Willem Buiter’s Bunny Boiler: Finance Capital Takes Down Its Foes?

Willem Buiter, an eminent economist, has been the victim, so it seems, of a stalker.

Heleen Mees, once on the short list for Secretary of Finance, has been charged, and now jailed, for harassing Mr. Buiter and his family, in the aftermath of an affair between the two.

At first reading, it seems to be a “Fatal Attraction” situation.

You remember the movie?

Attractive, talented, overly intense mid-life career woman has a brief affair with a married man.

Once the hormones have run their course, married man (the palpably lecherous Michael Douglas) wants to move on.

But horny, opera-loving mistress (Glenn Close) wants “happily ever after.”

Love deteriorates swiftly into obsession (her) and revulsion (him).  The obsessed lover turns into a stalker prone to hanging out on her victim’s lawn who, ultimately, cooks his kid’s pet rabbit.

[The term “bunny boiler” has since entered the lexicon as a hip signifier of (a tad too) crazy love.]

The movie managed to appeal to both piety and prurience by mixing a morality fable (see what happens when you cheat on mommy? – frown) with x-rated scenes in elevators (see what happens when you cheat on mommy!! – smile) .

So is Willem Buiter just suffering the aftermath of “crazy love”?

Or is something more going on?

On this blog, I’ve said I think about 85% of everything going on in the major media in the West (and thus all over the globe) is related to intelligence. Most of it is a psyop or propaganda/ disinformation of some kind.  The rest is commercial pumping or gossip intended to overpower more significant news.

How does the Buiter story rate?

Well, it sets off all of my BS-detectors. Here’s why:

1. Buiter is not just any “eminent” economist. He’s the chief economist of mega bank, Citigroup, the home of former Goldman Sachs honcho and Treasury Sec, Robert Rubin.

Buiter has also chaired the World Economic Forum and been a member of the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee. He was also the chief economist of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.

It doesn’t get more “elite” or connected than that.

Buiter has also been a professor at the London School of Economics, at Princeton, and at Yale. He’s written books. He’s voiced his opinions at a Financial Times blog and in articles in the major media.

Given that high profile, you’d think he’d take care of his private life a bit more.

2. Buiter is not just extraordinarily highly placed, he’s also been a vocal critic of the loose monetary polices of the Fed, more specifically, of Sir Alan Greenspan. Here’s a sample:

The Greenspan Fed: A Tragedy of Errors (April 8, 2008):

“………

1. The Greenspan Fed (August 1987 – January 2006) did indeed contribute, through excessively lax monetary policy, to the US housing boom that has now turned to bust

2.The Greenspan-Bernanke put is real. It is an example of an inappropriate monetary policy response to a stock market decline……….

3. Nonetheless, Buiter was no anarcho-capitalist, keen on defending finance capital even in its criminal  manifestations. He was smart enough to see through this brand of market fundamentalism as a ploy whereby finance capital seizes power.

In his now defunct blog at the Financial Times, Maverecon, he has a piece about Greenspan in which he attacks Greenspan’s “naive” belief that capital markets are self-regulating.

Notice, however,  that Buiter apportions only a part of the blame to interest-rate manipulation.

Instead of seeing opportunism and very likely malicious intent in what Greenspan did (it’s considered anti-Semitic conspiracy theory to even suggest malice in the Fed Chairman), he also palms off Greenspan’s misdeeds onto his (Greenspan’s) view of capital markets, ostensibly a “libertarian” view.

Actually, the idea that Greenspan was a  “libertarian” at any time in in his political life (as opposed to his youth) is so much disinformation put out by the mainstream press. As Ayn Rand immediately recognized, Greenspan, after his Objectivist phase, was nothing more or less than a careerist, more interested in power than in principle of any kind.

Despite this error, a large part of  Buiter’s analysis focuses – correctly, in my opinion – on “too big to fail” institutions and the problem of “regulatory capture.”

The latter term has been popularized by regulator William Black, as well as by Deep Capture blog, which supports Black’s approach strongly.

