Even the son of Anil Kumar, the man who “cooperated” to put Rajat Gupta in jail, thinks highly of “Uncle” Rajat.

Here’s a big selection of letters written in support of Rajat Gupta, from Bill Gates and Mukesh Ambani, to his daughters and wife.

The most interesting part for me was the section in Mrs. Gupta’s letter where she describes Goldman Sachs’ interactions with Gupta. Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein first wanted to kick Gupta out for wanting to consult for KKR (which other Goldmanites were doing).

Then, when GS got into trouble, Blankfein wanted him back.

Gupta – stupidly – went back, trying to be loyal to them.

They rewarded him for that loyalty by setting him up as a patsy when the sharks at the DOJ began circling.

Gupta -again, foolishly – trusted the system. The system did what it usually does. Chewed up the innocent (at least, relatively innocent) and rewarded the unscrupulous and powerful.

Blankfein hired a PR firm, took up gay rights activism, and came out smelling, if not like a rose, at least, somewhat less like a sewer.

I saw this at Nassim Taleb’s “Fooled by Randomness” site:

Dobelli [Lucerne, Switzerland] Can you increase happiness by knowing your cognitive errors (and by
avoiding them)?

(A side note: I believe that happiness is not equal to the absence of disaster – or vice versa. It’s not a linear opposite. The two properties (happiness and unhappiness) are somehow correlated, but in a strange way. But that’s for the happiness researchers to figure out, for the Dan Gilbert types.)

Taleb [New York] Let me repeat my statement about small mistakes. You will not increase happiness by
increasing cognitive fitness and rationality. Happiness requires some wisdom about big things, but childishness with the small things.

Comment:

Rolf Dobelli, one of the genuinely brilliant minds of the business world, has shown himself at home in philosophy, fiction, business, and finance.

He has a great book out called “The Art of  Thinking Clearly” where I his talent for pithy aphorisms and philosophical analysis is, once again, on display.

I hope to read the book soon.  Any book that promises to make the task of managing the “monkey mind” easier has to be at the top of my “to do” list.

Here’s a brief account of the book, which has sold an amazing 500,000 copies and been translated into 25 languages.

Modest, yet outgoing,  with the intellectual equipment of a scholar and the conviviality of the bon-vivant, Dr. Dobelli also manages to be an approachable nice guy, a creature apparently found in more abundance in Switzerland than in certain other geographical locations.

Maybe his next book should be “The Art of Being a Good Guy.”

Seems like that would fill a huge vacuum, say, around the DC beltway and hinterland.

Dobelli’s comment about happiness is insightful. Happiness is not unrelated to being free of unhappiness, as he points out. But the two are by no means mutually exclusive, either.  There is asymmetry in the correlation.  It is non-linear.

Meanwhile, Taleb’s assessment also struck home with me.

The “childish small things” I fancy are animals and… soft toys.

I “rescued” a brown and white fluffy rabbit the other day, left right on top of the dumpster, hardly a stain on his synthetic fur, looking all forlorn, one ear up and one down, his nylon whiskers askew.

Wetted down with a damp towel and soap, then sun-dried,  he now has pride of place among the silent muses and “angels” I keep around me to guard that space of joy that no circumstance in life will ever take from me again.

Soft toys embody my love of story-telling, carried over from an idyllic childhood filled with books, music, imaginative play, and loving family. Even thinking back to it brings back a smile to my face, even in the blackest mood.

As a child, I would go to bed, telling stories to anyone who would listen, a patient, half-asleep sib or my weary parents, if I was lucky.

Otherwise, I had to content myself with the menagerie of teddy bears, giraffes,  tinker-bells, baby elephants, dolls, and stuffed dogs that were my imaginary playmates and the compliant actors in the tableaux I staged across my bedroom with pillows and sheets for building blocks.

I’ve no doubt anyone who came across me today, in one of my ventriloquist moods, animating a toy rabbit, would think I was crazy to enjoy make-believe at this age.

But, in fact, the older I get, the more I like fantasy, children’s stories, and theater.  There seems to be something of the gods in these things.

When I look out the window, on the other hand, all I see is that trivial, vulgar thing called, for some inexplicable reason, “real life” ….and, along with it, too many stunted beings who shrink with each passing second, yet glory in being called “grown ups.”

