Category Archives: Ideology

Penny Freeman On The Neutering Of Rand (and Ron?)

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This shouldn’t be too surprising for anyone who’s been keeping their ears and eyes open.
Check out my comments at Veterans Today on a Sybil Edmonds piece on Bruce Fein

and my comments at Deep Capture at the bottom of this piece.

And at Economic Policy Journal and at The Daily Bell.

(I’ll put the multiple links above and my previous posts), not to gloat, because I feel very bad about this for all the poor people and even the Paulbots (just a joke) who slaved away, contributed and put their credibility on the line for these two and now have egg on their face. I hope Ms. Freeman is only expressing a dark view and not the whole story…because a lot of people are going to feel very taken.

And that includes me too. …except, I don’t close my eyes when I see something I don’t like. I reevaluate things.

A lot of an-caps don’t.  That kind of dogmatism is not reason. It’s emotion. And emotion blinds you to reality.

There were always these real problems with Ron Paul, as far back as 2008.

1. Too tied in to the financial world (especially the hard money network, which is riddled with intelligence operatives and propagandists)
2. His campaign showed too much nepotism
3. The campaign was too slick in marketing. They came off just like any other politician
4. There was too much money raised for what he seemed to be doing and no clear explanation of how it was used.
5. Too many Zionist advisors prominent in his following who appeared to have a disproportionate role.
6. Too much pandering to the left and to the media on some things – not critical enough of Assange; not critical enough of many of the trendy liberal-left positions (pro-porn, for eg) that actually support corporate interests.
7. Too many expedient decisions along the way.
8. Too tied into the internet newsletter community, marketing. Not enough criticism of corporate practices and ethics.

9.  Didn’t support the people who are actually fighting the banksters (Byrne and Co on the right; Naked Capitalism on the left).

10. Used many decent people badly. This is what I hold against them most. I think many of the very credible and sincere people at LRC, including Lew R. himself, Tom Woods and a few others, now look gullible.  Have to say they got a warning about that from Wendy McElroy. That went unheeded by Walter Block. He along with Kinsella and Hoppe may be heroes to some core constituency, but from where I stand, they aren’t the best spokesmen for liberty, since they advocate positions that deny it to substantial numbers of people.

Anthony Wile at The Daily Bell is taking the position that this sell-out doesn’t matter and the important thing is that Paul educated a lot of people.

Yes, he did that. And yes, he also struggled for a long time, taking the message where he could, in the face of ridicule and slander. And yes, he probably knows better than most that you can’t fight “city hall.” He’s old and he’s done his bit…..more than a bit, a tremendous amount.

Well, this is a smart position to take, for one’s own psychological health, but it’s not very truthful.  Paul’s influence was not just benign. It has had its dark side.

By running a campaign that sucked money and energy from the whole grassroots opposition to war and the police state, he bled that energy and money away from initiatives that needed more support and might have done something more substantial (although, I’ll admit that’s hypothetical..and although, in my view too, education is a huge and important foundation that has to be laid before real long-term change can come.

More importantly, he distanced himself from the active fight against the money-power that was taking place at Deep Capture, a forum which endorsed Paul, but never received a word of support in return.

People have been killed trying to unravel the whole story of the grip of the intelligence networks on the United States. People have impoverished themselves to write what had to be written, they’ve been sued and fled the country, they’ve been hounded and killed by the government.

Those are libertarian heroes in my book, not people who weren’t prepared to forsake the comforts of life, career, and networks….and more disappointingly, seemed to distance themselves from those who did.

To be honest, I’ve come to believe there are more libertarian heroes on the left and among conservative Christians, than there are among most anarcho-capitalists, who, seem to confine themselves to theory and advocacy but not to the battlefield where all of that must hit the ground…

How could it be otherwise, since most of them have such a limited idea of self-interest. “Mind your own business” is not likely to produce heroes, at least, not outside your own family.

Don’t blame that on Ayn Rand, who had a much deeper view of self-interest and values. I tend to blame it on Murray Rothbard’s influence, but that’s a judgment I’m not yet fully comfortable with. It’s possible I need to understand him more.

No. Ron Paul is not a villain at all. But he wasn’t the savior the libertarian grassroots believed him to be. That has already been made clear.

And the fall out will be painful for the true believers.

The rest of us will just chalk one up to observation, over ideology, and to individualism, over mass thinking.

And then we’ll turn off this show… and tune into the bubble in the next messiah…..

Rajat Gupta Trial: The Other Goldman Insider Ring…

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

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

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

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

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

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

but I digress…

Where was I? Oh yes. Insider trading.

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

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

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

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

Our condolences to the family.

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

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

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

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

That’s this swanky place in New York:

15 central park west residents

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

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

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

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

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

Nice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which leads to some interesting speculations.

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

The one with all those ties to hedge-funds.

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Raj had gypped Rajat by 2008 says Mr. Jain.

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

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

Or has he?

The Problem With The Rajat Gupta Insider Trading Case

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Update:

New charges have been added to the indictment, including alleged tips on March 12, 2007 (Goldman Sachs) and Jan 29 (Proctor & Gamble) that led to Galleon trading.

ORIGINAL POST:

You gotta hand it to the government. They know how to do theater.  Except it’s theater of the absurd.

While mafia outfits with…er…skeletons in their closet sail on unscathed; managers – especially brown ones –  who might have talked out of turn are facing the firing squad.

