Category Archives: Media

Elite Mouthpiece Taunts Ron Paul On Failure Of Fed Campaign

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Added July 21, 2012:

How did I see the confrontation? I thought Paul did as well as anyone could in the time given. Except for a few word slips, he was pretty cogent and effective. Bernanke looked discomfited in the middle, when he was questioned about the transfer of authority from Congress to the Fed and when the issue of secrecy was brought up. Other than that, he was impassive and spoke little.  Paul wasn’t “subdued” at all. I don’t watch all his videos, but I’ve seen him a number of times in debate, and that was fairly straightforward Paul. If there was a white flag, I didn’t see it.

If he wasn’t as combative as some seem to think, it’s most likely because it’s his last such confrontation. He’s retiring, I’m told. Too bad.

I thought it was a fairly effective performance and a good wrap up of his major arguments. I think if you’d known nothing about the Fed until then, you would have got the salient points of the anti-Fed argument: he described Bretton Woods,  exchange-rate and interest-rate manipulation; big government financing through debt; transfer of wealth from the poor and middle-class to the wealthy; malinvestment; money supply expansion versus CPI inflation; the housing bubble; and the need for Congressional oversight.

I wouldn’t call it a knock-out, simply because Bernanke was so impassive through out.

That of course helps the media to reframe the confrontation anyway it suits them. Which is what Dana Milbank promptly did.

Paul Vs. Bernanke video

“Ron Paul Vs. Bernanke: final battle ends on surprising note,” David Grant, Christian Science Monitor, July 18, 2012

“Ron Paul Has The Final Say,” Bob Adelman, New American, July 19, 2012

ORIGINAL POST

“Skull & Bones affiliated establishment journalist Dana Milbank taunts Ron Paul about the end of the “End the Fed” campaign in a piece entitled, “Ron Paul Fed Up With Trying To End The Fed” (Washington Post, July 18, 2012)

Well, I have plenty of problems with the whole Ron Paul movement these days (for a view from a Paul supporter see  this:), but the piece does more than criticize Paul.

What it does is gloat.

Here are some lines from it, with my parsing.:

“He didn’t even make a dent in it.”

[LR: The Fed is unassailable]

“…Paul raised the white flag.”

[LR: The Fed has won…]

“For the fiery Paul, it was a subdued surrender.”

[LR: So now you know how powerful we really are, old man.]

“….treating him with the cautious affection one might use to address a crazy uncle.”

[LR: You didn’t reach the point where we’d have to assassinate you, so we’ll just let people know that you and your supporters can’t be taken seriously.]

“But Paul faded away with surprising deference.”

[LR: Yes. He’s under our thumb. We call the shots. He knows what’s good for him, so he’s fading away.]

“The one substantial challenge to Bernanke — Paul’s “audit the Fed” bill, which the House is expected to approve next week before it dies in the Senate — was easily dispatched by the Fed chairman,”

[LR: Audit the Fed is croaking.]

“The Paul to Bernanke word ratio this time was 12 to 1.”

[LR: He’s just a rambling  old man. Real men don’t talk, they print.]

“There’s no constitutional reason why Congress couldn’t just take over monetary policy,” he said. “But I’m advising you that it wouldn’t be very good from an economic policy point of view.”

[LR: We’re the constitutionalists, not you. Audit the Fed is only about Congress taking over monetary policy, folks. Imagine! They can’t run a post office. How do you think they’re going to do with deep stuff like economics?]

“”At this point, the committee chairman cut him off. Paul’s time had expired.”

[LR: We’ve put up with you long enough, grandpa. Your time’s up. The game is over.]

The framing of the whole piece is quite masterful. There is not one substantial piece of analysis about the actual policies in question. We are not told what is involved in either “End the Fed” or “Audit the Fed.”

We are instead given information about procedure….rules regarding how bills go through the house, and how speakers get to speak. A contrast is set up between the grave, measured proceedings of the state and the law (the constitution) and the self-indulgent rambling of an aging politician.

The roles are reversed.

Paul becomes the political class. Bernanke becomes the embodiment of the constitution and of law.

From beginning to end we’re told how to think about what’s going on.

