Category Archives: Kleptocracy

Modi: Questionable Ties To Spy Corporations

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I’ve been looking for a while now for evidence that Modi will make good on promises to his heartland base.

I noted some positive things like his campaign for better public sanitation and his clarity on Indian PIO visas.

Unfortunately, all of that must take a back seat to recent events that show exactly where and how Modi has sold out.

The recent visit of Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Face-book highlights the importance that social media platforms, long regarded as tools of intelligence, are going to have in Modi’s India :-

Facebook will be in every village and Twitter is to be harnessed for “anti-terrorism” campaigns.

Zuckerberg had also met Telecom and IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad. Zuckerberg is the third high profile CEO of a US-based firm, after Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, to visit India in last few days. On Thursday, while addressing media persons, Zuckerberg had said he wanted to discuss the role Facebook can play in connecting villages and understand Modi’s Digital India vision.”

Mark Ame has written a revealing piece on the Indian investments of  Pierre Omidyar (libertarian activist/lawyer Glenn Greenwald’s backer. Greenwald, remember, is Edward Snowden’s handler).

I don’t agree with everything Ames has written, least of all his facile characterizations of  Hindu nationalists as “extremists” and “supremacists,” but the connections he’s dug up are very important and insightful.

They explain a lot about the success of  Modi’s  campaign to be PM.

Omidyar Network, as Pando readers know, is the philanthropy arm of eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar. Since 2009, Omidyar Network has made more investments in India than in any other country in its portfolio. These investments were largely thanks to Jayant Sinha, a former McKinsey partner and Harvard MBA, who was hired in October 2009 to establish and run Omidyar Network India Advisors.

During Sinha’s tenure, Omidyar Network steered a large portion of its investments into India, so that by 2013, India investments made up 18% of Omidyar Network’s committed funds of well over $600 million, and 36% of the total number of companies in its portfolio.

In February of this year, Sinha stepped down from Omidyar Network in order to advise Modi’s election campaign, and to run for a BJP parliamentary seat of his own. Sinha’s father, Yashwant Sinha, served as finance minister in the last BJP government from 1998 (when his government set off the nukes) through 2002. This year, Sinha’s father gave up his seat in parliament to allow Jayant Sinha to take his place…………………..

…

Shortly after Sinha left Omidyar Network to help Modi win, Modi gave a speech calling for opening India’s e-commerce market to foreign companies such as Ebay, whose largest shareholder is Pierre Omidyar. The message was clear: Modi is the candidate of hi-tech India, violent ultranationalism notwithstanding.

At the same time, Sinha helped organize a summit meeting between Modi and major global investors like JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley and Nomura bank…..

…

Another NGO that Omidyar invested in, the Institute for Policy Research Studies (IPRS), was accused of illegally trying to lobby India’s parliamentarians to vote for opening up India’s e-commerce market in late 2012. The IPRS nonprofit ran a program in which their staffers provided India MP staffers with “nonpartisan” research. In 2012, India’s intelligence bureau accused the IPRS of “compromising national security” and described it as “shrouded in mystery.”

Omidyar Network had pledged $1 million to the IPRS, and the Ford Foundation pledged half a million more — but the Indian government rejected the IPRS’s application to register as a foreign-funded NGO, deeming it a threat to India’s parliamentary integrity, and its national security. Google’s corporate philanthropic arm, Google.org, had previously given $880,000 to the same NGO program, under Sheryl Sandberg’s watch. The co-founder of this controversial never-registered NGO, CV Mudhakar, is now, you might not be shocked to learn, Omidyar Network India’s director of investments in “government transparency.”

The previous, center-left Indian government not only nixed the Omidyar-Ford Foundation NGO-slash-e-retailer-lobby front, it also announced last year that it did not plan to allow e-commerce firms like eBay open access into its markets. … The answer to that business problem, of course, was changing India’s government — even if that meant installing a brutal figure like Narendra Modi, who spent nearly a decade on the US State Department’s visa ban list for his role in the violent persecution of minority Muslims and Christians.

That’s terrible and all from a human rights perspective, but when you consider the interests of eBay’s shareholders — like its number one shareholder, Pierre Omidyar — India presents not so much a problem as an opportunity. The majority of eBay’s revenues come from its overseas operations, and eBay has made no secret that it sees its future growth coming from India and the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China).”

 

Unfortunately, Ames, being a partisan leftist, cannot speak truthfully when it comes to the church’s proven ties to  Maoists and Naxals, as well as the red terror of Naxalite violence:

The India Foundation also argued tndhat Christian missionaries allied with “Maoists” to forcibly convert Hindus to Christianity — a typical BJP slur that has incited countless Hindu lynch mob attacks on India’s Christians…”

While there has been violence against Christians, it’s been – so far as I’ve looked into it –  in the context of largely unreported violence against Hindus and attacks on Hindu temples.

