From Tikkun.org:

“The big problem facing us is how to take the millions of Americans who are ready to move in this new direction to work together coherently. Yet we can rejoice the first step has been taken: Americans coming out of the closet of despair and calling for a world of justice, peace and caring for each other and for the planet.

I’m particularly proud that young Jews participating in these demonstrations have created Sukkot, the temporary huts that Jews are supposed to live in for 7 days (the holiday started Wednesday night October 12) to symbolize detachment from the material security provided by our homes, to re-identify ourselves as a people that has mostly been homeless for most of our history, and to remind ourselves that all the accomplishments of material security are meaningless unless shared with everyone else. Tikkunista Jews (tikkun means healing and transforming the world) are challenging the establishment Jews, some of whom run the very institutions that all of us supporting Occupy Wall Street hope to see replaced by a more just order. Though right-wingers have followed David Brooks’ attempt to smear the demonstrators as anti-Semitic, the truth is that the Jewish world can be proud that a high percentage of these demonstrators are Jewish — and challenging the establishment Jews who have a disproportionate presence in the community of bankers and investment brokers.”

“In the market every profession is a helping profession,” says one libertarian.

Not true. There is a huge market for snuff movies. 

No one would suggest that this kind of “helping” is “better” than the work of many bare-foot doctors who bring help to villages for a pittance, since that is all their patients can pay.  Those are extremes, of course.  There are certainly non-profits that are simply sinecures.

But the idea that an excess of materialism had no part to play in the financial crisis, as some argue, is simply laughable.

The problem is the opposite.

Supposedly charitable/non-profit outfits and professions that used to adhere to standards of professional conduct have succumbed to the mentality of the state-capitalists, producing nothing, wanting perks, privileges, and subsidies, and adhering to no market discipline of any kind or to any ethical standards of any kind either. 

In a society with self-restraint, the laws work and the markets produce prosperity.

Without virtue (and virtu), the laws become instruments of plunder, and you get criminality. The law itself becomes criminal.

But as long as people think ideologically, and determine blame by ideology, things will continue along the same path.

My money is on OccupyWallStreet….at least, so far.

A recent book on the Bengal famine of 1943, in which recent studies say 5-6 million people starved, finds documentary evidence that it was the result, not of “ineptness,” but of the calculated policy of Winston Churchill.

Churchill is the hero of empire-lovers in America, who promote it as “good for the natives.” Natives, left to themselves, would have nothing.

That is the imperial position, even though it doesn’t explain why, before the arrival of the British empire, India was one of the wealthiest countries in the world.

Remember also that large numbers of Indian soldiers had been deployed to fight on behalf of the British empire (as they always had) at the very time Indians were being starved in a humanitarian catastrophe that has been white-washed by British academic historians.

Churchill, it should be noted, often expressed his hatred for Indians and Hindus and his preference for Islam.

(Lila: Not that I object to WC expressing his preferences, but it’s a bit odd to claim then that the imperialists were in India for the good of India).

Mind you, the findings of Ms. Mukherjee, a nuclear physicist and Guggenheim fellow, contradict the well-known thesis of economist Amartya Sen that the Bengali famine was avoidable.

Note also that Sen, married to historian Emma Rothschild, is supported in this thesis by Jeffrey Sachs, ideological architect of the looting of Russia through “privatization” in the 1990s, who is feted in this Time article.

Note further that Sachs is also one of the folks, along with Joseph Stiglitz, advising OccupyWallStreet…

[Correction: For some reason, the names Summers and Greenspan got pasted next to Stiglitz’s name. I’ve deleted them].

Note the number of agendas to which the Bengal famine can be put: It can be white-washed to show that the British were “good” for India; it can be blamed on Churchill, thus absolving imperial policy (Mukherjee, although that doesn’t seem to be her intention); it can be blamed on lack of democracy the empire, thus attacking the government in Bengal, while saving Churchill (Sen); it can be used to show British hatred for Hinduism, thus undermining the Islamicist-Marxist nexus….

