Category Archives: Ideology

Gore Vidal WAS A Pedophile, Says Family

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UPDATE

Further substantiating my accurate analysis that Vidal’s “anti-establishment” stance (including his “antiwar” stance) was not in anyway a principled objection to abusive power, notice from this report that he craved the status granted by elite institutions like Harvard (not having gone to college himself); notice that his hatred of the state was mixed with feelings of thwarted ambition because he’d always wanted to be president; notice that his anti-establishment rants were mingled with constant remembrances of status symbols and the upper-class gilded life to which he belonged and in which he reveled; notice the opulent life-style he lived (not that I have anything against that) and his $37 million estate); notice the deep alcoholism and madness in which he ended his life.

Now put against that the FACTS about Gandhi:

1. Was in excellent physical and mental condition late into life, when he was undergoing month-long fasts.

2. Was repeatedly offered leadership positions in the state and turned them down. Counseled against imitating Western state structures.

3.  Although once prosperous, gave away most of his belongings and was left with nothing more than a watch, his glasses, his loincloth and shawl, and a bowl out of which he ate.

4. Died not from alcoholism and insanity, but from a bullet delivered by an assassin. His last words were “He Ram” (Oh God).

No need to demonize Vidal, of course.

He was a talented, clever, witty man, who said many true things about history and government and he was a prolific, popular novelist of varying ability. He was a fine essayist, no doubt.

But he was also a compulsive  promiscuous pedophile (and most likely a child rapist) who publicly defended  other child rapists (Roman Polansky, Catholic priests).

He was nasty to friends and foes, envied others and relentlessly slandered them. He harbored demons to the end of his life that he was too weak to overcome. He deserved  the prayers and intervention of his friends and family in life, not the mindless adulation of strangers in death. He doubtless victimized scores of children, Thai children, whom we’ll never hear about. Safe Horizon, so exercised about the Indian nanny fake-slaver case should perhaps be called in about this compelling example of real child-sex tourism.

The American media can keep Gore Vidal for a hero. He fits their values.

I’d rather look among hundreds of unsung activists/writers for mine.

ORIGINAL POST

Gore Vidal’s family supports the long-standing rumors of Vidal’s pedophilia that I published here and that I decided, after analysis, were credible.

For that, this blog was hacked, and a week or so later, some spooky electronic harassment took place. I’m not really sure how that happened. I only know it took place.

I think I was alone among antiwar bloggers, most of whom praised Vidal to the skies, ignoring everything except the fact that his position on war was theirs.

I usually wouldn’t criticize a man on his death, but the universal praise of such a deeply flawed man, just after the contemptible and untruthful slurs against Gandhi, cried out to be corrected.

So here’s the post I wrote: Vidal, Polanksy and Kinsey, August 4, 2012.

In contrast, here’s Justin Raimondo’s piece “The Last Jeffersonian,” August 3, 2012

[I have always liked Raimondo’s investigative pieces on the Israeli lobby, one of the more dangerous areas for writers, so this isn’t meant as an attack on him.]

Here’s another libertarian Bill Kauffman on Vidal.

Now for the main points from the Daily Mail piece on Vidal:

“In a feature that appeared in the New York Times, Ms Straight – who had a ‘turbulent though close relationship’ with Vidal – said the openly-gay author had had sex with underage men.

“She described the alleged circumstances as ‘Jerry Sandusky acts’, referring to the former Penn State assistant football coach convicted of child molestation.

“Mr Steers – who directed the Zac Efron film Charlie St Cloud – said that conservative columnist William F. Buckley – who had a long-running public feud with Vidal, which also played out in court – had evidence linking Vidal to the alleged crimes.”

AND

“The New York Times article also says that the ever-opinionated Vidal had a strange and controversial take on the abuse perpetrated by Catholic priests.

“‘He would say that the young guys involved were hustlers who were sending signals,’ Mr Steers said.

[Lila: Based on this statement alone, I would give credibility to the charges against Vidal.]

“However the author of the article, Tim Teeman, wrote that ‘other friends of Mr. Vidal told me they doubted he had sex with underage men’.

“I”Vidal suffered from dementia and alcoholism towards the end of his life.

“Mr Steers said he would drink single male scotch ‘until he collapsed’.

Vidal also had ‘wet brain’ – proper name Wernicke-Korsakoff – a syndrome characterized by a number of symptoms, including confusion and hallucination.”

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2496631/Family-Gore-Vidal-allege-pedophile-challenge-writers-37-million-will.html#ixzz2q2g6wNOz
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Vidal was not only a pedophile, it seems he beat up gays, so intense was his own self-loathing.

[Lila: I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s not his “pedophilia” but his involvement in even worse – violence against  male child prostitutes that might be the real story and the “yes he was a pedophile” simply a diversion. After all, pedophilia apologias have already appeared in mainstream media, like The Atlantic.]

Consider the reverential treatment given to this insane, addicted, unpleasant man, who was a self-confessed pederast. His well-documented compulsive lifestyle was passed over in silence by the establishment media, since he was “one of them,” from the ruling class.

But of Gandhi, a man who fought his devils all his life bravely, with the utmost candor, and engaged, successfully or not, in one of the biggest social upheavals in modern history,  the same media has recently had nothing but scurrilous and easily discredited innuendo.

Malicious critics called him a bisexual pedophile molester, based on deliberate falsification and exaggeration of historical evidence. They called him a hypocrite, whereas the truth was he was compulsively open to his critics, even begging them to write the worst they knew about him.

Why so much venom? Because Gandhi was Indian and the media in the West has over the last two years been engaged in a systematic campaign of vilification and half-truths against India, along with literal provocations, as I’ve amply documented.

While Vidal,  a hero of  modern liberals, lived in terror of the truth about himself coming out, Gandhi courageously reported every passing sexual feeling in his diaries, urged his critics to say the worst about him that they could, and berated himself endlessly for even mental failures of continence.

Here’s more about  the new claims about Vidal:

“Vidal accused Buckley of being a “crypto-Nazi”; Buckley responded by labelling Vidal a “queer” and telling him to stop his insults or Buckley would “sock [him] in the goddamn face”.

Their argument ended up in the courts, where Buckley first lost an expensive lawsuit against Vidal for libel, before winning a settlement from a magazine that republished Vidal’s written attack years later.

Vidal once estimated he had slept with 1,000 men before he was 25, and boasted of having had sex with Fred Astaire, Rock Hudson and Noel Coward, according to Mr Teeman.

While enjoying a 53-year relationship with his long-term partner, Howard Austen, before Austen’s death in 2003, he wrote in his 1995 memoir, Palimpsest, that he was “attracted to adolescent males”…….

…Buckley’s son, Christopher, has said that while clearing out his late father’s study, he found a file labelled “Vidal Legal”, which he threw into a dumpster…….

An unidentified “longtime friend” of Vidal’s added that the author had once shocked a guest at his home in Ravello, Italy, by announcing: “You know I’m a pederast”.

This friend focused on Vidal’s time spent in Bangkok, Thailand, a city notorious for its sex trade. “He did go to Thailand every year, and he was definitely having sex with male prostitutes there, and they weren’t older male prostitutes,” the friend said.”

Evil people lie about good people for one principal reason – vanity.

They cannot stand being shown up by anything or anyone better than they are.  A couple of years ago, the Catholic Archbishop of Philadelphia, wrote about the profound intolerance of sin for anything that rebukes it, in an essay, “Evil preaches tolerance only when it’s weak.”

So also lies cannot tolerate truth.

But  the world is not built on lies.  And man cannot live on lies.

At the end, when the mud and the bile and the envious distortions of petty men have had their day, the truth will be vindicated.