When out of control mobs attack, innocents die, but the idea that violence is all one-sided and caused by Hindu fundamentalism as such  is as bogus as the notion that Christian extremism caused the Communist revolution in Russia.

These “peaceful Naxals” killed over 10,000 people between 2005 and 2010, according to this report.

Thus, every part of the Western media, every part of the ideological spectrum, is filled with half-truths, spin, exaggeration, and lies, never retracted, never qualified…

 

 

 

Tamil Nadu CM Jaya jailed for corruption

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Tamil Nadu chief minister Jayalalitha has lost the 18 -year old “disproportionate assets” case against her.

Bail has been denied, she has been fined $16 million, and she faces four years in jail.

Tamils for Obama have written to the US President to  intervene in support of Jayalalitha, apparently believing the case against her was a  result of  rival party DMK’s animosity toward her, political expediency demanded by the venue (Karnataka state, which has a dispute over river waters with Tamil Nadu); and national-level intrigue.

The interesting part to me is that Tamils for Obama apparently supports Tamil genocide claims made by the Tamil Tigers, claims that have been taken up by the US liberal establishment (see my previous post about human-rights lawyer Francis Boyle’s support of the Tamil Tigers).

I believe the new-found support for the Tamils was part of Obama’s Asian pivot strategy, which involved creating in Tamil Nadu a secure base, by catering to Tamil chauvinism, supporting covert missionary activity  and Dalit demands, and by dispossessing Hindu temples.

The Tigers had multiple ties to the churches and were, many of them, Christian converts. They raised their funds from Indians abroad through extortion.  They were trained by Mossad and were originally created by RAW, acting in concert with the West.

This was the Afro-Dravidian separatist strategy identified by Rajiv Malhotra in “Breaking India.”

Christian leaders saw in Jaya a future PM, Hillary Clinton treated  her  as a head of state and foreign infiltration into everything was wide-spread, from the renowned cultural center Kalakshetra to important biological sites.

Now the jig is up.

OSINT, espionage, & sedition

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A university researcher wrote to me a week or two ago. He asked if I would be interested in a project studying Operation Mockingbird and the CIA’s past and continuing use of the news media (and of social media).

A little research into the researcher showed that he was involved in a website promoting the use of  OSINT.

OSINT is the graceless acronym the government bestows on something called open-source intelligence.

OSINT is public information similar to what this blog uses.

Not just media reports, but links on forums,  government data,  court documents, commentary at blogs and in discussion groups, social media postings.

As long as it’s not confidential (a lawyer’s privileged conversation) or obviously private (a home phone number or medical information), it’s all fair game.

Until “national security” gets involved.

Of course, “national security” is an elastic term that seems to include everything.

The empire’s desire for full-spectrum dominance makes anything in outer – or inner – space part of “national security.”

Now, until I encountered the term OSINT in the past few days, I‘d no idea that what I was doing by chance bears a resemblance to what a whole wing of the CIA specializes in.

I do it because I’ve generally found the major media unreliable (and uninteresting) and the alternative media, while far more interesting,  ideologically biased.

But there’s a catch.

OSINT can get an un-credentialed journalist or blogger into serious trouble.

How serious?

Wikipedia on the dangers of OSINT:

“Accredited journalists have some protection in asking questions, and researching for recognized media outlets. Even so they can be imprisoned, even executed, for seeking out OSINT.

Private individuals illegally collecting data for a foreign military or intelligence agency is considered espionage in most countries. Of course, espionage that is not treason (i.e. betraying one’s country of citizenship) has been a tool of statecraft since ancient times, is widely engaged in by nearly all countries, and is considered an honorable trade.”

So, well-paid mercenaries and meddlesome bureaucrats who provoke international conflicts and break domestic and foreign laws while  spying on foreign countries are patriots, while unpaid citizen-bloggers/journalists trying to deconstruct the dense fog  of corporate-state propaganda to help ordinary people should be shot.

Very rational.

That leads me back to the curious invitation in my mail-box.

If gathering open-source intelligence can in some circumstances be seen as  treasonous, then why the invitation?

Blogging from public sources is one thing. But blogging that is intended to inform an enemy might be another.

The OSINT web-site I saw gave me a hint by referring to an open-source “revolution.“

Long-time readers of my blog will probably know  how I feel about “revolutions,” especially those led by what I call techno-utopians.

And sure enough, in the last two weeks it seems that the 45-year-old meme of “open source revolution” has been revived.

Yes, 45 years. That’s how old this “cutting-edge” meme is.

Only now it’s migrated from the soft-ware community, where it began, to the intelligence community.

Going back, the term “open-source” was a spin-off from a community of “hackers” creating what was later called free software at an MIT artificial intelligence lab in 1971.

The word hacker here doesn’t mean anything criminal. It’s a positive word for people who take apart and improve on computer programs for the sheer fun of it and for the good of the public.

At least, that’s the self-portrait.

The developer of free software, Richard Stallings, later worked at Lawrence Livermore lab and won a MacArthur “genius” award.

