Category Archives: Media

Rajat Gupta: The N****** Of Wall Street

Posted on by


(Source: Jury Representativeness: It’s No Joke In the State of New York http://papers.ccpr.ucla.edu/papers/PWP-DUKE-2011-001/PWP-DUKE-2011-001.pdf)

Ash Jen comments on an article at The Economist, “An Unlucky Man,” on the Rajat Gupta verdict:

1. David Sokol, an executive of Berkshire traded on his own account based on information available to Berkshire executives. There was NO case bought against him even when there is 10x more evidence available against him and who [sic] made couple of million dollars directly.

[Lila: Did they wire-tap Warren Buffet and Sokol?]

2. The other Goldman guy who provided information to Rajaratnam still works for Goldman. There was no case bought against him either.

[Lila; Commenter is referring to David Loeb. He doesn’t mention, mind you, Henry King and Mr. X, as well as a possible fourth person at Goldman tipping Galleon, and the multiple employees who had worked at both Galleon and Goldman. He doesn’t mention Blankfein and Gary Cohn who were named publicly by their own senior manager, Greg Smith, in March this year as being the source of Goldman corruption. Rajat Gupta was not mentioned by Smith.  Was Smith wire-tapped? Has he been subpoenaed. Of course, Smith, who joined in 2000, wants us to believe Goldman was just bouncing corporate babies on its knees until then. Haha, as the financial press, belatedly points out, and toldja! since we pointed this out repeatedly much earlier.

3. John Edwards clearly violated the rules of election fund [sic]. He got away scot free.

[Lila: He should have. It was a stupid vindictive case]

4. Mr. Corzine is another name.

[Lila: Now we’re talking]

All, I am saying is Indians are blacks of white collar crime in this country. For same level of evidence, they are prosecuted at a much higher rate than white guys. This is exactly what happens for blacks for low level criminal activity.

Black defendants are convicted at an 81 percent rate and white defendants at a 66 percent rate in an all white jury.

When the jury pool includes at least one black potential juror,conviction rates are almost identical.”


(Source: Jury Representativeness: It’s No Joke In the State of New York http://papers.ccpr.ucla.edu/papers/PWP-DUKE-2011-001/PWP-DUKE-2011-001.pdf)

Applause For 321Gold’s Barbara Moriarty

Posted on by

321gold’s Bob Moriarty salutes the brains behind that great resource, wife Barbara Moriarty, who’s retiring.

“Not a lot of people fully understand the dynamics behind 321gold.com. Barbara and I started the website in the summer of 2001 convinced that gold and silver were at a bottom and the financial system was fixing to come unglued. Well, gold and silver were at a bottom. Saying the financial system is coming unglued is no longer a prediction; you can watch it in living color daily.

From the beginning ten and a half years ago, Barbara was the backbone of the site. She designed it. She built it and she maintained it. I may be the guy visible at gold shows and with the byline but don’t be confused, Barbara was the brains.

But living with doom and gloom daily gets tiring. We are not as young as we used to be and she wanted out. She has worked practically every day and given everything to the site. It’s time for her to focus more on her and her family.

The transition will be mostly seamless but her sense of humor and adding brightness to every day will be missed. Rarely in life will you come across anyone as kind or thoughtful. I’ve been married to her for 21 years and I only regret not having met her forty years ago. I’ve known a number of interesting people in my life but of all the people I have ever known, Barbara was the most intelligent and the bravest. And the most loving of all people.

She will be missed.

Comment:

321gold would be on anyone’s top five of the most invaluable resources for information about gold for as long as I’ve been following the financial crisis (since 2004-5). For me, it’s always been the first place I looked. Bob Moriarty is also a writer whom I trust for accurate and un-hyped information. I never got the impression he was giving anything but his honest opinion. Most others are pumping something they’re paid to pump.  Apart from Bob Moriarty, I also pay attention to Nadeem Walayat of Market Oracle, among many others. (I have no relationship with either of these two individuals)

Tyler Durden On The Plunge Protection Team

Posted on by

Tyler Durden at Zerohedge has this week’s important report. None of it is surprising if, like me, you are a paranoid conspiracist, tired of being proved right over and over and over The report only confirms what any sensible observer, who wasn’t biased or ideological, could have seen.

I differ from Durden on a number of things, one being that I’m not sure the answer to our problems is an expansion of Federal regulation or the Department of Justice.

