Category Archives: Intelligence Operations

The Invisible Wealth Of The Rothschilds

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Accounting for the Rothschild Wealth and Influence

by Markus Angelicus: November 21, 1997 :

Morton (1962) noted that the Rothschild wealth was estimated at over $6 billion US in 1850. Not a significant amount in today’s dollars; however, consider the potential future value compounded over 147 years!

Taking $6 billion (and assuming no erosion of the wealth base) and compounding that figure at various returns on investment (a conservative range of 4% to 8%) would suggest the following net worth of the Rothschild family enterprise:

$1.9 trillion US (@ 4%)
$7.8 trillion US (@ 5%)
$31.5 trillion US (@ 6%)
$125,189.1 trillion US (@ 7%)
$491,409.0 trillion US (@ 8%)

To give these figures some perspective consider these benchmarks:

A little of $300 billion US buys every ounce of gold in every central bank in the world (see John Kutyn’s estimate (http://www.gold-eagle.com/gold_digest/kutyn111597.html).
U.S. M3 money supply August 1997 was $5.2 trillion
U.S. debt is currently $5.4 trillion.
U.S. GDP (1997; 2nd Q.) is $8.03 trillion.
George Soros’ empire is worth an estimated $20 billion.

Arnaud de Borchgrave writes on April 28, 2011 in The Washington Times:

(You will see that his assessment of the crisis is exactly mine)

“An original $100,000 stake in Mr. Soros‘ fund was worth $150 million by 1994. Between 1970 and 2000, the return was 3,365 percent. (For 10 consecutive years, it did 42.6 percent per year.) In 1992, Mr. Soros bet billions against the British pound – and broke the Bank of England (“Black Wednesday”).

Comment:

I needn’t remind you that this is BEFORE the bursting of the stock market bubble, 9-11, the 2003 stock market revival that was stimulated by the Iraq war, the housing bubble, the 2008 crash, and the gold boom, all of which provided ample opportunities for people in the know to make killings in the market.

Related Posts

The 24..er..4 Companies that Rule the World

See also Zahir Ebrahim: My Experiments In Confusion: The Invisible House of Rothschild

and Zahir Ebrahim: My Experiments In Confusion: The Omnipotent Rothschilds

and Arnaud de Borchgrave: Geneva Gnomes’ Global Dread

(hat-tip to WeAreChange.org, Oklahoma)

Deconstructing Soros’ New World Architecture

BCCI: Hit Man For The IMF

Soros: Front For N.M. Rothschild

The CIA, the US Govt, the Stock Market, and Drug-Running

John Paulson’s Man at Treasury Will Design Regulations

Civil Society + Internationalist + Anonymous = World Government

The Easter Bunny On the DTCC

Another False-Flag

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“We’re done folks. CNBC is reporting that there are now clients running out of the markets entirely because they do not believe their customer funds are safe. That’s the end of it. The belief that there are more MF Globals has now taken hold. The thieves have pushed it too far and now we’ve got the start of a global liquidity run, and with good reason”

—  Karl Denninger at The Market Ticker

[Gerald Celente, noted financial analyst and publisher of The Trends Journal, said recently that he’d lost six figures in the collapse of MF Global, which owned his commodity futures brokerage file and filed for bankruptcy on October 31, 2011. MF Global was headed by corrupt ex-Goldmanite Jon Corzine, who has resigned from MF and  is now being sued by investors.

Celente then called for a run on the banks on a show with talk radio host, Alex Jones, an anti-NWO activist:

“When I say take your money out of the banks and put it under the mattress, this is not advice,” Celente says. “Personally, I buy gold coins from reputable companies. I take my money out of investment funds and I buy gold and silver. You need the three g’s — gold, guns and a get-away plan.”

Celente has called for “direct democracy” recently,  a demand that I think is in tune with what the financial elites want. That’s what made me think the MF collapse was being used as a false-flag of some kind.

It was, maybe, intended to provoke a run and Denninger is amplifying it.

I recall that Max Keiser (a former derivatives trader and leftist who has now set himself up as a critic of derivatives) tried to provoke a bank run on JP Morgan, by telling people to go buy silver in December 2010.

Keiser disengages himself from Al Gore these days, but he still believes in anthropogenic global warming and the need for something to be done about it.

He seems to want chaos and confrontation on the streets, according to those who follow him closely. He is in favor of a carbon exchange, which, as a trader, he probably knows would be very lucrative for insiders.

On the forums of PrisonPlanet, one observer notes that Keiser claimed that if silver went to $47, JP Morgan would collapse.  Well, silver went to $49 this year, and JP Morgan is still around.