Walter Pavlo in Forbes:

“The government does have a case, but what they do not have is Gupta on tape, or anyone naming Gupta on tape, as being a source of insider information.  The way to sway a jury, beyond the evidence, is to portray the person sitting on trial as either a devil or saint; a devil guilty, a saint innocent.  According the NY Times, during one discussion outside of the presence of the jury on the first day of trial, Naftalis was warned by Judge Jed Rakoff to not get into too much detail about Gupta’s record of philanthropy (saint).  This, Naftalis argued, would go to discredit “greed” as being a factor in the alleged crime. I think it is a fair point.

Rajat Gupta is a good person who came from humble beginnings and rose to be someone who was well respected in the business community.  He should get a fair trial and I believe that will happen. However, the government’s mosaic of Gupta as a source of inside information is countered by a defense of a man of intelligence, character, and integrity. Those fine characteristics of a person should not go away with an indictment alone, they must be tried in court.  I think Gupta has a good chance, but if Raj shows up, all bets are off.”

I started out being unsympathetic to Rajat Gupta, when the government first brought charges against him last year. At the time, I thought he would be one of many top business leaders who would be charged, and that Lloyd Blankfein, Geithner, and others higher up the food chain and more culpable for the financial crisis, would follow.  Now that I’ve seen that Gupta is going to be served up as the main course for the public to devour, I’ve become a bit suspicious of the bona fides of the prosecution.

Insider-trading, whatever you think of it, is a very tangential part of the financial crisis, except in so far as it was partly the means by which some of the major firms were naked-shorted.

Goldman Sachs, as we’ve seen, is central to that story.

But the Gupta trial casts Goldman as a victim and GS chief Lloyd Blankfein is actually testifying against him. That’s the man whose confab with Timothy Geithner, NY Fed Reserve chairman, in the same month that Gupta is supposed to have tipped of Galleon’s Raj Rajaratnam (September 2008), constituted a scandal several orders of magnitude greater than the alleged shenanigans of Gupta.

Blankfein, surely more culpable, than Gupta or Rajaratnam, is getting good PR, from this trial, as he did from the Rajaratnam trial last year.

So what’s really going on here?

I don’t want to get into the larger picture in this post, except to say it’s all part of a strategy of rescuing Goldman from any serious damage and of redirecting energy away from the most dominant members of the financial world to the relatively new upstarts – the Indians.

In “Breaking India,” Rajiv Malhotra, a former tech entrepreneur turned author, has written eloquently about the dual strategy pursued by the US government in building up India (through the business schools and management networks), while simultaneously breaking it down (India-bashing from leftist journalists, activists, and academics, including the incitement of Dalit activism against India itself as a symbol of Brahmin supremacism).

In a sense, the dual strategy has ended with the Gupta trial and now the object seems to be solely to break the country. The media portrays it with increasing negativity, directing popular anger toward South Asian financial networks, to the exclusion of others,  and, specifically, away from the Anglo-Jewish elites who actually caused the financial crisis.

The new comers might have profited from it illicitly but in no way were they the prime movers of the global heist.

With that quick sketch of the general context, here are the particulars that I find striking for a criminal case pursued with so much fanfare and media attention:

1. There is no “smoking-gun,” whatsoever. That’s right. Zip. Nada. There is not one tape in the over 2000 (TWO THOUSAND) tapes held by the prosecution that either shows Gupta passing on a  tip to Rajaratnam or names Gupta as someone who tipped off RR.

Think about it. It’s pretty incredible. The government was secretly investigating Rajaratnam’s network as far back as 2007, with FBI wire taps over a period of at least 11 months between March and December 2008.

And not one of those conversations, intimate, unsuspecting conversations, actually contains a concrete tip or refers to Gupta as a tipster. There is actually only one Gupta conversation with Rajaratnam in the whole file – on July 29, 2008.

It’s based on this and other circumstantial evidence that the government rests its case that Gupta was passing on confidential board information to Galleon between March 2007 and January 2009, charging him with five counts of securities violations and one count of conspiracy, potentially opening him up to 105 years in prison and $25 million in fines.

I know if someone had taped me for over a year,  there would be a lot of things I’d find it hard to explain. Not because I’m up to anything wrong. Not at all. But simply because I blurt out my feelings in private. It’s the way I am. Sometimes, those are just passing feelings and quite meaningless to anyone who knows me.  I once told my family I wanted to raise a tiger cub in the garden; I’ve called friends names I’d rather forget; I’ve made forceful political statement that I wouldn’t think of venting on my blog. I say things that aren’t even accurate, just because it’s a casual conversation and I’m not thinking, or because I’m thinking of something else or…or…any of a dozen reasons.

And guess what, I’m not sorry I do. I have a right to.  Expressing your views, whether momentary feelings or long standing opinions, is what you do with your friends in your home.

It’s called privacy. If you can’t be free to vent feelings or express opinions, however unpleasant they might sound to a third party (third parties shouldn’t be listening, should they?), what the heck is privacy for?

But drawing conclusions from the haphazard, half-spoken chitchat of people’s private conversations is another things. Private chat is difficult to interpret, unless you get explicit repeated statements that are black and white. Everything else is open to interpretation.

2. There is no evidence that Gupta profited from the information he’s alleged to have passed on. This again is a big gaping hole in the government’s case. The essence of illegal insider-trading is that the wrong-doer materially benefited and that he passed on the tip with that benefit in his mind.