What’s wrong with Hans Hoppe…(random thinking aloud)

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Update:

Hoppe clarifies his views and DENIES that he is a supporter of monarchy:

Loved by the good guys, hated by the bad (Lew Rockwell,  May 20, 2014)

“It favorably contrasts traditional, pre-constitutional monarchies and kings to modern democracies and prime ministers or presidents – a thesis that likely appears only slightly less alien to contemporary Brazilian or Portuguese ears than it does to US-Americans’. But the book is not a defense of monarchy. Rather, it advocates a “withering away” of the state altogether, whether monarchic or democratic, and its successive replacement by a private law society, a “natural order.” And as suitable means to this end it advocates decentralization and secession – highly contentious issues in the history especially also of Brazil. ”

So there’s that.  I plan to keep an open mind.  It’s also possible, after all, that  Mr. Hoppe might not know the uses to which his thinking could be put.

ORIGINAL POST

WARNING NON-PC THINKING ALOUD. READ AT YOUR PERIL

…..is not his views about gays, Hindus, communists, or anyone else.

Hoppe is right that there is no liberty, unless one is free to associate with whomever one chooses.

However…

1.  One is not free to take tax-money (as he does, being addicted to the public academic trough) from people of all sorts of persuasions (gays, Hindus etc.)…. and then advocate secession from their embrace, WITHOUT COMPENSATION.

2. One is a hypocrite of quite a high order to make a living from an institution that one regularly denounces as untenable and immoral (Block and Hoppe both work for public institutions and always have).

Gary North, to give him credit, at least has his money where his mouth is – he makes his living in the private sector.

3. Hoppe’s arguments (argumentation ethics and IP socialism) are just bad, as I’ve shown on my blog, admittedly in a piecemeal fashion, but, hey, I don’t think they’re worth rebutting,, since they’ve been rebutted many, many times by fine scholars in the field. Google it.

4. Hoppe’s arguments about gays and time-preference are plain wrong, no matter where you stand on homosexuals.  The idea that gays don’t save as much as heteros is laughable, as anyone who’s had gay friends would know.

Your average upstanding hetero  with “the full catastrophe” of wife and kids, in Zorba’s immortal words, has no “time preference” at all.

He’s a consumption addict, not because of his sexuality, alas, but because of government-real estate industry propaganda.

So, the real source of distorted time preferences is not sexuality, perverse or otherwise, but ADVERTISING and PROPAGANDA, the first of which will certainly not disappear in Hoppe’s corporate-worshiping vision.

I could go on…but why bother?

Hoppe looks to me to be a front man for a strange mix of white nationalists who’ve renounced their brethren and bought their way into media acceptability by teaming up with left-libs in a marriage of convenience so strange its gives them laryngitis on a number of things….(sigh)

The fact is corporations act just like states, and, in the absence of states, will manufacture their own legitimacy – which is where Mr. Hoppe comes in.

Mr. Hoppe looks to me to be about manufacturing legitimacy for absolute monarchy.

I suspect his is the first toe in the water. In a few years, with the coming of the suitable member of the British royalty – now intermarried with the Rothschilds, who claim, British-Israelite fashion, to be the true heirs to the throne of David   ….we will know how many pieces of silver….or gold…were involved in this particular betrayal of conscience.

The CIA, Carl Oglesby, and Business International Corp.

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Update:

[I should clarify that the article on the site, which is devoted to LaRouche is not from the EIR itself, but from a critic, who has added some more interesting details to the story, in the comment section0.

Update:

Just to be clear, my link to the Lyndon LaRouche site (at the bottom) isn’t meant to support the man’s theories.  LaRouche is a Hamiltonian. I am not. He was also involved, allegedly, in cult-like behavior toward followers.

However, LaRouche, as even his strongest critics (like Chip Berlet here) admit, has good research. [ To clarify, the piece is not by LaRouche but by a critic who keeps tabs on his work and thus stores an archive of it.]

Linking to people like LaRouche, Stewart Rhodes of Oath-keepers (whom someone now informs me is considered a neo-Nazi)  is a no-no, apparently, in the PC world.

One is supposed to link only to certified organic, FDA-approved, brand-name thinkers.

On top of that, I just read today that the phrase “Talmudic Jew” is considered “Nazi” language.  Now, I don’t think I’ve ever used it, but I’ve surely written somewhere about Talmudic Judaism.

And to add to my sins, I’ve defended Ayn Rand (not that I am a Randian by any means). But when the media piles on someone,  some instinct in me compels me to rush to their defense.

Dear lord.  We say “Biblical Christian” all the time. And “Shia Muslim.” What about “Vedic Hindu?” Those are fine, aren’t they? Why the difference?

I know I can denounce the “bourgeoisie” as vermin all day long and still be OK. I can even talk about  femi-nazis without a  problem. ….just so long as I approve of Chip Berlet’s employers bombing the right sort of victims.

I give two figs for such puerile nonsense.

Because someone might read the  theories behind Hitler or Mao and try to understand them, it doesn’t follow that they are Nazis or Maoists themselves.

Vegetarianism doesn’t become Nazi become Hitler adopted it.

Hitler, Mao, PolPot…as monstrous as the crimes they enabled might be, they are not qualitatively different from the crimes of the average man.

No untouchables please, whether physically – through legal deprivations of their rights…or intellectually….through ghettoization and demonization.

ORIGINAL POST:

Carl Oglesby: “Revolutions do not take place in velvet boxes. . . . Nuns will be raped and bureaucrats will be disemboweled.”

Read more at http://politicaloutcast.com/2013/04/violence-and-mayhem-have-long-been-a-tool-of-the-left/#GbpcTScjJoQ0Mycu.99

One of the most respected student leaders of the antiwar movement in the 1960s was Carl Oglesby, who worked with Murray Rothbard, says Charles Burris at Lew Rockwell.

Not being more than a cursory student of this period, I did a little digging.

Here’s what I came up with:

Oglesby was initially a technical writer/editor with a defense contractor called Bendix, before entering politics. He soon rose to the head of  Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the best-known antiwar group.

The SDS was a splinter group from the Student League for Industrial Democracy, which was affiliated with the  National Student Association, formed in 1947.

The NSA was outed in 1966 as a CIA front.

(also here).

This was in an expose in Ramparts Magazine, a Catholic left-wing magazine.

The writers were Robert Scheer and Stanley Scheinbaum, who is described here as a communist activist.

This Catholic writer says Ramparts was a communist front posing as Catholic outlet to better attack the church.

In 2006, I wrote a piece called “Portrait of the CIA as an artist,” about cultural outlets that were set up or operated by the CIA, as the Cold War developed. Among the CIA-funded outfits was the Congress for Cultural Freedom .

All this is well known.

Besides that, several leaders in the antiwar movement, including feminist leader Gloria Steinem, received funding from the CIA.

Again, this is well-known.

New to me was that there was a  meeting set up between the business establishment and the leadership of the SDS. The  outfit involved was something called Business International, which seems to be the same Business International Corporation for which Barack Obama worked.

It’s long been considered an intelligence front.

So, you have a high-security employee of a defense contractor that was working for NASA and was later affiliated with Raytheon, entering an anti-government student movement, quickly becoming its spokesman, and letting the CIA spy on the movement without a qualm,…..but, yo,  it’s all good…

The ex- Bendix employee  suspects the company is an intelligence front trying to co-opt the movement, but that’s a good thing, because there’s an even worse bunch of business interests called “cowboys” that needs to be bested.

So, no problem.

The student movement thereafter develops a violent faction that blows up – literally as well as figuratively –   while from 1968 onward, the whole antiwar “scene” turns into a drug-addled, bead-wearing, orgiastic escape into self-help.

Oglesby worked closely with Murray Rothbard, about whose interactions with suspected CIA-affiliated figures – James Dale Davidson (of Agora Inc.), Robert Kephart, and Noam Chomsky –   I’ve blogged at length.

The Business International connection adds to the list.

Of course, I make no hard and fast claims. I just raise the issue.