Lawrence Livermore is a government lab devoted to science and research in the interests of national security.

The cypherpunk group, devoted to developing strong cryptography ,  was the group from which Julian Assange and Wikileaks emerged.

It  included one researcher from the Lawrence Livermore lab, as well as many senior people from Bell, MIT, and Sun Microsystems (among others).

Stallings himself is a strong supporter of free software.

He developed the “copyleft” approach to IP, which allows changes to be made to code by innovators, so long as each innovator in turn allows other users the same freedom.

Copyleft also allows people the freedom to commercialize their innovations.

Stallings is a strong supporter of the hacker collective Anonymous, seeing it as a kind of legitimate “street protest.”

You can search this blog to find my ruminations about Anonymous….

(To be continued)

Preet Bharara fixes HSBC; jail for Gupta, Martoma

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Credit: blogs.marketwatch.com

Manhattan prosecutor Preet Bharara shows his true colors as a servant of the money-power.

In the case of mega British bank  HSBC, Bharara is willing to settle for peanuts civil charges over HSBC’s defrauding of the US government to the tune of  millions of dollars:

Federal prosecutors in Manhattan on Tuesday announced a $10 million settlement with the British bank HSBC, accusing it of fraud over the way it submitted fees to the government when foreclosing on homeowners.

HSBC, prosecutors said, lacked the internal controls to review fees it incurred in the process of foreclosing — expenses that the bank ultimately passed on to the government for reimbursement. The bank, which admitted committing the misconduct as part of the civil settlement, cost the government millions of dollars in losses.

“Civil actions like these serve as an important tool that our office can and will continue to use in holding financial institutions responsible for misconduct,” Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan, said in a statement.

In a separate statement, a spokesman for the bank said, “We are pleased to have settled this matter,” additng that the bank had “taken steps to enhance oversight” of the billing process.”

HSBC  Holdings, the company that owns the bank, has a market capitalization of $192.57 billions. That is billion with a ‘b.’

The fine on HSBC was ten million.

There are a thousand millions to a billion.

In 2012, the bank settled criminal charges over money-laundering for $1.92 billion.

HSBC was the bank of choice for the Mexican drug cartels.

In Forbes’ global 2000 list of the world’s largest companies, HSBC came in at 14.

It ranked #3 among all companies in the world in  total assets.

HSBC’s billion-dollar-plus fine was the third it had earned in a decade, says a Reuters piece from 2012, which also lists the fines paid by HSBC’s mega-bank colleagues:

Standard Charter PLC:  $327 million (violating sanctions)

ING, NV:  $619 million (violating sanctions against Cuba and Iran)

Meanwhile, for not making any money on an alleged insider tip about consummate insider Warren Buffet’s insider-deal involving insider-bank Goldman Sachs (to which at least half-a-dozen insiders were privy and which any one of them could have leaked);

for not costing the government a dime,

Rajat Gupta became the highest-placed manager ever to be convicted criminally and the first to ever have been subjected to federal wire-tapping…and pre-textually, at that.

Wire-tapping is usually reserved for the mafia.

In this case, the blue-chip manager got the wire, the strip-down and jail…and the mafia (SAC Capital) got off with fines.

Gupta is now starting two years in jail, having got a “break” because of his philanthropic work.

The Occupy Wall Street left  would have liked him to do ten years.

Matthew Martoma, a significantly smaller fry than Gupta, is now facing eight years in prison, as  Bharara throws the book at him.

Martoma elicited information about drug-trials from a couple of doctors before the results were public and earned millions in bonuses.

It isn’t clear how Martoma’s conduct was any more corrupt than that of the big banks….and that of many fraudulent lenders and borrowers all through the financial crisis, not to mention corrupt bureaucrats, courts, lawyers, doctors, journalists and general public.

Martoma’s boss, the alleged mafia-man and Sith Lord of Wall Street, Steven Cohen, has not been touched criminally.

Actually, no manager or CEO of any of the largest banks has faced any criminal proceeding.

Some Sheriff of Wall Street, this Preet  Bharara.

Interestingly, the author of the piece I just linked,  Judge Jed Rakoff, is as much an enabler of corruption as any figure in the court-system.

Which makes the piece, while true, the usual hypocritical tosh, wherein the very folks who scammed us get to change their jaddis, put on new togs and and bloviate about the integrity of the markets.

(For non-desis, jaddi = underwear)

Just remember it was the same Jed Rakoff  who handled the Madoff fraud and reportedly made it harder for the victims to collect.

And it was again Jed Rakoff who prevented crucial evidence from being heard in the Gupta case.

Evidence that would have helped the defense and thwarted Bharara.

Now, between Bharara and Rakoff, the fix is in.

 

Google: Cyberbullying for profit

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An anonymous Australian web-site reveals how Google has a financial incentive to cyber-bully people by elevating smear-and-extort sites like The Ripoff Report.

