Update: Subsequent to my posting this, the Agora disinfo agent/troll/paid basher Ryals reposts Amberger’s comments to him (rather than Amberger’s blog posts about Agora), simultaneously discrediting and neutralizing Amberger by an unsubstantiated smear (Nazi Stasi), just as he posts any substantial criticism of Agora, ALWAYS with slurs about the critics and always with OLD NEWS about Agora, usually attributing criminal behavior to the critics, for which he gives not a shred of proof.
His response fails to mention the people who really are responsible for Agora’s marketing and selling today – Myles Norin (CEO), Matthew Turner (counsel), Addison Wiggin (chief of Agora Financial, its flagship subsidiary, and also heavily involved in Oxford Group, Michael Masterson (Mark Ford), Byron King, Alexander Greene, Mike Ward, Julia Guth, and many others, whose border-line promotions were all deconstructed by Christoph Amberger. Instead, Ryals tries to discredit Amberger’s whistle-blowing. No question Ryals has some kind of tie to Agora.
To make things clearer, Agora is not solely Bonner’s company but owned by several people, some of whom no doubt have axes to grind with others. Bonner himself might have enemies within the company, for partisan, financial or personal reasons.
Notice how Ryals only focuses on the Republicans in the group, like Bonner, presumably Casey, and Robert Bauman, who specializes in the admirable field of asset protection. Now, unlike the state-worshipping fraud Ryals, I would love to believe Bob Bauman is a really good asset protector (aka money-launderer), but, alas, if he is not what he seems (and I haven’t seen anything concrete to suggest that), he is much more likely to be an IRS/DOJ honey-pot, if I know how these things work.
That’s what I believe large parts of the asset-protection racket really is about, when it’s not about espionage and government-related money-laundering.
That might include the over-hyped Simon Black, who also seems to be a part of the LRC-Agora crew and constantly tells people that Singapore is a great place for financial security, when anyone who even researches the matter in a skimpy way will figure out that Singapore is crawling with Mossad and CIA.
NWO resistance indeed.
Anyone boosting simplistic asset protection, or simplistic encryption like Tor (heavens!) is simply pushing people into US govt supervised encryption. But, then, maybe that’s the idea.
ORIGINAL POST
The Daily Bell argues that the Ron Paul-Lewis Lehrman connection is meaningless (links to follow):
“Worse, in our humble opinion, whenever such issues arise these days, the dissemblers come out in force to attack the world’s only apparently honest politician, US Congressman Ron Paul, for working with Lewis Lehrman.
It is true that when Ron Paul and Lewis Lehrman served (with many others) on a US Gold Commission during the Reagan years they wrote a minority report recommending a return to some sort of gold standard.
But Ron Paul certainly didn’t seek Lehrman out to write the report. He wrote it with Lehrman because Lehrman was on the committee. Ron Paul, of course, went on to call for a regime of competing currencies, which is something we’re partial to.”
Comment:
This would be a whole lot more credible if The Daily Bell itself didn’t call out people on just as tenuous evidence, in much more black and white terms than I have ever done.
It also doesn’t help that the Bell dismisses critics of Paul as dissemblers.
Why?
What’s wrong with criticizing a politician who’s set up as the sole spokesman for libertarian issues?
Why would anti-state capitalists focus on a politician as their spokesman, in the first place?
What sense does that make?
Especially, when just a few days ago, the Bell raised no objection at all, when, in an interview on their site, Gerald Celente claimed Paul was “not a fighter” and had failed because he was not a fighter.
If that is the opinion of Paul’s friends, isn’t it natural that people on the paper-money team or outside the binary altogether (like me) would reach even more devastating conclusions?
I don’t believe most Paul critics are dissembling. I think they are genuinely disappointed and suspicious. I am too.
Three. The Bell loses credibility when it claims Paul is the “only honest politician in the world.”
That’s pure hyperbole.
I’m sure the Daily Bell doesn’t know “all the politicians in the world.” And Paul isn’t perfectly clean. There was rampant nepotism during his campaign. There was the alleged double-billing. There were other mis-steps.