This is what we’re supposed to think:

Bernanke is sage, powerful and indulgent.

Paul is a crazy old man, who doesn’t know the elements of civility….or the constitution.

He’s an anti-government politician, but he’s for the government control of the money supply.

He cuts into other people’s time. He rambles on. He talks too much.

Paul is just a “supplicant” before the great Fed chairman. The final word is with the Fed.

So, even though he gets his fifteen minutes, it’s clear Paul doesn’t really understand the constitution or money.

And he’s for the government!

Notice how the piece distorts Paul’s position to make it look as if “Audit the Fed” (Paul’s fall-back position from “End the Fed”) is about putting arcane and complex professional matters into the hands of politicians.

Milbank turns Bernanke into the “private” expert and Paul into the bumbling government man.

That is sure to appeal to Americans of every political stripe. The average reader would immediately distrust anyone who intends to subject policies about the country’s money-supply to ignorant legislators driven by partisan bias.

What that does is clear.

It turns the  whole anti-government argument against anti-government activists.

It also turns  the pro-constitution argument against constitutionalists.

This is propaganda of the highest order.

Legendary Journalist, Alexander Cockburn, Dies Of Cancer

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L.A.Time reports (h/t David Kramer, LRC) some sad news:

“Alexander Cockburn, the leftist journalist, has died. The 71-year-old had been living in Berlin and fighting cancer.

Cockburn was the co-editor with Jeffrey St. Clair of the political newsletter Counterpunch. On the publication’s blog, St. Clair writes, “Alex kept his illness a tightly guarded secret. Only a handful of us knew how terribly sick he truly was. He didn’t want the disease to define him. He didn’t want his friends and readers to shower him with sympathy.” Cockburn was a dedicated leftist; St. Clair described him as “friend and comrade.”

Jeff St. Clair describes him writing and publishing right through chemotherapy until the end.

This is really too bad.  I used to write quite a bit for Counterpunch, but stopped during the financial crisis, because I felt my views on economics weren’t in synch with theirs. But I’ve never stopped reading their combative and committed writing.  Both were good friends of India, as well. And both collaborated successfully on some of the most seminal works on propaganda and intelligence.

As long back as I can remember Alex  Cockburn defined smart, rowdy journalism, not afraid to roll up its sleeves and sock it to them, but always with wit and panache.  He will be sorely missed.

India’s Silent Scientists: G.N. Ramachandran

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From Shadow Warrior:

“Ask any scientist who acknowledges original research to give a list of Indians who should have got a Nobel Prize, and you will find the name G N Ramachandran (1922- 2001) there. Though trained as a physicist, Ramachandran’s greatest contributions were to biology, where he formulated the ‘Ramachandran plots’ which every biophysicist uses while studying proteins. His triplehelix structure of collagen is a classic discovery worth a Nobel.

“History of Science, Philosophy and Culture in Indian Civilization’ says Ramachandran’s lesser known contribution was to three-dimensional image reconstruction , which redefined the way we look inside the human body without cutting it open. Some, like P M Bhargava, founder director of the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, believe Ramachandran should be considered the father of NMR and CT scan, though some others took credit for it. “Ramachandran was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society after some of us worked hard for it. He never asked for it,” says Bhargava . “He was neither elected as a foreign member of the National Academy of Sciences of the US, nor nominated for a Nobel Prize which he richly deserved.”

Comment:

Western prizes, from the Booker to the Nobel, have strong political biases and are heavily slanted to Westerners themselves, or to others whose agendas align with Western interests.

Scores of great scientists who should have won the Nobel, have continued Indian’s ancient and medieval scientific tradition – one that is unknown to most in the West and regarded as some kind of feel-good myth.

Instead, it is the Western narrative of European supremacy in cultural achievement that is the feel-good myth.

European achievements are tremendous, but they aren’t as unique as current history tells us. Instead, they accompanied the achievements of others.

Then, because of European imperial conquests in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in many cases they supplanted those others, sometimes, after appropriating them for their own.

When the real story of India’s scientific history is told, we are likely to find that the great medieval and early modern learning of India that was brought to the Western church via Catholic priests and missionaries over centuries, also fed the Renaissance and Enlightenment and scientific development thereafter.

