Category Archives: Propaganda

Ron Paul Implosion: End The Fed To Technology Revolution…

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The Pauls have lost all credibility with me.

Read their latest missive, blogged at EPJ

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

They’ve abandoned the financial battle.

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

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

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

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

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

So, what do I think about the new campaign?

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

See my comment at The Daily Bell in 2010:

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

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

(Doug Casey on Presidents, LRC)

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

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

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

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

Forbes:

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

I’m going to call foul on that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

@Pisano.

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

There. Back to “business.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Talk about Trojan horses.

Big corporations cannot be analyzed separately from government.

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

Especially when it comes from seasoned politicians like the Pauls.

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

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

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

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

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

It was way behind. Gates himself admitted it.

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

It looks like Big Data is bankrolling him.

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

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

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

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

Blogging Skirmishes, Donkeys, and Chomsky’s Taxes..

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Some weird things have been happening to my blog….minor, but worth recounting.

First. A week or two ago, my blog was suspended because of a huge amount of spam that got sent my way.  That happened just after my first posts questioning the Gupta trial verdict. Not to worry, I told myself, can happen to any blog. Of course, in five years, it’s never before happened to my blog….

Second.  A video that I had posted on my blog was deleted….I didn’t delete it. Then that video shows up posted on a friend’s blog. The exact same thing happened last year, with another video that I didn’t delete either, which someone deleted from my blog.

OK. Petty harassment.

Third.  I opened my admin panel and found someone else added as a user. I didn’t add the person’s email.  So I deleted it. Next day, another user was added. I deleted it again.

Fourth,  I make a habit of searching my name to check blog comments or follow ups.  When I click the tab BLOGS on the side of the search, the top link these days  is to Veterans Today, where an error notice pops up saying an article apparently written by me has been taken down.  I’ve not written anything for VT since February 2011 and only wrote a few pieces for them, anyway. I asked them whether there was anything with my name on it on their site these days, they said no. So this is a google cache that someone is sending to the top of blog comments, for some reason.

Fifth. My blog posts show up in searches of Rajat Gupta, usually in the first two pages, sometimes quite high up.  In the last few days when I clicked on them, I found they were all set to private. I haven’t set any of those posts to private.

It’s possible that when updating the entire blog might have gone to private a few times, but why would individual posts change to private without my doing anything?

The posts that changed to private were all controversial ones:

One about Chomsky being for taxes for other people, but not for himself.

One about gold holdings by different countries, showing that India and China have much less than the developed countries and suggesting neo-colonial motives in manipulation of gold and currencies.

One about Goldman knowing all about Galleon and Gupta being a patsy ( a recent one)

Since I blogged, they’ve all been changed back. But I took screen shots,  so it’s not imagination or paranoia.

And a few other things.

I noticed at least one mainstream paper in India responding almost point for point to concerns about the trial I’d raised in my blog.

And then there was the Tahrir Square video on Gurcharan Das’s blog, which, as I said, was on the home page when I blogged it, and then the next day was hidden.

The internet, friends, is not an unalloyed force for good.

No more than TV was.  It is not instant liberation, as naive people like to say it is.

Heartwarming to say things like that. Not terribly true.

Something is good only in proportion to the motives with which it used.

The many well-intended people who use the internet do  make it a force for good.

Unfortunately, the net is also teeming with intelligence operatives, criminals, sting-operations, fakes, frauds,  and  police-state busybodies, who do not ever let really spontaneous interchange take place. They must have a thumb on the scales and rig the deal. They must manage the outcome so it goes in their favor….

Or supports their agenda.

Part of which is to lull people into a false sense of power and security on the net, so they put all their information out there. This is do-it-yourself surveillance. 24/7 and updated by the second.

Radical transparency is the carrot.  The internet kill-switch is the stick.

Either way, the donkey moves forward.

And when one donkey moves forward, so do all the others.

The net appeals to the herd in us.

Internet herds are no less herds because they are electronic. Think about the electronic trading that stampedes the market this way and that.

The internet may liberate us.

Equally, it may enslave us.

Right now it’s 50-50.

These days  I’d say  all bets are off.

Preet Bharara – Overhyped and Toothless

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Gary Weiss in Salon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rajat Gupta Trial: The Goldfinger Defense

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Goldfinger said: “My friends in Chicago have a saying, Mr. Bond. Once is Happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time, it’s enemy action.

Someone at The New York Times must be reading my blog.

Just as I started weaving my very creative and cogent conspiracy theory about the Gupta case ( my conspiracy theories always turn out to be true, you’ll notice) they trot out this article explaining that Goldman may be paying for Gupta, but they really hate doing it because Gary Naftalis, Gupta’s lawyer, is saying all those mean, mean things about them.

“To say that Goldman Sachs has paid Gupta’s legal bills grudgingly would be an understatement. Not only did Gupta abuse his role as a Goldman director, the jury determined, but Gupta’s lawyers assailed the bank throughout the trial.”