Some links:

“Clinton, Quigley, and Conspiracy,” Daniel Brandt (NameBase.org):

“Almost everything that happened to the student movement (Lila: the antiwar protests against US involvement in Vietnam) is best explained without conspiracy theories. There are, however, some bits of curious evidence that should be briefly mentioned. Each of these alone doesn’t amount to much, but taken together they suggest that something more was happening — the possibility that by 1969 a significant sector of the ruling class had decided to buy into the counterculture for purposes of manipulation and control:

  • Student leaders James Kunen[19] and Carl Oglesby[20] both report that in the summer of 1968, the organization Business International, which had links to the CIA, sent high-level representatives to meet with SDS. These people wanted to help organize demonstrations for the upcoming conventions in Chicago and Miami. SDS refused the offer, but the experience convinced Oglesby that the ruling class was at war with itself, and he began developing his Yankee-Cowboy theory.
  • Tom Hayden, who by 1986 was defending his state assembly seat against those trying to oust him because of his anti-war record, was quoted as saying that while he was protesting against the Vietnam War, he was also cooperating with U.S. intelligence agents.[21]
  • The CIA was of course involved with LSD testing, but there is also evidence that it was later involved in the distribution of LSD within the counterculture.[22]
  • Feminist leader Gloria Steinem[23] and congressman Allard Lowenstein both had major CIA connections. Lowenstein was president of the National Student Association, which was funded by the CIA until exposed by Ramparts magazine in 1967. He and another NSA officer, Sam Brown, were key organizers behind the 1969 Vietnam Moratorium.[24] (In 1977 Brown became the director of ACTION under Jimmy Carter; his activism, which was more intense and more sincere than Clinton’s, didn’t hurt his career either.)
  • Symbionese Liberation Army leader Donald DeFreeze appears to have been conditioned in a behavior modification program sponsored by elements of U.S. intelligence.[25]
  • The CIA has a long history of infiltrating international organizations, from labor to students to religion. I submit that if an anti-war activist was involved in this type of international jet-setting, the burden is on them to show that they were not compromised. Clinton comes close to assuming this burden.

For more on Carl Oglesby’s meeting with Business International (the CIA front):

“Omnisicient Gentlemen of the Atlantic,” Maureen Tcacik at The Baffler, 2012 (Tcacik is an exceptionally talented writer and astute analyst of politics):

“In one of the many surreal chapters of Journey in Faith, Gene [ Lila: Gene Bradley] later attempted to influence—thought-lead?—what he saw as the perilously bereft civic “education” of the student left. The year was 1968, and the official story is that he was researching a Harvard Business Review feature—which he produced, although the research seems to have been rather more intensive than required. Gene describes consulting with the FBI, a connection made via “mutual good friends,” and a deputy of J. Edgar Hoover’s gladly inviting him to take a look at the Bureau’s secret files on the student left; then traveling through Switzerland, Germany, and France “observing” demonstrations (though none are shared in the book or the story); and, finally, most bizarrely, leading a delegation of fellow businessmen in a “debate” with Students for a Democratic Society leader Carl Oglesby—hosted (“with the best of intentions but with a full measure of naiveté,” he writes) by a concern called the Business International Corporation.

It seems likely that the 1968 summit at which Bradley “debated” one-time SDS president Carl Oglesby was the same SDS-BI meeting referenced in James Simon Kunen’s SDS memoir The Strawberry Statement: Notes of a College Revolutionary. In the SDS version, the purpose of the meeting is straightforward. Certain unnamed businessmen who portray themselves as “the left wing of the ruling class” are seeking to “buy off some radicals”—purportedly because they’re rooting for Gene McCarthy to win the presidency. The businessmen “see fascism as the threat, see it coming from [segregationist George] Wallace,” Kunen reports. The idea is that heavy protests, which the businessmen offer to finance, will “make Gene [McCarthy] look more reasonable.”

This stated fear and motive seems dubious. Gene, after all, reported in the first chapter of his memoir how effectively he repressed his own fear of fascists. And the only people spooked by Wallace were those powerless enough to intimidate. Whatever the executives wanted from a bunch of college hippies, though, they were willing to both lie about and pay for. It’s all too easy to see in retrospect that lopsided “debates” of this sort had accumulated into a political reality that, for the lifetime of a college kid in 1968 anyway, was inextricable from the concoctions of Cold War propagandists.

Just the year before, the National Student Association, the dominant campus activism network that had spawned SDS, had been outed (along with the CCF enterprises) as a CIA front. It would not be until the late seventies that the bland-sounding sponsor of the Oglesby Bradley forum, Business International, would concede its own dual role as a CIA operation.”

“Ravens or Pigeons: SDS Meets Business International” (From Lyndon Larouche’s archives):

In his monumental history of SDS, Kirkpatrick Sale arguably makes a monumental goof. In his detailed discussion of 1968, he fails to mention one critical incident: the attempt by former SDS president Carl Oglesby to broker an alliance between SDS and the “Eastern Establishment” via Business International (BI), a firm that published sophisticated economic reports and advised top corporations. Sale’s mistake seems especially odd since the debate over Business International inside SDS was hardly a well-kept secret; there was even a long article about BI in New Left Notes.

The SDS-BI talks inspired the discovery of a supposed war between the “Yankee” and “Cowboy” factions of U.S. capitalism. In April 1968, Oglesby wrote a long article in the National Guardian promoting the idea of a deep split in the ruling class between two capitalist factions that he labeled “Yankees and Cowboys.”12 He argued that SDS should align with the Eastern Establishment Yankees, who, he argued, were anti-war, pro-Bobby Kennedy and opposed to newer and meaner factions of U.S. capital centered in the South and Southwest.13 In an August 1974 Ramparts article, Steve Weissman reports that in 1968 there was even a “vague proposal” by the Business International network to do “whatever was possible” to help SDS stage “a massive demonstration against Humphrey” in Chicago and one against Nixon in Miami.14 Weissman then recalled that SDS “refused the offer.”

In his memoir Ravens in the Storm, Oglesby discusses his negotiations with BI president Eldridge Haynes.15 Oglesby recalls that he first met Haynes at the Gotham Hotel in New York in the spring of 1968. As for Haynes:

He was a Harvard man. He had spent much of his career in the Foreign Service but had left government during the Kennedy years to become a consultant to businesses operating in the “frequently turbulent” countries of the Third World. This work had grown into Business International, Inc. CIA, right?16

The next day Oglesby took part in a roundtable presentation about SDS to a select group that included executives from GM, GE, AT&T, IBM, Ford, the AP, and even “a man from the State Department.” Two weeks later, Oglesby helped organize another dialog between BI clients and half a dozen SDSers from Columbia and CCNY. . . . SDS groups without me continued these meetings, sitting down with BI people four times that spring. . . . Haynes and I kept meeting. A little later that same spring, Haynes popped the big question. “Suppose Robert Kennedy were to become a presidential candidate. Do you imagine, Carl, that SDS might be inclined to support him?”17

Oglesby then explains:

I must confess, too, that I’d been scared of heavy-metal politics from the beginning . . . My fears of SDS’s leftward inclinations were strengthened by my sense, as of the BI meetings, that an alternative to a politics of rage was within our reach, and that it was essential that we choose it. . . . There was no way for us to achieve our objectives, I thought, without at some point establishing a sotto voce relationship with mainstream grown-ups.18

Clearly Haynes had done his homework and chose his first big SDS contact well.

Oglesby relates a conversation he had with Bernardine Dohrn who, like the vast majority of SDS members, opposed any alliance with BI, “sotto voce” or not. Oglesby says that he told Dohrn that even if “Haynes or the CIA has a secret agenda, I believe it’s not to screw us up but to use us in some way to help make RFK president.”

[Lila: as I believe the CIA – and Ron Paul’s campaign – used the Ron Paul libertarians to make Barack Obama president again.]

Dohrn replied:

Well, it could be both, couldn’t it? . . . You say this BI’s thing is to gather intelligence on Third World countries and sell it to the guys you once denounced as corporate imperialists. I don’t understand you, Carl. It seems like you talk one way and act another.“19

Oglesby remarked that Dohrn “was probably right in assuming that BI and Haynes were tied to Kennedy and very possibly to the CIA. . . . But who cared? As far as I was concerned, the more the CIA knew about SDS, the better. We had nothing to hide!”