It was not simply the Greeks.

But that is a story for another blog post.

Thousands Attend Cremation Of Bollywood Legend, Rajesh Khanna

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Rajesh Khanna, who died yesterday, was the biggest Bollywood star ever until Amitabh Bhachchan.

Khanna was cremated in Vila Parle in Mumbai, as thousands of people followed the cavalcade in the monsoon rains. Present at the cremation was Bachchan, a big fan himself, who complained that the huge crowd had come out to see the dozens of film stars at the funeral and not Khanna.

Khanna made some 120 films and had millions of fans who mobbed him each time he set foot outside his house. Known as India’s leading heart throb, Khanna had female fans who were known to marry pictures of him and write his name in blood.

Thus has India been ruled since independence.  Escapist film spectaculars and star-gazing for the impoverished millions, a form of narcotics.  For the intellectual and bureaucratic ruling-class, there is a different kind of escape, the coconut political/literary circles funded by the West and dominated by its ideologies, all shot-through with the malevolent intent of western state-craft, ceaseless in its goal of total dominion.

The masses of middle-class people who actually create value in society, remain invisible to a Western world fed a diet of media hype alternating between jet-setting  maharajas, models, and tycoons on one hand, and slums, sex-gurus, and call-centers on the other.

War On India: US Warns Travelers Not To Visit India

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US issues travel advisory against visiting India:

“The United States has issued a fresh travel advisory on overseas travel to its citizens, including India which “continues to experience terrorist and insurgent activities”.

“India continues to experience terrorist and insurgent activities which may affect US citizens directly or

indirectly,” the State Department said in its new worldwide travel alert for its citizens.

“Anti-Western terrorist groups, some on the US government’s list of designated Foreign Terrorist
Organizations (FTOs), poses a potential danger to US citizens in the region,” it said.

“Terrorists and their sympathisers have demonstrated their willingness and ability to attack targets where US

citizens or Westerners are known to congregate or visit.

“Their actions may include, but are not limited to, vehicle-born explosive attacks, improvised explosive device attacks, assassinations, carjackings, rocket attacks, assaults, or kidnappings,” the State Department said. “

Comment:

OK. That’s an official hit against the tourism industry. The advisory is basically letting the world know  the country’s got HIV, please quarantine it.

Is this for real, or is it one more show of force? We’ll soon see.

Meanwhile, it’s been six years since I’ve seen my family (FOO).  And as many since I’ve even talked to some of them.

They live and work in some of the most dangerous places in India, traveling on the most dangerous roads in the world (150,000 deaths a year), in a country with the highest number of terror attacks…and that’s besides the difficulty of just ordinary living in a place with mind-boggling bureaucracy, extreme corruption, non-existent government services (we’re not talking social-security and other kinds of pampering that you find in the west) and a thousand social ills… Nowadays there’s also soaring gas and food prices that make daily living for even the professional class an unending struggle.

Each of these problems can be traced back to some misbegotten government program shoved down the country’s collective throat against the warnings of India’s true national heroes, by some brainless puppets fed by Western foundation (Rockefeller etc.) and grant money.

So by the time the leftists and the corporatists and the NGOs and the rights brigade and the rest of the monotheist one-worlders have meddled (doing good, right?), bribed (moral, right?), blackmailed (heroic, right?), and extorted (fun business, right?) everyone, with the blessings of whatever bunkum leftist or rightist theory is currently being touted  by academic pimps and attention whores, all that’s left for the masses of  ordinary people will be the  intellectual transfat and spiritual aspartame that’s already poisoned the population back home in the West.

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.

Obama Birth Certificate A Forgery, Says Sheriff Arpaio

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Comment:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what’s the news in the recent claim?

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

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

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

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

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

But not here.

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

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

So why would google heart snopes?

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

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

And so it is.

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

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

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

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

You guessed it. George Soros.

US Navy Kills Indian Fisherman Near Dubai

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Update:

To make my original post a bit clearer, you’d have to understand what is called “convergence” by some people. I call it the “commie-capitalist” kiss up.