Talk about straining at gnats and swallowing camels.

While pedo-rape-romance “Fifty Shades” has got its author a spot on the 100 most influential people in the world, in Walmart and on every magazine and news outlet, without much criticism, NBC has pulled a video of female athletes at the London Olympics because of  alleged “porny” content.

If you think showing athletes in admittedly skimpy outfits doing what they do in slow-motion with music behind is “porny,” by today’s standards, you must come from another planet.

Or, perhaps there’s an agenda?  NBC is after all the major media.

Is this a way to defuse criticism about the pornification of culture? Concede the issue where it’s non-existent, so you one can let the real offenders fly under the radar?

Sort of like celebrating Ramadan in the White House but toning down the Christian accoutrements, on one hand, while slyly promoting anti-Muslim rhetoric and psyops on the other.

By a series of links involving the holocaust of Russians during the Stalin years, I landed up on a blog called ZionCrimeFactory.

Like many such blogs, it conflates being anti-Zionist with being pro-Nazi. While there is no need to exaggerate or embellish what Hitler did, there is a point when these sorts of blogs actually break with reality.

ZCF (which I won’t link) claims that Hitler wasn’t the murderous psychotic of  history books.

Fortunately, there was a time in my early teens when I was immersed in WW II history, and I still remember such books as the memoirs of Hitler’s chief of foreign intelligence, SS General Walter Schellenberg.

Schellenberg, a highly-ranked Nazi, describes the eugenicist projects of the Nazis, the arrangement of sexual unions between racially “superior” types, and many other repellent features of the Hitler regime that developed well before the events of the Holocaust.

To portray these developments as simply German nationalism resurgent is delusional.

Psychiatry online has a piece about the Nazi eugenicist program (h/t Henry Makow):

Ralph Nader at Countercurrents:

“There was something missing from the release of a tape showing Mitt Romney pandering to fat cats in Boca Raton, Florida with these very inflammatory words: “There are 47 percent who are with him, (Obama) who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it. These are people who pay no income tax.” Romney said his job “is not to worry about those people.”Mr. Romney, says Nader, doesn’t understand the double standard where government checks, whether already paid for or not, to people are called “entitlements” while far bigger checks to corporations are called “incentives.” (Photo: AP)

Hey, Mitt, why start with the 47 percent? Fully 100 percent of the nation’s 500 biggest corporations are dependent on various kinds of corporate welfare – subsidies, giveaways, bailouts, waivers, and other dazzling preferences – while many pay no tax at all on very substantial profits (see their familiar names – General Electric, Pepco, Verizon etc. – here).

Are the corporations that receive this corporate welfare going to vote for President Obama? (Mr. Romney has declared that corporations are people.) Of course they’re not. Nor are all of the 47 percent of people who are “dependent upon government.”

Mr. Romney doesn’t understand the double standard where government checks, whether already paid for or not, to people are called “entitlements” while far bigger checks to corporations are called “incentives.” Romney has lost control of his self-consciousness. Here is a man who talks about 47 percent of American households paying no income taxes (more on this later) while he has refused, unlike his father, to release back years of tax returns because they’ll show he has parked much of his wealth and income in foreign tax havens like the Bahamas precisely in order to avoid paying U.S. taxes.

Indeed, as tax expert and former New York Times Pulitzer prize-winner David Cay Johnston said on Democracy Now, Romney has maneuvered the tax laws so that his five sons will continue to receive millions of tax-free dollars from their parents’ enormous pot of wealth.

Why aren’t the big-time Democrats making much more of an issue of this “make or break” Romney campaign vulnerability? Maybe it is because, as author Kevin Phillips once said, “The Republicans go for the jugulars while the Democrats go for the capillaries.”

Essentially, [Mitt Romney) is a corporation running for president masquerading as an individual.

Now, either ignorance, callousness or both infected Mitt Romney’s pejorative characterizations of the “government dependent” 47 percent with victim mentalities who believe that they are entitled to the government providing them the necessities of life without paying income tax. Let’s see who these people are in these recessionary times. Unemployed Americans. Americans who are too poor to pay income taxes. Elderly Americans who live on their social security checks from money for which they spent their decades of working years paying. Americans using the “earned income tax credit,” so vigorously supported and extended by President Ronald Reagan. And disabled Americans who have no dollars for any income tax.

