Category Archives: Ideology

Joshua Holland on the myths behind Romney’s “47%”

Posted on by

Joshua Holland at Alternet has a thoughtful piece on the intellectual fudging behind  Romney’s  “47%” who allegedly don’t pay taxes, don’t have skin in the game, and feel both entitled and victimized.

This notion of a non-paying half of the population omits a fact that the right usually understands – that these sorts of figures are not set in stone.

47% is a figure that represents mobile segments of the population.

That is, the people who are in the non-paying 47% in one year are in the paying 53%  in the next.

For instance, included in the non-payers are students, who eventually do pay taxes.

Furthermore, there are plenty of wealthy households that don’t pay taxes.

In fact, if Romney wants to find entitled people who cry victim at the drop of a hat, feel the government owes them bail-outs, contribute nothing and steal whatever isn’t actually nailed down, maybe he should check out some of his colleagues in the financial industry.

Joshua Holland writes:

“More than a fifth of households that pay no federal income taxes are elderly. This is a group that should feel entitled. They paid into Social Security and Medicare during their working years, and are now in retirement. Many are struggling to get by .

There are a good number of rich people among the 47 percent of households that pay no federal income taxes. According to the Tax Policy Center, 18,000 households with incomes over $500,000 – and 4,000 households bringing in over $1 million – paid no federal income taxes in 2011.

Because there is no discrete group of Americans who routinely pay no income taxes year in and year out, it’s impossible to say for sure what their partisan loyalties might be, but it’s highly likely that a majority of them are Republicans. Around four out of 10 of those households are divided between demographics that lean towards the Dems – students, the poor – and those that lean toward the Republicans – the elderly, disabled veterans. But a majority of that group – six in 10 – are just lower income working families whose incomes fell below a certain threshhold in a given year. And this is where they live:

Click to enlarge.

The Romney campaign is reportedly going to run with this narrative in the coming weeks. The problem is that it only resonates with a minority of hard-right voters who aren’t up for grabs anyway. Most Americans understand that half the country isn’t indolent and doesn’t see themselves of victims of anything but the depression in which we find ourselves today. And that’s why, according to a Gallup poll released on Wednesday , only 20 percent of registered voters say that Romney’s sneering remarks make them more likely to vote for him, while 36 percent say they’re turned of by them.”

The delusional nature of Romney’s math is matched by the delusional nature of his philosophy.

He was born with no silver spoon, he claims, except the silver spoon of being born in America.

Well, being born in America is surely an enormous advantage.

But consider what Mr. Romney does NOT consider a silver spoon:

“Romney was the son of a governor and an auto executive who gave him a wealth of connections, a private education, college tuition, a stock portfolio that he lived on while in graduate school, help buying a first house.”

Apparently, Romney thinks that had he been born Hispanic, his life would have been much easier.

Oh boo-hoo.

Last I looked, the financial industry, not noticeably underpaid, was filled with while males who are NOT Hispanic.

And their high incomes seem to have reflected no great competence on their part.

Indeed, the high incomes seem to have gone hand-in-hand  with extraordinary levels of incompetence and criminality.

Vox Day: Free trade often linked to war

Posted on by

The provocative (some would use much harsher terms) Christian libertarian writer Vox Day pokes a hole in the venerable libertarian mantra –  free-trade uber alles:

“China and Japan have only been trading since diplomatic ties were normalized in 1972; China became Japan’s largest trading partner in 2004. A war between two of the world’s largest economies would permanently shatter the oft-heard argument that trade eliminates the possibility of war. It’s an argument that should always have been dubious, however, as England’s many wars against the various principalities in India and the USA’s Middle East wars have all followed the inception of large-scale trade with the region.

Once more, we see that free trade delivers precisely the opposite of what it promises. And, as Generational Dynamics adroitly points out, trade actually expands the range of warfare as well as providing an economic weapon that can be wielded against the trading partner. Even when trade is not a cause of the war, it provides a means of fighting it.

Lest anyone think I am setting up a strawman here, consider this article by a free trade advocate at the Mises Institute: “The Classical Liberals of the nineteenth century were certain that the end of the old Mercantilist system–with its government control of trade and commerce, its bounties (subsidies) and prohibitions on exports and imports–would open wide vistas for improving the material conditions of man through the internationalization of the system of division of labor. They also believed that the elimination of barriers to trade and the free intercourse among men would help to significantly reduce if not end the causes of war among nations.”

Paul-Lehrman Connection Meaningless, Says Daily Bell (Corrections Added)

Posted on by

Update: Subsequent to my posting this, the Agora disinfo agent/troll/paid basher Ryals reposts Amberger’s comments to him (rather than Amberger’s blog posts about Agora), simultaneously discrediting and neutralizing Amberger by an unsubstantiated smear (Nazi Stasi), just as he posts any substantial criticism of Agora, ALWAYS with slurs about the critics and always with OLD NEWS about Agora, usually attributing criminal behavior to the critics, for which he gives not a shred of proof.

His response fails to mention the people who really are responsible for Agora’s marketing and selling today – Myles Norin (CEO), Matthew Turner (counsel), Addison Wiggin (chief of Agora Financial, its flagship subsidiary, and also heavily involved in Oxford Group, Michael Masterson (Mark Ford), Byron King, Alexander Greene, Mike Ward, Julia Guth, and many others, whose border-line promotions were all deconstructed by Christoph Amberger. Instead, Ryals tries to discredit Amberger’s whistle-blowing. No question Ryals has some kind of tie to Agora.

To make things clearer, Agora is not solely Bonner’s company but owned by several people, some of whom no doubt have axes to grind with others. Bonner himself might have enemies within the company, for partisan, financial or personal reasons.