I’ll repeat once more that I support Black’s (and Deep Capture’s) work on regulatory capture and think Austrians do themselves a disservice by dismissing that analysis. Regulatory capture is much more than just froth floating on top of the ocean of interest rate manipulation.

So my point is not to denigrate Buiter’s work, but to say that in effect it constructed a via media between the Austrian critique and mainstream economics, making it very effective.

Yet, though he was mainstream enough to be given a visible platform in the major media,  Buiter spoke truth to power as he saw it. He launched a sustained attack on elite financiers and bankers.

He called them out even by name (links to follow).

In April 2008, he and his wife Anne Sibert, herself an eminent economist at Birbeck College, London, wrote a paper about the Icelandic banking crisis that was presented in July to the government of Iceland. It was considered too market sensitive to be presented publicly and was  kept under wraps until August (W. Buiter, A. Sibert, The Icelandic banking crisis and what to do about it, CEPR Policy Insight No. 26).

Buiter wrote about it in a post called “All in the Family” on his Maverecon blog in March 2009:

My wife, Anne Sibert, has just been appointed an external member of the provisional Monetary Policy Committee of the Central Bank of Iceland (CBI).  The five-member provisional MPC has three executive or internal members:  CBI Governor Svein Harald Øygard, Deputy Governor Arnór Sighvatsson and Þórarinn G. Pétursson, the CBI´s Chief Economist, and two external experts, Anne Sibert and  Gylfi Zoëga. This Monetary Policy Committee will operate on a provisional basis, with formal appointments for the next five years likely to be made following national elections in Iceland in April.

Iceland’s largest three internationally active banks collapsed during the autumn of 2008; its currency collapsed and tight capital and foreign exchange controls are now in place.  That this was the likely outcome of Iceland’s unsustainable credit boom and banking sector over-expansion had been predicted in a paper by Anne Sibert and myself, written in April 2008 (for fruit flies, a shorter version can be found here).”

Now for my theory of an elite take-down:

It was later that same year,  in the summer of 2008, that a pulchritudinous, multi-lingual ultra-feminist lawyer and doctoral economics student, Heleen Mees, approached the eminent economist for help with her dissertation (I’m not sure in what capacity).

Ms. Mees would have been 39 then. Buiter would have been 58. That is not unheard of, certainly, but are ultra feminist theoreticians prone to taking up with men twenty years older than they are, who are, moreover, married with children? I don’t know. Perhaps they are.

But there is not only a large age gap, there is an ideological gap. Mr. Buiter is a liberal.

Ms. Mees seems to be a radical, who wants quotas for women mandated by the state. She has argued that 35% of top jobs should be set aside for women. She has attacked women who stay at home and do not take up independent careers:

“Women’s contribution to the Dutch economy is around 27%. A raw estimate shows that if women would work a bit more outside the home and thus increase their contribution to the Dutch economy to, say, 35%, this would generate an additional 11% in GDP growth, some €60 billion per year. Women would still be working only half as much as men outside the home. With the extra money women would generate, the government could take care of the aging population and still have billions to spend on education and childcare.” (The Cost of the Gender Gap)

Note: Finance capital is a major supporter of gender set-asides in the work-place.

Radical feminist lawyers I’m sure have jumped into bed with men of differing ideology, but let’s add it to the oddities in this case.

So not only does Ms. Mees approach Mr. Buiter, a prominent and very married man 20 years older than she is, to help her, she boldly dedicates her thesis to him (“For Willem – May You Live in Interesting Times”), even though a lawyer, even a feminist lawyer, would know that her own credibility might suffer if her professional achievements were intertwined with her sexuality.

“Women on Top” – the female empowerment group she founded – was surely not intended to represent the sexual modus operandi of women who reach the top.

Now take a look at Ms. Mees’ thesis, “Changing Fortunes: How China’s Boom Caused the Financial Crisis,” published last year, 2012.

It is an argument that the financial crisis was the result of a savings glut caused by the Chinese.

But when I read an article from 2011, Ms. Mees is definitely blaming loose monetary policy for the financial crisis,

In fact, at least in that article, Ms. Mees blames the financial crisis solely on monetary policy, and dismisses entirely any narrative about the misuse/criminal use of financial instruments and the misbehavior of the rating agencies.