Gene Bradley was one of the participants in a BI-sponsored meeting with Oglesby. A Christian Science devotee, Bradley headed up the International Management Association. In a 2012 article for The Baffler, Maureen Tkacik notes that Bradley’s life reads like the history of a “big-time spook.”20 In September 1968 Bradley, a vice-president of the National Strategic Information Center as well as a businessman, wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review entitled “What Businessmen Need to Know about the Student Left.” In his memoir The Story of One Man’s Journey in Faith, Bradley reports that as part of his research, “mutual friends” invited him to meet Hoover’s top FBI aide William Sullivan, who let Bradley read FBI files on the New Left. Bradley also recalls debating SDS’s “Carl Ogilsvie.”

Lila:

And, finally, here is Russell Kirk on the progression of Carl Oglesby from high-security employee of  defense contractor Bendix, which made telecom equipment for NASA, to president of  SDS, whose parent organization was a CIA front.

Oglesby was a friend of both Bernadine Dorn and of Hillary Clinton…until he finally left politics to write history and make music.

“Humane Letters and the Clutch of Ideology”

(Russell Kirk, The Imaginative Conservative, March 2012, originally published in The Political Science Reviewer, Fall, 1973)

“Indeed, the eagerness of certain contributors to withdraw from political activism into literary scholarship is almost embarrassing. Take Mr. Carl Oglesby, who once led the riots at the University of Wisconsin.

Mr. Oglesby here gives us an essay entitled “Melville, or Water Consciousness 8c Its madness.” Herman Melville, he says, found a madness he could live with. Ahab was evil, exploiting his crew, and Moby Dick was the victim of Ahab’s imperialism.”

QUOTE FROM OGLEBY

“So with a subdued Melville, I ask: Given some broad estimate of the scale, tempo and rhythm at which protoimperial systems condense out and acquire historical outline and social architecture, then swell and grow fevered, finally either to hang suspended a moment before a sometimes luminously sweeping descent, or else to burst all at once and splash blood everywhere, leaving little behind besides shards, cripples and memories that everyone who survives them pants to forget: given ‘these choices, what is the political utility of the concept anti-imperialism?”
END QUOTE

Russell Kirk:

“Is this rich, beautiful prose, transcending the sorry time? Mr. Oglesby clearly hopes so. But Mr. Oglesby’s prose will make no revolution; it may not even make sense. He sedulously avoids any direct reference to Viet Nam, as if he were writing in the Circum- locution Office – as if he would be prosecuted for so heroic a dissent. One thinks of a remark by Georges Sorel, meant to be approbatory: “Our experience of the Marxian theory of value convinces me of the importance which obscurity of style may lend to a doctrine.

They talk of liberty, but hunger for power; they idolize the People, but serve the ego. If one is bound for Zion, it is not well to plod round a prickly pear planted long ago by Mr. Marx of the British Museum; nor is that a good exercise for rousing the literary imagination. Nevertheless, the cactus land of ideology is perfectly safe for an American writer nowadays.

Blessed are the academic revolutionaries, for they shall know tenure.”

Jean Raspail: sage dystopia or severe diplopia?

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At Zobenigo blog, Jean Raspail’s gloriously muddle-headed dystopia about the destruction of a virginal Europe by inchoate brown masses (the yellow peril recycled) gets a keen rebuttal:
“The reasons for the popularity of Le Camp des saints are easy enough to decode. Here’s the novel’s synopsis from the usual place:

The story begins in Bombay, India, where the Dutch government has announced a policy that Indian babies will be adopted and raised in the Netherlands. The policy is reversed when the Dutch consulate is inundated with parents eager to give up their infant children as it would be one less mouth to feed. An Indian “wise man” then rallies the masses to make a mass exodus to live in Europe. Most of the story centers on the French Riviera, where almost no one remains except for the military and a few civilians, including a retired professor who has been watching the huge fleet of run down freighters approaching the French coast. The story alternates between the French reaction to the mass immigration and the attitude of the immigrants. They have no desire to assimilate into French culture but want the plentiful food and water that are in short supply their native India. Near the end of the story the mayor of New York City is made to share Gracie Mansion with three families from Harlem, the Queen of England must agree to have her son marry a Pakistani woman, and only one drunken Soviet soldier stands in the way of thousands of Chinese people as they swarm into Siberia.

In short, it’s the OYPA — the old yellow peril alarm — all over again.THE OYPA seems a weird beast to me since I have spent all my life being bored with the familiar and seeking out out the exotic as its antidote. I welcome Asian immigration on several grounds: first, the wonderfully zany Indians seem a million times more interesting to me than the predictable familiar boring French, whom I have no reason to love anyway; certainly, on average, Pakistani women are prettier than the English; the food they bring is more tasty; etc.

I therefore cannot fit into my head: why would not everyone else feel the same way?

What is more interesting about Jean Raspail’s brain is that it appears to be internally split: while writing his Dantean yellow perilist visions about foreigners flooding (and destroying) good old France, he simultaneously writes other books of scathing criticism of the very same modern France as a rotten perversion of its former self. He is a monarchist to the core and writes movingly about the spark of divinity which resides in the person of the king; his inviolability and irreplacability; the dire consequences of regicide; the lack of proper legitimacy in the person of a merely elected President; lack of authority; lack of respect for authority; etc. This is not merely a political fantasy: Jean Raspail senses that there is something deeply and fundamentally rotten about modern French (and, more generally, European) culture (about which he is probably right) and seeks its causes in the abolition of the monarchy two hundred years ago (I withhold my opinion).

But then he defends that very same rotten France against subversion by foreigners. Why? If France is rotten, then, heck, why not let it sink?

This is known to psychologists as cognitive dissonance.”

Illuminati announce their party platform

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I ran into a British blog called armageddonconspiracy.uk that purports to be the platform of  Illuminism.

Instead of bashing the illumined ones and the rationalist enlightenment, the blog claims that Illuminism is the ONLY answer to the Old World Order.

It’s message is that no thinking person should fight the New World Order, since it’s infinitely preferable to fight the Old World Order. That would be the Old World Order of the Satanic Abrahamic god and  Zionist capitalism.

The site addresses itself to everyone who hates the monotheistic religions (Islam, Christianity, Judaism).

It addresses itself ostentatiously to the pagan world.  It tells you to stop looking for God and become God yourself.

Wake up your inner Lucifer.

What, according to the blog, is the Illuminati platform?

First, it abhors democracy, which it calls dumbocracy.

It ridicules monarchy.

It claims Star Wars as its inspiration.

It calls itself MERITOCRACY and it proposes a 100 percent inheritance tax as the means by which society is leveled.

In essence, the Illuminist platform demands that society proceed to a total technocracy, ruled by those who win the meritocratic race.

Undefined, of course, is how merit will be defined.

And who will define it.

All inheritance taxes will go to educate the public, which has the right to any surplus you’ve accumulated at the time of your death.

The blog decries Occupy Wall Street as ineffectual street theater, yet its language (1% versus 99%) comes straight out of Occupy.

The blog claims to propose a new revolution, yet its proposals sound like the old revolution,  the communist revolution.

100% taxation is just nine percent more than what Mark Ames  of the commie rag eXile called for a couple of years ago.

If Mark Ames is the New World Order, go back to sleep.

The blog uses the short-hand of populist anger at the 2008 bail-outs, short-hand  like “too big to fail,” “casino capitalism,” and “the richest 400.”  It co-opts that anger.

It makes “the people” (the social collective) the judge and jury of everything.

The blog decries the testosterone of  “free-racket” capitalism and praises the oestrogen-laden future world of “social capitalism”  – which is the best of socialism and capitalism combined.