It’s a “mental state” crime, which also makes it hard to prove.

No profit, and bingo, half the case has crumbled.

Now, given that, why would Rajat Gupta turn down a civil trial, where the maximum he faced would have been fines and bans from sitting on corporate boards, and go in for a criminal trial, where he could go to jail? There’s only one reason. An administrative hearing has a lower standard of proof and a judge who can make up his mind as he wishes. A criminal trial gets a jury and demands “beyond a reasonable doubt” as the standard.  But it’s also riskier. Juries can go one way or other.

Here’s my point. The only defendant who would take that kind of risk would be a defendant who thought he was innocent.

So what’s the government doing without these two major elements of a successful insider trading case?

It’s trying to build a circumstantial case, putting together a kind of “mosaic” of the evidence, as someone has noted. It’s calling witnesses to show that while Gupta might not have literally profited from his tips, he indirectly profited, because he was invested with Galleon and he intended to do even more business with it in the future. The tips were credit toward that future return.

The prosecutions’ second line of argument is to suggest that Gupta and Rajaratnam were such close friends, that Gupta had to have passed on tips, because that’s what buddies do.

But, here’s another thing. The government (SEC) didn’t let Gupta see settlement documents with cooperating witnesses against him.

That means the defense doesn’t get to learn the terms on which the government struck deals with cooperating witnesses against Gupta.

That’s pretty significant.

Fortunately, the judge did force the FBI  to review documents (notes) from the SEC’s civil investigation, which overlapped the FBI criminal case (Brady material), and it did force them to show the defendant exculpatory evidence in them.

Thirdly, the government is trying to piece together the timing of the calls to show that it must have been Gupta who put through the call just before closing on Sept 23, 2008, to tell Rajaratnam that Warren Buffet was going to invest in Goldman Sachs. That tip is the piece de resistance of the trial, because Rajaratnam turned around and managed to squeeze a trade through before closing that netted around $800,000.

The Buffet investment information was, of course, confidential, as Lloyd Blankfein testified, as was the information about a Goldman Sachs audit committee meeting, whose results are alleged to have been passed onto Rajaratnam (March 2008).

What Blankfein didn’t testify and someone should have asked was if Blankfein and everyone else in the firm had actually kept the information confidential, as they expected Gupta to. Blankfein does remark that there was a lot of speculation going on about the audit committee findings.

Does that mean there were loose lips all over the place?

Because if there were, then the case against Gupta founders again.

Because then, how do we know who it was that tipped off Raj Rajaratnam?

The answer is, we don’t.

And, in fact, so far the defense has found at least two (and possibly three) other people at Goldman, lower down in the food chain, who were passing on tips to Galleon’s chief. One of those, David Loeb, head of Goldman Sachs’ Asia Equity Sales In New York, made two dozen calls to Galleon, some of them on the same day Gupta is alleged to have tipped the hedge fund off.  Besides Loeb, an analyst Henry King, as well as a Mr. X , have also been mentioned as tipsters. King, a high profile tech analyst known for his spot-on calls, is alleged to have been leaking information from Taiwanese manufacturers to US investors.

Then there’s Anil Kumar, a colleague at McKinsey, who turned informant for the government, in the Rajaratnam case. Kumar testified that Rajaratnam often played off his sources against each other so they would be work harder to get a pat on the head from “Big Raj.” One of the tipsters Rajaratnam played off against Anil Kumar was the “insanely hot” blonde tipster, Danielle Chiesi, whose antics eventually sank the good ship Galleon.

So now we know that Rajaratnam has a profile of manipulating  people and that he could ‘have been trying to get Anil Kumar to do more for him (remember, in the call with Gupta he complains that Anil Kumar isn’t earning the million dollars a year he was giving him). One way to do that would be to hint that he was getting information from someone else, even if that someone else was simply chatting with him and wasn’t actually tipping him.  There’s another angle.  If Anil Kumar could wear a wire and rat out Rajaratnam,  what are the chances he wouldn’t agree to anything else the Feds wanted from him? Maybe he cut a deal to point the finger at someone higher up.  Gary Naftalis, Gupta’s lawyer seems to be thinking along those lines, in demanding to see the SEC’s deals with cooperating witnesses.  Anyway, Kumar is no pillar of integrity and his accusations should be taken for what they’re worth.

What’s also strange….passing strange….is that David Loeb, whom the government caught on tape passing on tips about Intel, Apple, and Hewlett Packard to RR,  has not been charged at all.

Yet, Loeb called Galleon traders twice on September 23, 2008, including once  at  3:07 pm. That’s the same day prosecutors are trying to pin the Buffett tip on Gupta.

I wonder when the other call was; reports don’t specify.

Loeb also made four calls to Galleon’s Adam Smith on October 23, 2008, the same day that prosecutors say Gupta told Rajaratnam that Goldman Sachs would lose almost two dollars a share.

That’s pretty damning. And it’s on tape.  But Loeb hasn’t been fingered.

Instead, the government has gone straight for the jugular of Rajat Gupta.

You have to wonder why.

Leonard Cohen: Joan Of Arc

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A great libertarian figure and my favorite historical character…..in a song by one of my favorite song-writers.