Oh dear. I sense a mine-field…

Telegraph:

“According to a new book on the famine, Sir Winston ignored pleas for emergency food aid for millions in Bengal left to starve as their rice paddies were turned over to jute for sandbag production and supplies of rice from Burma stopped after Japanese occupation.

Between one and three million died of hunger in 1943.

The wartime leader said Britain could not spare the ships to transport emergency supplies as the streets of Calcutta filled with emaciated villagers from the surrounding countryside, but author Madhusree Mukerjee has unearthed new documents which challenge his claim.

In her book, Churchill’s Secret War, she cites ministry records and personal papers which reveal ships carrying cereals from Australia were bypassed India on their way to the Mediterranean where supplies were already abundant.

“It wasn’t a question of Churchill being inept: sending relief to Bengal was raised repeatedly and he and his close associates thwarted every effort,” the author said.

“The United States and Australia offered to send help but couldn’t because the war cabinet was not willing to release ships. And when the US offered to send grain on its own ships, that offer was not followed up by the British,” she added.

The man-made famine and the contrast between the plight of starving Indians and well-fed British officers dining in the city’s many colonial clubs has been described as one of the darkest chapters in British rule on the Indian subcontinent.

Miss Mukerjee blames Churchill’s ‘racism’ for his refusal to intervene.
He derided Gandhi as a “half-naked holy man” and once said: “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.”
He was known to favour Islam over Hinduism.
“Winston’s racist hatred was due to his loving the empire in the way a jealous husband loves his trophy wife: he would rather destroy it than let it go,” said Miss Mukerjee.”

Lila: I’ll come back to this topic again….which interests me not only in itself, but in the way it’s being deployed in current debates.

Noted Belgian Indologist and Hindutva theorist Dr. Koenraad Elst describes how the false Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT) provided white nationalist David Duke with the inspiration for his racialist mission. The racialist goal is to wake up white Americans to their fate as a threatened minority in a future colored world.

So, for anti-Zionists to team up with people like Duke, or other racialists, even those who have foresworn their pasts, is to my mind very risky. My misgivings extend also to black racialists like Louis Farrakhan, although I’m not familiar with the details of Farrakhan’s theories, and they may well be more benign. 

(I use the term racialist to mean someone who recognizes the existence of race or racial categories but in a benign sense – say, for studying them for correlation to disease.  I consider a racist someone who categorizes races for malign purposes – to evaluate them for eugenecist purposes, to proscribe their movement or employment, or even commit ethnic cleansing or genocide. I consider racial epithets to be just vulgarities, unsuitable for public discourse, but not necessarily indicative of racial antipathy, let alone racism).

On the other hand,  I am also against the system of ideological “untouchables” we have. It is fundamentally regressive and anti-liberal.  One solution to this dilemma would be to bring people like Duke and Farrakhan into mainstream discourse, but actively criticize them and subject them to the test of reason and evidence. That would tarnish the aura of things forbidden and dangerous that now tempts iconoclasts on the left and right to their side.

How India woke David Duke up

So, David Duke, like many old-school Western scholars and like Hitler before him, sees in the Aryan invasion scenario a perfect illustration of his racialist world view. But it gets even better. Duke did not merely add the AIT to an arsenal of arguments which he was already building up in support of his racial politics, as just one more illustration. The AIT, in its racial version, played a completely pivotal role in his decision to devote his life to the cause of the White race.