Maybe that’s why the Daily Mail, a middle-class tabloid with a long history of war-mongering on behalf of imperialism came out recently with a piece entitled, “Why men need women’s hormones’ too,” Sept. 12, 2013.

But it was the Mail which also ran reports that oestrogen from the Pill was finding its way into the water supply and contributing to the decline of the male libido. That was in a piece that ended with dire warnings about global warming (“Fertility time-bomb found in drinking water”)

The Daily Mail is owned by Viscount Rothermere, a big supporter of David Cameron.

Under the current Viscount’s grand-father, the Mail was a supporter of Oswald Mosley and Hitler and urged ordinary Britons into war repeatedly.

Meanwhile, Rothermere himself, like his predecessors,  pays not a dime in taxes to the government on whose behalf he propagandizes.

So that’s who wants  oestrogen to be the chemical of the NWO.

And maybe that’s why we have  books announcing the rise of oestrogen, like Hanna Rosin’s “The End of Men.”

This is eco-feminism, the goddess caper.

And sure enough,  there’s also the mandatory bit on the blog about “oxytocin,” the cooperative chemical. The bonding chemical.

Oxytocin was branded the “emotional super-power” of women, in Naomi Wolf’s NWO advertisement, “Vagina.”

[Wolf branded   “dopamine,” the “Goddess” chemical.]

Diagnosis?

Yet another Rothschild-funded website, telling you what to think and where to go.

What’s the joke?

See how easy it is to get from “the Illuminati are evil” to “Come, sign up with the Illuminati.”

The joke is also how many of those anti-Illuminati anti-NWO activists were always just NWO fronts…

If this blog states its case plainly,  it’s because fronts aren’t needed anymore.

The mask is off.

You are now officially in the Illumined world.

That was what that recent Salon piece was all about, “The elite’s strange plot to take over the world,” Sept. 20, 2013

It admitted that the conspiracists were right all along…..

Globalist Rajan chairs Reserve Bank of India (Updated)

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Update 2:

On October 29, in response to a firestorm around his appointment, Rajan denied he’s an American citizen and says he only has a green card. For my analysis of the whole episode as a psyop, see this post.

Update:

I noticed that the picture of Rajan on the blog describes him as an American and an Indian citizen. This is spurious.

While the US allows dual citizenship, India does not. Rajan could not be an Indian citizen and still be an American citizen. The description is intentionally misleading.

India offers the category of OCI or Overseas Citizen of India, which is NOT citizenship proper, since it does not let you have an Indian passport or an Indian vote. It just gives parity in the field of employment and investment and obviates the need to register with the police every year.

Rajan is a US citizen, not an Indian, and he’s in charge of the RBI! That is simply incredible.

Original post:

GreatGameIndia..com describes how the American who heads the Reserve Bank of India is being given rock-star treatment by the Rothschild media.

Why not? He’s on a mission for the globalists – driving Indians out of the agricultural sector to make way for the multinationals:

“Welcomes don’t get much warmer than this—especially not for central bankers. But Raghuram Rajan, the new governor of the Reserve Bank of India, is being treated like a Rockstar by the media and a savior by the markets.

In his first briefing since taking office as governor on Sept. 4, Rajan announced plans to bolster the financial sector and support the rupee. None of the measures were ground-breaking, but the reaction was exuberant. The Economic Times, India’s leading financial newspaper, sketched Rajan as James Bond, replete with a sharp suit and a gun made out of rupee notes.

Never mind his American citizenship nor the various prestigious organizations he is associated with such as University of Chicago, World Bank, US Federal Reserve Board, Swedish Parliamentary Commission, American Finance Association, International Monetary Fund (IMF) etc. However, one distinct accolade that he has earned is the entry into an elite group of economist czars called the Group of Thirty or just G30 very recently last year just before becoming the Bank Boss of India. For the scope of this article we’ll need to dwell a bit on the background of G30.

History of Group of Thirty G30

The Group of 30 is a Rockefeller-sponsored group of leading Central Bankers and academics a Washington, D.C. based institution which counts as its members many of the more powerful banks and financial institutions in the world. The Group of Thirty, chaired by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul VoIcker, includes the current heads of the Bank of France, the Bank of Tokyo, the Bank of Italy, the Bank of Israel, the former head of the German Bundesbank and now even the Reserve Bank of India. Also represented are many of the top commercial and investment banks, including Citicorp, J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Deutsche Bank, the Industrial Bank of Japan, and J. Rothschild International Assurance Holdings.

The Group of Thirty is, in short, a mouthpiece for the international financial operatives who created the speculative bubble that is now exploding. It is a sort of vampires’ club – an elite group which is planning the reorganization of the world monetary system.

Since late 1981, the IMF and the multinational financial oligarchies have realized that the developing countries would not be able to pay their debts under their original terms. The Group of Thirty, designed a strategy to use the debt crisis to smash sovereignty. Their perspective is to create a world council with executive powers to dictate and supervise financial policies of each “sovereign” nation to allow free reign for nation-less capital. This entity would be made up of the IMF and the central banks, act independently from national governments and be coordinated by the Bank for International Settlements, based in Basel, Switzerland.

(Lila: That is why End the Fed is an empty slogan, as I blogged here. The money is being conjured at the BIS).

This is the same group that outlined the plan for changing the laws and regulations of nations, in order to protect their derivatives trading and perpetuate the bubble as long as they can. One of the G30 benefactors is the Open Society Foundation, with upon further examination is a George Soros founded organization. Another of the G30 benefactors is the Whitehead Foundation, which was started by John C. Whitehead, the former managing partner for Goldman Sachs, and Deputy Secretary of State in the Reagan Administration.

G30 and more specifically former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker was the major player in moving the USD off the gold standard under Nixon and was the prime mover at the Treasury in establishing Bretton Woods II. Volcker and his buddies at the G30 have not only known about but have methodically planned the global monetary regime that was instituted in response to the Global Financial Crisis caused by the derivatives time bomb (see G-30 manual on derivatives published in 1993).

Now it shouldn’t come as a surprise to you when our Pied-Piper Raghuram Rajan played the tune on how the world will fall into a hole; one of the few who predicted the 2008 financial crisis. The question is – to what end ?

With the world’s financial system in the midst of the biggest blowout in modern history, it is useful to take a look at the latest proposals from the so-called financial experts, as a way of demonstrating their incompetence to devise a solution to a crisis for which they themselves are largely responsible.

In an interview given to The New York Times Mr Rajan explains his definition of growth and provides his solution to the ailing economy :

“In terms of where will growth come from, it doesn’t need to come from fancy stuff like extraordinary innovation of one kind or another. Just getting people from agriculture into services and industry itself is growth.

[Lila: India has now lost food self-sufficiency altogether and prices are rising across the board on all grocery items, which cost nearly as much as they do in the West, at salaries far far lower.}

I think India’s medium-term future is moving people out of agriculture into industry and services. Services, you know, some extent we have a sort of a sense of what it takes. And India’s service sector is disproportionately large for a country of its income. Where we have had less success is industry, and the question is can we sort of find a way to free the path for small and medium industry, and not just keep them forever as small and medium industries but allow them to grow into large industries.

In another interview given to The Economic Times he extrapolates it further :

“There is a tremendous amount of value-add that can be created in services. In India, especially, financial services as also IT and others are where most value-add is created. Unfortunately, even though services account for 60% of the GDP, they don’t account for nearly as much for jobs. They account for just 15% of the jobs. What we need to focus on is perhaps thinking broadly about how we create services that will generate many more jobs.

Highlighting sectoral disparities building up in the economy, Rajan said in another interview to The Hindu Business Line that while agriculture’s share was declining, that of services had gone up. Manufacturing had remained flat.

“This is not surprising. As countries grow, agriculture declines. What is special about India is that the exit of people from agriculture has not kept pace. (no you’re not delusional; read again)

Increasingly, people in agriculture are impoverished relative to those having jobs in industry or service”.

