Category Archives: Kleptocracy

Iceland Versus The Banksters

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Political Vel Craft.org wrote on June 9, 2012

No one, except the Icelanders, have to been the only culture on the planet to carry out this successfully. Not only have they been successful, at overthrowing the corrupt Gov’t, they’ve drafted a Constitution, that will stop this from happening ever again.

That’s not the best part… The best part, is that they have arrested ALL Rothschild/Rockefeller banking puppets, responsible for the Country’s economic Chaos and meltdown.

Last week 9 people were arrested in London and Reykjavik for their possible responsibility for Iceland’s financial collapse in 2008, a deep crisis which developed into an unprecedented public reaction that is changing the country’s direction.”

And more:

“Returning to the tense situation in 2010, while the Icelanders were refusing to pay a debt incurred by financial sharks without consultation, the coalition government had launched an investigation to determine legal responsibilities for the fatal economic crisis and had already arrested several bankers and top executives closely linked to high risk operations.

Interpol, meanwhile, had issued an international arrest warrant against Sigurdur Einarsson, former president of one of the banks. This situation led scared bankers and executives to leave the country en masse.

In this context of crisis, an assembly was elected to draft a new constitution that would reflect the lessons learned and replace the current one, inspired by the Danish constitution.

To do this, instead of calling experts and politicians, Iceland decided to appeal directly to the people, after all they have sovereign power over the law. More than 500 Icelanders presented themselves as candidates to participate in this exercise in direct democracy and write a new constitution. 25 of them, without party affiliations, including lawyers, students, journalists, farmers and trade union representatives were elected.

Among other developments, this constitution will call for the protection, like no other, of freedom of information and expression in the so-called Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, in a bill that aims to make the country a safe haven for investigative journalism and freedom of information, where sources, journalists and Internet providers that host news reporting are protected.

The people, for once, will decide the future of the country while bankers and politicians witness the transformation of a nation from the sidelines.”

Comment:

Reporter Wayne Madsen, among others, has found connections between the IMMI and the elites.

Others have found them, as well. But since I periodically have doubts about all my judgments and want to refine them in light of new evidence, new research, additional epiphanies and/or rude awakenings, I plan on taking a second look at the IMMI.

Privacy versus transparency might be another of those binaries we need to surmount with creative intelligence.

Indian Rani: Retiring Prez Patil Traveled By Jumbo Jet With Butlers

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With even the middle-class struggling with soaring food and gas prices, farmers committing suicide (over 200,000 plus over 15 years, 17,000 in one year), electric shortages, no infrastructure, the country on austerity, the political class still rides the gravy train.

This video describes how retiring President Pratibha Patil (July 2007 – July 2012) still travels abroad in a Jumbo jet, with an entourage of 100 people including multiple cooks and butlers, and attendants.

Meanwhile,  UK PM David Cameron at least travels business class. Patil spent almost a million dollars a day when she traveled (22 trips), while the government was telling  Indians that if they earned more than 28 rupees/day (about 50 cents approx), they were not poor.

Patil is not the only one at fault, of course. And her trips were not taken on her own initiative.

But this kind of thing is rampant in the senior officialdom and their media parasites.

War On India: RAW Fighting Back Against Mossad In India

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This is from a Wayne Madsen report from February 2012 this year

“An Israeli Chabad sect couple, Rabbi Sheneor Zalman and his wife Yaffa Shenoi, have been told by Kerala police to leave India in fifteen days. The two are suspected by the Indian intelligence, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) of being involved in a covert operation in India linked to the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attack in which six Chabad members were killed in a shootout between Dawood Ibrahim’s Pakistan-based gangsters and the residents of Mumbai’s Chabad House. The incident was reported as a major act of terrorism when, in fact, it was score settling between Ibrahim’s drug syndicate and Chabadniks who were seen as moving in on Ibrahim’s control over the Mumbai drug trade.

WMR has previously reported that Chabad houses around the world are believed by multiple intelligence agencies to be centers for Mossad activity operating under religious “cover.”