Joan of Arc, by Leonard Cohen

Now the flames they followed Joan of Arc
As she came riding through the dark;
No moon to keep her armor bright,
No man to get her through this very smoky night.
She said, I’m tired of the war,
I want the kind of work I had before,
A wedding dress or something white
To wear upon my swollen appetite.

Well, I’m glad to hear you talk this way,
You know I’ve watched you riding every day
And something in me yearns to win
Such a cold and lonesome heroine.
And who are you? she sternly spoke
To the one beneath the smoke.
Why, I’m fire, he replied,
And I love your solitude, I love your pride.

Then fire, make your body cold,
I’m going to give you mine to hold,
Saying this she climbed inside
To be his one, to be his only bride.
And deep into his fiery heart
He took the dust of Joan of Arc,
And high above the wedding guests
He hung the ashes of her wedding dress.

It was deep into his fiery heart
He took the dust of Joan of Arc,
And then she clearly understood
If he was fire, oh then she must be wood.
I saw her wince, I saw her cry,
I saw the glory in her eye.
Myself I long for love and light,
But must it come so cruel, and oh so bright?
—
“Joan of Arc” as written by Leonard Cohen
Lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC

The Scapegoating Of Rajat Gupta?

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“It has to be said that in USA where Mr Corzine who ran a big company to bankrupty and violated many laws has not even been charged because he is an insider, where any number of big financial institutions have grossly violated laws bringing billions of dollars of losses to American taxpayer and untold misery to the world at large without a single serious conviction – they are going for a case against a man of honor where no motives have been established.

I think this is a very important trial and the world is watching.Is America a country where rule of law works or is it a country driven by its current political expediency”

—  From the website, FriendsofRajat, which suggests that Rajat Gupta, former McKinsey and Goldman Director, now undergoing a criminal trial on insider trading charges, is being scapegoated. (I’ll grant that that an endorsement from billionaire Mukesh Ambani, one of the richest men in the world,  may actually hurt Gupta in this context)

Mind you, I don’t agree with the lib shibboleth that insider-trading is a non-crime. There are all kinds of insider trading, and some types do fit that description.

However, corporate directors who disclose confidential and privileged information to enrich themselves (assuming the Gupta charges stick) are being unethical and abusing their fiduciary duties at the least; quite likely, they’re acting illegally.

But that indictment of Gupta simply isn’t available to anarcho-caps who routinely defend insider-trading as a voluntary capitalist exchange, unfairly and ignorantly targeted by law-makers.

If it’s fine and dandy at other times, it should be fine and dandy for Gupta too.

So, what I’d like to know is where are all those “radical” libertarians who are always defending guys like Marc Rich and Ivan Boesky and even Bernie Madoff?

Where are they now?

After all, Gupta didn’t run a shameless ponzi scheme , like Madoff, and he didn’t bilk clients and charities.

He didn’t bankrupt his company, like Sandy Weill or Jon Corzine .

Or steal from customers (like Citi).

Or treat his clients like marks (Goldman).

Or bribe (Goldman).

Or collude to naked-short struggling companies (Goldman and its hedge fund mafia).

He didn’t launder money for organized crime as Boesky and Milken are alleged to have done.

He didn’t blackmail or threaten public officials (certain hedge-funds that shall remain nameless).

He didn’t undermine national security or trade with the enemy (Marc Rich).

He didn’t set up anyone to be killed or embroil himself with the CIA or with conspiracies to murder (also, Rich, per Sherman Skolnik).

On the contrary, he has a long history of educational and charitable work and the confidence of the entire gamut of global corporate leadership.

And the victim of his alleged crime is none other than Goldman Sachs,  one of the sleaziest firms in corporate history, co-star with Alan Greenspan in the Financial Follies of the last twenty years.

Face it. Everyone seems to have been behaving unethically at Goldman Sachs for decades. Next to full-blown villains like Hank Paulson and Jon Corzine, Gupta’s alleged sins are small potatoes.

Rajat Gupta doesn’t even appear on the establishment’s own lists of the villains of the financial crisis.

Time magazine’s list of the 25 people responsible for the financial crisis doesn’t have Rajat Gupta on it.

Nor does he appear on Vanity Fair’s list of the 100 people and things we should blame for the financial crisis.

But…but… one of the people testifying as a government witness against him, Lloyd Blankfein, does.

Blankfein,  witness for the prosecution on insider jobs,  was in up to his neck in that

gigantic 2008 insider trade called the bail-out,

I  had been watching Goldman for a while by then. And Rajat Gupta wasn’t involved in that.

Hank Paulson and Blankfein and Tim Geithner and Hank Greenberg were.

Where do you suppose Gretchen the-most-important-journalist-of-her-generation-Morgenson, a known plagiarist who never wrote a syllable about Goldman before I wrote this article, “Putting Lipstick on an AIG,” got her own sudden interest in the matter?

And where do you suppose Matt “Hunter  S. Vampire Squid” Taibbi got his take on Goldman?

And why d’you suppose he spun that story to erase Hank (AIG) Greenberg out of it – the same Hank I indict in my piece and the same Hank who shows up on those establishment lists along with another better-known Hank (Goldman Sachs) Paulson, whom I also fingered in 2006-07 in multiple pieces?

If insider trading is a victimless crime, as Murray Rothbard, demigod of American Austrians says it is , seems like the Lew Rockwell libertarians  would be running to the defense of Mr. Gupta, right?