(I will not link to it, but here is Wikipedia’s entry on the Ripoff Report):

[Side-note: One of my attackers on the web seems to have been affiliated with this site,  which essentially runs an extortion racket by smearing people via hired proxies and then asking for money from the victims to remove the smears.]

UPDATE September 20th 2013: Victory

A large number of major companies have removed their advertisements from Ripoff Report.

This webpage contains an overview of the project.

The updated full report can be downloaded from this url:

https://www.adrive.com/public/9u3aau/Cyberbullying for Profit September 2013.zip

A list of examples URLs from Ripoff Report containing offensive material about children, public figures and individuals is contained in an attachment to the report but an also be found here:

This video explains how Google priorities links from Ripoff Report in its search results.

This video shows that Google considers Ripoff Report has unacceptable  business practices. So why does it advertise on its webpages? The answer is…..advertising revenue for  Google (see above).

Overview

The website Ripoff Report and other websites that emulate the business model of ‘cyberbullying for profit’  publish false and offensive information about minors, teenager, adults and businesses and these are often accompanied by photographs and identifying details.   Ripoff Report also publishes extremely racist and homophobic material, offensive material about religious groups, public figures and ‘celebrities’. While the material about public figures appears to be given a low Google page rank, the names of children, teenagers, ordinary people and small business owners ‘reported’ on these websites is contained in snippets displayed at or near the top of the Google search results (SERPs). These snippets contain names and location details couched in terms such as ‘ripoff’, ‘fraud, ‘pedophile’, ‘scam’, ‘whore’, ‘slut, ‘prostitute’, ‘skank’, ‘murderer’, ‘bitch’ ‘faggot’ ‘liar’ ‘drug abuser’, ‘cunt’, ‘stalker’, ‘HIV’ and/or ‘AIDS’ and other accusatory and derogatory terms.  

Ripoff Report earns revenue from two sources – advertising and payments from victims to the website to ‘rehabilitate’ their reputation in the Google search results or remove the false material. Despite the fact that the claims are false, if a person cannot pay their life is ruined because, as stated by Google, their search engine is often ‘the first place people look for information that’s published’ about a person.

Even if the allegations can be proven to be false Ripoff Report will not remove the material unless they are paid a substantial ‘corporate advocacy’, or ‘arbitration’ fee. In response to removal requests, Google provides a number of excuses and victims must find an ‘ex-gratia’ payment in order to ensure the material is removed from the Google index and ameliorate the danger towards their children and/0r save their livelihoods and businesses. Furthermore, Ripoff Report publishes registered trade names and copyrighted photographs without permission. It claims a copyright over the webpages. This business model is enabled by both a high Google page rank  and advertising revenue. The companies and business that advertise on Ripoff Report supply this revenue and support the endangerment and cyberbullying of children, teenagers and adults and the destruction of careers and livelihoods. This project arose out of my own experience with the publication of false and defamatory material on these websites.

Despite the fact that it takes only a couple of minutes to remove links from the Google index, after four years of notifications, pleading with the website and Google, and litigation against Google it has not been removed. ……I sued Google for defamation in February 2011 with the hope that it would simply remove the links and I could then move on with my life. My hope was misplaced. …….

…Despite the fact that Google refuse most removal requests, they have quietly removed links for other victims of Ripoff Report.

[Lila: I have seen Google actively suppress information that exposes the financial mafia,which is to the left, politically.]

“For obvious reasons I cannot and will not publish the names of these people because they likely paid a substantial amount to either the websites or Google to save their families and livelihoods.

However, Google can and does remove websites and links without much effort.

For example, since December 2011 Google has removed almost 90,000 links from its index at the request of Ripoff Report. Many of those links contained registered trademarks and copyrighted photographs but it appears that Ripoff Report is  not questioned about these DMCA issues by Google. My blog, was also removed from the Google index soon after it went online.  If this appears difficult to believe consider that the removal occurred  after I drew attention to the blog by applying for AdSense advertising as an experiment.

In fact, I clearly stated on my blog that I was suing Google. Apparently’ freedom of speech’ only applies unless one says something negative about Google.

My blog was magically re-indexed in the Google index within hours of my public complaint in a blog conversation in which Matt Cutts was participating. The documents showing the removal and reinstatement of my blog in the Google SERPs can be downloaded from this link.“

[Lila : Here is a previous blog post of mine, from 2009, where I reference Ripoff  Report and its owner, in the context of describing the nexus of organized crime and short-sellers.]

Worst cyber-crime is in US, Russia

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As I blogged yesterday, the IP addresses attacking me trace back to a Netherland hosting company called Ecatel Network.

ECATEL NETWORK

Ecatel has become notorious for hosting bad actors, from the Russian spammers to pedophile networks.  It also has a reputation for brushing off requests for help from the victims.

Trying to figure out what was going on, I did a bit of research into the world of cyber-crime.