Notice how Ryals only focuses on the Republicans in the group, like Bonner, presumably Casey, and Robert Bauman, who specializes in the admirable field of asset protection. Now, unlike the state-worshipping fraud Ryals,  I would love to believe Bob Bauman is a really good asset protector (aka money-launderer), but, alas, if he is not what he seems (and I haven’t seen anything concrete to suggest that), he is much more likely to be an IRS/DOJ honey-pot, if I know how these things work.

That’s what I believe large parts of the  asset-protection racket really is about, when it’s not about espionage and government-related money-laundering.

That might include the over-hyped Simon Black, who also seems to be a part of the LRC-Agora crew and constantly tells people that Singapore is a great place for financial security, when anyone who even researches the matter in a skimpy way will figure out that Singapore is crawling with Mossad and CIA.

NWO resistance indeed.

Anyone boosting simplistic asset protection, or simplistic encryption like Tor (heavens!) is simply pushing people into US govt supervised encryption. But, then, maybe that’s the idea.

ORIGINAL POST

The Daily Bell argues that the Ron Paul-Lewis Lehrman connection is meaningless (links to follow):

“Worse, in our humble opinion, whenever such issues arise these days, the dissemblers come out in force to attack the world’s only apparently honest politician, US Congressman Ron Paul, for working with Lewis Lehrman.

It is true that when Ron Paul and Lewis Lehrman served (with many others) on a US Gold Commission during the Reagan years they wrote a minority report recommending a return to some sort of gold standard.

But Ron Paul certainly didn’t seek Lehrman out to write the report. He wrote it with Lehrman because Lehrman was on the committee. Ron Paul, of course, went on to call for a regime of competing currencies, which is something we’re partial to.”

Comment:

This would be a whole lot more credible if  The Daily Bell itself didn’t call out people on just as tenuous evidence, in much more black and white terms than I have ever done.

It also doesn’t help that the Bell dismisses critics of Paul as dissemblers.

Why?

What’s wrong with criticizing a politician who’s set up as the sole spokesman for libertarian issues?

Why would anti-state capitalists focus on a politician as their spokesman, in the first place?

What sense does that make?

Especially, when just a few days ago, the Bell raised no objection at all, when, in an interview on their site, Gerald Celente claimed Paul was “not a fighter” and had failed because he was not a fighter.

If that is the opinion of Paul’s friends, isn’t it natural that people on the paper-money team or outside the binary altogether (like me) would reach even more devastating conclusions?

I don’t believe most Paul critics are dissembling. I think they are genuinely disappointed and suspicious. I am too.

Three. The Bell loses credibility when it claims Paul is the “only honest politician in the world.”

That’s pure hyperbole.

I’m sure the Daily Bell doesn’t know “all the politicians in the world.” And Paul isn’t perfectly clean. There was rampant nepotism during his campaign. There was the alleged double-billing. There were other mis-steps.

They might all be minor. And the Lehrman connection might be innocuous too, but it’s not the only troubling thing that comes to mind.

Which brings me to my fourth point.

Paul has a long-standing relationship via Murray Rothbard with Agora Inc. and its founder, James Dale Davidson, about which I blogged in July (the first person to pull that little nugget up, I do believe….although, as soon as I say that, I’m sure a dozen quicky sites will pop up with the same information on them).

This is a very troubling connection, in my opinion.

The Agora Inc. network has  ties to Rockefeller-related groups, like the Peterson Institute. I blogged about that in 2009, January.

Now, I myself have once cited research produced by the Peterson.

[It’s in my piece on Krugman, at LRC, and the researcher was Anders Aslund, who was one of the advocates of privatization in the Soviet Union. Aslund was wrong about that,  although not the only one wrong, and certainly not the main one.]

But I post research from all over the place, and that is not an endorsement of the authors’ other works or of the websites carrying the research.

Agora’s ties to the Peterson Institute, however, are a bit more relevant and important than my posting or quoting someone once, casually.

The I.O.U.S.A film (a spin-off from Agora’ “Empire of Debt,” Wiley, 2005) was promoted nationally by the Peterson Institute. Some of the positions Agora supports are consonant with Pete Peterson’s interests, although I do believe most people at Agora are anti-state libertarians, whereas Peterson is no more than a  crony capitalist.

This is what I wrote in my 2009 blog post  about the Peterson connection:

“Assembling this bipartisan group of prominent enablers/theorists of empire over the last twenty years lets IOUSA claim it goes beyond partisanship. In reality it does no such thing. Omitting a context for its arguments, the film actually lends itself to being interpreted in ways quite contradictory to the tenor of the original work. At times it even subverts the book thoroughly.

IOUSA lends itself to a very anti-libertarian, statist moralizing of the debt issue: thus, spendthrift population needs to be forced to save by government. Now that really alarms me. Watch out – forced savings accounts ahead!”

Agora also promotes things like “peak oil,” which I don’t find persuasive, being a long-time believer in the abiotic origin of oil.

These positions are  accompanied by promotions throughout its marketing network from which it stands to gain financially, either directly or indirectly.

That surely calls into question the credibility of the positions of anyone deeply connected to them.

Is Paul connected to them in a serious way?

{Added, August 25: Obviously, Agora has also supported anti-war positions that have not won it popularity, so I should give them credit for that and I do.

But I also recognize that the “anti-war” position has a place in the permissible range of public opinion, as long as on crucial issues and events  antiwar advocates develop laryngitis. This strategy, devised by the intelligence services, ensures that there is “cognitive diversity” among critics of war and the police state that gives the appearance of a “liberal” political culture, while actually permitting them little impact.  It siphons off the energy, time, money, and ambition of perhaps 95% of activists and effectively marginalizes the rest. Zahir Ebrahim has written extensively about this at his depressing but honest website, Project HumanBeingsFirst.]