What do many of the 47 percent pay to the government? They pay payroll taxes for social security and Medicare, federal fees and state and local taxes on their property, and sales taxes.

The avarice of Romney and his buddies at the strip-mining, job-exporting, bankrupting private equity company called Bain Capital has no bounds. He thinks it’s perfectly fine for companies like Verizon, Boeing, Duke Energy, Navistar, Wells Fargo and Pepco to use all of our country’s government funded public infrastructures and services, and yet not only pay no income tax but actually rig the tax system so they can get billions back in “benefits” from the U.S. Treasury, as General Electric has done for years. At the same time, Romney never speaks out against 35,000 super-wealthy Americans who also do not pay any federal income tax. He rarely questions crony capitalism, wants to maintain an even bigger bloated military budget, and spearheads the many-sided supremacy of corporations over real people throughout our entire political economy. He is, essentially, a corporation running for president masquerading as an individual.

If the Democrats are anything but inept and defeatist, they will wrap Romney around Congressman Paul Ryan, his vice-presidential nominee, and recover the Congress in November. The Romney-Ryan campaign is now hanging by a few threads, unmasked even before those millions of American voters who dutifully vote for politicians who disrespect and betray their economic plight and political powerlessness once in office.”

Chris Hedges at Truthdig writes:

“The costs of our most basic needs, from food to education to health care, are at the same time being pushed upward with no control or regulation. Tuition and fees at four-year colleges climbed 300 percent between 1990 and 2011, fueling the college loan crisis that has left graduates, most of them underemployed or unemployed, with more than $1 trillion in debt. Health care costs over the same period have risen 150 percent. Food prices have climbed 10 percent since June, according to the World Bank. There are now 46.7 million U.S. citizens, and one in three children, who depend on food stamps. The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency under Obama has, meanwhile, expelled 1.5 million immigrants, a number that dwarfs deportations carried out by his Republican predecessor. And while we are being fleeced, the Treasury Department and Federal Reserve Bank has since 2008 doled out $16 trillion to national and global financial institutions and corporations.”

Comment:

I don’t really see the removal of these support systems as such a calamity for the beneficiaries, except in a minority of cases. I see it mostly as a calamity for the providers and political allies of the support system.

That is cynical, but, here where I am, it’s hard to get anyone to work for less than $15 an hour, which is only ten dollars less than what I’ve worked for lately and much more than I’ve worked for when much younger.

So, not to be heartless, but cry me a river.

If you can’t find cheap or even free food somewhere in the US being given out by private donors/churches, then you are simply not looking hard enough.

You can live on sprouts raised in a one-bedroom apartment. You can grow food on the fringes of an abandoned lot or, with nice neighbors, in someone’s garden.

Health care bothers me more, because, really, if you have a sick child in need of brain surgery, alternative medicine isn’t going to help you.  So yes. That’s a serious issue.

Food costs rising 10%. Wow. Over how long? What sort of food? Where are you shopping? You can still get bread for around a dollar a loaf if you look. And canned veggies can run between 50 cents and a buck a can.

Spinach is up a buck from a few years ago. So stop eating spinach and eat kale which is still around the same price, or just a bit more.

Instant coffee is up a lot, but it’s not good for you anyway. If you look around and buy non-brands, or ground, you can still manage, if you must have your shot of caffein.

But that’s not starvation, by any means.

Having got that caveat out of the way, let’s indulge Mr. Hedges and agree with everything else he says.

So what is he proposing to do about it?

Nothing, except write eloquent tracts and vote for a third party. More politics, in other words.

Here’s my solution.

It doesn’t require voting.

It requires public support and anger.

Can you muster up some anger that’s directed and focused, instead of wasted on “Illuminati,” “lizards,” “German death cults” and so on?

Let’s stick with those we can get our hands on, and then I promise you  the Illuminati will be delivered dead as a door-nail to you.

Instead of attacking Iran, let’s attack the financial institutions and corporations that got public money to the tune of  $16 trillion.

How hard is that? Most of the corporations are HQ’d here on US soil…or on Israeli soil, which is maybe not all that different these days.

All it would take is a bit of will power.