In the countryside around Delhi, Duke visited a temple, and next to it,

“I saw something that will forever remain in my memory. In the shade sat a little, brown, half-caste Indian girl. She was thoroughly emaciated and resembled some sort of hideous doll except that she moved slightly, and her animated bones and skin had a terrifying effect. (…) On one cheek was an open sore the size of a quarter. More sores covered her arms, chest and legs. Dozens of flies covered each sore, jockeying with each other to feast on her flesh. (…) The child held her hand out to me, begging for a few rupees. I dug my hand deep into my pocket, pulled out all the Indian coins I had, and carefully tipped them into her dark, skeletal hand. I turned and stumbled back out into the hot Indian sun, my eyes blinded by tears.” (p.523)

Yes, tears for so much human misery, i.e. for a victim of Nehru’s counterproductive Soviet-oriented economic policies, just human fellow-feeling for a suffering child? That is what you would expect in this situation, and it may have been there in young David’s mind, of course. But his belief in the AIT put a most peculiar spin on this experience:

“On the way back to my room I wondered if, in a few hundred years, some half-black descendant of mine would be sitting among the ruins of our civilization, brushing away the flies, waiting to die. Every day our nation grows a little darker from the torrential immigration of non-Whites, high non-White birthrates and increasing racial miscegenation (…) To the plaudits of the media, the Pariahs — the Untouchables — are slowly replacing the Brahmin of America and the entire Western world. The hideous skeletal girl in the prophetic setting of that Indian temple was my glimpse of the future of the Western world. (…) The huge populace of modern India cannot sustain the level of culture and economic well-being that its high-caste forebears created. (…) Our race’s struggle for survival and evolutionary advancement became the meaning of my life when I looked into that little Indian girl’s forlorn face (…) I determined that my life would be about awakening the Aryan within every person of European descent. When I grow weary in this battle and I find my character smeared or my personal life attacked, that girl’s gaunt face is there to haunt me, to drive me onward. (…) that girl’s countenance is there to remind me, in the most graphic terms, what failure would mean for our progeny.” (p.523-524)

On seeing this pitiable girl outside a Hindu temple, Duke might have resolved to do something about poverty, unjust international trade relations, foolish economic policies, the starving of Hindu temple personnel and their families by Nehruvian secularism, or any other worthy cause somehow related to this poor girl. But because he believed in the invasion of white Aryans in India and their subsequent degeneration due to their biological Indianization, he resolved to do something entirely different: to blow new life into White racism. Who says that the racist understanding of the Aryan invasion scenario has become irrelevant in the West? It is the Aryan Invasion Theory that gave America the racialist politician David Duke:

“Before my journey to India, the racial ideals that I believed in were abstract concepts and principles. In the moment I saw that emaciated child in the ruins, all my ideas were dramatically transformed into the reality of flesh and blood. (…) Seeing the child in the temple changed an intellectual commitment into a holy obligation. (…) I realized that day, in the scorching Indian sun outside that temple, that I had to adopt the spirit of an Aryan warrior who understood that the current struggle of our race transcends the centuries. (…) The flame that ignited in me on that hot August day in India in 1971 is still white hot and imperishable.” (p.525)

If the Aryan Invasion Theory is refuted, or alternatively, if its holds out against the present wave of criticism and gets confirmed and stronger than before, it will have consequences not only in the Indian power equation between Hindus and their enemies, but also in America.

From Morris Berman:

“American English, he writes, has more than 200 synonyms or related expressions for the word ‘swindle’, and when two Americans get together, they pretty much understand that the other person has an angle or agenda and is trying to promote it. We are a people relentlessly on the make, we are all encouraged to develop “The Brand Called You” and market it. It reminds me of the comment made by the comedian Chris Rock, that in the United States, when you are talking to someone, you are actually talking to that person’s agent.”

Here’s a gem, from some reader of Human Events, a pithy summary of the problem of labeling things incorrectly, whether in politics (or physiology): 

“I can call myself a hot fudge sundae, that doesn’t mean my ass is made of ice cream.”

Marc Faber warns that we are in the middle of a great unwinding that could end right now, or in another five years, so prepare now:

“I think I am very constructive and a I’m a great optimist in life, otherwise I would commit suicide in view of the kind of governments we have nowadays.

Because, for sure, they will take wealth away from well-to-do people one way or the other. And from the middle class they will take it away through inflating the economy and lowering the standards of living.