They might all be minor. And the Lehrman connection might be innocuous too, but it’s not the only troubling thing that comes to mind.
Which brings me to my fourth point.
Paul has a long-standing relationship via Murray Rothbard with Agora Inc. and its founder, James Dale Davidson, about which I blogged in July (the first person to pull that little nugget up, I do believe….although, as soon as I say that, I’m sure a dozen quicky sites will pop up with the same information on them).
This is a very troubling connection, in my opinion.
The Agora Inc. network has ties to Rockefeller-related groups, like the Peterson Institute. I blogged about that in 2009, January.
Now, I myself have once cited research produced by the Peterson.
[It’s in my piece on Krugman, at LRC, and the researcher was Anders Aslund, who was one of the advocates of privatization in the Soviet Union. Aslund was wrong about that, although not the only one wrong, and certainly not the main one.]
But I post research from all over the place, and that is not an endorsement of the authors’ other works or of the websites carrying the research.
Agora’s ties to the Peterson Institute, however, are a bit more relevant and important than my posting or quoting someone once, casually.
The I.O.U.S.A film (a spin-off from Agora’ “Empire of Debt,” Wiley, 2005) was promoted nationally by the Peterson Institute. Some of the positions Agora supports are consonant with Pete Peterson’s interests, although I do believe most people at Agora are anti-state libertarians, whereas Peterson is no more than a crony capitalist.
This is what I wrote in my 2009 blog post about the Peterson connection:
“Assembling this bipartisan group of prominent enablers/theorists of empire over the last twenty years lets IOUSA claim it goes beyond partisanship. In reality it does no such thing. Omitting a context for its arguments, the film actually lends itself to being interpreted in ways quite contradictory to the tenor of the original work. At times it even subverts the book thoroughly.
IOUSA lends itself to a very anti-libertarian, statist moralizing of the debt issue: thus, spendthrift population needs to be forced to save by government. Now that really alarms me. Watch out – forced savings accounts ahead!”
Agora also promotes things like “peak oil,” which I don’t find persuasive, being a long-time believer in the abiotic origin of oil.
These positions are accompanied by promotions throughout its marketing network from which it stands to gain financially, either directly or indirectly.
That surely calls into question the credibility of the positions of anyone deeply connected to them.
Is Paul connected to them in a serious way?
{Added, August 25: Obviously, Agora has also supported anti-war positions that have not won it popularity, so I should give them credit for that and I do.
But I also recognize that the “anti-war” position has a place in the permissible range of public opinion, as long as on crucial issues and events antiwar advocates develop laryngitis. This strategy, devised by the intelligence services, ensures that there is “cognitive diversity” among critics of war and the police state that gives the appearance of a “liberal” political culture, while actually permitting them little impact. It siphons off the energy, time, money, and ambition of perhaps 95% of activists and effectively marginalizes the rest. Zahir Ebrahim has written extensively about this at his depressing but honest website, Project HumanBeingsFirst.]
Besides the tie-in to the establishment via Peterson/Rockefeller and besides the commercial imperative which undermines the sincerity of its positions, there are also Rothschild connections to Agora.
First, Rothschild interests are now directly connected to Rockefeller interests, by a recent merger (which I’ve blogged a couple of times).
Second, there are also direct connections between the Rothschilds and Agora.
I wasn’t sure about some of those, a couple of years ago.
In fact, I thought the allegation that Agora was a Rothschild front was only innuendo concocted at Executive Intelligence Review by ex-Larouchite, Bill Engdahl, who often doesn’t cite his sources and has once picked up leads from me without acknowledgement, likely because I come from the right
That’s why, even though I was disillusioned with Ron Paul by then, I didn’t place much stock in the Engdahl charge, especially when it was picked up on Jennifer Lake’s blog (see this blog post of March 10 2010) and then embellished with a lot of strange errors. I felt the whole thing had to be some kind of disinformation. I certainly didn’t make any connection to Paul. I thought it was a ploy to muddy more concrete legal issues. One can’t be prosecuted for being a Rothschild front, after all, but one can discredit one’s detractors by posing as one, since the whole Rothschild conspiracy is beyond the pale for mainstream analysts and writers. In fact, Lake’s silly comments, which I was forced to address because they libeled me, actually damaged the very thing she – with typical arrogance – thought she was assisting – the public interest. In short, she forced me to state things that tipped off the very people she claimed I was covering for.