Declare the enemy to be those 100 or so individuals named by the establishment itself as the cause of the financial crisis (check out Vanity Fair).

To be fair and balanced, we can add a few more to bring the total to about 200-300.

They all come with attached corporations. Declare a retaliatory war on all of them. Don’t waste time assigning levels of guilt. Don’t waste time trying to do any of this through the legal system either. It’s been bought off.

Create a military tribunal special to the commission of war crimes. Because we are in an economic war. A war conducted through the stock exchange.

Any legal action taken against the b******* will not affect the body of law or constitutional theory because it will pertain to war-making. America is full of clever lawyers. Someone can spin a good theory that will keep the enemy tied up in court while public opinion builds up against him.

Declare these 300 enemy combatants and round them up.

All bail-out money can be frozen immediately and seized.

All senior managers of bailed out corporations, with no exceptions, can be fined for their dereliction of duty during the financial crisis.

It costs too much and the system is too captured to go after individuals.

For the most culpable individuals, we can toy with the possibility of the electric chair, or, at least, life imprisonment…. but not at tax-payer expense.

Their punishment can be billed to their corporations for life.

Just indict the senior managers of all companies guilty of (economic) war crimes.

That would be a start.

We’ll spare them and us a Nuremberg trial, since we’re not interested in grand-standing prosecutors getting air time.

Quietly, quickly, seize the equivalent of the bail-out funds from their assets and return that money to the public treasury.

Then, divest the criminals of their citizenship, divest their corporations of legal status and protections.  Exile them to any country that will take them, with the proviso that they are permanently disbarred from working as managers, consultants, brokers, advisers, ever again, either directly or indirectly.

They can try manual labor in some place that’s thoroughly un-policed; where it’s each man for himself.

Libertarian nirvana.

Let’s see how they like it, when they’re starving nobodies and the bribers and blackmailers are no longer their friends but their enemies.

Publish photo IDs on the net, with no compunction, so they can be turned in wherever they flee, because one and all of these criminals have supported the spy state and surveillance for the rest of us. One and all of them have made money off of it.

A taste of their own medicine will be salutary.

Co-ordinate with the laws of other countries to ensure that rules aren’t bent for them.

Drive the top three hundred racketeers off the face of the US, confiscate their booty, and voila, problem solved.

So why doesn’t anyone do it?

Because, you, dear reader, are unwilling to do your part.

Which is to actually use your head and stop trusting people who manage to be so very angry..in a general way… but never actually name any names.

Who never ask for major criminals to be prosecuted, but waffle on about the sanctity of property and gun ownership.

They’re all for prosecuting criminals who attack their own own homes and properties. Then, there’s no mercy or compassion.

But if you don’t want the criminals at the top prosecuted, then you shouldn’t want those at the bottom prosecuted either.

If you believe in compassion and mercy for criminals, let it be all for all criminals.

Either punishment for all or punishment for none.

If you won’t jail the financiers, then open the jails and never jail anyone again.

Break open Super Max.

Batter down the doors of Alcatraz.

Let the murderers walk. Let the serial killers go free. Forgive the child rapists and the arsonists.

Weep for the bankers? Then you must weep for the burglars.

Put down your gun when the home invaders come. When your wife is raped, embrace the rapist and talk to him of mercy and compassion.

When Ted Bundy or Jeremy Dahmer stalks the land, talk about mercy and forgiveness to them too.

Then..and only then… will I  believe you.

Either prosecute the top 300 criminals of the financial crisis, the ones named by your own pet institutions and pet journalists, or shut up forever.

And you fools out there.  You suckers who line up to hand your pitiful savings  to charlatan activists.

Stop following clowns and jokers.

They are whited sepulchers. The numbers prove it.

300 or so corporate bosses/financial honchos on one side. Three hundred million non-bosses and non-honchos on the other.

Do the math.

Can’t you see if that if we can’t get the job done, it’s not for lack of man-power but from lack of will?

It’s because we prefer to sit on our backsides, play with slogans, t-shirts, and pretty girls on videos telling us how Google or Microsoft really really loves us, while we high-five our buddies on forums.

Do we really care about changing the system?

Or do we just want to talk about…or pay other people to talk to us about…. how someone else can change the system….if he’s paid enough to do it….