In other words, Ms. Mees, remarkably, for someone of her gender feminist proclivities, seems to be blaming the government solely for the financial crisis and dismissing any criticism of bankers, financiers, and regulatory bodies.

A pure Austrian position from a statist.

Now isn’t that interesting? Whereas Mr. Buiter blames and attacks major financiers and bankers (including Mr. Paulson), in addition to interest rate manipulation, Ms. Mees does not.

She dismisses regulatory capture.

That, as I’ve blogged before, is a hall-mark of the financial establishment, some part of which embraces Austrian theory out of its own self-interest. Ms. Mees, you can be sure, is not blaming the Federal interest rate policy because of any hatred of government.

Even more interesting, Ms. Mees has contributed frequently to the Soros-funded Project Syndicate website…….

Returning to the love-affair, if such it was, we don’t know much so far about its history, but it seems that it was some time in 2010 that Ms. Mees began emailing Mr. Buiter in a harassing fashion.

That would be the year  Mr. Buiter left his bureaucratic posts and became the chief economist of Citigroup.

In 2011, the emailing escalated. From July of 2011, more than a thousand emails were sent to Mr. Buiter, including explicit self-portraits, erotic offers, and even subtle and overt threats to him. It seems that it was fear for his wife and kids, who also got emails, that finally pushed Mr. Buiter to go to the courts and get a restraining order.

One of the emails was a picture of dead birds. “Fatal Attraction” with an added overlay of “The Birds”?

Seems a little “stagey” to me.

And a thousand emails, some with naked women in them, would seem as if someone were trying to entrap Mr. Buiter? That is, if there ever was a “relationship” that was not set up by Ms. Mees in the first place.

Now another oddity: Didn’t Ms. Mees, an attorney and scholar who specialized in gender issues, know she was engaging in criminal behavior? Why didn’t she stop after Mr. Buiter sent her a cease and desist letter in February 2013?  She is, I repeat a 44 year old activist lawyer and PhD economics scholar/teacher at some of the world’s most prominent universities, a polyglot comfortable in 5 languages, including Mandarin, the published author of several influential books, an outspoken feminist, a fit attractive woman with a major media platform.

That is a life of self-discipline that is hard to reconcile with the complete loss of control shown in the emails.

And yet another strange aspect of this strange business is that Ms. Mees, a lawyer and NYU professor, doesn’t have $5000 for bail and needs a legal aid lawyer?

Even if she doesn’t have money herself, doesn’t she have friends and family who can spring for the money? She did move in rather well-educated professional circles.

But what if Ms. Mees wants to go to jail to get maximum mileage from the whole scandal?

That would also be psychologically in keeping with someone who wants to destroy an ex-lover.

But it is also what someone who wanted to get Mr. Buiter for other reasons might do. Keeps the story in the public gaze.

Another thought occurs to me.

If someone wanted to publicly diminish Mr. Buiter, provoking him into asking for a restraining order would make sense. It puts Mees’ raunchy emails into the public domain.

Forcing the situation into the legal realm also and more crucially makes Mr. Buiter’s own private emails a legitimate target for legal discovery.

If someone did “take down” Buiter in retaliation for his criticism of certain big names, there is precedence for it.

Remember what happened to Eliot Spitzer when he started getting too close to some of the financiers/bankers (Hank Greenberg, Hank Paulson) whose misdeeds shaped the financial crisis?