Besides the tie-in to the establishment via Peterson/Rockefeller and besides the commercial imperative which undermines the sincerity of its positions, there are also Rothschild connections to Agora.

First, Rothschild interests are now directly connected to Rockefeller interests, by a recent merger (which I’ve blogged a couple of times).

Second, there are also direct connections between the Rothschilds and Agora.

I wasn’t sure about some of those, a couple of years ago.

In fact, I thought the allegation that Agora was a Rothschild front was only innuendo concocted at Executive Intelligence Review by ex-Larouchite, Bill Engdahl, who often doesn’t cite his sources and has once picked up leads from me without acknowledgement, likely because I come from the right

That’s why, even though I was disillusioned with Ron Paul by then, I didn’t place much stock in the Engdahl charge, especially when it was picked up on Jennifer Lake’s blog (see this blog post of March 10 2010) and then embellished with a lot of strange errors.  I felt the whole thing had to be some kind of disinformation. I certainly didn’t make any connection to Paul.  I thought it was a ploy to muddy more concrete legal issues. One can’t be prosecuted for being a Rothschild front, after all, but one can discredit one’s detractors by posing as one, since the whole Rothschild conspiracy is beyond the pale for mainstream analysts and writers. In fact, Lake’s silly comments, which I was forced to address because they libeled me, actually damaged the very thing she –  with typical arrogance – thought she was assisting – the public interest. In short, she forced me to state things that tipped off the very people she claimed I was covering for.

That’s why I even thought Agora itself was encouraging the story, a view shared by at least one other credible journalist. For the same reason, I suspect that Tony Ryals, the cyberbully behind all the negative postings about me, isn’t half as insane as he pretends to be. In fact, I think he has indirect ties to Agora himself, since he never mentions the people there who have actual legal responsibility there, like CEO Myles Norin, or their attorney, Matt Turner, or Agora Financial chief, Addison Wiggin, or some of their star traders, like Alan Knuckman.

[Sept 6 – this morning, I checked to find that Ryals’ posts referencing these comments of mine and thus referencing these individuals had been deleted or “disappeared.” Of course, just to make me a liar,  they might pop back. But it’s interesting that it’s impossible to stop Ryals’s libels, when it’s someone like me (or others, who aren’t in charge at Agora or whose crimes, if they committed any, are beyond the statute of limitations, but it’s easy enough to get him to remove comments about the people still there.]

Funnier still, Ryals never mentions a former senior employee, Christoph Amberger, whose blog about the company’s shenanigans (cons would be a better word from what I read) was shut down in 2011. Reportedly, this was after he was paid to keep his silence, that is, hold to a non-disclosure agreement under threat of litigation. All traces of his blog about the company’s marketing deceptions (GreenLaserReviews) were wiped off the net in a matter of days.

Instead of mentioning all this, Ryals, who even corresponded with Amberger (who smacked him down for the troll he is) waffles on about Davidson, who is safely beyond reach of prosecution, and, in any case, seems to have more than paid for any sins by his investigations into the Clinton mafia and his insights into the manipulation of the stock markets; Bonner, who probably has no legal liability, as he’s not an officer of the company, and is too wealthy, too cautious, too smart, and too well-connected to get into trouble anyway; and Stansberry, who is already damaged goods and unlikely to get hurt any worse by innuendo.

But leaving aside intriguing theories about the cyber-underworld in which Ryals and his rants reside, I’m still not sure what the Rothschild connections to Agora really amount to.  The best I can say is I’m much more willing to believe some people there profit from them.

Why did it take me so long to get to that point?

Because it’s only recently (over the last year) that I’ve had the time to dig around and find any kind of credible accounting of how the Rothschild family might be the financial juggernaut they are said to be on conspiracy sites.

[I got there by adding material posted at Project Humanbeingsfirst  to my own research into BCCI (via Engdahl, Skolnik, DeepBlackLies, Yamaguchi.com, Forbes.com, LBMA website and other material.]

Now that I’ve come to think the whole “Rothschild” conspiracy  is something more than fiction, I’ve also begun to look at Ron Paul with a more critical eye.

So that’s where I come from on that.

Now, for my own credibility on the subject, given that I too have a connection to Agora.

This is what I have to say.

Except for the attacks following my pieces on Assange (by an attention-seeking Assange groupie, Tom Usher at RealLiberalChristian) and a legal threat at DailyBell by another fanboy and blatant troll, calling himself Al Kyder, and a couple of other things), one hundred percent of  the negative posts about me on the net stem from this one supposedly crazy person, who seems to have an indirect connection to Agora.

And all the rest of the monitoring/hacking I’ve experienced stem from my fall-out with Agora too.

What was the monitoring/hacking about? Simple.

In 2008, I gave whatever information I had  about certain sensitive issues to responsible journalists and investigators.

There you have it. That’s why their campaign against me didn’t end with the resolution of my IP issues with the company.  In fact,  it’s the reason why the IP issue keeps festering.

Who likes to be joined at the hip to someone who’s outed them? Who likes to know that someone knows what they are capable of?

That is why they are so bent on isolating me, stirring up third parties against me, and minimizing my influence in every way possible.

Since then, I’ve been warned by good people to “leave it alone” or possibly become even more of a target.  And that’s what I’ve tried to do, but it’s not because I’m interested in covering up anything for anyone.

It’s because I see no reason to second-guess the integrity, good faith, and sound judgment of what I’ve been told but take it as solid advice from people who know better than me. And  it’s because I believe more evil than good will come from ignoring that advice.

Especially as there’s another layer of complexity to this story.

Agora Inc. was also the last business association of former CIA director, William Colby, who  seemingly committed suicide some twenty years ago.