What this amounts to is this. The elites try to subvert a country by soft and by hard power. The soft power angle is worked by human rights groups intentionally misrepresenting or exaggerating valid social concerns in a way that provokes rioting, secession, terrorism or civil war.

This then gives an excuse for intervention by the hard power arm of the empire (NATO police action, arms sales, legal actions, war financing).

In the case of India, you have a concerted ideological war on Hinduism played out in the looting of temples through communist-dominated/Christian friendly state governments.

Then you have the human rights focus on the plight of Dalits (socially the lowest caste). Their legitimate grievances are amplified and manipulated by Western interests to fracture the social fabric and enable legal action against state and federal governments which ultimately accrue to the benefit of Church-sponsored  NGOs and the Western powers themselves. Thus, in increasingly globalized Tamil Nadu,  Tamil secessionism is encouraged. Rumors of CIA/ Mossad involvement in the area should also not be discounted.

Then you have the communists in the West making common cause in the media with the communists in China (on the one hand)… and on the other, conflating the just demands of the Palestinians in the Middle East with revanchist Caliphate claims in India. This also incites secession among Muslim dominant states.

As someone who believes Asia has always been the main focus of the global elites since the end of WWII, the convenient Muslim terrorism narrative provides cover for both the expansion of Western hard and soft power in Asia, as well as a feint behind which covert operations against alleged allied of the US, like India, are conducted. In that sense, India is less an ally as it is a host incubating a parasite  that will eventually kill it.

Simultaneously, the globalist elites pressure the government through psychological war and cyber-war.  This explains the increase in negative portraits of India, the recurrent attacks on the political leadership for not giving into the demands of multinationals. For example, Arcelor-Mittal CEO  Lakshmi Mittal has  demanded that the Indian economy grow at the rate of 10 percent. The expulsion of Rajat Gupta (connected to Manmohan’s opening of the economy) displays the fist behind Mittal’s request.

Mittal has recently joined the board of Goldman Sachs (2011), and like the bank,  works with Rothschild interests, which were behind the opening of the Indian economy in the 1990s.

ORIGINAL POST

The Statesman reports on American naval fire on an Indian boat off the coast of Dubai.

Although so far it seems to be only an accident,it wouldn’t be far-fetched to wonder if it wasn’t a shot  in the low-grade psy war on India, about which I blogged here (Chinese cybera attacks on Indian naval HQ in Vizag) and here (Time’s derogatory cover of Manmohan Singh) and here (the criminal prosecution of Rajat Gupta, the man who opened up the Indian economy, most likely  by connivance between the government and the banking elites)  and  here (Rajiv Malhotra’s thesis of a US strategy of “breaking India” via  postmodern transnationalism, US intelligence and human rights activism all converging in NGO’s like Wikileaks that act as the soft power arm of  empire).

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — An Indian fisherman aboard a boat shot at by the U.S. Navy off Dubai’s coast has told officials the crew received no warning before being fired upon, India’s ambassador to the United Arab Emirates said Tuesday. The account differs from that provided by the Navy, which said it resorted to lethal force Monday only after issuing a series of warnings. One Indian was killed in the incident, and three of his countrymen were seriously wounded. The shooting underscored how quickly naval encounters can escalate in the increasingly tense waters of the Gulf.”

Note that this isn’t the first naval accident recently. In February 2012  an Italian cargo ship fired on an Indian trawler off the coast of Kochi in South India, killing two Indians. The equivalent of this would be Barack Obama’s face appearing in The Indian Express with the word ‘loser’ under it; Carly Fiorina arrested and convicted on weak evidence in India, while Indian CEOs guilty of multicrore fraud played witness for the prosecution; Indian and Iranian war ships shooting and killing American fishermen and officers off the coast of Florida and Scotland; and a pallid Indian hacktivist with an arrest record haranguing America on its internal affairs from the pages of a Chinese paper.

Rothbard’s Leninist Attack On Gandhi And Voluntaryists

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George H. Smith in the June 1983 volume of The Voluntaryist gives one more example of  Rothbard’s penchant for manipulating (in this case, manufacturing) evidence whenever he needed it. It is an article deriding the menace of Gandhism.