We managed to move the States together, but perhaps we need to do more on the sectoral side to move people out of agriculture into other areas

The ridiculousness of these statements is only complemented by the audacity with which it is said considering the fact that these conclusions are derived with a conviction and in full cognizance of their effects and consequences.

What is striking to me however is that I had heard this tune before. It’s enigmatic melody is so familiar to my ears that it’s been ringing in my head ever since. I had heard it play in what is called the Mecca of Book Lovers – the Jaipur Literature Festival by another piper that goes by the name of Ruchir Sharma; head of Emerging Markets and Global Macro at Morgan Stanley Investment Management and author of the international bestselling tune Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracles.

I remember this distinctly because when questioned by me about the very definition of growth and the solutions for development he was talking about I received the very same answer from him. So similar was the tune that I had to sit up and take notice. Remember that these two are the top Indian thinkers on the Forbes list. So when they speak people listen to them unquestioned like words of God.

Never mind that the Forbes family made their fortunes off of the Opium trade that was forcibly grown in India after ruining the agricultural lands and pushing the farmers into opium cultivation that was sold to the Chinese making their entire generations addicted onto it that made them unable to resist and fight when the time came during the Opium Wars; ultimately losing Hong Kong to the Rothschild gang-controlled East India Company.

Hong Kong became the hub of Opium trafficking and later Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC Bank) was founded on the trafficking money to better launder and manage the booty. Forbes was one of the directors of HSBC and later founded the Forbes magazine as we all know. These are respected family names now.”

For the American connections to the opium trade see this lengthy blog post by Linda Minor, “Why Would the Harvard Corporation Protect the Drug Trade?”

And in case you dismiss all that as history, here are stories about the advent of the opium trade and mass addiction to India. Only two decades ago, they were unheard of.

See the following:

“Indian Farmers, Maoists Team Up In Drug Trade” (Stopthedrugwar.org)

“Drug trafficking: Money Funds Terror Acts in India”

Slate: “Revenge Porn” is a crime of control, like stalking

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Slate has an excellent piece on “revenge porn” as an act of stalking.

Revenge porn is, as I blogged earlier, very similar to the crime of acid-throwing. It is essentially a crime of force and aggression. Someone wishes to control a woman’s behavior or “punish” her for leaving them.

In other cases, someone wants her to say nothing and uses some information to threaten her to shut up (blackmail) or to do something other than what she wants (coercion):

“There’s a growing body of evidence showing that the key to battling domestic abuse is to get into the assailant’s head, figure out what motivates his behavior, and tailor the legal response accordingly. Even though revenge porn website purveyor Hunter Moore may pretend the motivation is nothing but an opportunity “to look at naked girls all day,” in reality, the act of uploading a nudie picture to punish a woman for leaving you is less an erotic act and closer to the criminal behavior of stalking. Despite the word porn, it’s clear the point is to humiliate and dominate and to send the message to the victim that she is not allowed to leave you just because she wants to. With that in mind, we should amend stalking and other anti-harassment legislation to reflect our new digital lives. Just because the abusive acts are happening in “virtual” spaces doesn’t mean the terror of being stalked and harassed by a man who thinks that he has a right to punish you is any less terrifying. Our laws need to reflect this new reality.”

I can’t tell you how happy I am to read about the new legislation. It is surely inadequate but a step in the right direction. I have signed Ms. Jacob’s petition, and I urge any reader who can to do so.

My life from about 2008 onward has been overshadowed by cyber-stalking, electronic snooping, covert threats via the internet, some delivered in the most sophisticated and untraceable fashion.

[Added: I should make it clear that my case had nothing to do with “revenge porn” but involved hacking into personal emails and then deliberately falsifying the content  to threaten me.  But the principle is the same and tackling the issue led me to understand just how difficult it is to enforce existing laws with regard to cyber-harassment. The motives of my harassers were related to professional concerns, not personal. But the techniques and the goal of coercion/infliction of distress were the same.]

A conspiracy too far?

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1. I made the blog post about Heleen Mees private. I think my thesis is not wrong…..but there were things I’d like to research more before putting then out in public.  Or  maybe not.

It might be a conspiracy too far…

2.  I want to note some things that have happened to me this year.

Not all the things that have happened, but a few of them.  I have to write about them in a somewhat veiled way, so I don’t give away too much, but at the same time, I want a public record.

Someone has been trying to send things my way, either to identify my exact physical location or to set me up in some way. I don’t think I am being paranoid.

A couple of “customers” who came my way gave me a bad feeling almost instantly. They turned out to have backgrounds in the military or government, related to telecommunications. One had a connection to intelligence. They were working in private business though. Both were too insistent to do business.  One made many peculiar statements, as if he wanted to entice me to agree with him. He had a cell phone with him. You can record with those things, you know. I said nothing much of anything.

Someone masqueraded as being from the government.

Another person trespassed on my property, with a plausible excuse at the time. Later, I had second thoughts about him. After that, I found certain settings on my computer had been changed, whether accidentally, or by this person, I can’t say.

Certain comments on my blog make me suspect that some people are still keeping an eye on me via phone and computer.

That is another reason I made the Heleen Mees post private. Maybe I crossed the line there a bit.

Remember this guy? Mark Lombardi.

He connected dots…literally. He chronicled BCCI, the Bush-Bin Laden connection in 1999. The next year he was dead, apparently a “suicide.” The FBI photographed his work after his death….

Uri Dowbenko on Mark Lombardi:

Artist Mark Lombardi (1951-2000), whose business card ironically read “Death Defying Acts of Art and Conspiracy,” was found dead in his studio, officially declared a suicide in the police report. Or as government whistleblower Al Martin, author of “The Conspirators: Secrets of an Iran Contra Insider” (http://www.almartinraw.com) says, “The guy put together one chart too many.”

Martin was retained by attorney Frank Rubino, defense counsel for Panamanian strongman Antonio Noriega, to produce a chart for the courtroom, which would explain the complex relationships between individuals and offshore companies, etc. The 5’ x 9’ chart was topped off by a color photo of former president George Herbert Walker Bush and Antonio Noriega embracing one another, both giving a victory sign to the camera. It should be noted that US troops under George Bush invaded Panama, then hijacked Noriega to Florida, where he was convicted of drug charges. Noriega is still in prison to this day.

“When they set up this chart in the courtroom, the judge said, what’s that? We had Bush connected to this drug operation,” recalls Martin.

Martin says that later CIA operative Frank Snepp joined the defense team (Rubino himself was a former CIA agent) and gave daily reports to George Bush Sr. on how the trial against Noriega was proceeding. Martin says he overheard him on the phone talking to Bush in Rubino’s office.

“I was real naive,” says Martin about his participation in the Noriega trial. “I made the assumption that this is what they wanted” — to have a flow chart of personnel, covert operations, as well as banks and other front companies and how the schemes actually worked. Martin notes that they didn’t really expect him to use the real names of people and front companies

“Investigative reporter Dave Lyons from the Miami Herald told me this is what people can understand,” Martin continues. “Graphs and charts help the average person understand complex conspiracies

Martin jokingly concludes, “Charts and graphs — bad. Shredders – good.”

MAKING POLITICALLY INCORRECT ART

In a video of the artist shown at the exhibition, Andy Mann asked Lombard in February 1997, “Do you fear for your life?”

Lombardi didn’t answer the question. Instead he said, “This is a way I can map the political and social terrain in which I live.”

According to his friends, Lombardi told them that he was being followed — just before his death.

Lombardi also described his work as “visualized fields of information [which] started out as corporate diagrams.”

In the end, Mark Lombardi’s contribution to culture is his relentless search for the truth. He was a pioneer in the cartography of realpolitik, mapping international networks of crime which include high-level government officials and shady so-called “business” men.

Lombardi’s legacy is his depiction of geo-political realities, the essence of global criminal conspiracies. No theory, just conspiracy –- conspiracies that continue to haunt the planet into the 21st century. ”

Lila:

I hope I’m not being melodramatic..or self-aggrandizing.. here.  Usually I don’t worry. But then, something happens and for a few days I’m jumpy. This is one of those days.