(To Be Continued)

William Blake: A Prophecy

On Independence Day, in this first year of America’s full subjugation by the New World Order of  London (“the City”), an  excerpt from William Blake, “A Prophecy” seems apt:

“The Terror answer’d: `I am Orc, wreath’d round the accursèd tree:
The times are ended; shadows pass, the morning ‘gins to break;

The fiery joy, that Urizen perverted to ten commands,
What night he led the starry hosts thro’ the wide wilderness,
That stony Law I stamp to dust; and scatter Religion abroad
To the four winds as a torn book
, and none shall gather the leaves;
But they shall rot on desert sands, and consume in bottomless deeps,
To make the deserts blossom, and the deeps shrink to their fountains,
And to renew the fiery joy, and burst the stony roof;
That pale religious lechery, seeking Virginity,
May find it in a harlot, and in coarse?clad honesty
The undefil’d, tho’ ravish’d in her cradle night and morn;
For everything that lives is holy, life delights in life;
Because the soul of sweet delight can never be defil’d.
Fires enwrap the earthly globe, yet Man is not consum’d;
Amidst the lustful fires he walks; his feet become like brass,
His knees and thighs like silver, and his breast and head like gold.

`Sound! sound! my loud war?trumpets, and alarm my Thirteen Angels!
Loud howls the Eternal Wolf! the Eternal Lion lashes his tail!
America is dark’ned; and my punishing Demons, terrifièd,
Crouch howling before their caverns deep, like skins dry’d in the wind.

They cannot smite the wheat, nor quench the fatness of the earth;
They cannot smite with sorrows, nor subdue the plough and spade;
They cannot wall the city, nor moat round the castle of princes;
They cannot bring the stubbèd oak to overgrow the hills;
For terrible men stand on the shores, and in their robes I see
Children take shelter from the lightnings: there stands Washington,
And Paine, and Warren, with their foreheads rear’d toward the East.
But clouds obscure my agèd sight. A vision from afar!
Sound! sound! my loud war?trumpets, and alarm my Thirteen Angels!
Ah, vision from afar! Ah, rebel form that rent the ancient
Heavens! Eternal Viper self?renew’d, rolling in clouds,
I see thee in thick clouds and darkness on America’s shore,
Writhing in pangs of abhorrèd birth; red flames the crest rebellious
And eyes of death; the harlot womb, oft openèd in vain,
Heaves in enormous circles: now the times are return’d upon thee,
Devourer of thy parent, now thy unutterable torment renews.
Sound! sound! my loud war?trumpets, and alarm my Thirteen Angels!
Ah, terrible birth! a young one bursting! Where is the weeping mouth,
And where the mother’s milk? Instead, those ever?hissing jaws
And parchèd lips drop with fresh gore: now roll thou in the clouds;
Thy mother lays her length outstretch’d upon the shore beneath.
Sound! sound! my loud war?trumpets, and alarm my Thirteen Angels!
Loud howls the Eternal Wolf! the Eternal Lion lashes his tail!’

For an explication of the symbolism of this profoundly significant poem, indispensable to understanding such terms as “empire,” “elites,” and “illuminati,” see here.

At this blog I’m both too lazy and too discreet to say everything I want – or need- to say….

You readers out there will have to put two and two together at least once in a while.

Judgment At Nuremberg

“(An old post from my archives (May 2007):

“Just watching – intermittently – Stanley Kramer’s Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) – with Montgomery Clift in the role of the mentally defective man questioned by Maximilian Schell (who won an Academy Award for his performance) about his sterilization under the Nazis. Clift is riveting in his scene but to my mind Schell is even better as counsel for the defense.

In the scene following, there is a dialogue about the culpability of ordinary people in the government’s actions. I don’t necessarily agree, given the power of the government to propagandize and coerce and its apparent immunity to criticism. But it still makes you think..

“There are no Nazis in Germany – the Eskimos invaded and took over the country. It wasn’t the fault of the Germans; it was the fault of those damn Eskimos…. “

And in a later scene about the concentration camps:

“They say we killed millions of people..millions..how could it be possible? How?”

And the response:

“It’s not the killing that’s the problem..it’s the disposing of the bodies…”

And after Marlene Dietrich denies knowing anything about what was going on,

“As far as I can tell, there was no one who knew anything…”

A lot of interesting performers in the film – Judy Garland, Marlene Dietrich, Burt Lancaster, Spencer Tracy, William Shatner and the son of the conductor Otto von Klemperer. (A friend writes to tell me that he is T.V.’s Colonel Klink (in Hogan’s Heroes). I’ll take his word for it… 

Other quotes stand out:

“Once again it was done for love of country..”