RAW agents apparently staked out the couple’s pricey residence in Kochi as late night meetings were conducted with suspect individuals under Indian intelligence surveillance. The Israeli couple had lived in Kochi for almost two years. After being presented with evidence of espionage by the intelligence and police services, the Ernakulum District in Kochi decided to order the Israeli couple deported.

Chabad Jews and Mossad were forced to leave their former base in Goa as a result of increased RAW and federal police surveillance of their activities, believed to include the shipment of heroin from Afghanistan to Southeast Asia in the east and the United Arab Emirates to the west. The Israeli Mossad and Chabad re-located their operations to Kochi, which had replaced Goa as a major drug trans-shipment point.

In addition, Mumbai bombing suspect David Headley is believed to have maintained contact with the Mossad station in Goa prior to the Mumbai terrorist attacks. Headley is believed to have also maintained links with Ibrahim’s crime syndicate in Pakistan and the Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorist group in planning false flag terrorist attacks in India. Then the green light for the Mumbai attacks was given, Ibrahim’s men decided to use the occasion to also attack their drug smuggling competitors at the Mumbai Chabad House.

Kochi had, according to WMR’s Indian intelligence sources, also served as a clandestine communications support facility for Israeli Dolphin-class submarines and their contingent of naval divers operating in the Indian Ocean and Arabian Sea. The submarines are believed to be targeting Iran in the event of an outbreak of hostilities between Israel and Iran.

Indian intelligence also believes the Israelis in Kochi were targeting the classified communications of the Indian naval base in Kochi, the headquarters for the Indian Navy’s Southern Command. By targeting the Kochi naval base and the anti-submarine warfare intelligence elements there and at the Indian naval air station on Willingdon Island, the Israelis were capable of providing warning to Israeli forces of Indian, Chinese, American, British, and French warships transiting past the tip of southern India to the Arabian and Red Seas.

Rabbi Zalman and his wife denied all charges against them and insisted they were meeting people day and night as a service to the local Jewish community.

Our sources say that after years of being played by Mossad, RAW has finally taken action against a major Mossad operating cell in the country.“

Comment:

Earlier this year, India, like China, had skirted the sanctions imposed on Iran by the US, through barter and rupee accounts, bypassing the dollar altogether.

Recall that January-February (early in the year)  is also when the government began stalling about turning over its evidence to the Rajat Gupta defense, despite repeated requests, following Gupta’s arraignment in October 2011 on federal criminal charges.

It is also the same time that Goldman Sachs stated publicly that it no longer expected criminal charges (paraphrase), even though in August 2011, Blankfein had feared that eventuality enough to go out and hire a criminal defense attorney.

Sometime then, it seems, a deal got struck, involving letting Corzine and Blankfein out of the sights of the prosecution and instead throwing Gupta to the wolves. Hence the bizarre rulings of Judge Rakoff, a friend of the defense attorney and also apparently on good terms with Bharara, who prevented the defense from showing crucial evidence while allowing damaging hearsay from the prosecution.

Do all of these seemingly unrelated events have a common source – increasing tension between the NWO elites and India?
One faction of RAW (Research and Analysis Wing, the Indian intelligence service) reportedly wants to play along with the CIA and Mossad. Another faction wants to show third-world solidarity with Iran and Pakistan.

The RAW crack-down could explain why there was a noticeable intensification of negative media reports on India and pressure on the PM through the derogatory Time cover I blogged about previously.

In response, the Indian government has told Mr. Mittal to stop bashing it.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/transatlantic-alliance-between-rothschilds-and-rockefellers-for-wealth-management-7805035.html

Mittal is connected to the Rothschilds through his investments in RIT Capital,through his ownership with Evelyn and Lynn Rothschild of “FirstMark Communications International LLC” and “FieldFresh Foods”.

Evelyn is head of N. M. Rothschild, which has links to the Agora Inc. publishing network, which encompasses the hard money/patriot/libertarian crowd.