But I don’t fall into the opposite school of thinking, either. Let’s destroy national sovereignty isn’t the solution. I think there are other approaches, but since no one asked me, I’ll keep them to myself.  Let the ideologues knock themselves out. It’s too much fun watching to stop it.

The ideological divide, and purist positions are part of the problem, not the answer. And I wouldn’t be surprised if I were to find out that it has been set up that way intentionally. It certainly plays into controlling the terms of the debate.

Be that as it may, my position is that “insider trading” is secondary to the entire post-war conduct of the state-corporate complex.

Still, does that mean we need to defend Paulson…or Gupta…if they are guilty as charged? No. Live by force and fraud, die by force and fraud is a reasonable approach to take.

We needn’t take the part of the prosecution. Indeed, we can’t, when we remember how many people were lying on their loan forms, how many journalists had their lips stuck to the backsides of politicians, celebrities and Wall Street bigwigs they were supposed to be covering, and how many regulators looked the other way through it all.

But it is also wrong to think of Paulson or Gupta as private citizens either. They are BOTH king-pins of the state-corporate complex.  We don’t know exactly what either did wrong, and at this point Gupta’s actions look like peanuts next to the role of the plunge-protection team, but let’s wait and see it unfold.

I feel compassionate to them as human beings, for sure. And my own take was always that Paulson should just have been asked to step down, return that part of his fortune that was  dishonestly acquired to the victims or give it away to some charity of his choosing.

No waste of tax-payer money, no show trials, no time wasted.

But you know, in that case, we will also have to let the jails open and let the population out too. Including murderers (you don’t know what led them to kill, do you?).

If we are going to be determinists (“Bernanke’s money printing” made me steal and lie, your honor), then surely murderers should be let out too (“Child abuse made me kill) and serial cannibals (“Vicious snuff movies made me what I am, your honor). Let them all go.

And while you’re at it, stop ANY corporation or individual from using the laws (backed the by the state) too.

Where is the libertarian outrage over Googe’s lawsuits (using Federal courts) against competitors? Where is the outrage over corporate non-disclosure agreements (upheld by federal courts) signed under duress of various kinds to hide even criminal wrong-doing? Where is the outrage over blackmail and bribery used to steal what are by common understanding public funds meant for public use or to damage weaker firms or individuals? No outrage, right?

Instead, libertarians selectively defend fraud (“no such thing as IP”; no such thing as blackmail; no such thing as fraudulent advertising or marketing; no such thing as damaging pornography; no such thing as bribery).  Or rather, they’re all good things!

You get my drift.

Behold the ideologue. He’s not a bad guy. He’s even a good guy. But he’s become too clever in his conceit (pun intended…ideology is an extended conceit…in the literary sense… and it is conceited in the moral sense). So clever that common-sense and honor have fled long ago.

[Links and tidying up to follow…I just had to unburden myself of my feelings this morning. And by the way, I’m quite sure some of these blogs on the libertarian circuit are “sponsored” by various parties” as go-to sites.

I do go to them. But I still think my own thoughts.

Zerohedge:

“Today, BusinessWeek’s Michael Serrill and Jonathan Neumann have released a blockbuster report based on a FOIA response by the Treasury, which proves that in America rules are only for little people, that this country has been a banana republic for years, that Animal Farm was spot on, and gives excruciating detail of how Hank Paulson tipped off a select group of Goldman diaspora hedge fund managers about the eventual failure of Fannie and Freddie 7 weeks ahead of this information becoming public knowledge. The report basically is a summary of a meeting that took place at the offices of Eton Mindich’s Eton Park headquarters on July 21, 2008, 7 days after his famous ‘“If you have a bazooka, and people know you have it, you’re not likely to take it out,” speech and 7 weeks before both GSEs effectively filed for bankruptcy and were put into conservatorship. Now if it only ended there it would have been fine – a case of potential criminal collusion between the government (although nothing specific against Paulson as he didn’t actually trade: he just made sure his former Goldman colleagues made money), and the 0.00001% in the face of a few multi-billionaires who most certainly did trade on material non-public information sourced by Hank. Where it however gets worse is when one considers the actual role of one Eric Mindich in the hierarchy of the Asset Managers’ committee of the President’s Working Group on Capital Markets, better known of course as the PPT: a topic we discussed first back in September 2009 when we asked “What Is Goldman Alum Eric Mindich’s Role As Chair Of The Asset Managers’ Committee Of The President’s Working Group?” Back then we did not get an answer. Luckily, courtesy of a few answered FOIA requests, some real investigative journalism, and not reporting for the sake of brown-nosing just so one can get soundbites for their next name dropping “blockbuster” and straight to HBO movie, we are starting to get the full picture of just how high in US government the Goldman Sachs controlled “crony capitalist” adminsitration truly runs.