I mean, if they can defend a corporate villain like BP that inflicted serious injuries on the public, not just paper-cuts, as Mr. Gupta is alleged to have, shouldn’t they be falling over themselves to defend this case?

But they aren’t, are they?

And should that be put down to opportunism…or to racist feeling…or maybe even to envy?

Back In A Couple Of Months

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I’ll be shutting down this blog again for a couple of months.

What with the NDAA, it might be wise to wait a bit until I have a better sense of where things are going.

If anyone is interested in being informed when I have it up again, please shoot me an email with your name, email address, and a line or two about yourself, so I can be sure I’m dealing with a real human being.

Thanks to W.F for writing. I will keep you on my list.

I’ll be leaving the blog public for a couple of days before I take it off the web.

I wanted to leave you all with a wonderful resource that brightened my day recently and might brighten yours:

atmajyoti.org, the site of the atmajyoti monastery and nightlotus.com, the site of former Hollywood film producer, Hindu monk, singer and writer, Sharon Janis, who also calls herself Kumuda or night-lotus.

Sharon has put together a huge range of Hindu texts in various translations, along with recordings of chanted versions, as well as her books on the subject. There are dozens of beautiful, authoritative websites of Hinduism on the web, but some are written by non-native speakers of English, so they don’t always makes graceful reading; others are scholarly, but lack the insight that the practice of religion brings; still others are crude.

This one hits it note-perfect.

Nothing to do with the economy or politics, but everything to do with human liberty and individualism.

I particularly recommend the chapter The Christ of India both for its spiritual and its political implications. I for one firmly believe the globalists intend to destroy evidence that the origins of Christianity and Judaism are to be found in the Vedic tradition.

That may well be the ideological reason for their support of the Islamicist claim to Kashmir. There are, of course, compelling strategic reasons, but I think this ideological agenda might be more important than most people would guess.

Addition: 1/8/12

Just to make it clear, I don’t subscribe to everything posted on either site. The notion that Christ went to Kashmir, for instance, is disputed by orthodox Biblical scholarship, just as orthodox scholarship disputes the theories behind Zeitgeist, the enormously influential movie based on “The Christ Conspiracy,” by Acharya S.

Acharya S., who is a skeptic and humanist scholar of comparative mythology, actually takes the position that Jesus was not a historical figure and that the globalists of the time used the mythology of Christ, cobbled from pre-existing mythologies, to buttress the rationale of empire.

In my view, that’s inaccurate. There’s enough historical evidence to believe fairly certainly that Jesus was a historical figure who was crucified under the Romans. Beyond that, it gets confusing.

With that caveat, it’s documented that the tenets of Sanatana Dharma inform practically every aspect of New Age thought, contemporary Christian mysticism, Sufism (born in India), Buddhism (also born in India), for it to be mandatory that anyone discussing questions related to these issue study their roots in the Hindu tradition and its subversion, appropriation, use and misuse in the West.  In these texts, and in the still untapped reservoir of Vedic science and literature, you will recognize everything from David Icke’s fables about lizards and moons to Gurdjieff, to Nietzsche, to Yeats, Lawrence, Rand, Scriabin, Tesla, Emerson, the Transcendentalists, Hasidic and Sufi mysticism, the so-called prosperity gospels (“Think and Grow Rich”, the Law of Attraction and so on), Jefferson (who studied the Upanishads and Vedas), Freemasonic ritual (the inner rites were perversions, I believe, of Tantric initiation), Blavatsky, Fritjof Capra, Heisenberg, Planck, Einstein, Ramanujan, Bose, the Internet, nuclear power, radio waves, alternative medicine (ayurvedic, homeopathic), the environmental movement,  yoga, the animal rights movement, Edgar Cayce, and of course all the New Age gurus from Da Free John to Robert Pirsig.

In those texts, you will find the most inclusive and systematic exposition of the spiritual and intellectual basis of global spiritual consciousness. That is not an exaggeration. It is an opinion I share with some of the most notable thinkers in the West including Schopenhauer and Romaine Rolland. [Some of these people may have absorbed the influence subconsciously, but it is nonetheless demonstrable in every case.]

Murderous Rhetoric From David Neiwert’s Friends

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antinwo

UPDATE 4: MEDIA ATTACK AGAINST ANTI-NWO ACTIVISM

Democratic Underground has a good post from a forum participant about Neiwert –  his writing for the  Soros-funded Media Matters outfit, known to be close to the Democracy Alliance and other wealthy liberals close to Hillary Clinton, and the rants of his readers:

“This is the same guy that scribbled the “Al Qaida says you can buy unregulated machine guns at gun shows, and I believe them” article. Then quoted a gun control advocate, not a police armor or ATF firearms expert, but an unnamed GCA on how easy it is to convert a semi auto to a full auto. In other words, he couldn’t hack it at a high school newspaper. Now he is back with this shit. What was even worse, was that he copy and pasted other peoples’ stuff, or they plagiarized his because they read the same. That was only last spring.

[Lila: at the bottom of this post I have another quote from Reason magazine about Neiwart’s journalism]

[Neiwert]”A number of state legislatures in the Interior West in recent years, reflecting their deeply conservative constituencies, have tried to outdo each other in promoting gun rights within their boundaries — almost always at the behest of far-right gun factions.”