Just keeping a paper trail going.  I’ve always thought I could get away with more by not climbing up too high on the food-chain, but there are pros and cons to that argument….

Anyway, “ammo” is always useful, whether you’re a little guy or a big one. I keep some “ammo” around (intellectual ammo, to spell that out for any morons looking for trouble-makers here).

Willem Buiter’s Bunny Boiler: Finance Capital Takes Down Its Foes?

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Willem Buiter, an eminent economist, has been the victim, so it seems, of a stalker.

Heleen Mees, once on the short list for Secretary of Finance, has been charged, and now jailed, for harassing Mr. Buiter and his family, in the aftermath of an affair between the two.

At first reading, it seems to be a “Fatal Attraction” situation.

You remember the movie?

Attractive, talented, overly intense mid-life career woman has a brief affair with a married man.

Once the hormones have run their course, married man (the palpably lecherous Michael Douglas) wants to move on.

But horny, opera-loving mistress (Glenn Close) wants “happily ever after.”

Love deteriorates swiftly into obsession (her) and revulsion (him).  The obsessed lover turns into a stalker prone to hanging out on her victim’s lawn who, ultimately, cooks his kid’s pet rabbit.

[The term “bunny boiler” has since entered the lexicon as a hip signifier of (a tad too) crazy love.]

The movie managed to appeal to both piety and prurience by mixing a morality fable (see what happens when you cheat on mommy? – frown) with x-rated scenes in elevators (see what happens when you cheat on mommy!! – smile) .

So is Willem Buiter just suffering the aftermath of “crazy love”?

Or is something more going on?

On this blog, I’ve said I think about 85% of everything going on in the major media in the West (and thus all over the globe) is related to intelligence. Most of it is a psyop or propaganda/ disinformation of some kind.  The rest is commercial pumping or gossip intended to overpower more significant news.

How does the Buiter story rate?

Well, it sets off all of my BS-detectors. Here’s why:

1. Buiter is not just any “eminent” economist. He’s the chief economist of mega bank, Citigroup, the home of former Goldman Sachs honcho and Treasury Sec, Robert Rubin.

Buiter has also chaired the World Economic Forum and been a member of the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee. He was also the chief economist of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.

It doesn’t get more “elite” or connected than that.

Buiter has also been a professor at the London School of Economics, at Princeton, and at Yale. He’s written books. He’s voiced his opinions at a Financial Times blog and in articles in the major media.

Given that high profile, you’d think he’d take care of his private life a bit more.

2. Buiter is not just extraordinarily highly placed, he’s also been a vocal critic of the loose monetary polices of the Fed, more specifically, of Sir Alan Greenspan. Here’s a sample:

The Greenspan Fed: A Tragedy of Errors (April 8, 2008):

“………

1. The Greenspan Fed (August 1987 – January 2006) did indeed contribute, through excessively lax monetary policy, to the US housing boom that has now turned to bust

2.The Greenspan-Bernanke put is real. It is an example of an inappropriate monetary policy response to a stock market decline……….

3. Nonetheless, Buiter was no anarcho-capitalist, keen on defending finance capital even in its criminal  manifestations. He was smart enough to see through this brand of market fundamentalism as a ploy whereby finance capital seizes power.

In his now defunct blog at the Financial Times, Maverecon, he has a piece about Greenspan in which he attacks Greenspan’s “naive” belief that capital markets are self-regulating.

Notice, however,  that Buiter apportions only a part of the blame to interest-rate manipulation.

Instead of seeing opportunism and very likely malicious intent in what Greenspan did (it’s considered anti-Semitic conspiracy theory to even suggest malice in the Fed Chairman), he also palms off Greenspan’s misdeeds onto his (Greenspan’s) view of capital markets, ostensibly a “libertarian” view.

Actually, the idea that Greenspan was a  “libertarian” at any time in in his political life (as opposed to his youth) is so much disinformation put out by the mainstream press. As Ayn Rand immediately recognized, Greenspan, after his Objectivist phase, was nothing more or less than a careerist, more interested in power than in principle of any kind.

Despite this error, a large part of  Buiter’s analysis focuses – correctly, in my opinion – on “too big to fail” institutions and the problem of “regulatory capture.”

The latter term has been popularized by regulator William Black, as well as by Deep Capture blog, which supports Black’s approach strongly.

I’ll repeat once more that I support Black’s (and Deep Capture’s) work on regulatory capture and think Austrians do themselves a disservice by dismissing that analysis. Regulatory capture is much more than just froth floating on top of the ocean of interest rate manipulation.

So my point is not to denigrate Buiter’s work, but to say that in effect it constructed a via media between the Austrian critique and mainstream economics, making it very effective.

Yet, though he was mainstream enough to be given a visible platform in the major media,  Buiter spoke truth to power as he saw it. He launched a sustained attack on elite financiers and bankers.

He called them out even by name (links to follow).

In April 2008, he and his wife Anne Sibert, herself an eminent economist at Birbeck College, London, wrote a paper about the Icelandic banking crisis that was presented in July to the government of Iceland. It was considered too market sensitive to be presented publicly and was  kept under wraps until August (W. Buiter, A. Sibert, The Icelandic banking crisis and what to do about it, CEPR Policy Insight No. 26).

Buiter wrote about it in a post called “All in the Family” on his Maverecon blog in March 2009:

“My wife, Anne Sibert, has just been appointed an external member of the provisional Monetary Policy Committee of the Central Bank of Iceland (CBI).  The five-member provisional MPC has three executive or internal members:  CBI Governor Svein Harald Øygard, Deputy Governor Arnór Sighvatsson and Þórarinn G. Pétursson, the CBI´s Chief Economist, and two external experts, Anne Sibert and  Gylfi Zoëga. This Monetary Policy Committee will operate on a provisional basis, with formal appointments for the next five years likely to be made following national elections in Iceland in April.

Iceland’s largest three internationally active banks collapsed during the autumn of 2008; its currency collapsed and tight capital and foreign exchange controls are now in place.  That this was the likely outcome of Iceland’s unsustainable credit boom and banking sector over-expansion had been predicted in a paper by Anne Sibert and myself, written in April 2008 (for fruit flies, a shorter version can be found here).”

Now for my theory of an elite take-down:

It was later that same year,  in the summer of 2008, that a pulchritudinous, multi-lingual ultra-feminist lawyer and doctoral economics student, Heleen Mees, approached the eminent economist for help with her dissertation (I’m not sure in what capacity).

Ms. Mees would have been 39 then. Buiter would have been 58. That is not unheard of, certainly, but are ultra feminist theoreticians prone to taking up with men twenty years older than they are, who are, moreover, married with children? I don’t know. Perhaps they are.

But there is not only a large age gap, there is an ideological gap. Mr. Buiter is a liberal.

Ms. Mees seems to be a radical, who wants quotas for women mandated by the state. She has argued that 35% of top jobs should be set aside for women. She has attacked women who stay at home and do not take up independent careers:

“Women’s contribution to the Dutch economy is around 27%. A raw estimate shows that if women would work a bit more outside the home and thus increase their contribution to the Dutch economy to, say, 35%, this would generate an additional 11% in GDP growth, some €60 billion per year. Women would still be working only half as much as men outside the home. With the extra money women would generate, the government could take care of the aging population and still have billions to spend on education and childcare.” (The Cost of the Gender Gap)

Note: Finance capital is a major supporter of gender set-asides in the work-place.

Radical feminist lawyers I’m sure have jumped into bed with men of differing ideology, but let’s add it to the oddities in this case.

So not only does Ms. Mees approach Mr. Buiter, a prominent and very married man 20 years older than she is, to help her, she boldly dedicates her thesis to him (“For Willem – May You Live in Interesting Times”), even though a lawyer, even a feminist lawyer, would know that her own credibility might suffer if her professional achievements were intertwined with her sexuality.