I say seemingly, because the suicide theory has been peddled only recently, and only by one of Colby’s sons. No one else believes it and there’s not much evidence for it.

Thus far, the official story has been  that it was an accident.

That sounds just as unlikely to me, as I blogged earlier.

Note: Ryals not only filched the Davidson-Chomsky-Rothbard connection from my blog (posted on July 20), as well as the information about Rees-Mogg’s and Colby’s Le Cercle and Pilgrim connections (which I got by discovering and researching the ISGP.EU site in detail),** he failed to link the post and then tried to pretend that I was covering up something about the Colby killing, when I’d  blogged about it as a murder, long ago, in 2010, and before that, in 2009. In fact, I’d been researching Mockingbird, MKUltra, mind-control, and sex-trauma as early as 2004, for my first book, where I have a couple of chapters on the material.

In 2005 I wrote a piece about former CIA director Stansfield Turner and Operation Gladio. It was around then that I also first heard about about Colby.

The fact that I ended up in the company where Colby once worked is one of those strange coincidences that “intention” pulls out of the universe.

And, far from covering up any of this, I’ve blogged repeatedly about it.

For instance, here’s my comment on an interview of Rees-Mogg there:

Posted by Lila Rajiva on 06/05/10 11:59 AM

Sorry. Colby was Cercle and apparently also Opus Dei …

Posted by Lila Rajiva on 06/05/10 11:55 AM

Rees-Mogg is reportedly a member of Le Cercle and the Pilgrim’s Society, as well as the exclusive Roxburghe club – supposedly a very influential part of the Anglo-American establishment. He was backed by speculator and corporate raider, James Goldsmith, relative and close associate of the Rothschilds.

Allegations are made on the left that Rees-Mogg is closely associated with Richard Mellon Scaife. Rees-Mogg is also closely tied to James Davidson, Bill Bonner, and Agora, through the Strategic Investment newsletter and other publications.

Through SI, he’s also linked to William Colby, ex CIA chief, also a Pilgrim Society member, if I’m not mistaken.

By link, I just mean there exists a relationship. It’s by no means clear how that actually plays out, if at all.

Colby was murdered (?) early 1990s. My best guess is it was related to the opening of CIA files with the Church Committee (much earlier)….and inter departmental fighting that resulted; there’s also a connection to a White House- related paedophilia scandal in Nebraska that got hushed up in a hurry. Some have linked that scandal to CIA mind-control operations but I haven’t seen anything conclusive about it. “

It always seemed plausible to me that Colby’s death was a political assassination, given his involvement in Operation Phoenix and Project Mockingbird, his testimony at the Church Committee hearings, his interest in the Nebraska pedophile ring, and his work for the intelligence-affiliated Nugan Hand bank (which had ties to BCCI).

I learned about Le Cercle and the Pilgrim’s Circle from ISGP.eu, and passed that onto the Bell, as well.

I posted the link to ISGP.eu at the Bell below a July 8, 2010 article

Posted by Lila Rajiva on 07/09/10 12:28 PM

Sorry. Two careless mistakes.

@John Treichler (not Treicher, as posted before).

The site is the Institute for the Study of Globalization and Covert Politics (ISGP.eu not ISGPU, as I wrote in a hurry). Written from a very left-wing perspective. Meticulously compiled.

[Note: ISGP eu was up when I posted the link, but googling for it today, I find that the domain is for sale and I find a post at Cryptogon, dating back to January of the same year (2010), saying that the site had disappeared, but that the writer at Cryptogon had saved the information from the google cache in the form of a zip file. However the link he had posted didn’t open to the ISGP.eu file at all. He claimed he had given it to Wikileaks for safe-keeping. I later found it at wikispooks.]

So, that’s my explanation of why the Bell’s dismissal of the Lehrman link isn’t quite enough; why there are other reasons to worry about Paul, such as his connections to Agora; why I was slow to start looking at Paul critically; what Agora’s ties to the Rothschilds might be; and what my connection to the whole business amounts to.

There’s one other thing. The Bell is also a part of the same Agora network to which Paul seems to have ties.

You won’t hear that from them, though.  It’s one of those little omissions that are troubling,  like the repositioning and revisionism that goes on on the site, at times.

For instance, in the same piece on the Lehrman tie, Wile writes that he knew Assange was disinformation right away.

Not so. He got that from me (see these comments below a piece at Infowars.com

as well as these comments below another piece there.

I was perhaps the only rightist anti-neocon to criticize Assange.

Other debunkers were Wayne Madsen (the first on the case) and Bill Engdahl, both on the left.

Neither of those two, by the way, assembled nearly as comprehensive a critique of Wikileaks as I did.

And I know that research had an impact, because  the Guardian ran a piece derived from it shortly after (picking up on the John Shipton lead) and an Australian academic wrote a paper repositioning the cypherpunk association (deconstructed in my pieces) into a narrative more favorable to their man.

Wile relied on that research, as well as material on Gordon Duff’s site, in changing his opinion. Then he exaggerated and ended up with a kind of parody of my criticism of Assange.

This he tends to do, which allows an opening to people like Fed regulator, William Black, whom Wile once made the mistake of criticizing. Black reacted with a petty and surprisingly  personal attack, but, when you distort people’s positions, you have to expect vehement reactions.

Wile’s subtle perception management has even caught the attention of many contributors to the Bell, including pro-Paulian goldbugs like Bionic Mosquito and Leonardo Pisano, as well as paper-money anti-Paulians like FauxCapitalist and Memehunter.

Why does he do it? Most likely as a way for the site to stay viable on the net, while conspiracy mongering, or perhaps, as a way to manage the reactions of readers and associates. Nothing wrong with that, but, still, it’s unsettling and tends to make people suspicious.

