring funds to whom. Less than two weeks later, Agence France Presse (AFP) confirmed the FBI’s findings. According to the AFP report, the money used to finance the 9/11 attacks had allegedly been “wired to WTC hijacker Mohammed Atta from Pakistan, by Ahmad Umar Sheikh, at the instance of [ISI Chief] General Mahmood [Ahmad].”8 Dennis Lormel, director of the FBI’s Financial Crimes Unit, has confirmed that Saeed Sheikh transferred $100,000 to Mohammed Atta at the behest of General Mahmood Ahmed, head of the ISI, before the New York attacks.9 According to the AFP (quoting the intelligence source): “The evidence we have supplied to the U.S. is of a much wider range and depth than just one piece of paper linking a rogue general to some misplaced act of terrorism.”10

The questions remain: What did the U.S. government do with the information provided by the FBI and other sources with regard to the ISI’s involvement in 9/11? Why has there been no meaningful action and investigation? Why are U.S. officials not telling the truth? In a May 16, 2002 press conference on the role of General Mahmood Ahmad, a journalist asked Condoleezza Rice about her awareness of “the reports at the time that the ISI chief was in Washington on September 11th, and on September 10th $100,000 was wired from Pakistan to these groups.” She was also asked why General Mahmood was in the United States, and about his meeting with Condoleezza Rice. She replied: “I have not seen that report, and he was certainly not meeting with me.”11

Michel Chossudovsky concludes in his June 20, 2005 report, published by the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) that the ISI and CIA have developed close relationships, and that Condoleezza Rice was covering up the ISI Chief’s involvement in 9/11″