[LR: I learned about this connection only after leaving and have blogged about it since then, as much as possible, given my one-time connection to them. In my previous blog posts about them, I noted various associations, but also noted that Agora’s flag-ship publications didn’t seem to promote views similar to what George Soros might be expected to promote. Soros is a Rothschild agent, according to some observers.  However, quite recently,  researching Lakshmi Mittal’s connection with Rothschild, I came across some more evidence of ties between the Agora network and the Rothschilds. If this new evidence pans out, then the Rees-Mogg link  – noted by Bill Engdahl a while back –  is likely also a Rothschild connection.

Agora then would be related to both Rothschild and Rockefeller interests.]

[Note: Recently, another Rothschild, Jacob, bought a 37% stake in David Rockefeller’s business, so both families are consolidating investments.]

Kochi, the focus of Chabad and the drug-trade, is also the site of the killing of two unarmed Indian fishermen by an Italian vessel in February, following which murder charges have been brought against the culprits.

Gender Wars: A Word To The Wise

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Comment at A Voice Of Men.com

“If men were all that into how women look, why does she think that 99,9% of the men on the planet will shy away from the question: ‘Does this dress make my ass look fat?’
Besides the trouble you might get into if you actually dared answer the question truthfully, I find it really hard to believe that men give a rat’s ass to begin with. On a very basic level men will look at a woman and go:
‘Is she young and fertile?’
‘Yes.’
‘Ok, she will do.’
All you have to do is look at all the fat, bleached and self-centered women out there, that are some man’s wife, to prove this point.

If women spend half the amount of time they spend in front of the mirror, trivializing over petty details about their looks, on actually having sex with us, and doing something serious about what’s going on on the inside, there would be no shortage in men loving them.”

Comment:

Blog comments are often more enlightening than the blogs themselves. Digging around for more information about the crime of battery-acid throwing, common in some parts of Asia including India, I came across a masculinist blog, on which I found this gem of a comment.

I call it a gem, because although it’s ill-tempered and unfair (we women do spend time on fixing our “insides”), it manages to say more in one paragraph, intentionally and unintentionally, than many an essay in ten.

A truth that is uncomfortable to many women is that sex is more important to men than it is to women (we’re talking averages and generalities).

Despite all the media hype, beyond a few attributes signifying youth and health (which are both important for fertility),  a high level of beauty is simply not needed for male sexual and emotional engagement, as even men readily admit.

(See here and here and even here (Naomi Wolf: “The Beauty Myth,” Anchor, 1992), although Wolf’s other contentions are controversial and not something I want to bring into this blog post.

Then, what is important for male sexual engagement?

Evidently, the opposite of female self-involvement.

That would be a woman’s awareness of the needs, thoughts, and feelings of people around her.

Something your neighborhood padre would be happy to celebrate.

Women concerned about the raging gender-wars should chew on that.

Maybe Shakespeare was onto something, after all.

Mitt Romney’s Foreign Policy Team

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Joseph Sarkissian analyzes the foreign policy team to which Rand Paul, heir-apparent to his father’s flock, delivered the libertarian faithful (they-who-do-not-question-but-yet-know-all-the-answers) when, this summer, he endorsed Mr. Wall Street Mitt Romney.

1. Eliot Cohen – Special adviser, author of Romney’s foreign policy white paper.

At least Eliot Cohen doesn’t pull any punches. He has overtly called for the removal of the Iranian regime by all means necessary, sans force. Good to know, but how do we pull that off? Cohen believes soft power would do the trick, but how long before that soft power necessitates hard power once the Iranian regime begins ramping up attacks against U.S. and Israeli assets? No regime like Iran’s will stand by idly as it is picked apart from the outside, and once the retaliatory bombings, assassination attempts, and other counter-intelligence measure are begun by Iran, the U.S. and Israel won’t be able to stand by either.