…So I think that we are in a very difficult situation…

If you print money the U.S. it doesn’t mean that it creates bubbles in the U.S. It can create bubbles in your neighboring regions – say Latin America, or Asia, or it can create bubbles in precious metals or in commodities, or in home prices somewhere else in the world. Or, say, for instance, in China. And if the Chinese bubble bursts one day, which inevitably will happen, maybe not tomorrow, but maybe in three months or maybe in three years. But when it happens it will have devastating consequences for the global economy.”

Hunting for evidence that the Israel-Palestine issue has been deployed strategically in the last several months, I  came across this analysis. It supports a reading that much of the debate on Israel-Palestine is misleading in its focus.

Thomas Barnett, an idealogue of empire whom I’ve critiqued at length in 2007,  has written an interesting analysis of Obama’s Middle East speech of May 19.  He applauds Obama for emphasizing what really undergirds the globalists’ war on Islam, in which, as he correctly points out,  Israel-Palestine is a side-show.

This is why I blogged before that you can be anti-Zionist (anti-empire) and still take Israel’s side on certain things.  It is neither here nor there. Israel is not going away, and probably has as much right to exist, at this point, as many other states.  What is being disputed then is simply Israel’s right to exist as a supremacist state and that turns out to be no bar to  the “international community” either, if the underlying demands of the globalists are met.

What are those demands?

That women be allowed to enter the workforce en masse and that international capital and business be allowed to operate with no restriction of race and creed.

From this we can conclude the so-called “universalism” of the globalists’ human rights agenda (women’s rights, anti-racism, religious tolerance), all worthy goals in themselves, is in context nothing more than a prescription for universal domination, the opening up of national doors to state-subsidized transnational business interests.

Those interests, of course, are led by Western multinationals, almost all of them beholden to, or compliant with, Zionist ideology, which is the ideology of the Anglo-Israeli empire, as the tenor of this whole piece demonstrates.

“Not only did Obama eschew any direct promises of toppling leaders, he coupled a passive-tense treatment of American leadership with a clear repudiation of the notion that elections alone can bring “real reform.” Thus he spent the bulk of his speech listing all the vast social reforms — freedom of religion, women’s rights — that must undergird political change, while stating unequivocally that all such transformations are unsustainable absent broadband economic development.

In short, Obama’s speech made clear just how much the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a complete sideshow to the civilizational rebirth triggered by the Arab Spring, which is about the Arab world finally adapting itself realistically to the demands imposed by globalization’s creeping embrace: If you want to do real business in this world, achieving the sort of investment and production-chain integration that generates serious job creation, you must engage with all comers regardless of race or creed. Regarding women, the reality of every economic “miracle” of the last several decades is that they all began when societies allowed women to join the workforce en masse. There’s your “inscrutable” secret of Asia’s rise.

Obama stated as much on both of these highly contentious issues, signaling his understanding that for the Arab Spring to be successful, it must be a process that extends many years beyond his presidency. But make no mistake: The Arab Spring arrives on the basis of demographics — the youth bulge — and globalization’s connectivity. The Israeli-Palestine issue neither held up its arrival nor obstructs its progress. At best, it remains a potential red herring for future Islamist governments in places like Egypt that need to cover up their domestic policy failures.”

A most interesting analysis by William Black, which bears out what I’ve been saying on this blog many times. Interest rate manipulation set the stage for the financial scams, but the latter half of both the last bubble and previous ones were driven by specific types of fraud:

“The epidemic of accounting control fraud that drove the second phase of the S&L debacle (the first phase was caused by interest rate risk) was followed by an epidemic of accounting control fraud that produced the Enron era frauds. The FBI warned in September 2004 that there was an “epidemic” of mortgage fraud and predicted that it would cause a financial “crisis” if it were not contained.”