AKAMAI REPORT – CHINA LEADS CYBER-CRIME?

The mainstream media likes to portray cyber-crime as essentially a foreign threat. China, especially, is fingered as the bad guy.

For instance, in January,  US-based Akamai Technologies issued a report  placing China at the head of global hacking, responsible for 35% of cyber-attacks world-wide.

More recently,  the US government pressed cyber-warfare charges against five of China’s army officers.

Nigerians scamsters are rumored to run a close second.

There are two things wrong with this picture. The first is the source of the information.

Akamai Technologies is a “content-delivery network” head-quartered in Cambridge, Massachussetts.

It was founded by an MIT applied math professor, Tom Leighton, and a graduate student at MIT, Daniel Lewin, later killed on AA flight 11, which crashed during the September 11, 2001 attack.

According to his MIT bio, Leighton is a specialist in cryptography,  digital rights, and algorithms for network applications. He also chaired a Presidential committee on Cyber-Security.

Akamai’s co-founder,  COO, and President was the founder of the Road-Runner cable service. Its CEO was a senior VP from IBM.

Akamai’s privacy policy states that it collects IP addresses and effectively tracks clients.

Its partners include Microsoft and Apple and its clients include the BBC, the White House,  Facebook, Twitter, Adobe Systems, Netflix, Yahoo, ESPN Star (India),  China Central Television and Al Jazeera, among many others.

How likely is it that reports from Akamai on cyber-crime are untouched by political pressure?

WORLD HOSTS REPORT –  US, RUSSIA LEAD CYBER-CRIME

Point two. The statistics don’t support Akamai’s pious propaganda.

The Chinese do indeed have a very high number of IP addresses attached to their malicious activity. If sheer volume were the only criterion, China would dominate.

However,  as far as the number of malicious sites and the level of threat involved, the world’s leading cyber-criminals aren’t Chinese.  Not even close.

They are in the US and in Russia, closely followed by smaller countries like the Netherlands, the Ukraine, and Romania.

In Host Exploit’s authoritative World Hosts Report of March 2013, five of the top twenty  malware hosts were based in the US; four were in Russia, two each in the Netherlands, Germany, and the Ukraine.

Chinanet Backbone was the only host from China that made the top twenty.

What was especially interesting to me was to find the originator of the attacks on my computer, Ecatel network, at the top of the list of the world’s leading hosts for malware.

Host Exploit also breaks down cyber-crime by country, with Russia leading the pack.

This is its list of the world’ top ten cyber-crime havens in 2013:

1. The Russian Federation (RU)

2. Belarus (BY)

3. Ukraine (UA)

4. The British Virgin Islands (VG)

5. The United States (US)

6. Romania (RO)

7. Netherlands (NL)

8. Poland (PL)

9. Turkey (TR)

10. Bulgaria  (BG)

 

The Repat Racket

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The Repat Racket describes the gigantic boondoggle that is the Veterans’ Affairs Dept.

Anyone, however briefly or tenuously connected to war, gets public funds for whatever ailments he/she contracts, however many years after his service:

“Let me tell you about my uncle. He wouldn’t mind, even if he were alive. One day he signed a piece of paper, and received a free trip to a lot of exotic places, such as Greece, Crete, Egypt, and North Africa. He also got a free trip home which, he cheerfully used to add, had never been guaranteed.
Several decades later, when he was closer in age to eighty than seventy, he happened to muse to a friend at the R.S.L., “It’s a bit of a nuisance. My hearing’s getting worse, and I’ll have to get a new hearing aid. They’re so darned expensive.”
“Don’t worry!” said his friend. “Repat [that is, the Department of Veterans’ Affairs] will provide it” – and he got him to sign another piece of paper. Then, in no time at all, so it seemed, he found himself in receipt, not only of a new hearing aid, but also of a 40% disability pension.
All this rather puzzled him, so, knowing I was an employee of Veterans’ Affairs, he broached the subject on his next visit. “What I can’t understand,” he said, “was how I got that pension. I never applied for it.”
“Oh yes, you did,” I replied. “That form you filled out was headed: ‘Claim for Pension and Treatment for a War-Caused Condition’.”
“But it wasn’t war-caused,” he replied. “It was due to plain old age.”
“Well,” I explained, “the Department would have taken the view that if you hadn’t heard all those guns, you wouldn’t have reached the current level of hearing loss for perhaps another five years.”
He looked dumbfounded. “Well, that is quite amazing,” he said.
“And that,” said I, “is the difference between Social Security [now Centrelink] and Veterans’ Affairs. Social Security is designed so that any lying parasite can rip off the system. Veterans’ Affairs is designed so that even honest people can rip off the system.”