But all that is beside the point. The point is Gupta didn’t win what should have been an easy case. 

For $30 million bucks, a very high sum even for such a high–profile case, I wouldn’t take anything except a win.

So slamming Goldman means nothing.

People say nasty things about Goldman all day long, and all they’re doing is letting off steam.

I bet the powers-that-be are quite happy for people to let off steam. They get to know what everyone’s thinking without the bother of opinion-polls. And they know if you’re venting on a blog, you’re unlikely to be blowing up a bridge, hacking a military computer, or putting together a legal brief that would really put some of the BigBoyz away.

Stomping around, muttering  and swearing, is a fairly safe thing to do, unless in your muttering, you’re also puncturing the hot-air balloons floated by the establishment.

[That’s our thankless but quite enjoyable task on this blog. Not that you’ll find any “hero of liberty” here. Heroes should be prepared to die. We’re not even willing to be sued.]

Anyway, back to Naftalis. It’s not the cussing out of Goldman that counts. It’s the evidence supporting the defense.

In the final count, Naftalis wasn’t able to get the evidence through to Rakoff – that’s all that matters and that’s what worries me…and has me worrying that the fix is in.

So The NY Times gets E, for effort, for making the PR case for Goldman so swiftly, but B- for plausibility.

I’ll stick with my Goldman Fix conspiracy for now.

The NYTimes goes on:

“They depicted Goldman as a cesspool of tipsters feeding Rajaratnam inside information. A defense lawyer called Lloyd C. Blankfein, Goldman’s chief executive who was forced to testify for three days, “cold and callous.”

Lila: Well, dah-links (in my best Zsa-Zsa manner) there were Goldman tipsters running around all over the place. And  it would be human to suspect Lloyd Blankfein didn’t exactly keep a zipped lip from sunrise to sundown, did he?

On prattles the conscience of the nation:

“….The “cold and callous” remark about Mr. Blankfein came from a defense lawyer who said that Mr. Blankfein didn’t remember laying off about 3,000 people during the financial crisis. A spokesman for the bank accused the lawyer of distorting Mr. Blankfein’s testimony.”

Oh dear. This gets more entertaining by the minute.

Where have we heard those words before?

Why, it’s straight out of —

Goldfinger!

Goldfinger, he`s the man, the man with the Midas touch
A spider`s touch
Such a cold finger beckons you to enter his web of sin
But don`t go in
Golden words he will pour in your ear
But his lies can`t disguise what you fear…

...Golden words he will pour in your ear
But his lies can`t disguise what you fear
For a golden girl knows when he`s kissed her
It`s the kiss of death from Mister
Goldfinger, pretty girl, beware of this heart of gold
This heart is cold
He loves only gold
Only gold
He loves gold
He loves only gold
Only gold
He loves gold!!!!!!

With suitable “ed-jessment” for gender…. and agenda…and minus all the hard evidence (wire-taps of actual tips being passed by Goldman tipsters), that’s what the defense amounted to – Goldfinger!

LOL

Of course, it’s not too far from the facts, come to think of it.

We know Lloyd Blankfein came out of  J. Aron, the trading company. As did Gary Cohn. We pointed out what Blankfein’s trading background meant for the firm back in 2006 at Money Week.

Lloyd was originally a gold trader himself.

And both Blankfein and Cohn have been named as the source of Goldman’s problems in the recent past, by managing director Greg Smith, who jumped ship publicly this March.

So a Goldfinger defense actually works (or, rather, it should have worked).

More Lulz..

(To be continued in the next post)

Rajat Gupta: Goldman Footing Legal Bills, Says Anonymous Source

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The WTF quotient of this bizarre case shoots up even higher.

Someone from Goldman is leaking anonymously that Gupta’s bills –  to the tune of $30 million and counting – are being footed by Goldman itself. With Procter & Gamble picking up the rest.

Startribune:

Goldman foots bulk of Gupta’s $30M legal bill

For Goldman Sachs, the insider trading case against former board member Rajat Gupta which ended in a conviction Friday, was distracting and embarrassing. It has also been very expensive. Goldman Sachs has paid for the bulk of Gupta’s legal defense, which has cost nearly $30 million, according to two people with direct knowledge of the case who requested anonymity because they were unauthorized to discuss it publicly. Procter & Gamble, on whose board Gupta also served, has picked up the balance of the bill. A jury found Gupta guilty of leaking Goldman’s private boardroom discussions to the former hedge fund titan Raj Rajaratnam. He was acquitted on a count related to divulging secrets about P&G. Gupta plans to appeal.”

Comment

[Lila, June 19, 2012. This has since been confirmed as factual and not a rumor or PR]

Hmm. We don’t think too much of anonymous leaking.  Sounds like Goldman PR. The guy is coming off sympathetically, so maybe some one wants to stir up a little bad feeling. Kind of obvious.

They figured they’d axe the guy and everyone would be dancing in the streets and asking for blood. But most people seem to realize that even if Gupta did what he did, insider trading is a small time side-show on Wall Street.  Not the really bad stuff. Most people get that.