Think about that the next time someone complains about politicians, bankers, elites and the rest.

Take a good look in the mirror.

Let’s ask ourselves what any of us have done to change things. Ask ourselves  if it cost us anything. Ask ourselves why we expect anyone else to do what we ourselves are unwilling to do.

Uncovered politics.com tells the unpleasant truth the Paul supporters refuse to see.

[Note: I hadn’t planned to vote for anyone, but I sure feel more sympathetic toward Johnson than to Paul.

Further note:

A vote for Johnson will probably help Romney, because it will be one less person voting for Obama.

Romney is Goldman Sachs’ candidate and seems to be salivating for war.  So if you want to vote, on paper, theoretically, Obama makes more sense.

That is the mess the Paul campaign left us with by going soft on Romney for most of the time.

Best course of action? Spend your time getting prepared and save your money for your family.

Turn off your TV,  hang up the phone on people calling for contributions, tear up letters asking for money and use them to line the bird cage.  Arrange your affairs so you’ll be fine in case of global war, should Romney win; and in case of high taxes, regulations, and collapsing businesses, should Obama win. In both cases, prepare for depreciation of the currency, rising prices, currency controls, and possibly emergency or martial law.

If you can, leave the US, but only for something better, which isn’t easy to find or cheap.

If you are middle-class and have no savings, forget that and stay put, preferably in a warm, relatively cheap state. Texas is good if you need a job; otherwise, any warm cheap state is better than freezing through the next four years.

If you’re not doing well, avoid people and get a dog. This makes for happiness easier than anything else. You need to be happy somehow or other to get through the next few years.]

“What’s the biggest difference between Congressman Ron Paul and Governor Gary Johnson? It’s not ideological, although there are some key and important distinctions on their positions.

The biggest difference is money.  How much they have and how they’ve spent it.

For Gary Johnson, his whole campaign has been a shoestring affair.  Having raised only several hundred thousand dollars in pursuit of the Presidency, he’s spending the limited funds he has on travel and critical campaign operations.  Calling the Johnson campaign “budget conscious” would be an accurate descriptor.  They know their resources are tight, the money they have raised has not come easily and they seem legitimately dedicated to stretching their campaign-dollar to the maximum.

The same cannot be said for Ron Paul’s latest bid for the Republican nomination or the myriad organizations he and his family members have spawned to fleece the “true believers” of their every last dime. People don’t just support Ron Paul, many are personally obsessed with the man. They give and give, and then give some more. In fact, it often seems like Ron Paul’s role model is less Barry Goldwater than something closer to L. Ron Hubbard, the science fiction author and founder of the cult-like cash-cow known as Scientology.

[And it’s no surprise to me that behind the career of libertarian Harry Browne can be found Scientologists like Michael Baybak, who also had a history of stock manipulation. Scientology is notorious for unethical financial practices. Likewise,  I will not even attempt to compile the number of convictions/investigations that seem to attend the careers of prominent libertarians and their backers.]

It would be one thing if the Paul campaign spent their money as wisely as the Johnson campaign. There’s no telling how much could have been accomplished with the tens of millions of dollars that the Ron Paul machine has generated over the last half-decade. Unfortunately, we will never know what might have been.

Recently we learned that Jesse Benton, Ron Paul’s bumbling campaign manager and grandson-in-law, had been paid a staggering $586,616 by the Paul campaign and associated organizations. That number has likely grown by, at least, tens of thousands of dollars since it was first reported. Gary Johnson could have financed his entire campaign thus far on Benton’s salary alone!

The problem goes beyond just Benton, who recently enraged Paul supporters when he put out a series of statements to the public that explained a shift in campaign strategy away from active campaigning in upcoming primaries. He explained this was a way to conserve campaign resources. The press interpreted this as Paul suspending his campaign and the announcement likely cost Paul a significant number of delegates in the Arkansas, Kentucky and Texas primaries. It also signaled a desire to preserve relations with the Romney campaign and the GOP establishment, likely with the hopes of protecting the future career of Kentucky Senator Rand Paul.