For example, what laws is he talking about? Other than liberalizing concealed carry laws like everyone else, what is he talking about? Other than maybe this:
http://helenair.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/new-gu…

But those guns (if they exist) can never leave the state. Oh yeah, signed by the same guy who wants to set up a single payer system in Montana.

[Neiwert] including a recent bill giving sheriffs the right to arrest federal agents.

So, where can I find more on this? So far, it looks like it was introduced but went nowhere. Outside of the OP, I only see places like World Nut Daily and various black helicopter spotter type sites.

[Neiwert]: This post is written as part of the Media Matters Gun Facts fellowship. The purpose of the fellowship is to further Media Matters’ mission to comprehensively monitor, analyze, and correct conservative misinformation in the U.S. media. Some of the worst misinformation occurs around the issue of guns, gun violence, and extremism; the fellowship program is designed to fight this misinformation with facts.
In other words, this is part of the $400K the Joyce Foundation gave MM to write disinformation. It is at the bottom of Neiwert’s article. IMHO, the most dishonest and hypocritical thing I have seen.

Here are some of the comments from Neiwert’s post. Who can spot the bigotry here?

[Comment on Neiwert post] Fuck Montana. If we had any kind of real democracy, these fascist, racist asshats would be nothing but the side-show that their inbred lifestyles make them out to be…
[Comment on Neiwert post] If your typical Montanan is anything like your average southern redneck, they afford their guns by letting their wives and children go without decent food, clothing, healthcare, education, Hey, these guys know what’s really important. Personally, I say let ’em have all the guns they want. Maybe they’ll get into a good ol fashioned Hatfields and McCoys type war and shoot each other.

Media Matters has been keeping a very close eye on Alex Jones, the 9-11 truth movement, and anti-NWO activism in general, as you can see by this list of articles at their site.

Again, what that suggests is that the Neiwert attack on Ron Paul is part of a larger effort to suppress anti-NWO and 9-11 truth, and has little legitimate basis.

Update 3 – THE ULTIMATE RACISM OF WAR

Will Grigg gives you a glimpse of the extremism that really matters – not some offensive words in an old commercial newsletter, but a drone strike that burns the face off a four year old girl and leaves her for dead in a trash bin.
drone

Update 2:  CONSPIRACY THEORIES

Neiwert goes by the handle Spudboy on some internet forums like Fray, a forum attached to Slate magazine. Digging into Spudboy’s comments, it seems he’s been following around Patriot group and anti-NWO people for a while. And his prime concern is not to get rid of them. He thinks that, like the poor, we’re always going to have them. What worries him is that the mainstream might start accepting them.

Here’s a quote from one forum, themote.info:

436. spudboy – Aug. 7, 1999 – 12:25 PM PT
Arky: I think you give a nice summary of my central concern. I’m not really worried about the crackpots and their theories — they have always been with us and always will be. I’m more concerned by the level of circulation and widespread acceptance that their ideas are getting, among people who really should know better. What the hell ever happened to common sense?”

Spudboy is a fan of Paul Krugman and Michael Kinsley, who apparently used to publish articles at Slate magazine. Might that explain the animosity toward Dr. Paul a bit more?

Krugman, after all, is a favorite punching bag at Lew Rockwell and at the EconomicPolicyJournal.

Perhaps it’s not Paul’s “racism” that really bothers Neiwert. It’s Paul’s economics. After all, in the Fray thread linked above, Neiwert writes that there’s nothing to fear in Patriot and militia rhetoric, unless it turns violent. Dr. Paul is rather evidently against violence.

As for conspiracy theories, from what I read on these old threads, Neiwert sounds like he’s kind of fascinated by them.

At least, he seems to have read many of them with some relish (“It’s wild!” he writes about “Behold A Pale Horse,” by William Cooper).

palehorse

The Fray forums discuss conspiracy theories, pretending not to find them plausible, a common form of dissembling among journalists who want to retain their mainstream credibility while still plagiarizing ideas and connections from more daring and original writers.

Last point. Whom does spudboy quote when he wants to discredit conspiracizing? That old chestnut, Richard Hofstadter? No. He quotes right-wing anti-Islamicist theorist, Daniel Pipes, who has since then suggested, conspiratorially, that Obama was once a Muslim:

“80. spudboy – May 16, 1998 – 1:45 PM PDT

I think the following passage from David Greenberg’s Slate article is important for consideration in any discussion of the Masons and conspiratorial beliefs (it’s a nice distillation of scholarly research on the subject):

“Modern conspiracism is almost a thousand years old. Pipes, in a book called Conspiracy: How the Paranoid Style Flourishes and Where It Comes From, pinpoints the Crusades of the 11th century–the wars waged by Europe’s Christians on the Muslims who controlled Palestine–as its first mass outbreak. To legitimize their attacks, Crusaders demonized their Muslim foes–not hard to do, since the Muslims had a competing empire and religion of vast size and power. But Europe’s Jews, too, had to be converted or killed. How to justify the eradication of a weak and numerically insignificant group? The Crusaders convinced themselves the Jews were a secret cabal with insidious powers, out to destroy Christendom.

crusaders

“Besides this anti-Semitism, Pipes identifies a second, related strain in Western conspiracist thought: fear of secret societies. This variety focused on small groups (other than Jews) whose rituals seemed mysterious and whose beliefs seemed threatening to Christianity. Masons–professional stonecutters–were the earliest targets. Since medieval times, masons had devised confidential phrases and handshakes to recognize fellow craftsmen and protect their trade secrets from outsiders. During the Enlightenment, their guilds became clubs for discussing the new liberal ideas of deism and toleration (and also came to include nonstonecutters as members). Religious authorities feared that, within their lodges, the Masons, too, were plotting Christianity’s doom. … (cont’d)

nullrosicrucians

81. spudboy – May 16, 1998 – 1:46 PM PDT
… “Pipes contends these two strains of conspiracism co-existed and intermingled over the years, giving rise to various fantasies of global schemes. Typically, these fantasies have centered on such staples as the Bavarian Illuminati (a Masonlike order founded in 1776), the Rothschilds (a Jewish banking family of the 18th century) and, later, the Council on Foreign Relations (a bunch of foreign-policy wonks who meet on East 68th Street).”