And the Indian business world didn’t break down and sob with contrition either, which also flummoxed the ruling class. I mean what good is a psyop, if your target holds up his middle finger back at you?

Reuters ran a piece telling the Indian business community to get a better cause.

The Financial Times (pretty much a mouthpiece for the financial establishment) scolded them for showing support for Gupta.

Then it trotted out various Indian chamchas to pontificate about how corrupt Indian business is, which is true but irrelevant, since Indian business culture has nothing to do with what went on here.

Rajat Gupta lived all his life in the West. He graduated  from Harvard Business School, for pete’s sake. The guy is a product of Western business culture. Go wag a finger at Harvard.

They even had one Gurcharan Das – must be a pretty naive guy – to come out with the proper attitude the wogs are supposed to take about all this. Notice that Gurcharan Das has a website that shows him speechifying at Tahrir Square (US Intel-led revolution)and advising Indians not to let a good crisis go to waste

(this is pure globalist-speak).

[June 19: Further conspiracy note: when I got up today and checked, I noticed that the reference to Tahrir Square etc. had been cut out from my blog post, even though I clearly remember saving it.  I must be confused right? But then, when I checked Gurcharan Das’s website this morning, the video on the home page was no longer about Tahrir Square. It had been switched to something else. The Tahrir Square video had got tucked away inside. Hmm-mmm.]

“It’s the classic problem of status anxiety. It’s what we all suffer from in some form,” said Mr Das, who is the author most recently of The Difficulty of Being Good, a book that draws on the philosophical lessons of the Hindu epic, the Mahabharata.

“As head of McKinsey he was associating with CEOs and billionaires earning very large sums. His job was to advise people with a lot of capital, not to be an owner of capital. He got new ambitions.”

You’ll recognize the  “greed” meme which the establishment pushed heavily to explain what happened.

Fool's Gold: How Unrestrained Greed Corrupted a Dream, Shattered Global Markets and Unleashed a Catastrophe

That’s to distract from the rather obvious origins of the financial crisis in government policy abetted by the criminal actions of connected firms, and not in some generic evil capitalist greed curling around Wall Street like a miasma.

Mr Das also highlighted the “glaring” contrast between an erratic and slow-moving Indian legal system that often protects the well-connected, and the swift and harsh punishment handed out by the powerful US courts. “We sometimes catch [people] but we don’t convict,” he said.

“What the US system is saying is that no one is above the law.”

Poor dear Mr. Das. He must have been struck blind and deaf in the past decade if he believes that “in the US system no one is above the law”.

But I guess, even though Das is doing the talking, he’s really a sock puppet, for his masters.

Like this chap, remember him?

But back to Goldman footing Gupta’s bills. Say it’s not just clever PR from Goldman. Say it’s true.

Why would they do that?

Probably because they really wanted Gupta to get off?  If he’s been a corporate wise man all these years, he’s bound to know where some bodies are buried. Lord knows what he’s going to start saying around sentencing time.

[Or maybe they want to make sure the crowd gets someone to pay for all the excesses of the last few decade.  At Forbes, Richard Levick apparently thinks Gupta deserves the harshest sentence possible just because he didn’t make money on the tip, but wanted to become a bigger player..]

Still, I had no idea that criminal defense teams were part of the severance package at these places. Maybe it has to be.

Given what we know about Wall Street culture,  an individually-wrapped securities lawyer is a non-negotiable perk, like stock options, or something.

Or maybe, I wonder if it doesn’t tell us something else.  May be if they’re footing the bill for Gupta, they’re also picking the lawyer. (Naftalis and Bharara are old friends (I originally wrote Rakoff, but I now read that Bharara is a friend of Naftalis, as well, and I can’t find the place I read the reference to Rakoff, so I’ve deleted it))

And maybe if that’s the case, this is even more of a set-up than I thought.

Rajat Gupta: Establishment Trying To Spin Jury’s Unholy Haste

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Ha ha. The establishment is trying to put out some good spin to cover up for the haste with which this obviously rotten case was tried and resolved.  Good try, but people are shocked with good reason, they can see the fix is in, and all the slanted articles aren’t going to hide the stink rising from this steaming pile of dung that just got offloaded in Manhattan.

Here’s the Wall Street Journal, spinning like top:

“During the four-week trial of former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. director Rajat Gupta, juror David Klein often glanced in different directions than his fellow jurors.

“When they were intently focused on a witness on the stand, Mr. Klein would be eyeing Mr. Gupta,” said defense trial consultant Julie Blackman.

Mr. Klein, 53 years old, initially voted to acquit Mr. Gupta on all counts, the only holdout among the 12 jurors in the insider-trading case, according to jurors.

In an interview, Mr. Klein said he wanted to approach the case methodically. “The case was based entirely on circumstantial evidence that warranted more scrutiny,” he said. “I didn’t think it was something we should rush into.”

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

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(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)

Climate-Gate: The 2011 Edition

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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

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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

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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)