And that’s about it. I could tell you innumerable anecdotes about the claims I have processed. Take, for example, the old man who lodged a claim for “eyes” because he suffered from cataracts and glaucoma – which are major problems, I agree, but not obviously connected to any military service. It never occurred to him to ask how many men of his age group suffer from these diseases, or what sort of conditions cause them. Rather, he automatically assumed they may must have resulted from his service in the Pacific Islands forty years before. When I telephoned him for more details, the following conversation ensured:
“Well, there were the batteries.”
“The batteries?”
“Yes, I had to fill the batteries for the trucks, and the fumes from the acid made my eyes water.”
“I see.”
“Then there were the centipedes.”
“The centipedes?”
“Yes, you know what a centipede is? Well, in the Islands they were about a foot long. Sometimes you would lift a stone, and there they were. You couldn’t avoid them.”
By now my mind was starting to boggle, but I had to ask the obvious question: “So, how would they affect your eyes?”
“Well, they’d spray some sort of vapour at you, and it’d get in your eyes.”
Good grief! I thought. Where do people get these ideas?
All right, he probably left school at fourteen. The younger generation should be a bit better educated or more savvy. Or are they? A much younger soldier – I think he was even too young to have gone to Vietnam – lodged a claim for about a dozen non-specific symptoms – such as aches and pains, chronic constipation and diarrhoea (!), and general fatigue. In fact, they had caused him to give up his favourite recreation of marathon kayak racing. He could no longer do it without aching all over and feeling exhausted….”

Of course, this kind of  boon-doggle isn’t unique to the VA. It’s endemic in every walk of life. Patients file for multi-millions in damages, even when they suffered trivial losses.  Workers do stupid things on the job and then sue deep pockets.

Voice of the Martyrs: Fraud and Pedophilia?

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Michael Wurmbrand is the son of the famous Jewish-born communist, Richard Wurmbrand, who converted to Christianity and suffered extraordinary persecution in communist Romania.

In February 2014, Michael Wurmbrand  wrote to Voice of the Martyrs, the prominent Christian organization founded by his deceased father, to drop their association with his name because of suspected fraud and pedophilia in its leadersip:

My parents died in 2000-2001 and I am now 74 years old.

Against my express request NOT TO DO SO, the mission Voice of the Martyrs of Bartlesville (VOM), Oklahoma, USA and its international affiliates, continue to use Richard Wurmbrand, Sabina Wurmbrand, my parents’ persona, pictures, writings and books, my persona also to obtain your donations!

Tom White, the past Voice of the Martyrs Chairman for more than 20-years, committed suicide in April, 2012, only two to three hours after an accusation of child sexual molestation (pedophilia) of a 10-years old girl was formally filed by her parents with the local police, and while the Bartlesville, OK. police were searching to arrest him. This terrible event made world news. At the time of his committing suicide, Tom White had a $140,000+, plus perks, yearly salary and very substantial travel and expense accounts used in his extensive and frequent international travel year after year. Since the suspected perpetrator was dead, the police closed any further investigation of the sexual molestation. The police chief and the former mayor of the town of Bartlesville, OK. were personally serving on the Board of Directors of Voice of the Martyrs. A few other directors are related to each other or get salaries from the organization.

I asked in writing of the Voice of the Martyrs Board of Directors for an independent investigation, to be undertaken from outside of VOM. The investigation in the famous legal action in England of Jimmy Saville, the BBC children program head while alive, started with only 2 cases BUT there were more than 600 pedophilia complaints after Saville died. In the last 4 years, the state of Arizona, for instance, failed to investigate 6,000 cases of children molestation. Being the son of Richard Wurmbrand, a person of my background and position could have more inside information, than I can discuss publicly. I asked therefore for an independent investigation!….”

This is one more instance of the highest levels of conservative anti-communist circles being associated, rightly or wrongly, with pedophilia.

Here are some other recent scandals in conservative Christian circles.

More here.

Some Protestant foes of the Roman Catholic Church derided Wurmbrand’s ecumenism as a false-front for a New World Order co-optation of Christianity.  (LINK DELETED)

[ADDED: I should clarify that I consider this accusation deluded and semi-litarate.]

It is important to consider that the allegation of pedophilia has not been followed by any public testimony from victims, which is usual in such cases.

There was a third-party statement by a Christian minister in the area to the effect that he had spoken to the father of the alleged victim and was sure that the abuse had taken place.

However, that isn’t evidence.

The minister in question was Wade Burleson,  pastor of the  Southern Baptist Emmanuel Enid church.  In a comment on his blog, defending his unsubstantiated statement, he described his past government affiliations.

Wade Burleson said…

Ken,
I have worked as a chaplain for the Tulsa Police Department (1987-1992), the Garfield County Sheriff’s Department (1992-2012), the Department of Justice (1995), the FBI and DEA special task forces (1995-2012), and have had training in hostage negotiation, criminal interrogation and the like. You can trust me when I say the man on the phone was who he says he is–though not one ounce of my training is even needed to immediately ascertain the truth. Of course, for me to tell you how I know would give too much information that I have pledged to keep confidential.