2. Dov Zakheim – Special adviser

Aside from also being hawkish on Iran and Iraq, Zakheim has a proven track record of sketchy behavior. Aside from the highly controversial disappearance of a massive amount of money while comptroller of the Pentagon, he runs Foreign Policy’s “Shadow Government” blog where he argues for even more aggressive drone strikes and rails against Obama’s foreign policy. Zakheim is a staunch supporter of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a lobbying group that pushes hard for intervention in Iran and was adamant about the push for war in Iraq.

3. John Bolton – Trusted personal policy adviser, potential cabinet appointee

Mitt Romney once said of John Bolton that, “John’s wisdom, clarity and courage are qualities that should typify our foreign policy.” If this is true, be very afraid. Bolton could be the most hawkish of Romney’s advisers. He is a signatory to numerous letters to presidents past and present, including one to Bill Clinton in 1998 from the defunct Neocon think tank, “Project for a New American Century (PNAC)” urging Clinton to get rid of Saddam. In a March letter to President Obama from Romney’s foreign policy team, Bolton signed off on statements saying the president is too soft on Iran, not supportive enough of Israel’s interests, should have left troops in Iraq, and has potentially crippled the U.S. military with budget cuts.

4. Robert Kagan, Special adviser

Who’s ready for some good old-fashioned regime change? If Robert Kagan gets his way, that’s what you can expect. Aside from wanting to oust Iranian leadership and cause massive conflict, Kagan is on the board of directors for the Foreign Policy Initiative, or as I like to call it, PNAC 2.0, where he served as a project director. A quintessential Neocon, Kagan has time and time again steadfastly supported the war in Iraq, saying that the war was a good idea, that Iraq was getting more secure in 2004, and that the Arab Spring can be attributed to U.S. efforts in Iraq. It’s hard to find someone more disillusioned in the policy community.

While some could chalk up all of Romney’s rhetoric to early election cycle hogwash, his advisers haven’t changed their tunes. Given that Mitt is about as informed as a table lamp on foreign policy, I shudder to think of the consequences of his team having carte blanche. Whether they suffer from groupthink – since many of them have worked and continue to work in the same place –or just a lack of ability to see the errors of their predictions, something has to balance them out. Hopefully that something is a loss at the polls in November.”

Ron Paul Implosion: End The Fed To Technology Revolution…

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The Pauls have lost all credibility with me.

Read their latest missive, blogged at EPJ

And reported here at Forbes: “Ron Paul Takes Up Internet Freedom with New Technology Revolution.”

They’ve abandoned the financial battle.

I guess the financial coup of 2008, completed in 2010, is now sealed and cordoned off from prosecution. Last month, as if to confirm that, the White Queen (the City)  took down the Black Knight (Gupta) that had infiltrated the highest ranks of her court, while the White Bishop (Lloyd Doing-God’s Work Blankfein) was witness for the prosecution.

“End the Fed,” which  Rand Paul converted to” Audit the Fed,” is over.

The Pauls have now skipped forward to their new, new project –  the  “Technology Revolution.”

I  never thought that much of “End the Fed,” because, as I’ve blogged previously, the elites can manufacture money from other places besides the Fed, like the BIS and the reconstituted IMF.

But, apparently,  End the Fed doesn’t even work as a popular slogan any more.

So, what do I think about the new campaign?

I think it will be about as effective as their “End the Fed” campaign, which is to say, not effective at all.

See my comment at The Daily Bell in 2010:

Posted by Lila Rajiva on 11/23/10 11:55 AM
Daily Bell: “But by pursuing his strategy, he has made his opponents look like fools and perhaps altered the course of history.”

Lila: Let’s hope. Personally, I agree with Doug Casey on this:
“As a lone voice, his father was a breath of fresh, more principled air, but he didn’t change anything at all that I can see”

(Doug Casey on Presidents, LRC)

But it will be a great platform for the Pauls to sell books, promote ideas and launch political careers for their family members.

I only hope it won’t be done on the backs of idealistic young people. There were many who put change they could hardly spare in a tough economy into the Paul’s war chest.

The new campaign, which dubs itself  “The Internet Versus The Machine” is obviously a rebranding campaign to move young people away from what Forbes calls “the archaic” (they mean arcane) issues of finance.