That’s why I even thought Agora itself was encouraging the story, a view shared by at least one other credible journalist. For the same reason, I suspect that Tony Ryals, the cyberbully behind all the negative postings about me, isn’t half as insane as he pretends to be. In fact, I think he has indirect ties to Agora himself, since he never mentions the people there who have actual legal responsibility there, like CEO Myles Norin, or their attorney, Matt Turner, or Agora Financial chief, Addison Wiggin, or some of their star traders, like Alan Knuckman.
[Sept 6 – this morning, I checked to find that Ryals’ posts referencing these comments of mine and thus referencing these individuals had been deleted or “disappeared.” Of course, just to make me a liar, they might pop back. But it’s interesting that it’s impossible to stop Ryals’s libels, when it’s someone like me (or others, who aren’t in charge at Agora or whose crimes, if they committed any, are beyond the statute of limitations, but it’s easy enough to get him to remove comments about the people still there.]
Funnier still, Ryals never mentions a former senior employee, Christoph Amberger, whose blog about the company’s shenanigans (cons would be a better word from what I read) was shut down in 2011. Reportedly, this was after he was paid to keep his silence, that is, hold to a non-disclosure agreement under threat of litigation. All traces of his blog about the company’s marketing deceptions (GreenLaserReviews) were wiped off the net in a matter of days.
Instead of mentioning all this, Ryals, who even corresponded with Amberger (who smacked him down for the troll he is) waffles on about Davidson, who is safely beyond reach of prosecution, and, in any case, seems to have more than paid for any sins by his investigations into the Clinton mafia and his insights into the manipulation of the stock markets; Bonner, who probably has no legal liability, as he’s not an officer of the company, and is too wealthy, too cautious, too smart, and too well-connected to get into trouble anyway; and Stansberry, who is already damaged goods and unlikely to get hurt any worse by innuendo.
But leaving aside intriguing theories about the cyber-underworld in which Ryals and his rants reside, I’m still not sure what the Rothschild connections to Agora really amount to. The best I can say is I’m much more willing to believe some people there profit from them.
Why did it take me so long to get to that point?
Because it’s only recently (over the last year) that I’ve had the time to dig around and find any kind of credible accounting of how the Rothschild family might be the financial juggernaut they are said to be on conspiracy sites.
[I got there by adding material posted at Project Humanbeingsfirst to my own research into BCCI (via Engdahl, Skolnik, DeepBlackLies, Yamaguchi.com, Forbes.com, LBMA website and other material.]
Now that I’ve come to think the whole “Rothschild” conspiracy is something more than fiction, I’ve also begun to look at Ron Paul with a more critical eye.
So that’s where I come from on that.
Now, for my own credibility on the subject, given that I too have a connection to Agora.
This is what I have to say.
Except for the attacks following my pieces on Assange (by an attention-seeking Assange groupie, Tom Usher at RealLiberalChristian) and a legal threat at DailyBell by another fanboy and blatant troll, calling himself Al Kyder, and a couple of other things), one hundred percent of the negative posts about me on the net stem from this one supposedly crazy person, who seems to have an indirect connection to Agora.
And all the rest of the monitoring/hacking I’ve experienced stem from my fall-out with Agora too.
What was the monitoring/hacking about? Simple.
In 2008, I gave whatever information I had about certain sensitive issues to responsible journalists and investigators.
There you have it. That’s why their campaign against me didn’t end with the resolution of my IP issues with the company. In fact, it’s the reason why the IP issue keeps festering.
Who likes to be joined at the hip to someone who’s outed them? Who likes to know that someone knows what they are capable of?
That is why they are so bent on isolating me, stirring up third parties against me, and minimizing my influence in every way possible.