I have no idea what Celente’s role is in all that, but it’s all mighty suspicious to me.

He has, for instance, said that he is “all for this Occupy Wall Street”.

No ifs, no buts. No reservations. No questions.

It’s all good, for Mr. Celente. It’s all democracy, even thought it’s apparently paid for by billionaire George Soros, to whom the CIA has essentially outsourced its functions.

I didn’t comment on the story before, not knowing what happened exactly, but now I’m beginning to think it was intended to provoke a run and maximum panic. Apparently, it’s had that effect.

Celente and others are also promoting “direct democracy”, which, like “full transparency”, is something the elites want, whatever its inherent merits. Those merits aren’t the point. The elites will use whatever tool they can.

The point is direct democracy in which the social media is manipulated anonymously by intelligence agencies, corporations, governments, and media shills, is  tyranny by another name.

Here is what I wrote about Celente last month.

Gerald Celente Stabs anti-NWO Folks Front, Back, and Center, October 14, 2011:

I do not  say that direct referendums necessarily lack merit. They might work, were we living in small city states…. and were the internet discontinuous, fragmented, and highly private…. and were most people rational, well-educated, self-critical and self-reliant.

But we aren’t, it isn’t, and they aren’t.

So Direct Internet Democracy will not be anarchism, right or left, and it won’t be Christian liberty. Nor will it be federalism or decentralization.

It will be the direct control of the masses through electronic networks, propaganda, surveillance, and co-option of alternative mouthpieces of all stripes, across the board.

Direct Electronic Democracy = Tyranny

I call it Direct Electronic Action for Tyrants and Demagogues

Which equals DEATH. The death of true liberty.

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”

Climate-Gate: The 2011 Edition

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James Delingpole at The Daily Telegraph breaks the latest from the Climatistas:

“Breaking news: two years after the Climategate, a further batch of emails has been leaked onto the internet by a person – or persons – unknown. And as before, they show the “scientists” at the heart of the Man-Made Global Warming industry in a most unflattering light. Michael Mann, Phil Jones, Ben Santer, Tom Wigley, Kevin Trenberth, Keith Briffa – all your favourite Climategate characters are here, once again caught red-handed in a series of emails exaggerating the extent of Anthropogenic Global Warming, while privately admitting to one another that the evidence is nowhere near as a strong as they’d like it to be.”

Some quotes from more scrupulous researchers are cited in the article:

/// The IPCC Process ///
Thorne/MetO:
Observations do not show rising temperatures throughout the tropical
troposphere unless you accept one single study and approach and discount a
wealth of others. This is just downright dangerous. We need to communicate the
uncertainty and be honest. Phil, hopefully we can find time to discuss these
further if necessary […]
Thorne:
I also think the science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it
which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run.”

The email writers recognize that public perceptions about ” global freezing” might be ruining the brand value of “global warming” as a technique of social change:

Minns/Tyndall Centre:
In my experience, global freezing is already a bit of a public
relations problem with the media
Kjellen:
I agree with Nick that climate change might be a better labelling than global
warming
Pierrehumbert:
What kind of circulation change could lock Europe into deadly summer heat waves
like that of last summer? That’s the sort of thing we need to think about.”

 [Some of my blogging on climate-gate can be found here and in other posts you can locate by using the Search function on this blog]

The blog Watts Up With That has links to a comprehensive timeline and graphics that display the thirty-year subversion of climate science behind climate-gate.

The Guardian suggests that the new climate emails probably date back to the first group, released in 2009, and that the motive is, again, to sabotage the Durban Climate summit, which starts on Monday:

“The emails appear to be genuine, but the University of East Anglia said the “sheer volume of material” meant it was not yet able to confirm that they were. One of the emailers, the climate scientist Prof Michael Mann, has confirmed that he believes they are his messages. The lack of any emails post-dating the 2009 release suggests that they were obtained at the same time, but held back. Their release now suggests they are intended to cause maximum impact before the upcoming climate summit in Durban which starts on Monday.”

 There are similarities to the first release, says the Guardian:

“In the new release a 173MB zip file called “FOIA2011” containing more than 5,000 new emails, was made available to download on a Russian server called Sinwt.ru today. An anonymous entity calling themselves “FOIA” then posted a link to the file on at least four blogs popular with climate sceptics – Watts Up With That, Climate Audit, TallBloke and The Air Vent.”

But there are also differences:

“The use of points instead of commas to mark the thousands when writing a number – highly unusual in both the UK or US – is sure to lead to speculation about the nationality of those responsible.”

The Guardian also indicates that although not all the emails have been confirmed genuine, the University of East Anglia claims that they have had no recent breach of security and says that the emails were probably held back from the original batch released in 2009.