Before we get into the details of Mr Mindich’s curious relationship with the government, here is the gist of the BusinessWeek piece, which as noted focuses on Paulson who “said he had erred by not punishing Bear Stearns shareholders more severely. The secretary, then 62, went on to describe a possible scenario for placing Fannie and Freddie into “conservatorship” — a government seizure designed to allow the firms to continue operations despite heavy losses in the mortgage markets.”

The gathering comprised some of Wall Street’s most storied investors. Mindich, a former chief strategy officer of New York- based Goldman Sachs, started Eton Park in 2004 with $3.5 billion, at the time one of the biggest hedge-fund launches ever. [Dinakar] Singh, a former head of Goldman’s proprietary-trading desk, also began his fund in 2004, in partnership with private- equity firm Texas Pacific Group Ltd. Lone Pine’s [Stephen] Mandel worked as a retail analyst at Goldman before joining Julian Robertson’s Tiger Management LLC, one of the most successful hedge funds of the 1980s and 1990s. He started his own firm in 1997. [Daniel] Och was co-head of U.S. equity trading at Goldman before founding Och-Ziff in 1994. The publicly listed firm managed $28.9 billion in November. One other Goldman Sachs alumnus was at the meeting: Frank Brosens, founder and principal of Taconic Capital Advisors LP, who worked at Goldman as an arbitrageur and who was a protege of Robert Rubin, who went on to become Treasury secretary.

In other words the point of the meeting was nothing short of the former Goldman CEO telling all his former Goldman colleagues just what he was planning on doing in his capacity as Treasury Secretary.

Others also benefited: Non-Goldman Sachs alumni who attended included short seller James Chanos of Kynikos Associates Ltd., who helped uncover the Enron Corp. accounting fraud; GSO Capital Partners LP co-founder Bennett Goodman, who sold his firm to Blackstone Group LP in early 2008; Roger Altman, chairman and founder of New York investment bank Evercore Partners Inc.; and Steven Rattner, a co-founder of private-equity firm Quadrangle Group LLC, who went on to serve as head of the U.S. government’s Automotive Task Force.”

Ames: Tax The 1% At 91%

Posted on by

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

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

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

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

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

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

Climate-Gate: The 2011 Edition

Posted on by

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But there are also differences:

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

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

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

Ames Versus Wile

Posted on by

Winter comes, says Anthony Wile:

“This is a very important movement … this movement that is perhaps the prelude to REAL world government. And yet …

Nothing shall grow in the gardens of world government. Fairness will reign. The guilty shall be punished and those who have been oppressed will mount the Throne of Theosophy, certain of their righteousness and rejoicing in their power. See here:

“He who protests is an enemy; he who opposes is a corpse.”

“If someone is very hungry, the Angkar will take him where he will be stuffed with food.”

“If you wish to live exactly as you please, the Angkar will put aside a small piece of land for you.”

(Sayings of the Khmer Rouge: “to be “stuffed with food” is to become a corpse, fertilizing the rice fields; and the ‘small piece of land’ refers to a burial pit.)

Ever read Chronicles of Narnia? Or the descriptions of the White Queen’s winter. It is a land where all things that are good are frozen and quiescent, where rivers have ceased to run, where people have ceased to speak and even the animals have ceased to sound. No history is available but that which is approved.”

“Pus-humpers Should Writhe In Hell,” says Mark Ames, Exile journalist and former colleague of Matt Taibbi:

“In 1985, Niskanen left Reagan’s side for the comfort of a lifelong sinecure in the Koch welfare program, safely protected from the ravages of the free-market, just like Hayek, just like all the pus-humpers in the libertarian nomenklatura.

And within a year, chief pus-humper himself, William Niskanen, chairman of the libertarian Cato Institute, was attacking Catholic bishops for daring to allege that Christianity is not all about free-markets and enriching the 1-percent:

A former economic adviser to President Reagan says the nation’s Roman Catholic bishops are ignoring the Bible as well as sound economics in their call for more government help for the poor.