Maybe we didn’t know the details. But if we didn’t know, maybe it was because we didn’t want to know….”

“But if he is to be found guilty, there are others who went along who also must be found guilty”

“Why did we succeed, your honor? What about the rest of the world? Did it not know the intentions of the Third Reich, did it not read the words of Mein Kampf? Where is the responsibility of the Soviet Union….where is the responsibility of the Vatican…….where is the responsibility of Winston Churchill? Where is the responsibility of those American industrialists who helped Hitler?Is Germany alone guilty…

the whole world is as responsible for Hitler as Germany is.

Ernst Janning said he was guilty..if he was guilty, then his guilt was the world’s guilt no less, no more.. ”

More:

“What difference does it make if a few political extremists lose their rights? What difference does it make if a few racial minorities lose their rights?”

And this, again, about the camps:
“Break the body, break the spirit, break the heart..”

But the best line may be at the end, when Burt Lancaster calls Spencer Tracy into his cell and says, “I never thought it would come to this,” and Spencer Tracy responds,

“The first time you convicted an innocent person you knew it would come to this.”

Ilana Mercer: Language Police Should Go To Hell

Ilana Mercer has the guts to say what Paula Deen apparently can’t:

“Ms. Deen appears to be a productive person who works hard and leads a good life. The Food Network, Wal-Mart and Caesars Entertainment have purged Paula, but her fans—hungry for the treacle of her voice and cooking—are packing into the “Paula Deen Cruise” liner, and buying up her latest cookbook from Amazon.

“Go to hell” is what Ms. Deen should tell her detractors and wishy-washy, condescending defenders alike. The latter, it would seem, are offering up in her defense nothing but mitigating circumstances, the kind that attach to a crime.”

Comment:

The entire globe is being spied on at all hours of day and night by a totalitarian network; the financial system is in slow-motion collapse everywhere; and the outrage du jour is some woman saying n***** aeons ago…or maybe, once to an employee…or thereabouts.

Who cares?  On the street, n***** is the least of the things I’ve heard.  Call a women a “c***”, a “b****” and a “whore” all day long, and you’re ready for prime-time. No smelling salts needed.

Crawl through the forums on Asian sites and you’ll see us brown devils outdoing each other in PUBLIC name-calling.

I haven’t noticed any apologies….

Black people say “cracker” and “honky” all the time.  Tamils call Europeans and Americans “vellakaras” (whites in a slightly derogatory fashion). Maybe you think “whitey” doesn’t carry the history of degradation that the “n” word does.

True. But if I ask you to stop using the “n word” then I must be prepared to fore-go “cracker,” “honky,” “polack,” “kike,” “wog”…. and all the rest.

Something tells me most of us aren’t prepared to do that.

People use nasty language when they feel mad about something. It’s normal and it’s human.

Some of us do it more than others, for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with growing up white in the pre-Civil Rights South.

Afterthought:

Question for Ms Mercer.  After posting the video of a white woman beaten up during a horrific home invasion by a black man, you write:

“The hate crime you endured will not mitigate or explain any future slip-of-the-tongue. You may stereotype an elderly, highly successful white woman, based on her tribe’s past wrongdoing; but you dare not attach statistical significance to the misdeeds of a black man, because of his group’s considerable contribution to crime.”

If, after a video of the financial crimes of Mr. Blankfein, Mr. Greenberg, Mr. Paulson, Mr. Cohen, Mr. Madoff, Mr. Milken, Mr. Boesky, Mr. Soros…..and after another video of the “shock-and-awe” treatment of Baghdad, the bombing of Libya, the attack on the USS Liberty, and, for good measure, the espionage of Mr. Pollard, I were to write in the same vein of other groups, would you still stick with your brave argument?

Edward Snowden’ World Historical Leak, In Context…

Business Insider:

“Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971, described the

Snowden’s disclosures — which amount to the first concrete evidence of the NSA’s domestic surveillance apparatus — as the most important leak in American history.”