In other words, Kurt, modern-day conspiratorial thinking is ultimately descended from the reactionarism of the status quo, particularly during the Enlightenment, in resisting most of the innovations that we have since come to think of as democratic society.”

Reading this, one suspects it’s not conspiracizing that bothers either Neiwert or Pipes so much as the target, in this case, the New World Order….

In other words, conspiracies about Islam and Muslims (by Mr. Pipes) are harmless….even though they result in world-wide wars and surveillance.

But conspiracies about the New World Order (by Mr. Paul) that fight against world-wide wars and surveillance are dangerously radical.

It all depends on whose ox is being gored.

Seems to me that Mr. Neiwert protests too much…

Update 1 SHODDY SCHOLARSHIP

In an excellent piece at Reason Magazine blog on the extreme denunciations of extremism, Michael Moynihan shows how flimsy is some of the scholarship on which David Neiwert based his book “Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right”.

The book cites the popular quote from Sinclair Lewis about fascism coming to America wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross. It was republished widely on the net in an image superimposing the quote on a picture of Sarah Palin.

palinimage
Turns out Lewis never wrote it. Neiwert just cited it as if he’d got it from Sinclair Lewis, when all he did was just pick it up from the net.

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Patterico.com points to a rant by one of David Neiwert’s fellow travelers that is many times more dangerous than anything Ron Paul allegedly wrote/allowed to be written/might have subscribed to/possibly still subscribes to.

[By the way, I wonder if Neiwert has time to tear himself away from those old newsletters and figure out if this face off from OccupyWallStreet – which he endorses – is also “racist” and “hateful?” ]

Mr. Neiwert, hunter of non-existent evil in Ron Paul and professional race-monger, misses the very real, very contemporary statement made below by one of his friends. I’m not a lawyer, but I’m pretty sure it crosses the line of legally protected speech.

Mark Ames:

[T]here’s still time to prove that you’re not passive, pathetic serfs. That’s right Americans, here’s your chance to prove that you’re not slaves, that you won’t just sit there and take it when they steal from you. We know who stole everything from you. They don’t even hide—they’re all over the TV networks, bragging, strutting, laughing at you. We know where they work, and we know what they look like. They’re literally asking for it. Shouldn’t you, Americans, with your guns and your high and mighty talk about how you protect your rights and your property and your families—shouldn’t you, like, do something? They’re responsible for throwing you out of work, out of your house, bankrupting your retirement, destroying your life and your family and everything you’ve worked for. And they don’t even hide it! So, what’re you gonna do about it? Sit there and complain? Call another fucking rightwing radio talkshow and kvetch like an old Jewish grandmother? Do you have any fucking balls left at all?

There are so many deserving targets out there—or rather, let’s call them “opportunities” out there to prove that you’re not the world’s biggest suckers and most passive, pathetic slaves that the planet has ever hosted. I’ll give you one, a real shocker. Her name is Betsy McCaughey . . .

[Ames proceeds to explain that McCaughey opposes socialized medicine — although the way Ames puts it is: “BETSY MCCAUGHEY WANTS TO KILL YOU IN ORDER TO ENRICH HERSELF.”]

So, here is what I’m going to ask readers: DOES ANYONE KNOW WHERE BETSY MCCAUGHEY LIVES? DOES ANYONE KNOW HER HOME ADDRESS? If you do, please send it to us and we’ll publish it. Then Americans can prove to Russians that they are not slaves, they do not sit back passively and allow themselves to be killed by vampires like McCaughey. Americans fight back, right? We’ll see. Send your information on her address to: ames@exiledonline.com

Patterico also quotes a comment on Ames’s post:

Timmy, don’t be such a pansy. What all decent people want to see right now is these rich fucks being dragged out of their mansions by a mob, shitting and pissing themselves with terror, then being shot with their blood and brains blasting over the snow. Then watching it again and again on Youtube with your mates. Fuck criminal charges. Preach on, Brother Mark.

Comment #27:

Drag her into the streets and burn her. Once everyone sees one of them “getting it,”

[Lila: Who is “them”? What has Betsy McCaughey got to do with the Wall Street heist enabled by the Federal Reserve?]

the other 60,000 who lost their jobs the other week can get to work on the rest of em.

[Lila: Who’s “the rest of ’em”? White Christian women? Rich people in general, by whatever definition of rich is the standard at the moment? Anyone who has a 401K? Anyone who irritates Neiwert?]

Patterico suggests that the only “eliminationist rhetoric” really in play is the one  emanating from the left.