Michael Mann, Director of the Earth Sciences Institute at Pennsylvania State University, whose messages are part of the release, is quoted in the piece dismissing the emails as more of the same. He calls the anonymous FOIA “agents” of the fossil-fuel industry and “criminal” hackers.

Hail Hillary, Smart-Power Chief To Come..

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I put on my pointy black hat (I actually have one) when I wrote this in August 3, 2010 about Ms. Clinton:

After reading all the hoopla about Chelsea Clinton’s wedding, I felt…once again… that the future of the US, for good or bad, will have more of Hillary Clinton in it. In fact, if I were a witch, I might venture the following prophecy as I stirred my brew:

“All Hail M’Clinton!/Wife of Bill/Secretary of State/That shall be President hereafter…..

“I don’t know why I’ve always felt this was in the cards. Perhaps because of the sustained ferocity of her ambition…or perhaps because she’s a committed Zionist, with Jewish roots…and only a committed Zionist seems likely to be able to do anything about the Israel-Palestine issue….perhaps because she was once a Goldwater Republican and I see a certain kind of conservatism (a populist kind) marrying itself to a certain kind of liberalism. Pat Buchanan made a similar point about Mrs. Clinton during the 2008 campaign….and he makes it again, predicting that Biden and Clinton will trade places in 2012. Meaning, she’ll be Veep and he’ll be Secretary of State. But I wonder if she’ll go farther.

This isn’t something I look forward to. It’s something I fear will take place.”

I wrote this on October 26, 2011:

“Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, presumably Syria and Iran as well. The Zionists – for that is who they are – declare themselves against all standards. The pretense of humanism and secularism has long been dropped. The glorying in power is evident in the response of the elites to the killing of Gaddafi.

Hillary Clinton, uncrowned queen of the future feminist supranational order of Gaia, heiress apparent to the bankers’ throne, cackled.”

Now I see a cover story at Time Magazine, lauding the rise of “smart power” (a notion developed during Bill Clinton’s time). Smart power is something about which we’ve written in Language of Empire.

Smart power includes things like “no-touch torture” (sexual or religious torture), mind-control through social media manipulation, humanitarian interventions (liberventionism is my term for it)*, psyops, black ops, the melding of the military into domestic security operations, war masquerading as peace-keeping or policing, creation of a “grey zone” in which war and peace, civilian and military blend.

I recall coining this term in a discussion of Jean Bricmont, but find it has been used much earlier by Joseph Stromberg.

[Note: I came across this piece because I noticed a blog at LRC by David Kramer, who seems to read this blog (and why shouldn’t he, looks who’s writing it (wink)…and who’s reading it),

I’ve had this notion for a few years for several reasons:

1. Ms. Clinton fulfills the ruling class requirement whereby a white conservative Christian (George Bush) and a black radical leftist (Obama) do the dirty work of putting the transnational order in place and take the negative fall-out. [Nov 25: I mean, these are their respective ideologies. In practice, of course, their policies fed the elites, in Bush’s case, the oil and defense crowd; in Obama’s case, the hedge-fund/speculator complex].

That spares the reputation of the so-called centrists (the ideological establishment) from blame. Then someone from that class, a white feminist and environmentalist, from the heart of ideological and power networks (wife of Bill Clinton, etc. etc.) presides over the new order, someone whose dirty laundry has already been publicly washed, someone who is a hard worker and a natural politician (to give her credit)….

2. Two people as far apart and as experienced as Alex Cockburn and Patrick Buchanan have both noted her popularity among the ruling classes.

3. She was a Goldwater Republican originally. She has the confidence of many in the “permanent government ” (a.k.a. bureaucrats and spy agencies). She is unlikely to surprise…

4. There is a faint whiff of the androgyne about her, and the androgyne is revered in many occult traditions, and even in the traditional practices of Hinduism, from which the occult traditions take their inspiration, if not their direct descent. The ethos of the androgyne is embodied in popular language as the “strong woman” and the “metrosexual”. ….

Those are my reasons…and of course, as always, they’re just good guesses. Meanwhile, keep your stop-losses tight, and hold onto your (regular) hat..

Globalists Subverting Liberal Arts Discourse In India

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Obama: Normalizing The Police State

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ISI And 9-11

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Abid Ullah Jan, Pakistan Tribune, July 14, 2006

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who Guards The Guardian?

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

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

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

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

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

Wikispooks explains:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That Transparency Meme…

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About that transparency meme that I caught on to in 2010, from whence it… er…percolated..to others, like the estimable Daily Bell, whom I have often and meticulously cited,  whom I applaud for its wonderful work and have supported over and over, despite many misgivings….