It’s why I stopped posting on their forum, despite my gratitude to them. for providing a useful and unusual venue for discussions.

I also do respect Wile’s courage in tackling material people usually avoid for fear of losing their credibility.

So the Bell does get a lot of props from me for bravery and unique content, yes, but I also see them as compromised by their financial ties. The same goes for some other libertarian sites I still read.

Other pluses: Wile is almost always polite and he is not as Eurocentric in his thinking as some others.

I should add that I’m not one of those who think he’s running a limited hang-out himself.  Or, at least, he is doing it less than most.

Some final thoughts:

First, about Colby and Agora.

Colby had so many enemies that it would be hard to narrow down who murdered him, if he was murdered, without a lot more evidence being uncovered. But no one in officialdom or intelligence is likely to want to do that. And only a fool or a martyr would venture into that territory alone.

About the Agora connection (and, through them, to Paul):

Colby’s name appeared on Agora’s long-running Strategic Investments newsletter, with which the Rothschild-related Rees Mogg is/was affiliated, along with long-time anti-tax advocate, electronic counterfeiting (anti-Naked Short Selling) critic, and Forbes/Scaife protege, James Dale Davidson.

Davidson, Rothbard, and Chomsky all worked together in the 1970s, in antiwar activism, which by itself means little or nothing. Many ideological foes make common cause on single issues.

But, it was not “by itself,” as the evidence shows.

At least one of Paul’s writers (the guy who wrote the race realist pamphlets) is directly tied to Agora.

Paul himself has been incessantly promoted by Agora, until very recently, when affiliates and associates began promoting a few anti-Paul libertarians, like Wendy McElroy, N. Stephen Kinsella, and even Stephan Molyneux, who appeared briefly on the Doug Casey website, and then was pushed out.

It was also from Agora Inc. that I first heard of Ron Paul.

Casey, like Jeff Berwick and what looks like a majority of the hard-money community, is himself closely tied to the Agora network by business affiliation.

So also, as I said earlier,  the Daily Bell, with its multiple banking and gold community associations.

These ties may or may not mean anything nefarious, but they would certainly limit what the Bell, or any other libertarian writer in this circle, would be willing or able to say publicly.

Which means I really can’t trust someone in that circle to be too forthcoming about Paul, since they all share business networks.

That is simply common-sense.

Even I have had a hard time writing about Agora’s network, even though all I did was write and do some research there, and the only person I really worked with was Bill Bonner.

To put it as simply as possible for all the trolls who still can’t read my actual words, let alone between my words:

It is difficult to write critically about people with whom you have had personal and professional relationships; who have accessed your personal and business records (illegally).

It is even more difficult when their employees work and live close to where you work and live and they are native-born, while you are an immigrant.

It becomes impossible when the political and economic context is a multi-front global military and economic war, in which your motherland is also involved, and not always as an ally; when the legal and media environment of your adopted country is totalitarian; when your family lives abroad and you are self-employed and modestly well-off, while they have tens of millions of dollars behind them, are connected to intelligence and financial elites, have thousands, if not millions, of subscribers and friends to whom they can outsource their efforts, and when they are marketing, financial, and political players on a global scale.

If that is true of me, how much more is it true of the hard-money community, which is completely encompassed by the Agora network?

I don’t expect any of them to pipe up with anything but support for Ron Paul. They will alienate their business associates, otherwise.

I hope that explains why I don’t think the Bell’s dismissal of the Lehrman tie is sufficient by itself.

I say this as someone who took a long time to open their eyes about Paul.

Which person likes to think they’ve been had? Or, that establishment critics mightn’t be entirely off-base in their criticism of Paul?

As far back as 2008, I heard some mutterings from loyal fans of Paul but said nothing, hoping it was all minor or a mistake.

I even took the part of the LRC crowd against the WSJ in a lengthy blog post.

[As far as that WSJ incident goes, I still stand by the piece ]

In 2010 I spoke up about my dissatisfaction with Paul’s positions at the Daily Bell forum.

I didn’t want to, because I knew Paul supporters would get annoyed by it, but credibility is very important to anyone writing about politics. It should be more important than pleasing the team.

Then, a few people who’ve wanted to discredit me for supporting libertarian positions(albeit nuanced and rather more conservative ones than that of the anarcho-caps), or for criticizing Assange (albeit in a most circumspect and balanced way than his other detractors), or for deconstructing Ron Paul and his libertarian promoters (albeit factually and with respect), have tried to claim that I’m covering up for this or that person.

The truth is exactly the opposite. I’ve been libeled, monitored, and undermined covertly, almost continuously since 2007.  I’ve also been plagiarized repeatedly and marginalized.

I don’t really believe the government was behind any of that, except maybe at a very low level, in so far as some petty operatives might have been employed by my enemies to do the dirty work.

So, there is no cover up on my part. Or paranoia.  What I say is not a lie. It’s not propaganda. It’s not a smear or anything but the most truth it is possible, helpful, and advisable for anyone in my position to speak.

For the umpteenth time, I’m not RAW, nor CIA, nor Jihadi, nor Hindu fascist. I’m just a writer, with a lot of interests, an eclectic background, and too much curiosity and impetuosity for her own good.

It was a meaningful synchronicity that I got involved in the whole business. I don’t say that to promote myself,  create a mystery, or confuse the situation. I say it because that is really how it happened.

There are mysteries of “intention,” “attraction,” and the cycles of time.  And they have nothing to do with “dissembling”, “disinformation,” or “RAW”.

The innuendos by Jennifer Lake, Tony Ryals, and Tom Usher are simply smears, even if they are understandable smears.