Instead, the Pauls will focus on the hip world of the net.

Forbes:

“Young people have been a driving force in the Paul campaign, and the focus on internet freedom should only bolster that support.”

I’m going to call foul on that.

Their new “campaign” is in support of the Technology Revolution on the Internet?

Last I looked the tech revolution has been around for a while, getting on quite well without the Pauls.

One part of  the new project is going to be defending big business from attempts by consumers to scrutinize their data collection.

I kid you not. Here is Buzzfeed on the subject.

“The Pauls also take a stand for the growing industry known (and widely criticized) as “big data.”

“They deride the notion that “private sector data collection practices must be scrutinized and tightly regulated in the name of ‘protecting consumers,’ at the same time as government’s warrantless surveillance and collection of private citizens’ Internet data has dramatically increased.”

So does this mean that Ron Paul is going to be fighting to prevent European governments or NGOs  like EFF or Asian governments from scrutinizing Google’s data collection practices?

Remember that I just blogged that Google’s CEO Larry Page should be arrested for privacy violations and espionage against foreign governments?

I was being satirical about US surveillance of foreign CEO’s and money-managers.

For instance, in the Galleon -Gupta cases, the government used wire-taps whose authorization was obtained pre-textually in violation of the defendants’ constitutional rights.

I don’t recall that the Pauls said a word about that, although the Galleon insider case has dominated the financial media for a couple of years now, and is directly tied via Rajaratnam’s funding of Tamil charities to  issues like terrorist money-laundering  with which Paul adviser Bruce Fein – once employed by an alleged front group for the Tamil Tigers –  is intimately connected.

A recent Washington Post article described how the military is outsourcing surveillance in Africa to private contractors (with little accountability, significant cost over-runs, and little to show for the expense).

Densely populated China and India are both locked in battles with the West for access to resources and agricultural lands.  Indian and Chinese companies compete with American and European countries on the African continent.  China and India have also complained about American corporate espionage.  American companies in turn complain about IP theft from the Indians and Chinese.  Meanwhile the US government itself is involved in IP theft through its pervasive global surveillance.  Where does data collection for corporations end and espionage for the state begin, anyway? Where does the government end and the private sector begin, when private companies are outsourced arms of the government and the government is the enforcement arm of the companies?

Ron Paul is not oblivious to the complexities of all this. He is far too shrewd.

Rajat Gupta’s conviction shows evidence in my opinion of being a  set up by the government, with some arm-twisting from Goldman Sachs. Likely it was an important blow in the  covert psy war against India, an ostensible US ally, about which I blogged here (“Coconut Imperialism”and here, “Educating the Gentoos In India”)

The obvious response from foreign governments (such as India) would be to treat American CEO’s the same way and wire-tap them.

So, is it just coincidental that the Pauls suddenly abandon their financial campaign (which never involved a word against Goldman Sachs), and suddenly rush to head off any animosity toward Google?

On their silence on G Sachs, here is a comment I made (one among many) below the same Daily Bell article:

Posted by Lila Rajiva on 11/23/10 11:40 AM

@Pisano.

Why would it distract him?
How hard is it to say, unequivocally, “Goldman Sachs and several other banks, are involved in corrupt actions and should be investigated and prosecuted.”

There. Back to “business.”

He certainly had no problem drawing a hard line over relatively trivial things like a monument to Rosa Parks. If he was really afraid of distraction, why would he make a fuss over something like that, and then on something crucial, suddenly go silent?

Why doesn’t he state clearly – “9-11 needs to be investigated. There is credible evidence that there was some kind of conspiracy involving intelligence agencies, US and foreign.”

I like Ron Paul and want to believe the best of him.

But this excuse doesn’t hold water for two seconds.”

This looks like more material to add to the mounting evidence (see  here) that Paul fronts for financial interests.

Perhaps he cannot avoid doing it, as I’ve said.