Smith correctly calls it “Leninist.” ((This, by the way, is Rothbard’s own term.  By it he meant not the substance of what he wrote but the strategy and tactics he used which he admitted he borrowed from Lenin.

Ah. I knew I wasn’t mistaken.  I know the smell of sulphur as well as anyone. …

Anyway, since I’ve read quite a bit on Gandhi (including the multi-volume biography by Pyarelal, Koestler, Chaudhuri, and dozens of others, as well as Gandhi’s own writing), I feel I am on very strong grounds when I say that Rothbard could not have known much about Gandhi at all, if he thought that Gandhi’s habit  of sleeping with some young women of his circle was unknown.  It was not. It was widely known.

To be clear, there was never any sex in these arrangements and the whole thing was highly public and visible to everyone. The young women were around the ages of 18 or 19 (maybe one was 17? I’ll check)   and vied for the honor of sleeping next to him.

This happened when Gandhi was in his eighties, and it happened after the death of his wife of nearly seventy years (he’d had a child marriage, a common practice in those days).

The young women helped him walk (he called them his crutches), bathed him, and often administered the enemas that were routine in his nature cures. Gandhi wrote about all of this at length, because he saw it as part of a spiritual practice testing his celibacy. He derived this apparently from Tantra and berated himself endlessly when he felt he had been aroused subconsciously or in his dreams (!), instead of just feeling like a “mother” to the women.

I’ve written about this at Counterpunch and Dissident Voice and I believe I was among the first to describe Gandhi’s practices as both arising from repressed psychological needs as a widower and from bona-fide Tantric techniques.

I even corresponded for a while with an academic who had written a dissertation to that effect.  Gandhi was a strongly sexed man, who married in childhood (13), fathered several children, and took a vow of celibacy in his forties. There is no evidence that he ever broke his vow, although he enjoyed warm and slightly very flirtatious relationships with several female admirers.

[Correction n July 18: Sorry, I overlooked more recent research since my 2005 piece that shows Gandhi had “spiritual marriages” with a couple of his close women friends and a very close emotional relationship with a male friend.  These were very close but not physical, so far as I know.  His own words certainly show him to be a highly sexed man and reveal what many will insist is a homoerotic tendency. My own conclusions are different, but I can see some one else thinking he was “creepy” or “freaky”.]

Where Rothbard misrepresents is in claiming that this is unknown. Gandhi himself talked incessantly about his sexual feelings in his letters and even in his startlingly honest autobiography, “My Experiments With Truth,” probably the most revelatory autobiography ever written by a man in his position. Also, there is very little traditionally Hindu about Gandhi in any way. He was a Westernized eclectic, most influenced by Jesus, Thoreau, Tolstoi, and Ruskin]

He was strict (even authoritarian) but affectionate with his own wife, and most of what took place after her death was a kind of acting out of  subconscious drama that he never confronted consciously.

What he did was certainly not harmless to the young women, who must have suffered a good deal of psychological damage.

But it was not intentional, and he was no charlatan.

Even Koestler never thought so.

Anyway, whatever you think about Gandhi or mysticism or Tantra, those who met the man were largely captivated.

Except for a few like Churchill who famously dismissed him as a “seditious Middle Temple lawyer,” most people were impressed by Gandhi’s patent sincerity, demanding personal discipline, and complete unwordliness with regard to money or power.

He loved India and he loved her villages and he wanted to free the masses of people from the most grinding poverty and oppression. No one can doubt that.

What is even more remarkable he never expressed hatred for the British and showed sincere affection and respect even for the officers who arrested and beat him.

When he was shot, his last words were “He Ram” (a salutation to God).

Gandhi’s  stature as a political figure and as a man  is probably a bit higher, I’d guess, than Rothbard’s, which makes R’s shoddy scholarship even stranger.

In sum,  Rothbard has no qualms about

1. Attacking major figures (Gandhi, Ayn Rand, Adam Smith, Milton Friedman and others) in vicious and often personal terms.

2. Misrepresenting both what his targets said and what others have said about them.

3. Refitting the facts/history to suit his own ideological goals and individual temperament.

Why am I spending times analyzing Rothbard’s missteps?