…In a lengthy teaching letter approved last month, the bishops declared that significant poverty in such a rich nation is “a moral and social scandal that must not be ignored.” They said government as well as individuals and businesses should do much more to help the poor and powerless take part in economic life.

Niskanen, identifying himself as “an economist and a Protestant,” said, “one has reason to question the moral authority of a letter that has little apparent basis in the Scriptures of our shared religious heritage. The letter seeks to provide an agenda for the state. The New Testament is a message of individual salvation through Christ,” he said. “The bishops encourage us to seek justice through political action. Jesus counsels us that the Kingdom of God is not of this world.’ The central theme of the letter is economic justice. The New Testament provides no concept of secular justice, economic or otherwise,” he said.

Now William Niskanen is dead. For all I know, Niskanen may be in Heaven, bouncing on Calvin’s lap. Or maybe–one hopes–he’s dealing with a very Guantanamo-like wrathful god. The only thing we can say for sure is that William Niskanen did everything possible to create a kind of Hell on earth for the 99% of Americans who weren’t as blessed with Koch-funded sinecures as he.

May the bastard writhe in pain.”

Comment

Ames, like Taibbi, and, disappointingly, like even Bill Black, who as a former government official has an even higher standard to meet, refuses to argue honestly. Whatever you might think of an opponent,  ad hominem is the least persuasive way to make your case.

In the first place, Ames sweepingly puts all libertarians in one category.

(Of course, some libertarians do the same too).

Then he confuses the position of the minarchists Friedman, Mises and Hayek with the current Mises libertarians, who are mostly pure anarcho-capitalists.

Next, he confuses minarchists with the oligarchs who espouse  libertarianism, the Koch brothers, although the Kochs (as the libertarians have been the first and more vociferous to point out), are state capitalists or mercantilists.

Then, Koch is conflated with Alan Greenspan, who abandoned libertarianism for the state, and Greenspan is associated with Ayn Rand, who was a minarchist who expressly considered crony capitalism and criminal capitalism “looting”.

What an ignorant rant.  And in the middle of it all, Ames invokes Jesus, about whom his crowd has nothing good to say otherwise, unless it’s to get the long-suffering Galilean to brand their wretched marketing campaign to reelect whichever lame is on the ticket this time.

Jesus wouldn’t have approved of very much in modern life, left or right.   [Nov. 23: On second thoughts, I don’t think this is necessarily true, but it would take too long a digression for me to address it here]

Jesus would likely not have approved of this kind of violent debate, not Wall Street, nor DC. Who knows what he would have demanded. He could have been a mystic revolutionary, for anything we know.

But a Democrat re-election campaign funded by Soros and the ruling elites, astro-turfed by a bunch of liberal- to-left outfits and led by professional activists, that threatens global violence as a way to get the kulaks to pay for its agenda isn’t exactly a change from the status quo.

That’s exactly what the terrorist attack of 9-11 was.

It’s exactly what the financial terrorism of 2008 was.

So, this is the third time we’re hearing the mantra,  Give us what we want or else.

That’s not the population demanding. That’s Soros and assorted other elites, speaking through their intelligence and media assets, provoking and co-opting popular rage.

But guess what.

Strike three …right?

This time, it’s Mr. Soros who might be out.

Update 1: I should add that I am not on either side of this debate theoretically.

Practically, however, I believe less government is better, just because government is far too large and centralized now. But I don’t believe that a small republican government in a city is automatically the same as an empire. It is simply not true, from the evidence of history, and from my own personal experience, having lived in small villages in small countries, and in the heart of the empire in the US, in the DC area.

If force and fraud are the reasons why government coercion is wrong, then it stands to reason that force and fraud by themselves are a kind of “government,” one without legitimacy. Corporations, often, are mini-governments that depend on state-created law to protect them from the results of their actions. There is no hallowed ground anymore. It’s all rotten and so ideological arguments start from a false premise.

Both sides, like those who see terrorists everywhere and those who see them nowhere, are thus bound together in opposition. They become locked into their respective positions, which is where the elite wants them to remain, because it allows the “shadow government” to steam ahead with no opposition.

Update 2 (Nov. 23) :

In keeping with my position on ideology, I also think Jesus was not an ideologue. He was a poet, that is, someone whose “thinking” is an image of existential reality not a logical superstructure arising out of inherently flawed assumptions.