So, now girls and boys, since I know you aren’t all as juvenile as you sound (“It’s a hero!…. it’s a spy!….it’s super—man!”), here’s a little run-down from the world of boring non comic-book adults. To wit, here’s

a brief history of the public exposure of the surveillance state, prior to the apotheosis of Edward Snowden, formerly of Fort Meade, Maryland, now of Russia, Ecuador, Hongkong, etc. etc.:

In 1996 ( that would be 17 years before Snowdon), Nicky Hager, a New Zealand journalist, exposed New Zealand’s involvement in Echelon, a satellite network, run by the Western powers, that had the ability to intercept practically all communications across the globe.

I blogged about it at length way back in 2010  here: – http://mindbodypolitic.com/2010/06/27/echelon-the-global-spy-system/.

“ECHELON links together all these facilities, providing the US and its allies with the ability to intercept a large proportion of the communications on the planet.

The computers at each station in the ECHELON network automatically search through the millions of messages intercepted for ones containing pre-programmed keywords. Keywords include all the names, localities, subjects, and so on that might be mentioned. Every word of every message intercepted at each station gets automatically searched whether or not a specific telephone number or e-mail address is on the list.

The thousands of simultaneous messages are read in “real time” as they pour into the station, hour after hour, day after day, as the computer finds intelligence needles in telecommunications haystacks.”

Mind you, Hager’s book, based on an article for the magazine, Covert Quarterly, was itself late in the game, as she herself he himself acknowledged. Here’s the relevant part from the my blog post in 2010:

“Per Cryptome, the earliest public report on Echelon is in 1972. The first reporter to write on it is British intelligence reporter, Duncan Campbell: “They’ve Got It Taped,” New Statesman, August 12, 1988 (republished at Cryptome.org). Campbell testified before Congress on the subject in 1999 and prepared a report for the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) that was refused by EPIC’s director Marc Rotenberg, on the grounds that much of the information hadn’t been substantiated (see this correspondence between Rotenberg and Young). After that, there was debate between Campbell and Bamford over what the main focus of the espionage was.”

That would place the earliest public exposure of Echelon in 1972, which would be, let’s see, only FORTY TWO YEARS before the one by the TrueHooha (Snowden’s nick-name on the Ars Technica forum).

To be fair to the lad, he hadn’t yet been born..

But Hager is a journalist, not a whistle-blower from within the system, so maybe Snowdon, or, at least, his real-life predecessor, William Binney, are first off the mark there?

No.

It turns out that as far back as the 1970’s, Margaret Newsham, who designed programs for Echelon’s network, had described her work to Congress in 1988 and, in 1999, to the press:

[thanks to a commentator at American Everyman for alerting me to Newsham]

In interviews with Denmark’s Ekstra Bladet in 1999  (posted by the real American hero who runs Cryptome.org) Newsham stated:

“I know Echelon exists, because I helped make the system.”

Here’s an excerpt from one of the interviews with her, forwarded on the cypherpunk list and published at Cryptome, “I Sold My Life To Big Brother”

“For the second day running, former Echelon spy Margaret Newsham tells about the ‘Black World’ of espionage – and the fatal consequences it is had on her life. Half of her espionage colleagues are dead today.

“The surveillance was incredibly target-oriented. We were capable of singling out an individual or organization and monitoring all electronic communication – real time – and all the time. The person was monitored without ever having a chance to discover it, and most of the information was sent with lightening speed to another station using the enormous digital capacity at our command. Everything took place without a search warrant.”

Was all the information forwarded to NSA headquarters at Fort George Meade in Maryland?

“Not all of it, but quite a lot.”

Does the system use programs that are capable of virtually scouring the airwaves based on certain categories and trigger words?

“That’s one of the ways it functions, yes. It’s like an Internet search engine. By restricting your search to specific numbers, persons or terms, you get results that are all related to whatever you enter.”

Tell me, what did Snowden reveal that wasn’t revealed by Newsham?

This and dozens of equally devastating pieces are freely available at Cryptome.org, which is where I read them a few years ago. They’ve been there a lot longer, and so far as I know, the USG hasn’t hunted the authors or publishers across the globe.