Some of the Paul diehards have suggested that Benton “acted alone” in making these campaign policy shifts and in setting his own salary, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. This is Ron Paul’s standard operating procedure: his family gets paid, every time.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) has noted that Representative Paul was one of the worst offenders in the U.S. House for using campaign and PAC money to enrich family members. In CREW’s recent survey of 2008 and 2010 spending by Congressional candidates, they noted: “Rep. Paul’s campaign committee, Committee to Re-elect Ron Paul, paid salaries to his
daughter, his grandson, his daughter’s mother-in-law, his granddaughter, his grandson-in-law, and another relative. In addition, his campaign committee reimbursed the congressman and several other relatives and paid his brother’s accounting firm. Finally, Rep. Paul’s leadership political action committee (PAC), Liberty PAC, reimbursed the congressman, paid his brother’s accounting firm, and paid his daughter a salary.”

Considering the way that the Ron Paul political machine has generated so much of its millions of dollars from small donors over the last half-decade, many of whom could hardly afford to give to a political campaign, it is shocking that this is how much of the money was apparently being spent. Many of the footsoldiers of the liberty movement have dedicated so much of their lives to supporting this one man, it’s reached such an unhealthy degree that they can no longer see the greater cause they are supposedly fighting for.

There is now a Libertarian governor with a resume far more impressive than that of Congressman Paul, standing up and reaching his hand out to them. And yet they largely ignore this amazing opportunity, fixated on a sad old man who has mesmerized them into attempting to etch his likeness onto everything from chocolate bars to a pub in New York City to discussion of building a statue of the man himself.

Described by some as one of the “biggest purveyors of nepotism in U.S. history,” the failure of Ron Paul to even consider passing the torch to Gary Johnson shows that he is now entirely focused on building his family’s political dynasty, and perhaps even trying to find a spot for his son Rand on the Republican ticket with Mitt Romney. Ron Paul’s supporters aren’t just promoting the message of liberty, they are worshiping a man who deserves very little of their praise.

Contrast this gross abuse of donor trust with how the Johnson campaign operates. Gary Johnson’s adult son, Erik Johnson, has been working day and night on the governor’s campaign and is getting paid no salary to do so. The governor even got a little choked up when he acknowledged his son’s sacrifice in a touching moment during his acceptance speech at the Libertarian Convention last month.

Gary Johnson is an avid skier, adventurer, and bicyclist. He has reached the highest peaks on four of the seven continents, including Mt. Everest. He’s built a successful private sector business, and been elected the chief executive of a large state for two highly productive terms, during which he vetoed more bills than the governors of the other 49 states combined. His libertarian credentials are unmatched, and yet today Rand Paul endorsed Mitt Romney for President. That alone should tell you everything you need to know about the Paul clan’s priorities.”

“Those who try to remain viable in the mainstream by denigrating 9-11 research or aiding and abetting other conspiracies of silence end up with neither victory nor a clean conscience, as the case of the defunct Ron Paul campaign demonstrates, says Jason Erb at Faux Capitalist.

“Lee Rogers of Live Free or Die Radio on Oracle Broadcasting has been at the forefront in the true alternative media in questioning whether Ron Paul’s campaign has been intentionally set up to fail, in saying that he wasn’t supporting Ron Paul in 2012 because of what happened in 2008.

Lee Rogers is no armchair quarterback when it comes to Ron Paul, as he conducted an interview with him in the run-up to the 2008 campaign, and he later revealed that Ron Paul said he had asked him tough questions.

Since Ron Paul didn’t win the nomination, the argument that Ron Paul should throw 9/11 under the bus again in 2012 is moot, since he didn’t win, regardless.

On April 29, 2011, I posed the question, will Ron Paul throw 9/11 Truth under the bus again, like he did in 2008?, and was met with a mostly hostile reaction on RonPaulForums.com. While I didn’t hear of him throwing it under the bus in 2012, he also didn’t embrace it or even say that those seeking a full independent account of what happened on 9/11 had some legitimate points in doubting the official story.

The fact that avoiding 9/11 Truth didn’t win him the nomination confirms the futility of that strategy, and the same strategy of any subsequent libertarian presidential candidate. To say that if he had embraced 9/11 Truth, he would’ve lost even more is like saying that it’s better to lose less in a contest where winning is the goal and there’s only room for one winner.

Dr. Stan Monteith has said that “most of the conservative organizations have been infiltrated,” and I don’t think Ron Paul’s campaign is any different.”