A recent piece at CNN’s Belief blog makes this point well, and suggests how something like “microfinance’ can be remedied by adapting to this reality:

“The discussion at the AEI event revolved around the Biblical parable of the Good Samaritan and the problem of providing immediate relief for compounding and overwhelming needs but still being able to make the transition to sustainable development.

The concept of microfinance and microcredit, for which the founder of the Bangladeshi Grameen Bank was awarded the Nobel Peace prize, has been applied under HOPE International to 14 countries serving more than 250,000 clients. I asked Greer whether he thought microfinance could become a broken system, and about the phenomenon of loan sharks emerging in India’s microfinancing world:

“What’s happening right now in the microfinance base shows why it’s necessary to have something else than just access to capital or some new way of providing loans to the poor; that in and of itself is insufficient to see real transformation that happens in communities.

So the situation in India – we also operate in India – but have a different operating model; we make sure that the profits that we’re generating are reinvested back into those areas. We emphasize training, we emphasize savings, and we don’t have the belief that if you just give individuals 50 dollar loans that that’s gonna result in huge transformation.

That’s an important piece. It takes money to make money. But it’s only a piece of a bigger picture of what it takes to transform a community.”

I’m not certain that AEI, a neoconservative outfit, best known to the general public for its hawkish positions, is the best place to be having this discussion, and I don’t know what assumptions are at work in this discussion, but at least the authors are correct in warning against appropriating Jesus for any partisan political model.

Hitler’s Pope And The Serbian Holocaust

Posted on by

The little known slaughter of Orthodox Christians, Jews, and Roma in Yugoslavia at the hands of Nazi-sponsored Croatian leadership had the full approval of the Catholic pope and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem.

“During the Second World War in Yugoslavia, Catholic priests and Muslim clerics were willing accomplices in the genocide of the nations Serbian, Jewish and Roma population. From 1941 until 1945, the Nazi-installed regime of Ante Pavelic in Croatia carried out some of the most horrific crimes of the Holocaust (known as the Porajmos by the Roma), killing over 800,000 Yugoslav citizens – 750,000 Serbs, 60,000 Jews and 26,000 Roma. In these crimes, the Croatian Ustasha and Muslim fundamentalists were openly supported by the Vatican, the Archbishop of Zagreb Cardinal Alojzije Stepinac (1898-1960), and the Palestinian Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini. Many of the victims of the Pavelic regime in Croatia were killed in the war’s third largest death camp – Jasenovac, where over 200,000 people – mainly Orthodox Serbs met their deaths. Some 240,000 were “rebaptized” into the Catholic faith by fundamentalist Clerics in “the Catholic Kingdom of Croatia” as part of the policy to “kill a third, deport a third, convert a third” of Yugoslavia’s Serbs, Jews and Roma in wartime Bosnia and Croatia (The Yugoslav Auschwitz and the Vatican, Vladimar Dedijer, Anriman-Verlag, Freiburg, Germany, 1988).

On April 6th 1941, Nazi Germany invaded Yugoslavia. By April 10th, Croatian fascists led by Ante Pavelic were allowed by Hitler and his ally Mussolini to set up a “independent” puppet state of Croatia. Hitler granted “Aryan” status to Croatia as his fascist allies carved up Yugoslavia. Pavelic had been awaiting these developments whilst under the auspices of Mussolini in Italy who had granted them the use of remote training camps on a Aeolian island and access to a propaganda station Radio Bari for broadcasts across the Adriatic. As soon as the new fascist state of Croatia was born, and campaign of cold-blooded terror began, as noted by John Cornwell in his book Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII (Viking, London, UK, 1999):

“(It was) an act of ‘ethnic cleansing’ before that hideous term came into vogue, it was an attempt to create a ‘pure’ Catholic Croatia by enforced conversions, deportations, and mass exterminations. So dreadful were the acts of torture and murder that even hardened German troops registered their horror. Even by comparison with the recent bloodshed in Yugoslavia at the time of writing, Pavelic’s onslaught against the Orthodox Serbs remains one of the most appalling civilian massacres known to history” (p 249)

Obama: Normalizing The Police State

Posted on by

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ISI And 9-11

Posted on by

Abid Ullah Jan, Pakistan Tribune, July 14, 2006

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who Guards The Guardian?

Posted on by

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

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

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

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

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

Wikispooks explains:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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