My Comment

So where is David Neiwert or Abe Foxman or Chip Berlet when there’s an actual incitement to violence, with published threats directed at a named individual?

Where are they?

Scrabbling around to come up with some twenty year old newsletters that predict exactly this kind of race war.

They’re communist agitators.

agitprop

Agitprop is what the leftist media does best. They’d be out of a job if they weren’t allowed to do it.

What’s even more true is that there’s a good reason why Mr. Neiwert has to distance himself from Mr. Paul. To most establishment liberals, he’s just as conspiracy-minded as he claims Paul is. So the only way to distinguish his views from Paul’s is to clamor that Paul’s a racist. It eliminates the threat that the Ron Paul campaign presents to the leftist vote-base.

It’s only good politics..

Dean’s World, a liberal blog, wrote in 2004:

“Back in May, a really creepy obsessive named Dave Neiwert, well known for lunatic fringe conspiracy theories, decided to insinuate that your host (Dean Esmay) is a secret Nazi sympathizer. Or at least a fascist at heart, though my dark desires are hidden to anyone but clever brave scribblers such as himself, anyway.

Now such accusations are nothing new. If you ever read Niewert’s materials (no links for him–attention is what people like him crave and I won’t give it to him, although if you follow some of my links below you can find his strange site if you really want to), you can see that he is of the exact same mindset as people like Lyndon LaRouche, the white supremacists who believe we live under a Zionist Occupation Government, the Holocaust Revisionists, and creeps like Michael Moore. Just take a whole jumble of seemingly related facts, slap it all together, and come to vile, hateful conclusions based on your own paranoia. It’s classic Conspiracy Theory reasoning. You can read a pretty good dissection of the mindset in Richard Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style In American Politics or in Daniel Pipes’ Conspiracy: How The Paranoid Style Flourishes And Where It Comes From. You can see how Niewert’s long, intricately reasoned nonsense is a textbook case of the Conspiracy Theorist mindset. Niewert’d get along great with the LaRouchies, or those who think that the Freemasons control world events.”

So, David Neiwert protests too much. In political terms, Neiwert’s crew at CrooksandLiars is competing with Paul for the same anti-establishment vote.

That’s really what’s going on here….

Albert Pike: Beyond Theism And Atheism

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Correction (9/21/14):

I didn’t research the origin of this quotation when I found it, massively reproduced on the web.

Unfortunately, one blogger has done some research and the letter appears to be a long-standing hoax. Perhaps there’s more to the story, but at this point, it’s necessary to flag the quotation as suspect.

“The Third World War must be fomented by taking advantage of the differences caused by the ‘agentur’ of the ‘Illuminati’ between the political Zionists and the leaders of  Islamic World. The war must be conducted in such a way that Islam (the Moslem Arabic World) and political Zionism (the State of Israel) mutually destroy each other.Meanwhile the other nations, once more divided on this issue will be constrained to fight to the point of complete physical, moral, spiritual and economical exhaustion…We shall unleash the Nihilists and the atheists, and we shall provoke a formidable social cataclysm which in all its horror will show clearly to the nations the effect of absolute atheism, origin of savagery and of the most bloody turmoil. Then everywhere, the citizens, obliged to defend themselves against the world minority of revolutionaries, will exterminate those destroyers of civilization, and the multitude,disillusioned with Christianity, whose deistic spirits will from that moment be without compass or direction, anxious for an ideal, but without knowing where to render itsadoration, will receive the true light through the universal manifestation of the pure doctrine of Lucifer, brought finally out in the public view. This manifestation will result from the general reactionary movement which will follow the destruction of Christianity and atheism, both conquered and exterminated at the same time.”

–     Albert Pike in a letter to Giuseppe Mazzini, excerpt from William Carr’s “Pawns in The Game”

Ames: Tax The 1% At 91%

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Mark Ames in a nutshell (which is exactly where nuts belong);

“The eXiled has set up an emergency “deficit crisis” website calling on America to restore President Eisenhower’s top tax rate on the wealthiest 0.1% Americans: RATFOCR. Everyone agrees that the Golden Age for America’s middle-class was under President Eisenhower, when the top tax rate reached 91% for the wealthiest Americans.”

There you have it. 91% taxes is confiscatory. Why not 100%, though? I mean, if it’s all so righteous, just take everything and split it up. Why stop at 91%?

The point is who decides what’s rich? $250000 sounds like a lot of money to most people, including me. But if you have a lot of expenses and are a businessman in New York, it might not be.  Of course, here comes Felix Salmon to say let’s just check your bank balance and tax you if you have $5 million plus. But, suppose you got that $5 million by not having a family, scrimping and saving, and suppose you actually earned much less than $250000, say $100,000? Suppose you have sick relatives or you wanted to bankroll some charity dear to your heart, or to spend the end of your life pursuing your dream, after years of deferring it? What if you hold the savings for an extended family or for relatives living in unstable countries? Who sorts all that out? Mark Ames?

How fair is that? You not only didn’t get the use out of your money, you didn’t get interest from it, because the banks were speculating on it and losing money, and now you have to subsidize the people who spent their money (and got the use of it) or actually debased or stole other people’s money?

I haven’t studied Eisenhower’s tax policies, but if this was his tax-rate, the economy was prosperous in spite of it.  Income disparities today are extreme, but they are caused by all kinds of hidden and open subsidies and redistribution schemes.  Undo them and you won’t have to confiscate property.