“Women on Top” – the female empowerment group she founded – was surely not intended to represent the sexual modus operandi of women who reach the top.

Now take a look at Ms. Mees’ thesis, “Changing Fortunes: How China’s Boom Caused the Financial Crisis,” published last year, 2012.

It is an argument that the financial crisis was the result of a savings glut caused by the Chinese.

But when I read an article from 2011, Ms. Mees is definitely blaming loose monetary policy for the financial crisis,

In fact, at least in that article, Ms. Mees blames the financial crisis solely on monetary policy, and dismisses entirely any narrative about the misuse/criminal use of financial instruments and the misbehavior of the rating agencies.

In other words, Ms. Mees, remarkably, for someone of her gender feminist proclivities, seems to be blaming the government solely for the financial crisis and dismissing any criticism of bankers, financiers, and regulatory bodies.

A pure Austrian position from a statist.

Now isn’t that interesting? Whereas Mr. Buiter blames and attacks major financiers and bankers (including Mr. Paulson), in addition to interest rate manipulation, Ms. Mees does not.

She dismisses regulatory capture.

That, as I’ve blogged before, is a hall-mark of the financial establishment, some part of which embraces Austrian theory out of its own self-interest. Ms. Mees, you can be sure, is not blaming the Federal interest rate policy because of any hatred of government.

Even more interesting, Ms. Mees has contributed frequently to the Soros-funded Project Syndicate website…….

Returning to the love-affair, if such it was, we don’t know much so far about its history, but it seems that it was some time in 2010 that Ms. Mees began emailing Mr. Buiter in a harassing fashion.

That would be the year  Mr. Buiter left his bureaucratic posts and became the chief economist of Citigroup.

In 2011, the emailing escalated. From July of 2011, more than a thousand emails were sent to Mr. Buiter, including explicit self-portraits, erotic offers, and even subtle and overt threats to him. It seems that it was fear for his wife and kids, who also got emails, that finally pushed Mr. Buiter to go to the courts and get a restraining order.

One of the emails was a picture of dead birds. “Fatal Attraction” with an added overlay of “The Birds”?

Seems a little “stagey” to me.

And a thousand emails, some with naked women in them, would seem as if someone were trying to entrap Mr. Buiter? That is, if there ever was a “relationship” that was not set up by Ms. Mees in the first place.

Now another oddity: Didn’t Ms. Mees, an attorney and scholar who specialized in gender issues, know she was engaging in criminal behavior? Why didn’t she stop after Mr. Buiter sent her a cease and desist letter in February 2013?  She is, I repeat a 44 year old activist lawyer and PhD economics scholar/teacher at some of the world’s most prominent universities, a polyglot comfortable in 5 languages, including Mandarin, the published author of several influential books, an outspoken feminist, a fit attractive woman with a major media platform.

That is a life of self-discipline that is hard to reconcile with the complete loss of control shown in the emails.

And yet another strange aspect of this strange business is that Ms. Mees, a lawyer and NYU professor, doesn’t have $5000 for bail and needs a legal aid lawyer?

Even if she doesn’t have money herself, doesn’t she have friends and family who can spring for the money? She did move in rather well-educated professional circles.

But what if Ms. Mees wants to go to jail to get maximum mileage from the whole scandal?

That would also be psychologically in keeping with someone who wants to destroy an ex-lover.

But it is also what someone who wanted to get Mr. Buiter for other reasons might do. Keeps the story in the public gaze.

Another thought occurs to me.

If someone wanted to publicly diminish Mr. Buiter, provoking him into asking for a restraining order would make sense. It puts Mees’ raunchy emails into the public domain.

Forcing the situation into the legal realm also and more crucially makes Mr. Buiter’s own private emails a legitimate target for legal discovery.

If someone did “take down” Buiter in retaliation for his criticism of certain big names, there is precedence for it.

Remember what happened to Eliot Spitzer when he started getting too close to some of the financiers/bankers (Hank Greenberg, Hank Paulson) whose misdeeds shaped the financial crisis?

(To Be Continued)

Scholar’s discovery reignites controversy over Jesus’ “wife”

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Theologian Mark D. Roberts explains why he’s not overwhelmed by new research that has turned up a 4th century fragment that refers to someone named Jesus having a wife. Notice how many of these “fragments” of later centuries keep showing up in revisionist texts. Before this, there was the Secret Gospel of Mark, which was used to argue that Jesus had homosexual relations with Lazarus and other young men who “loved him.”

I’m now waiting for “Fifty Shades of Jesus,” wherein it will be proved, in the style of all those sites promoting Christian porn or Christian BDSM, that Jesus was actually a sado-masochistic cannibal, who invited his followers to eat him and enjoyed his flagellation, torture and killing on the cross. [Note: THIS IS SARCASM]

The disturbing fact is that in an age of multiple-choice tests and zero-sum debates, the ability to place things in context, balance the weight of a piece of evidence against contradictory claims, the ability to study a text on its own terms without projecting onto it the prejudices and obsessions of the contemporary world, has vanished.

No matter how carefully a scholar frames a question, all the nuances are thrown aside when the media gets hold of a piece of information.

Mind you, I wouldn’t be surprised if Jesus was married.  It was a requirement among Jewish rabbis. Perhaps he was married when he was younger and his wife died. Or she herself became a teacher.  Or maybe she was a silent part of his ministry.  Who knows. Even, if against all odds, this new research finds support in the future,  I fail to see how it affects Jesus’ explicit teaching about sexuality. Nor does it alter the judgment of his contemporaries, as recorded in the Gospels, that “there was no sin found in him.”

Since they were looking very very hard for it, I think that’s fairly conclusive just there.

However, knowing that there are many people who have an axe to grind with the traditional Christian teaching that elevates celibacy (which is also elevated in Buddhism and Hinduism), I also know that it isn’t dispassionate scholarship or intellectual curiosity or respectful disagreement that drives these debates. Rather it is political activism that wants to rewrite the people and events of the past into forms more palatable to modern sensibility.  I have advice for them. If  you don’t like what Jesus had to say, don’t read him or follow him or try to follow him. Get a teacher after your own heart.

Dr. Mark D. Roberts:

“Did Jesus have a wife, after all?

Major news outlets, such as the New York Times, are reporting on the discovery of a new document that refers to Jesus’ wife. More precisely, a small fragment from a previously unknown document contains a statement by a character named “Jesus” referring to “my wife.”

Does this give us new historical evidence for the literal marriage of Jesus of Nazareth to some woman, perhaps Mary Magdalene?

Professor Karen King displays the fragment of the so-called Gospel of Jesus’s Wife. Photo from http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/090512_AncientPapyrus_1714_605.jpg

No, says Karen L. King, the scholar who recently revealed the existence of the manuscript fragment in which “Jesus” speaks of “my wife.” In an article to be published in the Harvard Theological Review, King writes:

This is the only extant ancient text which explicitly portrays Jesus as referring to a wife. It does not, however, provide evidence that the historical Jesus was married, given the late date of the fragment and the probable date of original composition only in the second half of the second century.

Near the end of her article, King, with contributions by AnneMarie Luijendijk, reiterates:

Does this fragment constitute evidence that Jesus was married? In our opinion, the late date of the Coptic papyrus (c. fourth century), and even of the possible date of composition in the second half of the second century, argues against its value as evidence for the life of the historical Jesus.

Of course, King’s measured judgment here will do little to stop the coming tidal wave of claims that we now have definitive evidence if not proof that Jesus was actually married. Dan Brown and his spokesman, Sir Leigh Teabing, appear to have been right all along! At least this is what we’ll hear in the days to come.

In fact, as Karen King rightly observes, the discovery and publication of the fragment known as the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife in fact tells us nothing about the first-century man we know as Jesus of Nazareth. If it is genuine, the fragment of the otherwise unknown document will tell us something about the beliefs of people who lived a century or two after Jesus, though what exactly we should conclude on the basis of this small piece of an ancient manuscript is yet to be determined.”