There really are more things in earth and heaven, Horatio…

[Added: August 5, 2017, I deleted the link on this page to http://occultview.com/category/astrology because my security software sent me a malware alert for it. You can google the site directly.]

A Real History Of Conservativism..

Posted on by

Ah. At last, some truth in advertising.  Clyde Wilson at LRC brushes off some forgotten conservatives and sets them down against what passes for conservatism today. May he find some more of these old codgers and create an alternative line of descent for modern conservatives without a taste for bullying and bribing the world.

“The true conservatives have been those who wanted to let the American people alone and not hector and dragoon them into schemes of “progress” and foreign entanglement.

Conservatism, for us, has been a powerful and eloquent train of thinkers who have opposed the Hamilton/Lincoln regime of state-capitalism and the Roosevelt/Bush/Irving Kristol agenda of “global democracy.” Our conservatism stands strongly contra to the historic Republican party and to “neoconservative” imperialism. In this we are not so much out-of-step as some may think. Russell Kirk, “the father of modern conservatism,” considered Alexander Hamilton to be no conservative but rather a dubious “innovator.” And more than once Kirk lamented that “the conservative disposition” in the United States has too often been misunderstood by identifying it with rent-seeking behaviour.

As we have tried to show, many of the great figures of American literature – James Fenimore Cooper, H.L. Mencken, William Faulkner – fit well into our scheme of true American conservatism. The thinkers Dr. McClanahan and I have presented are perhaps not so much forgotten as they are unheeded, but they are all good men who have warned tellingly of the march toward the regime of regimentation and exploitation that is now established.”

Mitt Romney: Jerusalem Is Zionist and Jewish, not Christian Or Muslim

Posted on by

itt Romney lands in his favorite country and declares for it (“In Israel, Romney declares Jerusalem to be capital,” AP, July 29):

“On Israeli soil, U.S. presidential candidate Mitt Romney on Sunday declared Jerusalem to be the capital of the Jewish state and said the United States has “a solemn duty and a moral imperative” to block Iran from achieving nuclear weapons capability.

“Make no mistake, the ayatollahs in Iran are testing our moral defenses. They want to know who will object and who will look the other way,” he said. “We will not look away nor will our country ever look away from our passion and commitment to Israel.”

Comment:

“Since when do Presidential candidates stand on foreign soil and pledge to conduct U.S. foreign policy in accordance with the desires of the foreign government on whose soil they are standing?” asks the DailyKos correctly (https://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/07/29/1114809/-You-re-not-President-yet-Mitt).

You’ll notice this is the same position that Ron Paul has recently taken (“Ron Paul shocks campaign staff with new position on Israel,” Business, April 13, 2012).…. albeit for constitutional reasons.

Does that bother me? Yes, I admit it does, even though Dr. Paul’s reasoning is perfectly valid….if you use strictly ideological arguments and forget politics,  history, and prudence.

It’s one more piece of evidence that Dr. Paul’s non-interventionism is weighted in favor of  Zionism.

I blogged as much last year – Ron Paul’s Zionist non-interventionism.

The whole thing bothers me, even though the campaign manager quoted in the piece, Douglas Wead (here he is blogging on the subject) has a tendency, reportedly, to put his own spin on Paul’s statements or actions.

It also bothers me that Ron Paul’s chief legal advisor is Bruce Fein, who has an extensive background as a lobbyist for foreign governments ( “Def(e)ining choice: Bruce Fein, the Turkish Lobby, and the Ron Paul campaign,” Nanour Barsoumian, The Armenian Weekly,January 20, 2012) that is completely at odds with Paul’s rhetoric against special interests.

I’ve blogged about Bruce Fein before and commented about him at other sites.

It was Bruce Fein who lobbied in support of US recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, instead of as an international city, belonging equally to Islam, Christianity, and Judaism — which has been the position taken by the US State Department these many years (http://jerusalem.usconsulate.gov/about_the_embassy.html).

Sure, the State Dept. is left-leaning. But the left gets many things right, and I’m neither ideologically rigid enough nor partisan enough not to recognize when they do..

Last year, there was a seminal case that centered on whether a young Israeli-American dual citizen born in Jerusalem should have Jerusalem listed as his place of birth on his passport, or Israel. (“Court may rule on US stand on Jerusalem,” Barbara Ferguson and Tim Kennedy, Arab News, May 12, 2011)

The State Department  resisted all appeals from the parents and the case went to the Supreme Court, which decided in favor of having Israel on his passport, thereby setting a precedent for any judge who wants to overthrow US foreign policy from the bench.

That’s how the New World Order Works. Through judicial fiat.

The red-herring that constitutionalists dangle before everyone is the overweening power of the President and the constitutional limits that need to be set on it. That’s all very well and perfectly true,  except, again, the devil is in the details.

Who sets limits on Congress and the judiciary, both bribed and bought by  Zionists?

The media?

Also owned by Zionists.

It’s Zionists all the way down.

While the Paul/Rothbard anarcho-capitalist philosophy rails against secretive government and  executive over-reaching, you’ll notice that it also equates all commercial advertising and political donations with free speech.

Murray Rothbard, the principal intellect behind the hybrid movement,  also defended the decriminalization of bribery and blackmail. See M.N. Rothbard, Man, Economy and State, 443 n. 49, 1993, (http://mises.org/books/mespm.pdf).

Whom does that help? The Zionist financiers who buy  Congress and bribe and bully the Judiciary.

So, what the left hand (constitutionality) giveth, the right hand (anarcho-capitalism) taketh away.

Using the letter of the law to circumvent its spirit is legalism.

Depending on which sect of conspiracy theory you favor, you can blame this on Jesuitical or Talmudic casuistry… or on perfidious Albion.

I prefer more academic terminology. Like, phony-baloney.