But there’s no need to be suckered into what could well be a counter-attack against foreign governments who defend themselves against espionage by Google/Facebook/Hotmail/Skype/TOR and the rest of the government-corporate spy sector, by couching the issue as a defense of the private sector.

That explanation also takes care of Paul’s pandering to the left.

The financial world (which controls the media) is left-leaning, in contrast to non-financial businesses.  Paul’s recent moves make quite a bit of sense when understood that way.  He acts to co-opt the brand of libertarianism appropriately called the Marxism of the right by deploying what seem to be ideologically inflexible positions in the service of  larger imperial goals.

So, I have to ask. Will the two Pauls now be collecting money from young people to defend multi-billion dollar multinationals like Google from scrutiny by the governments on which they spy?

I mean, if you phrased that in the appropriately anti-state way, there will be enough libertarian lemmings who’ll rush to defend Google, I’m sure.

This theory might explain why the financial media, usually so vocal in defense of insider-trading, when it’s done by Michael Milken or Ivan Boesky, is suddenly so quiet  about South Asian insider-trading not a tenth as bad.

Does it also explain why large parts of the alternative press  have had nothing but praise for Julian Assange, another front for western financial interests? And why the Pauls have promoted Assange?

Talk about Trojan horses.

Big corporations cannot be analyzed separately from government.

When the state outsources its spying to corporations, for someone to argue that the state should not limit corporate surveillance because it’s engaged in surveillance itself is confused, at best, and downright misleading, at worst.

Especially when it comes from seasoned politicians like the Pauls.

Parts of the government are scrutinizing the private sector. Often they’re right to.

Other parts of government are much worse than the private sector when it comes to privacy violation.

Those parts of the government are often most incestuously allied with corporations. This is the corporate-state or intel-industrial complex that produces programs like Echelon.

So it’s quite bizarre for the Pauls to claim that Microsoft (or Google or Apple) are pure private-sector entities, when they gain market share directly because of concrete government actions on their behalf and because of endemic and pervasive state-created judicial/legal/financial corruption.

One more thing.  Microsoft wasn’t prescient at all about the net, as the Pauls claim in their new manifesto.

It was way behind. Gates himself admitted it.

There is, finally, another reason why the Pauls may have turned their attention to protecting Big Data,

It looks like Big Data is bankrolling him.

Here’s Reason’s Brian Doherty, making the point:

“With Peter Thiel, founder of the controversial “big data” company Panantir, having made a $2.6 million investment in the (somewhat feckless in the end) superPAC “Endorse Liberty” during campaign season, perhaps the Paul machine sees this as a cause that can energize both grassroots and big money.”

And that’s all  I want to say now about this turn of events until I learn a bit more what is really going on.

But, if you were waiting to see Ron Paul libertarianism implode, it happened this week.

License Raj: Indian Plutocracy Feeds Off Middle-Class

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Developmental economist Atanu Dey asks why crony capitalism and not real capitalism has a grip on India  and comes to some saddening conclusions:

“This story has three main characters: the poor, the rich and the government. The poor are happy to receive stuff; the rich are unhappy; and the government is happy. The happiness of the latter arises from two sources: first, it is good to be powerful and make others bend to your will. It’s a natural animal instinct, and the human animal gets more out of it than do non-human animals. The second source of happiness for the government (we must remember that governments are people too) is that in the process of the redistribution, they get to keep some part of the other people’s stuff they are handling.

But wait, what about the rich? Are they not powerful? Actually, they are not powerful relative to the poor. Here’s how. Every government has to have popular support. Every. Dictators and authoritarian governments not excepted. In the government’s move to remove property rights, it has the support of the poor — which in most cases (and especially in poor countries) outnumber the rich. The poor want the wealth to be redistributed and the government is only too happy to oblige. It may be that good people were once in government who could take the long or enlightened view. But only those who are skilled in the game of promising redistribution win and in time the government is made of people who are good at it.