That is hardly a revelation.  Conservative movements have been infiltrated, for sure. The real news is that so has the libertarian movement. At least, that is the mildest interpretation of events.

I for one think it is much worse. I think many “libertarian” leaders are controlled opposition, compromised in some way, working against their expressed goals, cozy with the kleptocracy, or otherwise operating in bad faith, not just from ignorance.

I’m sorry to think that. But I’ve learned to respect my gut instinct. And that is what my gut instinct tells me.

In Ron Paul’s  case, I get the feeling he is being “handled” by others, and either can’t or won’t stand up to it.

It hardly matters which at this point.

Dr. Stanley Monteith:

“These young men represent what is more or less America’s first generation of disposable children,” he continues. “More than half of the guys in the platoon come from broken homes and were raised by absentee, single, working parents. Many are on more intimate terms with video games, reality TV shows and Internet porn than they are with their own parents.” They went to war “predisposed toward the idea that the Big Lie is as central to American governance as taxation…. Even though their Commander in Chief tells them they are fighting today in Iraq to protect American freedom, few would be shaken to discover they might actually be leading a grab for oil. In a way, they almost expect to be lied to.” “We’re like America’s little pit bull,” one Marine wryly told Wright. “They beat it, starve it, mistreat it, and once in a while they let it out to attack somebody.”

The mindset Wright described in Generation Kill is displayed in much greater detail in Hard Corps: From Gangster to Marine Hero, the battlefield memoir of Iraq veteran Marco Martinez.

A product of a military family from Albuquerque, Martinez enlisted in Latino street gangs as a teenager. He was “rescued” from a life of private-sector gangsterism through a federally funded, police-supervised school program called GREAT (Gang Resistance Education and Training), which eventually led him to enroll in the ROTC program at his High School. This curriculum prepared Martinez for a career as a state-authorized gang-banger.

“Salvation from a civilian existence is through these doors, boys,” Martinez and several other enlistees were told as they assembled at the local recruiting station. Like most gang-bangers, Martinez was susceptible to an appeal based on tribal and territorial loyalties, so he was an apt pupil at boot camp. Discipline refined his instinct for violence; training enhanced his capacity to inflict it; and the potted platitudes of nationalism sanctified his urge to kill into something he believed was noble.

Reciting the Rifleman’s Creed “got me so fired up that it put me into a blood lust,” Martinez recalls. “I wanted to kill America’s enemies. I could see and taste it.”

That opportunity came in April 2003, one month after George W. Bush ordered the assault on Iraq. Corporal Martinez was part of a 42-man Marine platoon that was dispatched on a “contact patrol” in the town of Al-Tarmiya, a predominantly Sunni town about sixty miles north of Baghdad.

A “contact patrol,” Martinez explains, “is the most coveted of infantry patrols…. Marines on contact patrol become human wrecking balls, leaving maximum carnage in their path, as any person encountered, armed, is to be considered hostile and killed at will.”

This was not the first time Martinez had carried out a mission of that kind. As a street thug, he and his buddies would often go out on “contact patrol” by rolling into a rival gang’s turf, seeking to provoke a firefight by throwing gang signs and calling out their “sets” at their enemies.

“You are to take out anybody displaying any type of aggression toward U.S. forces,” explained the lieutenant commanding Martinez’s platoon prior to the mission in Al-Tarmiya. How residents of a neighborhood could be guilty of “aggression” by displaying hostility toward armed invaders, the lieutenant didn’t explain. In any case, the rules of engagement were clearly intended to bring about the result Martinez described: The Marines were being sent into Al-Tarmiya to provoke a firefight and kill as many people as possible.

Shortly after the platoon was deployed, Martinez’s squad was ambushed by a group of guerrillas. The squad leader was severely wounded. Martinez identified the source of the gunfire, threw a grenade into the nearby building, then stormed in and gunned down four Iraqis.

That this was an act of individual courage is impossible to deny. Martinez’s actions saved the life of his squad leader (who was left crippled by his injury, and actually became a public opponent of the Iraq War after leaving the military). But the word “heroism” isn’t appropriate here – unless we could apply it just as accurately to similar actions taken by a street-level gangster in an inner-city turf war.