Since then, I’ve been warned by good people to “leave it alone” or possibly become even more of a target. And that’s what I’ve tried to do, but it’s not because I’m interested in covering up anything for anyone.
It’s because I see no reason to second-guess the integrity, good faith, and sound judgment of what I’ve been told but take it as solid advice from people who know better than me. And it’s because I believe more evil than good will come from ignoring that advice.
Especially as there’s another layer of complexity to this story.
Agora Inc. was also the last business association of former CIA director, William Colby, who seemingly committed suicide some twenty years ago.
I say seemingly, because the suicide theory has been peddled only recently, and only by one of Colby’s sons. No one else believes it and there’s not much evidence for it.
Thus far, the official story has been that it was an accident.
That sounds just as unlikely to me, as I blogged earlier.
Note: Ryals not only filched the Davidson-Chomsky-Rothbard connection from my blog (posted on July 20), as well as the information about Rees-Mogg’s and Colby’s Le Cercle and Pilgrim connections (which I got by discovering and researching the ISGP.EU site in detail),** he failed to link the post and then tried to pretend that I was covering up something about the Colby killing, when I’d blogged about it as a murder, long ago, in 2010, and before that, in 2009. In fact, I’d been researching Mockingbird, MKUltra, mind-control, and sex-trauma as early as 2004, for my first book, where I have a couple of chapters on the material.
In 2005 I wrote a piece about former CIA director Stansfield Turner and Operation Gladio. It was around then that I also first heard about about Colby.
The fact that I ended up in the company where Colby once worked is one of those strange coincidences that “intention” pulls out of the universe.
And, far from covering up any of this, I’ve blogged repeatedly about it.
For instance, here’s my comment on an interview of Rees-Mogg there:
Posted by Lila Rajiva on 06/05/10 11:59 AM
Sorry. Colby was Cercle and apparently also Opus Dei …
Posted by Lila Rajiva on 06/05/10 11:55 AM
Rees-Mogg is reportedly a member of Le Cercle and the Pilgrim’s Society, as well as the exclusive Roxburghe club – supposedly a very influential part of the Anglo-American establishment. He was backed by speculator and corporate raider, James Goldsmith, relative and close associate of the Rothschilds.
Allegations are made on the left that Rees-Mogg is closely associated with Richard Mellon Scaife. Rees-Mogg is also closely tied to James Davidson, Bill Bonner, and Agora, through the Strategic Investment newsletter and other publications.
Through SI, he’s also linked to William Colby, ex CIA chief, also a Pilgrim Society member, if I’m not mistaken.
By link, I just mean there exists a relationship. It’s by no means clear how that actually plays out, if at all.
Colby was murdered (?) early 1990s. My best guess is it was related to the opening of CIA files with the Church Committee (much earlier)….and inter departmental fighting that resulted; there’s also a connection to a White House- related paedophilia scandal in Nebraska that got hushed up in a hurry. Some have linked that scandal to CIA mind-control operations but I haven’t seen anything conclusive about it. “
It always seemed plausible to me that Colby’s death was a political assassination, given his involvement in Operation Phoenix and Project Mockingbird, his testimony at the Church Committee hearings, his interest in the Nebraska pedophile ring, and his work for the intelligence-affiliated Nugan Hand bank (which had ties to BCCI).
I learned about Le Cercle and the Pilgrim’s Circle from ISGP.eu, and passed that onto the Bell, as well.
I posted the link to ISGP.eu at the Bell below a July 8, 2010 article
Posted by Lila Rajiva on 07/09/10 12:28 PM
Sorry. Two careless mistakes.
@John Treichler (not Treicher, as posted before).
The site is the Institute for the Study of Globalization and Covert Politics (ISGP.eu not ISGPU, as I wrote in a hurry). Written from a very left-wing perspective. Meticulously compiled.
[Note: ISGP eu was up when I posted the link, but googling for it today, I find that the domain is for sale and I find a post at Cryptogon, dating back to January of the same year (2010), saying that the site had disappeared, but that the writer at Cryptogon had saved the information from the google cache in the form of a zip file. However the link he had posted didn’t open to the ISGP.eu file at all. He claimed he had given it to Wikileaks for safe-keeping. I later found it at wikispooks.]