Censorship doesn’t operate that way in the US. The powers-that-be have no objection to exposes appearing in small-circulation sites or in academic journals. To some extent they welcome it, since it blunts any charge of “censorship.”

But try and get a larger audience, and then the iron hand of the state emerges, as Nicky Hager found, when her his book, after initially creating a sensation, simply vanished from the public view.

From the same site, Cryptome, here is Duncan Campbell, the earliest journalist on the story:

They spy on companies and interest groups,” says Duncan Campbell, who has looked at the listening post at Aflandshage near Copenhagen in Denmark. “The facilities at Aflandshage are hardly distinguishable from the Echelon installation in New Zealand.”

Physicist and technology expert Duncan Campbell has no doubt. Denmark is involved in illegal surveillance together with the other primary participants in the so-called Echelon system, the US, England, Australia, Canada, Hong Kong and New Zealand.

“My best guess is that the facilities at Aflandshage were additionally expanded shortly after the end of the Cold War. In 1990 or perhaps a little later.”

What does that mean?

“Well it means that Aflandshage is in any case not part of NATO’s defense against Russia and the other East Bloc countries like it was before. Everything indicates that the large parabolic antennas and accompanying buildings are used in the same way as the facilities in the other countries: to intercept communication from commercial satellites that transmit the phone and fax conversations of ordinary people. And to forward the intercepted information.”

And in this excerpt, also dated 1999, the Danish Minister for Defense admits that Denmark participates in a network of surveillance and has been doing so since World War II, and refuses to rule out the possibility that all civilian communications might be included as targets:

“Denmark participates in a global surveillance system,” admitted the Minister for the Defense Hans Hækkerup under heavy pressure.

As one of the first governments in the clandestine Western intelligence cooperation, Hækkerup acknowledged during a joint council in the Danish Parliament’s Europe Committee last Friday that the FE (Intelligence Agency of the Danish Armed Forces) participates in the interception of electronic communication.

Does this occur in cooperation with the NSA, which manages the so-called Echelon?

“I can’t confirm that, but I can tell you that the FE has been intercepting signals ever since the Second World War – and we’re still doing it.”

Bruce Fein, counsel to Snowden’s father, slams Wikileaks

Bruce Fein, a constitutional lawyer closely associated with Ron Paul, who has recently gone from denouncing to supporting the Tamil Tigers, is now counseling the father of Edward Snowden:

“The father of Edward Snowden, the former defense contractor accused of disclosing details about secret U.S. surveillance programs, is concerned that his son’s recent association with the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks is being used by its founder Julian Assange to raise the organization’s public profile for fundraising purposes.

Attorney Bruce Fein, who represents Lonnie Snowden, said Friday that Snowden’s father is worried that the legal counsel and travel expenses provided by WikiLeaks are part the plan to “keep (Edward Snowden) from doing the right thing” by returning to the USA to confront the espionage charges filed against him.

“They are using him to raise money,” Fein said in an interview with USA TODAY.”

Blockian Blackmail Not Looking Good To Blockians Anymore

LRC finally understands where the libertarian talking up of blackmail gets us:

LRC:

“Other whistleblowers say the same thing. When the former head of the NSA’s digital spying program – William Binney – disclosed the fact that the U.S. was spying on everyone in the U.S. and storing the data forever, and that the U.S. was quickly becoming a totalitarian state, the Feds tried to scare him into shutting up:

[Numerous] FBI officers held a gun to Binney’s head as he stepped naked from the shower. He watched with his wife and youngest son as the FBI ransacked their home. Later Binney was separated from the rest of his family, and FBI officials pressured him to implicate one of the other complainants in criminal activity. During the raid, Binney attempted to report to FBI officials the crimes he had witnessed at NSA, in particular the NSA’s violation of the constitutional rights of all Americans. However, the FBI wasn’t interested in these disclosures. Instead, FBI officials seized Binney’s private computer, which to this day has not been returned despite the fact that he has not been charged with a crime.