What are the factors that drive this redistribution game? It’s a combination of envy, greed, sloth and ignorance — all very human failings but ultimately supremely destructive at both the individual and the societal levels. I reluctantly admit that in moments of weakness, I envy the rich even though I am far from being poor. How much more the envy of the rich among the really poor I probably cannot imagine. I am not immune to greed or laziness either. My only saving grace, I boldly claim, is that I know that giving up any bit of my freedom in exchange for me to receive some free stuff is a very stupid trade.

People who support governments that steal from the rich are being myopic. The habit of stealing grows, and while the promise made is that the rich will be robbed to give to the poor, in truth the government steals from the poor with equal relish. The theft from the poor is not so visible but is equally or even more despicable and destructive. What the poor lose is not just self-respect (being on the dole cannot be very good for the soul) but also the capacity to shape their own destiny. Slavery and dependency are not very distinct concepts.

Given a choice between keeping the right to property intact and getting free stuff, if the poor choose the latter, then society ends up with a government which steals stuff and redistributes some of it. As noted earlier, the poor have to outnumber the rich, which is always so in poor countries.

Two related matters to consider now. One, why don’t the rich prevail? And second, why does the basic instinct for freedom get subverted? Let’s take the first one now.

The non-poor can be further segmented into the middle-class (which is also sometimes called the bourgeoisie or the social middle-class), and the rich upper-class. You and I belong to the bourgeois. We mostly make our daily living in middle-class occupations such as being engineers, scientists, office-workers, small-time merchants, etc.

We  get a salary. We are the people who are the haves that the government preys upon.

The upper-class rich are those who make their fortunes by being close to the government and indeed are (in most poor countries) rich because of their proximity and their intimate relationship with the government.

Governments in poor countries are heavily interventionist in the economy and have the power to make or break the fortunes of the upper-class rich. In this piece, I will focus only on the dynamics of the middle-class, the poor and the government. The filthy rich in poor countries, for the purposes of this exercise, can be considered as part of the government because their fortunes are so intimately and inextricably related.

The license-control-permit-quota raj that India is so famous for lies at the foundation of that relationship……..

This theft cannot go unnoticed. So the government faces the problem of people speaking up. It solves that problem with clamping down on the freedom of speech and expression. Another piece of the freedom edifice crumbles to dust.

The poor — uneducated for the most part — cannot fathom what the whole fuss about freedom of expression is anyway, and they are not concerned.

The government, to ensure that education is government directed, controls the education system with an iron fist. The people only get to know what the government wants them to know.

………So back to the question. Do people value freedom or not? The answer depends on many things.

One has to know what freedom is to really value it. Freedom is a terminal value but it also has an instrumental role.

Its instrumental role is that it increases material prosperity.

If one does not know that it is so valuable, it is possible that one gives it up in exchange for trinkets.

If enough number of people get into that exchange, then the outcome is predictable. The result is poverty.

At some level of analysis, the poor are themselves responsible for the poverty they suffer and endure.

The government, at that level of analysis, is neither benevolent nor malevolent. It just is a response to the underlying reality. What the government does is what any “rational……

Its main objective is to extract wealth. For this it needs the support of the poor. That means it has to pit the poor against the non-poor.

The government has to create divisions and if there are already tears in the social fabric, it has to deepen them.

The government has to make policies that ensure that the numbers of the poor increase. It has to control all aspects of the economy not just to extract as much rents as it can but also as a by-product enlarge the number of the poor.

They depend on the poor for their legitimacy and poverty is their friend — and who would willingly give up their friend!

India is a classic case of a people who have collectively, at least in the last couple of centuries, never really valued freedom.

What will it take to awaken them to the great wonders of being a free people?

Lots of people have tried and judging from the results have failed miserably. Swami Vivekananda was eloquent and forceful. Result: The people are in deep slumber.

Sri Aurobindo tried and eventually retired to his ashram.

Ultimately, the slavery preached by some continued to fascinate the masses. Gandhi, Nehru and the whole bunch of sepoys ruled over them. Freedom didn’t mean a damn thing.”