Because for some time I have felt something terribly amiss with the Ron Paul movement.

There is more going on there than meets the eye and it is not just picking the right strategy or Rand’s tactics or alleged opportunism (or not).  My misgivings are not confined to Paul. They extend to the people who promote him, many of whom are anarcho-capitalists (if there is such a thing).

Rothbard is the central figure of this group.

That seems to be not just because of his scholarship (there are many Mises scholars) but because of his relative political success and the success of his acolyte Ron Paul.

Paul, Rothbard and Co. have become the mouthpiece of antiwar, antistate libertarianism.  What they say needs to be examined carefully.  It would be smart to give them more than uncritical support.

With all the establishment propaganda and co-optation out there, one can’t be too suspicious. And Rothbard and Paul have given any thoughtful observer plenty to worry over.

Here are some excerpts from the Smith piece.

“THE ROTHBARDIAN FLIP-FLOP

One of the first times I talked to Murray Rothbard was at the 1975 California Libertarian Party Convention. Looking for a conversational topic, and having just read Arthur Koestler’s anthology The Heel of Achilles, I mentioned to Murray one of  the essays, “Mahatma Gandhi: A Re-valuation.” Calling it “Gandhi revisionism,” I related some of Koestler’s debunking, such as Gandhi’s practice of sleeping with young girls to
test his vow of celibacy.

I vividly recall Murray’s reaction. Stating that Gandhi was a “good guy” who was “sound” on British imperialism, Murray emphasized that one’s personal life is irrelevant to one’s political beliefs and accomplishments. A simple point perhaps, but it sunk in.

Considering this background, it is surprising to see the Koestler piece re-emerge. This time, however, the article (reprinted in a recent Koestler anthology) is used by Rothbard to attack Gandhi with surprising vindict¡veness. Calling Koestler’s piece “a superb revisionist article,” Rothbard employs a Classic Comics version to argue that Gandhi was a “little Hindu charlatan.”

Something changed Rothbard’s view of Gandhi. Was it a scholarly assessment of Gandhi’s ideas and influence? The facts suggest otherwise. Rothbard displays little familiarity with Gandhian literature, primary or secondary. He seems to  think that Koestler uncovered obscure information about Gandhi, but Koestler relied on standard biographies and anthologies (as his footnotes reveal). “The time has come,” Rothbard announces, “to rip the veil of sanctity that has been  carefully wrapped around Gandhi by his numerous disciples, that has been stirred anew by the hagiographical movie, and that greatly inspired the new Voluntaryist movement.”
What “veil of sanctity”? Gandhi’s sexual theories and practices,  his dietary habits, his treatment of his children — these and other “revisionist” aspects of Gandhi’s life were extensively discussed by Gandhi himself, and they appear in many  Gandhi biographies. This may be scintillating revisionist fare for Murray Rothbard, but not for people who have read more than a solitary article. (Rothbard apparently hasn’t even seen the movie.)

Has voluntaryism been fueled by a trumped-up, sanctified Gandhi? Not one iota of evidence is given to support this claim. Not one word of voluntaryist writing is quoted to support Rothbard’s contention that we are, in effect, Gandhi disciples…”

And this:

Nonviolent resistance is not just a fallacy or mistake. True, it is “Hindu baloney,” nonsense,” and a “fad,” but it “cuts deeper than that.” It is a “menace,” “a spectre haunting the libertarian movement” which “has been picking off some of the best and most radical Libertarian Party activists [i.e., RC members], ones
which the Libertarian Party can ill afford to lose if it is to retain its thrust and its principles.” (How such a ridiculous fad appeals to the Party’s best and brightest is not explained.)

Here lies the solution to our puzzle. Here lies the difference between the 1975 Gandhi and the 1983 Gandhi: the latter is a threat to the Party, whereas the former was not. The good of the Party required some quick, if inaccurate, revisionism, so Gandhi got the axe. Rothbard assassinated a dead man for “reasons of Party.” (My own keen analyst informs me that Rothbard searched for someone else to do the dirty work; but apparently unable to locate a good hit man, he did the job himself.”