[Lila: That means the Feds can implicate him…or  you…. in some cooked up wrong-doing, in which they can be prosecutor, judge and jury….and hold all the “evidence” – i.e. emails you didn’t know you wrote, conversations and words torn from their context, phone calls strung together into a circumstantial daisy-chain of the kind that convicted Rajat Gupta]

Other NSA whistleblowers have also been subjected to armed raids and criminal prosecution.”

Webster Tarpley: The State Blacks Out Truth-tellers

Webster Tarpley on how to tell a limited hang-out artist from a truth-teller:

Limited hangout artists are instant media darlings

The most obvious characteristic of the limited hangout operative is that he or she immediately becomes the darling of the controlled corporate media. In the case of Daniel Ellsberg, his doctored set of Pentagon papers were published by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, and eventually by a consortium totaling seventeen corporate newspapers. These press organs successfully argued the case for publication all the way to the United States Supreme Court, where they prevailed against the Nixon administration.
Needless to say, surviving critics of the Warren Commission, and more recent veterans of the 9/11 truth movement, and know very well that this is emphatically not the treatment reserved for messengers whose revelations are genuinely unwelcome to the Wall Street centered US ruling class. These latter are more likely to be slandered, vilified and dragged through the mud, or, even more likely, passed over in complete silence and blacked out. In extreme cases, they can be kidnapped, renditioned or liquidated.”

Salon Attacks “Laura Poitras” Conspiracy…

which was hatched first here (June 13: “Edward Snowden=Sophie Scholl or you’re a fink,”

and also posted at Scott Creightons’ blog.

Creighton took up the the Poitras conspiracy on June 15 and he is referenced, but not me.

Very interesting. Have I joined the list of non-persons? I kind of think so.

Ever since, I began “not playing ball” (2007) this has been the case.

Not that I care.  I’ll just add it to my long list of stories about the underworld of blogging…stories that shine the light on the sewer that is the international “free” press.

Yes, free to lie, plagiarize, manipulate, brainwash, and finally justify mass murder and enslavement.

Some freedom.

My Snowden Theory….So Far

Just from what I know so far (and I’m always open to changing my mind if I find anything new), I’ve kind of concluded that this is a “good-guy” intel operation.

See what it accomplishes:

1. Gets to bring up the US gripe with Chinese hackers against the US, while simultaneously giving the Chinese a bit of a fright, with indications of how far they’ve been hacked. Lots of room here for swinging between arm-twisting and the kind of  hugging boxers do before matches

2. Brings out of the closet the massive extent of the US surveillance state and does it in a colorful “sexy” way, replete with pole-dancing, a little gender-tweaking, spy versus spy. Desensitizes the public to some of it, while alerting it about some of its dangers.

3. Lets the “bad guys” and terrorists know that the USG has their number.

4. Scares away any minor trouble-makers from joining “the revolution” (Wolf’s point). Creighton’s point is exactly the opposite – that Snowden is a provocateur.

5. Now comes my favorite explanation –  “maps” social networks and assesses real-time responses, in a  form of cyber war-gaming or, if your prefer it, a kind of opinion poll.

6. Informs people of the need to encrypt communications. This is the good guy part. The government is concerned that a lot of its data bank is being used by criminals and private contractors for their own purposes. So mom and pop need to be told it’s a good thing to encrypt (it is, if you can).

However, even Snowden admits tacitly that the NSA can get its hands quite easily on anything you write, even encrypted, by spying at other points in the chain of communication.

7. Separates bloggers/activists/other trouble-makers into groups:

a. Those who will support their fearless leader, not matter what. And those who won’t.

b. Those who will play the game, and those who aren’t into game playing, generally.

c. Those who can be allowed a greater voice. And those who can’t.

8. Feeds bogus information about the NSA into the internet to confuse foreign intelligence agencies (and my heart is not breaking for any of them)…. because the “battle-field is everywhere”.

9. Feeds bogus information to activists at home who might otherwise inadvertently disclose sensitive security matters.

10. Possibly hurts another agency or department (i.e. interdepartmental outing, a favorite sport of the government (think State versus CIA or FBI versus Military Intelligence).

11. Payback against Booz Hamilton or maybe this is a government versus contractor pay-back?

12.  Creates a credible and popular voice in the alternate media.