You notice I didn’t use the politically correct terminology, which would be “pro-Israeli” Congress and “pro-Israeli” President.  Because Israel, the nation-state, is only one part of this and because nation-states seem to be slated for demolition in the near future.

Israel  is the cockpit, but not the whole plane.

If the Zionists want something, they can get it equally through extra-legal means or the most snow-white constitutionality. Paul’s constitutionalism, however well-meaning, has acted as nothing more than window-dressing.

I don’t think he can be blamed for it. It may not be something he or anyone can really help.

But it’s lesson should be clear.

Politics is not only not the answer. At this point, it is a diabolical diversion.

Ron Paul and Herman Cain Only Non-Deadbeats

Posted on by

LRC blog comments on a Politico piece about presidential dead-beats (“Presidential also-rans stiff small businesses, ” David Leventhall and Robin Bravender, Politico, July 29, 2011):


Bachmann, other candidates stiff small businesses
Posted by Lew Rockwell on July 29, 2012 09:05 AM

Politico goes down the list of shame, but for some reason neglects to mention the one non-deadbeat, Ron Paul.

Comment:

Ron Paul wasn’t mentioned, true. But why did Lew Rockwell emphasize Bachmann? The Politico piece emphasized her too and buried the Democrat names at the back.

It also buried Herman Cain’s notable difference from the crowd. He paid his vendors personally and ended up being owed by his own campaign, as well as Gingrich’s.

Even Bachmann was actually less in debt to vendors than the other candidates (under a million compared to multiple millions for the others, all of whom are richer than she was).

So why would a former paleo-libertarian pick on Bachmann?

Pandering to the left?

Is Tolstoyan Anarchism The Same As Rothbardian Anarcho-Capitalism?

Posted on by

I smell more smoke…and mirrors..

Agora-affiliated  Jeff Berwick

[in an interview today with Agora-affiliated Daily Bell]:

“Tolstoy was an anarchist.”

Agora-afflicted Lila Rajiva

[in a monologue with herself over coffee as she looks over Tolstoy’s astrological chart – just kidding! – and recalls the millions of words of  Lev she actually read decades ago, if only in translation]:

Yes, Tolstoy was an anarchist.

He was also anti-capitalist and anti-property, and, by the end of his life,  he was also anti-sex, anti-church, anti-religion, anti-mysticism, anti-technology, anti-capital punishment, and anti-art.

He worshiped the Russian peasant.

He excoriated himself for having written “War and Peace” and “Anna Karenina”.  He wanted to give away everything he owned, even though his children and his poor wife (who had slaved over his manuscripts for years) opposed him.

And most of this extremism came out of his own psychodrama (as Gandhi’s “issues” came out of Gandhi’s psychodrama).

Tolstoy killed a man in a duel in his youth, fought in wars in which he killed his enemies, and contracted an STD from an early experience of sex (perhaps his earliest).

He had such an enormous sexual appetite that he was always taking up with underclass women and then suffering bouts of self-loathing and revulsion toward them.

He often threatened his wife with a gun, while cussing her out.

Then he had a “dark night of the soul” and became a different man.

You know what happens. An alcoholic swears off drink. Then he becomes even more of a nuisance than he was before. He follows you around, a thermos of coffee clutched to his heart, the lingo of AA on his lips. You feel sorry for him. He’s off liquor. But he’s not cured.

Same thing with Tolstoy.

For the Mises-Agora-hard-money (gold-bug) libertarian circle of co-investors and co-thinkers (to which Jeff Berwick belongs) to pretend that Tolstoy’s anarchism is equivalent to the anarcho-capitalism of the gold-bug, secessionist, philo-Semitic-yet-Dixiecrat, finance-capital-friendly, anti-democratic, Rothbardian  wing of American political and economic thought is, frankly, nonsense.

But it’s terrific marketing if you want to neutralize the anger of a  whole bunch of  anarchist youngsters, oldsters, and hipsters,  by channeling it into anti-nation state ideology in the service of the new KKK – Korporatist-Krisismongering-Kleptocrats.

And make a few bucks doing it too.

Wink.

Sharukh Khan: Yeh Jo Desh Hai Tera

Posted on by

“Yeh jo des hai tera” from the movie, “Swades,” (Motherland) directed by Ashutosh Gowariker.
The lyrics are by Javed Akhtar and the singer is A. R. Rahman.
H/T Mounir Nassor
(www.myindias.blogspot.co)

English subtitles can be seen by clicking on the left-most button under the video.

I’ve translated the poem a bit differently from the translation on the video:

Yeh jo des hai tera

This country of yours

Swades hai tera

It’s your motherland

Tujhe hai pukara
And it’s calling to you

Yeh voh bandhan hai

These ties that bind you

Jo kabhi toot nahin sakta
How could they ever break?

Mitti ki hai jo khushboo
The smell of that soil

Tu kaise bhulega
How will you ever forget it ?

Tu chahe kahin jae
Wherever you might go

Tu laut ke aaega
No matter what might happen, you’ll come back

Nayi nayi raahon men

With every new turn

Dabe dabe aahon mein

With every sigh

Khoe khoe dil se tere

To your lost heart

Koi yeh kahega

Someone or other will say this –

Yeh jo des hai tera
This country of yours

Swades hai tera
It’s your motherland

Tujhe hai pukara
Yeh voh bandhan hai
Jo kabhi toot nahin sakta

Tujhe zindagi hai yeh kahe rahi
Your whole life seems to  be telling you

Sabh to paa liya abh hai kya kami
You’ve got everything, what else do you need ?