Rothbard – Fudged Money Supply Figures?

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I came across this on the Mises forum, in my search for any other examples of Rothbard’s tendency (noted by several people) to manipulate facts to support his objectives.

I’ve noted some of them before. His treatment of Ayn Rand seems to be the strongest example and the best documented. The others I can’t judge yet, but they include

misrepresentation of Adam Smith (which provoked a rebuttal by David Gordon, which was then answered by David Friedman)

misrepresentation of Milton Friedman’s work (addressed by David Friedman)

and a couple of examples from banking history I’ve noted elsewhere.

Here is another example from Civil War history. Again, there could be other explanations for it (oversight, confusing data etc.), but it’s one more question mark. I have no wish to exaggerate his failings (as he did others), but it’s at the least very curious and troubling.

Here’s the comment as it appears on the forum (I’ll add links later):

I’m starting to research into the Panic of 1873 for a college project I have. Among other economic literature, I reviewed Rothbard’s “A History of Money and Banking in the United States”. Upon scrutinizing his money supply statistics, I’ve noticed either a vague (i.e, not explicitly distinguished) or downright false money aggregate of his.

At the beginning of his talk about the Civil War, Rothbard mentions that “over the entire war, the money supply rose from $745.4 [sic] million to$1.773 billion, an increase of 137.9 percent, or 27.9 percent per annum.” (p.130).

However, on page 153, Rothbard writes that “Total state and national bank notes and deposits rose from $835 million in 1865 to $1.964 billion in 1873, an increase of 135.2 percent or an increase of 16.9 percent per year.” (p.153)

So what happened here? At first I suspected that Rothbard was being ambiguous by referring to the later statistic as “bank money”, but later Rothbard seems to use it as his total statistic of “money supply”. Even if this wasn’t the true money supply, then that means Rothbard was lobbing off roughly $1billion (and more as currency increased) in all of his subsequent monetary calculations.

Did the total money supply drop by a “cataclysmic” 50% from 1865 to 1867, was Rothbard wrong on his money supply statistic for the Civil war or his later money supply statistic, or am I missing something here?

Note that if we treat $1.964 as the money supply as he seems to do, then using his earlier estimate (1.773) the expansion over nearly ten (8) years increased by a paltry10.77%, or 1.34% per year. In a similar statistic (though with different money aggregates), Friedman states that the money stock from 1867 to 1873 increased by 1.3% per year. Although this is inflationary, one wonders how such a small increase in the money supply could have caused a very serious banking panic/business cycle in 1873 (say what you will about the subsequent recession, the actual panic was very supposedly severe).

Although still optimistic there’s a way to make sense of this, I’m a little disgruntled by this mistake/ambiguity made by Rothbard. Either he just wanted to calculate a “total money supply only for the Civil War” and then proceeded to concentrate solely on bank deposits, or there is a large error in his statistics. I know he gets his money sources from the historical statistics, which I plan on consulting, but that doesn’t seem to answer his ambiguity/incorrectness.

Any thoughts on these money supply statistics? Any help is appreciated.

Well I got the book, 1957 and all. I felt an air of history as I pulled it off the shelf and sifted through its yellow and fading pages.

From what I can tell, there is good news and bad news.

The good news is that Rothbard’s money supply statistics add up, at least according to this book. All of his Civil War totals are obtained by adding total bank deposits, state bank notes, gold coins, silver  subsidiaries, fractional currencies, other U.S currency, greenbacks,  and national bank notes.

The bank news is that judging by this book, some of the statistics are questionable, and Rothbard should be severely criticized for his misleading interpretations. The most obvious is his 1865-1873, state and bank deposits and notes increased about 16.9% per annum. From the book, this is correct, but using highly suspect statistics. It is true that state and national bank notes and deposits increased from 1865 (roughly $869) to $1.964 in 1873, an increase of 16.9% per annum. However careful inspection reveals that according to the statistics, the number of deposits did not increase really increase 16.9% per annum, but rather 50% between last two reported years (1872-1332 and 1873-1964)! My guess is that the bank money (and to a greater extent total money supply) did not explode in one year, but rather the amount of banks voluntarily reported their deposits to the state banking authority. It even says in the forward to the particular section Rothbard used that “Prior to 1896, figures shown here include all national banks and all State banks that voluntarily reported to State banking departments in the United States..”. My guess is that with the Panic in 1873 and more banks under distress, they contacted the state authorities more so than before.