So, that’s my explanation of why the Bell’s dismissal of the Lehrman link isn’t quite enough; why there are other reasons to worry about Paul, such as his connections to Agora; why I was slow to start looking at Paul critically; what Agora’s ties to the Rothschilds might be; and what my connection to the whole business amounts to.
There’s one other thing. The Bell is also a part of the same Agora network to which Paul seems to have ties.
You won’t hear that from them, though. It’s one of those little omissions that are troubling, like the repositioning and revisionism that goes on on the site, at times.
For instance, in the same piece on the Lehrman tie, Wile writes that he knew Assange was disinformation right away.
Not so. He got that from me (see these comments below a piece at Infowars.com
as well as these comments below another piece there.
I was perhaps the only rightist anti-neocon to criticize Assange.
Other debunkers were Wayne Madsen (the first on the case) and Bill Engdahl, both on the left.
Neither of those two, by the way, assembled nearly as comprehensive a critique of Wikileaks as I did.
And I know that research had an impact, because the Guardian ran a piece derived from it shortly after (picking up on the John Shipton lead) and an Australian academic wrote a paper repositioning the cypherpunk association (deconstructed in my pieces) into a narrative more favorable to their man.
Wile relied on that research, as well as material on Gordon Duff’s site, in changing his opinion. Then he exaggerated and ended up with a kind of parody of my criticism of Assange.
This he tends to do, which allows an opening to people like Fed regulator, William Black, whom Wile once made the mistake of criticizing. Black reacted with a petty and surprisingly personal attack, but, when you distort people’s positions, you have to expect vehement reactions.
Wile’s subtle perception management has even caught the attention of many contributors to the Bell, including pro-Paulian goldbugs like Bionic Mosquito and Leonardo Pisano, as well as paper-money anti-Paulians like FauxCapitalist and Memehunter.
Why does he do it? Most likely as a way for the site to stay viable on the net, while conspiracy mongering, or perhaps, as a way to manage the reactions of readers and associates. Nothing wrong with that, but, still, it’s unsettling and tends to make people suspicious.
It’s why I stopped posting on their forum, despite my gratitude to them. for providing a useful and unusual venue for discussions.
I also do respect Wile’s courage in tackling material people usually avoid for fear of losing their credibility.
So the Bell does get a lot of props from me for bravery and unique content, yes, but I also see them as compromised by their financial ties. The same goes for some other libertarian sites I still read.
Other pluses: Wile is almost always polite and he is not as Eurocentric in his thinking as some others.
I should add that I’m not one of those who think he’s running a limited hang-out himself. Or, at least, he is doing it less than most.
Some final thoughts:
First, about Colby and Agora.
Colby had so many enemies that it would be hard to narrow down who murdered him, if he was murdered, without a lot more evidence being uncovered. But no one in officialdom or intelligence is likely to want to do that. And only a fool or a martyr would venture into that territory alone.
About the Agora connection (and, through them, to Paul):
Colby’s name appeared on Agora’s long-running Strategic Investments newsletter, with which the Rothschild-related Rees Mogg is/was affiliated, along with long-time anti-tax advocate, electronic counterfeiting (anti-Naked Short Selling) critic, and Forbes/Scaife protege, James Dale Davidson.
Davidson, Rothbard, and Chomsky all worked together in the 1970s, in antiwar activism, which by itself means little or nothing. Many ideological foes make common cause on single issues.
But, it was not “by itself,” as the evidence shows.
At least one of Paul’s writers (the guy who wrote the race realist pamphlets) is directly tied to Agora.
Paul himself has been incessantly promoted by Agora, until very recently, when affiliates and associates began promoting a few anti-Paul libertarians, like Wendy McElroy, N. Stephen Kinsella, and even Stephan Molyneux, who appeared briefly on the Doug Casey website, and then was pushed out.