Tue May 01, 08:27:00 AM 2012

His blog post was addressed to the ten-year old girl and confirmed her abuse, but it didn’t produce any evidence.

The post was reproduced at Christianpost.com, where astute readers faulted it for its theatricality and lack of substance.

[I will add more on this as I research the story.]

The local police-chief who was in charge of the investigation  was  on the board of Voice of the Martyrs  at the time and shut the case down, without disclosing anything further.

The case was closed within a month of the charge, even before the coroner’s office issued a medical report.

That report, shared with the press, showed that VOM chief Tom White died from a mixture of alcohol and prescription drugs.

The quick cover-up of the case can be interpreted either in VOM’s favor (the charges were false and concocted to destroy the organization, so there was no evidence) or against it (the charges were true but hushed up to save VOM).

White took his life before a warrant had been issued, suggesting that he had been tipped off in advance, presumably by Tom Holland, the police-chief.

Holland himself  is facing two cases of discrimination.

He has been ranked 14 among America’s top 100 worst bosses.

Oddly, he was brought into the Bartlesville Police Dept. to clean it up. It had a bad reputation for corruption.

This is significant because city documents show that VOM was on the receiving end of a corrupt subsidy via tax-payers for  improvements that the city had asked it to perform.

There are other questions.

According to its 2008 income tax returns, VOM has gross receipts of over $44,000,000, but spent only around $9 million for services directed for persecuted Christians, which is its stated mission as a non-profit.

That mission is what earns it tax-exempt status from the government.

VOM’s director at the time of the 2008 returns earned a six-figure salary ($140000/year).

Total salaries at VOM in 2008 amounted to over $2,000,000.

One of  VOM’s principals in 2008 turns out to  have been convicted twice for embezzlement.

(I am not naming him or linking the article, since I haven’t researched this personally).

As the Bible says,

Put not your trust in princes nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help…

 

Rothschild ties to Western & Russian oligarchy

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An extremely thorough article by Willam Jasper at the New American confirms what I’ve said about Putin, that he is simply another tool of the NWO, an instrument of “convergence”:

“One of the important ventures that Soros and Pinchuk are financing is the Ukrainian Crisis Media Center (CMC), a collaboration of Ukrainian public relations corporations and journalists that is headquartered in Kiev’s Hotel Ukraine. Ostensibly, it was created to counter the propaganda onslaught of Putin’s Russian media cartel. Much of the “independent news” we receive from Ukraine is produced by the CMC and stamped with the Pinchuk/Soros-approved brand of propaganda. That includes cheering on or papering over the fact that the “new” government in Kiev is simply the latest rotation of musical chairs, and it has ended with Pinchuk’s fellow oligarchs (virtually all of which are “former” communists) and their parliamentary blocs and political parties occupying the most important chairs (as we reported here).

Pinchuk is a member of the Board of the Peterson Institute for International Economics and sits on the International Advisory Council of the Brookings Institution, both of which Soros has long been associated with. Another very important Soros-Pinchuk tie is their mutual connection to the famous (or infamous, as you prefer) Rothschild banking dynasty. 

In 2011, George C. Karlweis, adviser to Baron Edmond de Rothschild and his Banque Privee, revealed that it was Rothschild who provided Soros with the startup money — and, undoubtedly much (illegal) insider trading intelligence — for Soros’ fabulously successful Quantum Fund. 

The full extent of Pinchuk’s connections to the Rothschild’s global private empire would require a similar revelation from an insider. That could be Jean-Pierre Saltiel, who sits on the board of Pinchuk’s Yalta European Strategy, as well as the oligarch’s global steel and metallurgy conglomerate, Interpipe, Inc. He is also a longtime adviser to the Rothschilds and the past president of Rothschild Conseil International, one of the fabled family’s major bank holding companies. Interestingly (but not so surprising), Rothschild agent Saltiel also sits on the board of PIK Group, Russia’s largest residential real estate developer, founded by Russian oligarchs Yuri Zhukov and Kirill Pisarev (and still run by Pisarev).

Like Soros and the Rothschilds, Ukrainian oligarch Pinchuk works with and partners with a number of Russian oligarchs. And his YES summits regularly feature Putin-allied Russian oligarchs, as well as Putin-appointed Russian politicians and apparatchiks. Alfa Bank, Russia’s largest private bank, for example, is a YES sponsor. And Alfa Bank chairman, Mikhail Fridman, a Putin ally and one of Russia’s richest billionaires, sits on the CFR’s International Advisory Board and provided the funds to create the CFR’s “Russia and Russian-American Relations Lecture” program. Similarly, Rinat Akhmetov, Ukraine’s richest oligarch, a former Putin-Yanukovych supporter and ally, is now a member of the new government. He is also, along with Fridman and Soros, a YES sponsor and a business partner with Russian, EU and U.S. Insiders. What these and dozens of other similar examples indicate is that there is much more to all of the Sturm und Drang over the Ukraine-Russia-EU “crisis” than meets the eye.