Taking out 1873, and just taking the totals from 1865 to 1872 (for whatever they are worth, considering that they are probably low due to faulty reports), the annual percentage increase was much lower, roughly 4% per year! For Rothbard to report these statistics that bank money increased 17% per annum when it reality it seems to have come only from 1)the last year 2)more likely bad statistics is downright sloppy and poor research.

Regardless of the factual accuracy of the Historical Statistics (I’m extremely hesitant to see bank totals increasing by 50% in one year), even with the statistics he is using they clearly did not increase 17% per year, as Rothbard is claiming.

The problem is he isn’t really stating that the annual expansion in bank deposits wasn’t 16.9%. It’d be one thing if the yearly averages were 10, 20, 12, 15, etc etc, which averaged out to 16.9%. But in the last year when you have a 50% increase lifting an otherwise 7-8 year statistical average of 4%, and then claiming that there was an average of 17% bank credit expansion,it  is very misleading and  resembles an outlier. In addition, it seems likely that the overall expansion wasn’t that great and there were less banks reporting in the late 1860s/early 1870s their financial conditions, which means the bank deposit figures for that time period (1860s) was abnormally low, giving the illusion of great bank credit growth than what actually occurred. Either the statistics are 1) Entirely truthful,which would give great doubt as to why no one has written about one of the U.S’ greatest yearly MS expansions 2)Not accurate, and Rothbard was misleading to use these aggregates and conducted poor research. Even if he wanted to use these numbers, he should have at least written in a footnote that the totals weren’t accurate, especially the 16.9% figure he was using.

EDIT: “The problem is he isn’t really stating that the annual expansion in bank deposits wasn’t 16.9%. It’d be one thing if the yearly averages were 10, 20, 12, 15, etc etc, which averaged out to 16.9%. But in the last year when you have a 50% increase lifting an otherwise 7-8 year statistical average of 4%, and then claiming that there was an average of 17% bank credit expansion,it  is very misleading and  resembles an outlier. In addition, it seems likely that the overall expansion wasn’t that great and there were less banks reporting in the late 1860s/early 1870s their financial conditions, which means the bank deposit figures for that time period (1860s) was abnormally low, giving the illusion of great bank credit growth than what actually occurred. Either the statistics are 1) Entirely truthful,which would give great doubt as to why no one has written about one of the U.S’ greatest yearly MS expansions 2)Not accurate, and Rothbard was misleading to use these aggregates and conducted poor research. Even if he wanted to use these numbers, he should have at least written in a footnote that the totals weren’t accurate, especially the 16.9% figure he was using.”

Beneath this comment is a response from someone who lays out various possible explanations and seems to think Rothbard wouldn’t have manipulated the data intentionally.

There could be many reasons for this error.  I don’t think he was lying.

He states clearly that this is the result of pyramiding of state bank deposits on top of national bank deposits and it doesn’t explicitly say that this happened in one year.  It says “…after 1870…” not in 1872.  Also, he says, “From then on [May 1871] paper money would be held consonant with the U.S. Constitution.” (p. 153)  Although, his stating it as ‘percent per year’ could be considered dubious and was very generous to his argument.

If we are to assume that the statistics prior to May 1871 (the under-reporting) would not have counted all of the paper money as some states had made it illegal. (p. 152).  And my guess is that the unreported money that was being counted after 1871 was so because the state banks had a new Federal law forcing them to redeem all of the paper they had and were using. (Kind of an argument that if the Federal government would have stayed out of it there would never have been the statistical explosion that Rothbard is exploiting, which ironically Rothbard would have wanted.)  To me this could be an explanation as to the dramatic rise that Rothbard was seeing in total money supply.  Again, he could also have been following, or interpreting, again in a possibly conspicuous manner, along with the Federal law.  But lying, I don’t think.