Yiunh to saare sukh hai barse
Showered with riches and happiness

Par door tu hai apne ghar se
Yet so far away from home

Aa laut chal tu abh deewane
Come back now, crazy one,

Jahan koi to tujhe apna maane
To the only place you belong

Awaz de tujhe bulane wahi des
Listen to this call from your country

Yeh jo des hai tera
This country of yours

Swades hai tera

It’s your motherland

Yeh pal hai wahi
This is the moment

Jis mein hai chupi
In which is hidden

Puri ek sadi, saari zindagi
A whole century, an entire life

Tu na pooch raaste mein ka hai

Don’t ask what’s ahead

Ae hain is tarah do raahein
You’ve reached the fork

Tu hi to hai raah jo sujhae
You have to choose

Tu hi to hai abh to yeh batae
It’s for you to say which

Chahe to kis disha men jae
It’s for you to pick where to go

Obama Birth Certificate A Forgery, Says Sheriff Arpaio

Posted on by

Update (July 20): The Daily Bell has an interesting theory that this whole controversy might be engineered to rescue Obama in public perception. Their reasoning is that Sheriff Arpaio is himself a polarising figure guilty of many controversial practices and making him the center piece of the storm over the certificate (which broke in 2008) might be an clever way to diffuse the scandal. Additional proof for this theory is that the forgery itself is so clumsy that people have been speculating it was intended as a trap.

Well, well, well. Lookee here (chuckle, and h/t EPJ)…

Turns out Barack Obama’s birth certificate is definitely forged.

“I have to respect the science of document examination and the evidence there points to the forgery pictured above.  There are also serious signs that the forger of the Obama birth certificate released by the White House did not understand codes and numbers associated with the document.  Analysis of the numbers and code revealed that the document is not genuine.  The evidence is more than compelling.

The biggest error came as a result of the age of the document forger.  He or she was obviously too young to be aware of correct terms used to classify what we today call African-Americans. The creator of the phony document listed Obama’s race as African.  That is a huge red flag because that term was not applied as a race title until well into the 1980’s.  That term and the moniker, Black would have been considered politically incorrect and racist back when Obama was born.  The proper term throughout history until the late 1970’s was Negro. The government did not change this until well into the 1980s.

“Additionally the United States government standardized the acceptable terms for all identification documents.  Eventually Negro became an apparent derogatory term that sensitive politically correct Americans abandoned in the 1980’s.

This so-called birth certificate document was the product of a criminal conspiracy.  It needs to be investigated by Congress and the State of Hawaii.   The problem here is politics prevents the orderly administration of justice.  Democratic politicians have total control and are breaking the law by obstructing justice. “

Comment:

President Obama’s release of a long form birth certificate in April 2011 didn’t assuage his critics. They insisted it was forged.

The persistence of such doubts, die-hard Obama defenders in the media replied, was yet another yahoo conspiracy by bitter clingers.

Here are some reminders of what the mainstream said (courtesy of wikipedia):

Michael Tomasky called it racial paranoia “Birthers and the persistence of racial paranoia” The Guardian (London) April 27, 2011

[A guy called Tomasky would never express racial paranoia, I suppose]

Dan Vergano said it was racial prejudice, “Study: racial prejudice plays role in Obama citizenship views”. USA Today, May 1, 2011

[USA Today would never, never cater to racial prejudice.}

The New York Times said it was an embarrassment, “A Certificate of Embarrassment”. The New York Times. April 27, 2011.

[The NY Times is never embarrassed by the baldfaced banditry in its own backyard]

Fareed Zakaria said it was coded racism, “Fareed Zakaria on Donald Trump and coded racism”. Global Public Square (CNN), April 22, 2011.

[Zakaria apparently doesn’t mind racism when it involves dropping bombs on strangers in the Middle East]

Real estate mogul Donald Trump’s taste in wives  is much better than his taste in wedding-cake mansions…..or in bankster bail-outs, but he scored a bulls-eye on this one.

The fudge with “African” instead of “Negro” was discussed a long while back.

So what’s the news in the recent claim?

Apparently, a 95 year old retired state worker was able to point out numerical codes that hadn’t been filled in, while the boxes for race and employment had.

I’m not sure what to make of it yet, but I already know what to make of how it’s being spun.

I googled Obama birth certificate, and right after a couple of sites with the hot news at the top, where you’d expect it to be,  were sites that dismissed the birth certificate controversy as “birther” conspiracy.

They were in  third or fourth place when I saw them, which would seem to be pretty high when the news that’s breaking is that big.

Usually new stuff buries the old stuff and sends it way back past the fourth or fifth page in an Internet search…at least for the first day after a big story.

But not here.

Then I hunted for images to put up on my blog so people could see what the Sheriff’s team means about the fudge about “African.”

Well, when I searched google and then looked on the left-hand side of the search results for what comes up under IMAGES, the very first image on the left was the certificate.  But instead of getting a bunch of different sites where the image was posted, google kept redirecting me instantly to Snopes.  The redirection was blatant.

So why would google heart snopes?

Snopes, according to its ABOUT page, was founded in 1995 by Barbara and David Mikkelson of Los Angeles, to explore urban legends and such. Naturally, it just became the web’s leading “touchstone” for rumor research. Naturally, they got a couple of “Webbies” and “Best of the Web” awards and have been invited onto all the major networks.

So naturally, no one in their right mind would take them at face value.

And so it is.

Read anti-Zionist activist Maidh O’Cathail’s piece at Dissident Voice, exposing its pro-Israeli bias in covering 9-11 research.

See also the conservative blog called Huffington Riposte which considers Snopes a left-liberal propaganda outlet.

On the other hand, here are some Kossacks (from Daily Kos) claiming it pushes right-wing views.

My diagnosis of something that sounds left to the right and right to the left and reeks of big bucks?

You guessed it. George Soros.