Soros gave a strong clue as to what the scripted outcome of the scenario would likely be. His solution would see Russia as a “partner,” and Angela Merkel (the “former” Communist from East Germany who now runs the unified Germany) would be the broker.

“Germany should take the lead,” Soros said, in his February 26 Project Syndicate column cited above. “Chancellor Angela Merkel must reach out to President Vladimir Putin to ensure that Russia is a partner, not an opponent, in the Ukrainian renaissance.”

Putin as Prod for “Convergence”

Merkel appears to be doing just the opposite, threatening Putin with sanctions, including freezing of Russian bank accounts and restrictions on travel in the EU, unless Putin “deescalates” the situation and comes to the bargaining table. But, in reality, she is “reaching out” to Putin, and he, after providing what is deemed an appropriate level of drama, will likely come to the table and deescalate. Contrary to Russia’s current bellicose posturing, it is in the Kremlin’s interests to offload Ukraine onto the taxpayers of the EU and the United States, and it fits perfectly with their long-term strategy of “convergence” with the EU and the United States.

Anatoliy Golitsyn, arguably the most important KGB defector to escape to the West, exposed the top-secret Soviet convergence strategy in his books New Lies for Old and The Perestroika Deception. (See here, here, and here.) Mikhail Gorbachev was making oblique reference to the ongoing reality of the convergence process when he described the EU as “the new European Soviet.” As in the transmutation described in Orwell’s Animal Farm, when it became almost impossible to tell the pigs from the men, it is now becoming all but impossible to detect any substantive differences between the ruling elites of Russia, China, the EU, and the United States. And, as the EU and the United States adopt more socialist policies and police-state measures, there is less and less distinction between our societies and the one ruled over by Putin and his Kremlin cronies.”

Mark Ames: Ties between Soros, Snowden, Greenwald, Ukrainian Nazis

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Mark Ames separates himself from the pack of craven journalists to point out that George Soros is aiding the Ukrainian neo-Nazi coup and he’s also behind Snowden’s treasure-trove of NSA secrets:

Some­how, the same bil­lion­aire who co-financed the “coup” in Ukraine with USAID, also has exclu­sive access to the NSA secrets—and very few in the inde­pen­dent media dare voice a skep­ti­cal word about it.

Lila: Actually, Mr. Ames, there are at least a few of us who have been skeptical of Snowden from the start and have pointed out the tell-tale connections between Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald, George Soros and the world of “hacktivism” and  IP-socialism….. with few giving us credit for it.

I have questioned the Snowden story since June 2013 and Assange since 2009. Search this blog.

In the larger sense, this is a prob­lem of 21st cen­tury Amer­i­can inequal­ity, of life in a billionaire-dominated era.

Lila: Well go get a job and write on the side, beholden to no one.

It is a prob­lem we all have to con­tend with—PandoDaily’s 18-plus investors include a gag­gle of Sil­i­con Val­ley bil­lion­aires like Marc Andreessen (who serves on the board of eBay, chaired by Pierre Omid­yar) and Peter Thiel (whose pol­i­tics I’ve inves­ti­gated, and described as repug­nant.) But what is more imme­di­ately alarm­ing is what makes Omid­yar dif­fer­ent. Unlike other bil­lion­aires, Omid­yar has gar­nered noth­ing but uncrit­i­cal, fawn­ing press cov­er­age, par­tic­u­larly from those he has hired. By acquir­ing a “dream team” of what remains of inde­pen­dent media — Green­wald, Jeremy Scahill, Wheeler, my for­mer part­ner Matt Taibbi — not to men­tion press “crit­ics” like Jay Rosen — he buys both silence and fawn­ing press.

Lila: That tells you what Taibbi and the rest were all about…..which is what I said from the start. Check out my comments about Taibbi, plagiarism and revisionism.

.Both are incred­i­bly use­ful: Silence, an absence of jour­nal­is­tic curios­ity about Omidyar’s activ­i­ties over­seas and at home, has been pur­chased for the price of what­ever his cur­rent all-star indie cast cur­rently costs him. As an added bonus, that same invest­ment buys silence from expo­nen­tially larger num­bers of des­per­ately under­paid inde­pen­dent jour­nal­ists hop­ing to some­day be on his pay­roll, and the under­funded media watch­dogs that sur­vive on Omid­yar Net­work grants. And it also buys laugh­able fluff from the likes of Scahill who also boasted to the Daily Beast of his boss’ close involve­ment in the day to day run­ning of First Look. “[Omid­yar] strikes me as always sort of polit­i­cal, but I think that the NSA story and the expand­ing wars put pol­i­tics for him into a much more promi­nent place in his exis­tence. This is not a side project that he is doing. Pierre writes more on our inter­nal mes­sag­ing than any­one else. And he is not micro­manag­ing. This guy has a vision. And his vision is to con­front what he sees as an assault on the pri­vacy of Americans.”