Compare this to my analysis in 2008:

“AIG was phonying its books long before the housing bubble, at least since Alan Greenspan began cranking out liquidity on the cheap at the end of the 1980s. That is, as soon as the junk-bond mania died and the stock market crashed, money was injected into the system by Maestro Greenspan through low interest rates. The tech bubble was inflated. Goldman Sachs was in the thick of it, sending a tidal wave of credit across the globe through new and complex derivatives and through electronic trading. MIPs, SPVs, SIVs. These off-book vehicles and other hedges (for Ghana’s Ashanti Gold, for AIG, for Enron, even for Fannie and Freddie) were developed before the real estate bubble,
some to skirt tax rules, others to make the books look better…”

What they also did was blind the companies who used them to the risks and losses they had on their books. Accounting rules and business practices that rewarded managers in the short-term exacerbated the problem. They encouraged shortsighted deal-making, quickie trading into hedge-funds, opaque off-book entities, and accounting swindles of all sorts. Now the bar tab has come due and our boon companions are making their excuses and exiting in a hurry. Guess who’s paying?”

Despite the casual tone, I actually waded through dozens of books and articles before reached that conclusion.

Of course Black would not agree with my prescription. Which would be to cut taxes to a straight-across-the board number – say 15%- and then tear up all the fancy footnotes and loopholes. They just feed a whole army of tax lawyers and creative accountants, hobble small businesses, and waste weeks of time for everyone else who has to read the fine print.

Black also seems to agree with another gripe I have. I too believe that conservative/pseudolibertarian apologists for fraud provide the environment and the justification for white-collar criminality, just as surely as cynical race-hustling provides the justification for at least some crime from the underclass.

“This is the second column in a series responding to Stephen Moore’s central assaults on regulation and the prosecution of the elite white-collar criminals who cause our recurrent, intensifying financial crises. Last week’s column addressed his claim in a recent Wall Street Journal column that all government employees, including the regulatory cops on the beat, are “takers” destroying America.This column addresses Moore’s even more vehement criticism of efforts to prosecute elite white-collar criminals in an earlier column decrying the Sarbanes-Oxley Act’s criminal provisions: “White-Collar Witch Hunt: Why do Republicans so easily accept Neobolshevism as a cost of doing business?” [American Spectator September 2005] This column illustrates one of the reasons why elite criminals are able to loot “their” banks with impunity – they have a lobby of exceptionally influential shills. Moore, for example, is the Wall Street Journal’s senior economics writer. Somehow, prominent conservatives have become “bleeding hearts” for the most wealthy, powerful, arrogant, and destructive white-collar criminals in the world. Criminology research has demonstrated the importance of “neutralization.” Criminals don’t like to think of themselves as criminals and their actions as criminal. They have to override their societal inhibitions on criminality to commit their crimes. When prominent individuals like Moore call their actions lawful and demonize the regulatory cops on the beat and the prosecutors it becomes more likely that CEOs will successfully neutralize their inhibitions and commit fraud. People like Moore have never studied white-collar crime, have no knowledge of white-collar criminology, do not understand control fraud, and do not understand sophisticated financial fraud mechanisms. They show no awareness of the economics literature on accounting control fraud, particularly George Akerlof & Paul Romer’s famous 1993 article – “Looting: the Economic Underworld of Bankruptcy for Profit.” People like Moore not only spur neutralization, they actively campaign to minimize the destructiveness of elite white-collar crime and to deny the regulators and the prosecutors the resources to prosecute the criminals.”

“If you have ever wondered about the government’s ability to control the civilian airwaves, you will have your answer on November 9th.

On that day, federal authorities are going to shut off all television and radio communications simultaneously at 2:00PM EST to complete the first ever test of the national Emergency Alert System (EAS).

This isn’t a wild conspiracy theory. The upcoming test is posted on the Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau website.

Only the President has the authority to activate EAS at the national level, and he has delegated that authority to the Director of FEMA.  The test will be conducted jointly by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) through  FEMA, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) National Weather Service (NWS).

In essence, the authority to seize control of all television and civilian communication has been asserted by the executive branch and handed to a government agency.

The EAS has been around since 1994. Its precursor, the Emergency Broadcast System (EBS), started back in 1963.  Television and radio broadcasters, satellite radio and satellite television providers,  cable television and wireline video providers are all involved in the system.”