“All those times that I’d carried a gun as a teenager had been for sh*t,” insisted Martinez in Hard Corps. “My friends at the time and I were prepared to shoot and get shot at over girls, cars, money, or something as stupid as the way somebody looked at us…. But my Marine buddies and I carried weapons to defend our nation against its enemies. We, like millions who came before us, used the awesome might of America’s military power for liberation, not conquest….”

It takes a formidable gift for self-delusion to refer what was done to Iraq as “liberation,” and a complete hostility to the truth to suggest that the invasion of that country was in any sense a defensive act. Martinez’s rationalization for the state-mandated criminal violence he committed could have been adapted from the hymnal of the Soviet Cheka secret police: “To us, everything is permitted, for we are the first to raise the sword not to oppress races and reduce them to slavery, but to liberate humanity from its shackles….”

Even when it is fought for purely defensive purposes, war is an unqualified curse. As James Madison famously warned, war is the greatest of all “enemies to public liberty” because it “comprises and develops the germ of every other.” This isn’t only the case with corruption of public policy and the consolidation of political power; the principle applies just as well to matters of individual morality on which the preservation of freedom ultimately depends. This is why Madison lamented the “degeneracy of manners and morals” that inevitably ensues whenever a country goes to war, however briefly – and why he emphasized that “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”

Those facets of war most abhorred by Madison were considered by Karl Marx to be most admirable. Writing in 1851 to his disciples, Marx extolled the revolutionary “virtues” of generational war: “You will have to go through fifteen, twenty, fifty years of civil wars and international wars, not only in order to change existing conditions, but also in order to change yourselves and fit yourselves for the exercise of political power.”

How do people who pass through this revolutionary curriculum behave? What does it mean to be people Marx would describe as “fit … for the exercise of political power?” And what would America look like a generation from now – if not sooner – as a result of being immersed in “continual warfare?” One appropriate answer could be found in examining the people who embodied the revolution Marx and his heirs inflicted on Russia – the agents of the Soviet Cheka secret police, the chief instrument of Soviet terror.

The ruling ethic of Lenin’s regime, recall, is that the fundamental political question is not defined by the Golden Rule, but rather “who does what to whom” – and the Cheka, being the enforcement arm of the “Who,” saw no reason to restrain itself in plundering, torturing, and slaughtering those unfortunate enough to be part of the “Whom.”

“This organization is rotten to the core,” observed Bolshevik official Serafina Gopner in a March 22, 1919 letter to Lenin. Those who enlisted to be the “sword and shield” of the revolution were, almost without exception, “common criminals and the dregs of society, men armed to the teeth who simply execute anyone they don’t like. They steal, loot, rape … practice extortion and blackmail, and will let anyone go in exchange for huge sums of money.” (7)

“The Cheka are looting and arresting everyone indiscriminately,” reported a Bolshevik regional secretary in Yaroslavl on September 26th of the same year. “Safe in the knowledge that they cannot be punished, they have transformed the Cheka headquarters into a huge brothel where they take all the bourgeois women. Drunkenness is rife. Cocaine is being used quite widely among the supervisors.”

A dispatch to Moscow dated October 16th informed Feliks Dzherzhinsky, the head of the secret police, that “Orgies and drunkenness are daily occurrences. Almost all the personnel of the Cheka are heavy cocaine users. They say that this helps them deal with the sight of so much blood on a daily basis. Drunk with blood and violence, the Cheka is doing its duty, but it is made up of uncontrollable elements that will require close surveillance.”

If those reports from a century ago have a strongly contemporary flavor, this is not entirely coincidental. If we could peel away the veneer of “respectability” from those who rule us, we would be rewarded with a spectacle at least as squalid as the ones described above. More ominous still is the fact that the degenerate elite presuming to rule us has effectively eradicated every significant institutional, legal, and social impediment to the exercise of total power. And they are filling the enforcement apparatus with people who subscribe to the nihilist’s credo “Respect yourself and no one else” – the hip-hop culture’s updating of Lenin’s “who/whom” formula.”

Russell Peters, an Indo-Canadian stand-up comedian, has won four Grammy awards for his hilarious routines about racial stereotypes, accents, and other politically incorrect topics. In this clip he takes on media stereotypes of Arabs.