(One of its associates/editors’ comments to my post can even be seen later in this blog post).

A nod in the direction from where you get stuff, folks, would be nice. It would be even nicer if I got it without having to bring it up, although, as you can see, I’m not bashful about doing that either…

I  give credit regardless, and I hope for the same, politely, humbly, and patiently at first, but if not, then a tad more assertively. Ultimately, this blog is committed to subverting and destroying the lies on which modernity has lived for centuries and a little (intellectual) blood-letting will take place when it has to, with no qualms.

The biggest lie fostered by modernity is the lie called western supremacism, whose economic form is mercantilism. This, as I  see even in this day, can only be sustained by the appropriation of other people’s work, whether physical or mental.  That is fundamental to it.

My attribution battles, small and great, are thus an intrinsic part of  the mandate of this blog, and not solely personal. More later…

Thus this brief history of the transparency meme  is not the first such and it probably won’t be the last.

Over and over, even recently, I blog something  and then see it surface a day or so later, without a nod in this direction. [One recent example was when I blogged why we need avoid treating ‘End the Fed’ as a slogan and why I think that power has already moved to the BIS].

Sometimes, I daresay, it’s just accidental. I allow for that. But more often it isn’t. Then I am reluctantly forced to call them out.

That kind of thing is simply wrong, no matter how many people do it and what theories or philosophies they quote. It is a kind of theft. Whether it is simply careerism or the professional standards of hard money people or marketers or the financial industry, it has to be called out. Nothing will get better without a clean up of the intellectual pollution and smog that clogs political debate.

Think about it. How can you denounce state actions as the means to enforce norms, if your own conduct adheres to none? If you yourself worship at the foot of power, whether money power, or status, or marketing clout, or anything else, and rely on your ability to “get away with it” because “everyone does it,” rather than on objective truth, then you have no moral grounds to complain when another kind of power (state power, the power of law, or the will of the people) opposes you. In fact, your behavior invites it.

That is why, in the end, the OccupyWallStreet folks will triumph. Soros will win. Why shouldn’t he?

If all you really care about is your network, and the money you make from them, and aggrandizing yourself, rather than objective truth, well then, on all those counts Soros is your master. He has proved it.

You cannot complain. If capitalists express in their behavior no more than the tenet, “might makes right”, they  have nothing on which to stand when the might of the state turns against them.  And it will turn against them. In fact, it already has.

And, truthfully, they have no one to blame but themselves.

See below:

http://mindbodypolitic.org/2010/08/03/the-tangled-web/

“Again, I could be mistaken about Wikileaks.

But even if I were,  even if Assange himself turned out to be well-meaning and principled, I’m not enthusiastic about his perfect transparency, leak-for-profit model. I think it has ominous parallels in corporate and state intelligence services. In my reading (and that of some others), it was one of the instigating factors in the Abu Ghraib torture scandal. Furthermore, the model depends on flouting the privacy rights of innocent people and private outfits.

So however things turn out, I’ll pass on Wikileaks and the “glamor” of spy v. spy. Means are just as important, if not more, than ends. That’s a lesson the Cold War should have taught us. In fact, I thought libertarianism was premised on it.

It troubles me then to see so many liberty-minded people simply brush off these questions as “spiteful” or “envious”……

In such matters, no one is beyond respectful questioning.”

And this post below (I’d actually started doubting Assange much earlier…as you can see from checking back at my posts)

http://mindbodypolitic.org/2010/06/27/more-on-assange-and-wikileaks/

Here’s the main theoretical reason why one might tend to suspect Wikileaks.

Assange objects to privacy. Wikileaks violates privacy. Kind of like Google, notice? Google thinks it’s heroic too and Google has its China-connection too. Wikileaks makes anonymous sources, hacking, leaking, and ratting out your associates cool. It makes snitches heroes.

Cui bono? Need I ask? Corporate rivals, speculators and short-sellers, blackmailers, rival governments, spy agencies. Does that sound like the company the power-elites keep?

So even if Wikileaks were not a disinformation agent, whose agenda would its work finally help? A totalitarian outfit’s. It certainly doesn’t help individualism.

A friend said…

  • [From The Daily Bell]

    Hi! Interesting article. Can you post a definitive (or semi-definitive article) showing Assange is a disinformation agent? Is that your point in this excerpt … that your suspicions are re-ignited? Maybe we misunderstood.

    At this point, (without evidence to change our tiny, collective mind) our betting is still that it is more likely MADSEN is one (since he is actually a member of several US old boy intel clubs) than Assange. We have our doubts about Rense too, where Madsen often appears.

    06/27/10 2:05 PM | Comment Link Edit This