It was also from Agora Inc. that I first heard of Ron Paul.
Casey, like Jeff Berwick and what looks like a majority of the hard-money community, is himself closely tied to the Agora network by business affiliation.
So also, as I said earlier, the Daily Bell, with its multiple banking and gold community associations.
These ties may or may not mean anything nefarious, but they would certainly limit what the Bell, or any other libertarian writer in this circle, would be willing or able to say publicly.
Which means I really can’t trust someone in that circle to be too forthcoming about Paul, since they all share business networks.
That is simply common-sense.
Even I have had a hard time writing about Agora’s network, even though all I did was write and do some research there, and the only person I really worked with was Bill Bonner.
To put it as simply as possible for all the trolls who still can’t read my actual words, let alone between my words:
It is difficult to write critically about people with whom you have had personal and professional relationships; who have accessed your personal and business records (illegally).
It is even more difficult when their employees work and live close to where you work and live and they are native-born, while you are an immigrant.
It becomes impossible when the political and economic context is a multi-front global military and economic war, in which your motherland is also involved, and not always as an ally; when the legal and media environment of your adopted country is totalitarian; when your family lives abroad and you are self-employed and modestly well-off, while they have tens of millions of dollars behind them, are connected to intelligence and financial elites, have thousands, if not millions, of subscribers and friends to whom they can outsource their efforts, and when they are marketing, financial, and political players on a global scale.
If that is true of me, how much more is it true of the hard-money community, which is completely encompassed by the Agora network?
I don’t expect any of them to pipe up with anything but support for Ron Paul. They will alienate their business associates, otherwise.
I hope that explains why I don’t think the Bell’s dismissal of the Lehrman tie is sufficient by itself.
I say this as someone who took a long time to open their eyes about Paul.
Which person likes to think they’ve been had? Or, that establishment critics mightn’t be entirely off-base in their criticism of Paul?
As far back as 2008, I heard some mutterings from loyal fans of Paul but said nothing, hoping it was all minor or a mistake.
I even took the part of the LRC crowd against the WSJ in a lengthy blog post.
[As far as that WSJ incident goes, I still stand by the piece ]
In 2010 I spoke up about my dissatisfaction with Paul’s positions at the Daily Bell forum.
I didn’t want to, because I knew Paul supporters would get annoyed by it, but credibility is very important to anyone writing about politics. It should be more important than pleasing the team.
Then, a few people who’ve wanted to discredit me for supporting libertarian positions(albeit nuanced and rather more conservative ones than that of the anarcho-caps), or for criticizing Assange (albeit in a most circumspect and balanced way than his other detractors), or for deconstructing Ron Paul and his libertarian promoters (albeit factually and with respect), have tried to claim that I’m covering up for this or that person.
The truth is exactly the opposite. I’ve been libeled, monitored, and undermined covertly, almost continuously since 2007. I’ve also been plagiarized repeatedly and marginalized.
I don’t really believe the government was behind any of that, except maybe at a very low level, in so far as some petty operatives might have been employed by my enemies to do the dirty work.
So, there is no cover up on my part. Or paranoia. What I say is not a lie. It’s not propaganda. It’s not a smear or anything but the most truth it is possible, helpful, and advisable for anyone in my position to speak.
For the umpteenth time, I’m not RAW, nor CIA, nor Jihadi, nor Hindu fascist. I’m just a writer, with a lot of interests, an eclectic background, and too much curiosity and impetuosity for her own good.
It was a meaningful synchronicity that I got involved in the whole business. I don’t say that to promote myself, create a mystery, or confuse the situation. I say it because that is really how it happened.
There are mysteries of “intention,” “attraction,” and the cycles of time. And they have nothing to do with “dissembling”, “disinformation,” or “RAW”.
The innuendos by Jennifer Lake, Tony Ryals, and Tom Usher are simply smears, even if they are understandable smears.
There really are more things in earth and heaven, Horatio…
[Added: August 5, 2017, I deleted the link on this page to http://occultview.com/category/astrology because my security software sent me a malware alert for it. You can google the site directly.]
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