Obamacare: Bad From Every Angle

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David Lindorff at Oped News points out that people on the left should also  be upset by the Supreme Court ruling on Obama care, equating a penalty with a tax. I guess if  the government decides to make  people tattoo 666 on their foreheads, as some maybe not-so-batty-after-all people fear it might, that could be constitutional too.

Not since the commerce clause has there been a  semantic theory so convenient for overreaching executives.

“On the downside for Obama, he goes into the final four months of the election campaign saddled with a decision that says he has raised taxes on some of the nation’s poorest people –– for that is what the court said will be happening, 18 months from now, when the health insurance mandate part of the new Act takes effect, and people who have no employer-provided health plan, and no other kind of coverage, fail to buy a policy for themselves and their families.  They will be socked with a bill by the IRS, and while the Obama administration and supporters of the act in Congress were at pains to say that the payment such people would be hit with would be a fine, the Justices in the majority were adamant that it would be a tax………

..The real losers in the latest Supreme Court decision, however, are the people of the United States. Not those who will be required to go out and buy some over-priced, minimal coverage, rip-off insurance plan offered by the private insurance industry, or to pay a “tax” to the IRS for not doing so, but everyone…”

Comment:

This is just a gift to the insurance industry, probably the industry most responsible for soaring costs in every field.

And it’s a blow to young people, who can often get by with just catastrophic coverage. It also hits people who are fine with self-medicating or using cheaper alternative resources.

Finally, it’s a huge blow to small businesses, the engine of job-growth.

With the economy struggling, you’d think that would be a consideration. But it wasn’t.

People are going to think twice about hiring now.

That means fewer young people are going to find jobs…..

If I were young,  this has  to be the point where I pack my bags, get my passport stamped, and hop onto the first cheap flight out of the country.

Preet Bharara – Overhyped and Toothless

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Gary Weiss in Salon

“Yet nowhere in Gabriel Sherman’s well-researched piece in New York is there even one mention of Preet Bharara.

There’s a simple reason for that:  Preet Bharara is not busting Wall Street. He’s not collaring the masters of the meltdown. He’s done nothing to even slightly discomfit Wall Street’s still-ferocious money machine, or has yet to bring to justice the architects, enablers and continuers of the 2008 financial crisis — the bankers who got us into that mess, and the ones who are continuing to extract pain from foreclosed homeowners, in the New York area and beyond.

As a matter of fact, his over-hyped insider-trading prosecutions, the main focus of the Time piece, are doing the Street a favor, by targeting people who actually ripped off Wall Street — individuals like hedge fund managers Raj Rajaratnam and Danielle Chiesi, who functioned a bit like the goons who used to dope race horses in the old days.

Bharara’s insider trading targets rigged the game for their own profit by illegally misappropriating information, in effect stealing from their employers and other investors, just as the horse-dopers cheated racetracks and other betters. Another analogy, also from the racetracks of old, would be to the scam artists who used to “past-post”: bet on races after they knew the outcome.

That’s how insider trading works. It’s a form of theft and cheating. It’s bad. Bharara was right to prosecute them, just as he has aggressively pursued drug gangs in the outer boroughs. But let’s be clear on something: The big players, the Goldman Sachses, Merrill Lynches, Banks of America and so on, don’t like insider trading any more than Preet Bharara does.

And none of his criminal prosecutions to date — including his recent bust of three high-ranking former Credit Suisse execs, accused of rigging the value of mortgage bonds they held in 2008 — had any connection to the pain being felt by Americans today, which can be directly traced to the misconduct of mortgage bankers and derivatives traders in the run-up to the financial crisis.

The real perps of the financial crisis haven’t been in Bharara’s — or the Justice Department’s — cross hairs for a single moment since Barack Obama took office three years ago. It’s one of the most troublesome failings of his administration.”

Rajat Gupta Verdict: Insider-Trading & IP Theft By The Govt

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“Anyone can benefit from insider information but not anyone can afford a supercomputer. They may both provide – with fair certainty – a market advantage but only one advantage will be prosecuted.”

–    Anthony Wile, The Daily Bell