Alexander Solzhenitsyn, quoted by Michael Terheyden at Catholic.org:

“To a large extent, this impending crisis is the end result of a pragmatic, materialistic philosophy which rejects God and absolute morality. It also embraces moral relativism and scoffs at the concepts of good and evil, which are considered old fashioned and laughable. It is a fundamental change in the way that we view the world and ourselves. This philosophy also forms the foundation for Marxism, communism and socialism, which are all violent and opposed to democracy and liberty.

For instance, Solzhenitsyn says Karl Marx wrote that democracy should be more feared than monarchy and that political liberty is worse than abject slavery. Marx and Engels frequently said that once they got in power, terror would be necessary. Solzhenitsyn quotes them as saying, “After achieving power, we’ll be considered monsters, but we couldn’t care less.”

Whereas this crisis was manifested in Russia under the guise of communism, it is now manifesting itself in the West under the guise of socialism. Solzhenitsyn believes socialism is a myth. He calls it a misty phantom that provides the illusion of quenching people’s thirst for justice. It is believed to be some sort of ultramodern structure that can serve as an alternative to capitalism, but it does not have a single or precise definition. He says socialism is like an emotional impulse that defies logic. Its devotees do not study it or subject it to critical analysis, yet they defend it with a passionate lack of reason.

Many do not believe that what happened in Russia can happen in the United States, but we are not impervious to calamity. Solzhenitsyn lists some of the warning signs in Russia just before the crisis hit. Thirty-five years ago when he wrote this book, he saw these same signs in Europe. Although America is years behind Europe, we can see almost all of these signs in the United States today.

The complete list of signs Solzhenitsyn mentions in his book is as follows: “Adults deferring to the opinion of their children; the younger generation carried away by shallow, worthless ideas; professors scared of being unfashionable; journalists refusing to take responsibility for the words they squander so easily; universal sympathy for revolutionary extremists; people with serious objections unable or unwilling to voice them; the majority passively obsessed by a feeling of doom; feeble governments; societies whose defensive reactions have become paralyzed; spiritual confusion leading to political upheaval.”

Solzhenitsyn says that these signs mean the crisis is near. In the final pages of his book, he pleads for Europeans to heed his warning, but he could just as easily be speaking to Americans today. He writes, “We the oppressed people of Russia, the oppressed people of Eastern Europe, watch with anguish the tragic enfeeblement of Europe. We offer you the experience of our suffering; we would like you to accept it without having to pay the monstrous price of death and slavery that we had to pay.”

Comment:

Appeals to emotion prevail in political debate today. Austrians are of course at a tremendous disadvantage because of this.  Economics that leaves aside emotional grand-standing and concerns itself methodically with displaying the causes and effects of things cannot hope to easily defeat economics couched in terms of people’s self-interest.  Thus spending on infrastructure must be good, because it will “create jobs”. But for how long? How lasting? And at what cost elsewhere? To create, by fiat, jobs in one section of the economy must be to remove, as a consequence investment that should have gone elsewhere and deprive another sector or even a new sector that might have transformed production, as the internet did. All these subtleties are lost, when the appeal is to the newly displaced workers, the young student with no prospects, the mother looking for work. Who can argue with hunger? OccupyWallStreet cannot be blamed if its adherents vote for their pockets, which are empty.  But the ones who promises to fill those pockets is the one to watch. For as surely as he isn’t dipping into his own for the money, he is dipping into others’.

But when you are fearful and hungry, emotion and food go a long way. Logic no where. Socialism laid its groundwork well, over more than a century, and argument alone will not undo it.

Communism and the Evolution of “Errors of Russia” (Solange Hertz):

“Post-Vatican II developments are sufficient example of this master tactic whereby the dialectical struggle has been introduced into the Church herself. The only power on earth superior to Communism, she is being tempted at all levels to set her pace to the world, for she presents an insuperable obstacle to the Revolution.

The communist never lies or contradicts himself, because for him there is no absolute right or wrong. His Party, midwife of the Revolution, uses any means to accelerate delivery, espousing even reactionary causes if this will aggravate conflict. Lenin laid down as principle that “one must learn to work legally within the most reactionary organization.” Within these groups revolutionaries, always a minority, transmit party orders in the guise of their own personal opinions, harnessing as many non?communists as possible to the work of the Revolution without their suspecting it.

Never openly preaching Communism, party members are adept at manipulating “peace” offensives, defending “motherhood” and “democracy,” encouraging “patriotism,” so as to neutralize and dismantle any real opposition. All the while, management is pitted against labor to produce the deadly wage vs. price cycle which will wreck the economy and destroy money itself through inflation. Conservatives are hurled against liberals, haves against have?nots, black against white. In the women’s lib movement even the sexes are turned against each other to produce crisis in the family, basic cell of natural society. In the Church agents are found in traditionalist ranks as they are among the purveyors of the New Religion, promoting discord from both sides. This kind of super-opportunism at work supporting all sides is incomprehensible to those who can’t see that the basic strategy never varies.

“The dictatorship of the proletariat,” said Lenin, “is a relentless battle, both bloody and unbloody, violent and peaceful, military and economic, pedagogical and administrative, against the forces and traditions of the old world.”

Marcel Clement, on whom this article has drawn heavily, calls Leninism “the methodical exteriorization of all conflicts, based on organized deception and incitement to envy and hatred. Christianity is the acceptance of the Cross, the light of Truth, the pardon of injuries. We are in a way at the eve of the great option. It’s the destiny of the world which is at stake.”

Communism, dedicated to such “exteriorization of conflict,” can never be reconciled with the Faith, which is founded precisely on interiorization of conflict as exemplified by Christ on the Cross, of whom the Psalmist had prophesied, “I bear in my bosom all the accusations of the nations!” (Ps. 88:51).”

Comment:

This is why partisanship and party politics (external factions) only lead to more government, even if they are pursued in the name of libertarianism. Out of politics (factions, materialism), can only come more factions.

Please note: I have posted on BCCI several times. I post excerpts that I think are relevant to understanding what’s happening in the markets.

It doesn’t follow that I endorse the rest of the author’s positions or narratives. To make that clear,  I am adding links to my previous posts below, which flesh out the British connection to BCCI. I don’t know if the connection is a controlling one, but it’s reasonable to suppose it is influential

http://mindbodypolitic.org/2011/10/18/george-soros-front-for-n-m-rothschild/

http://mindbodypolitic.org/2010/04/15/the-cia-the-us-gvt-the-stock-market-and-drug-running/

American Pendulam.com

“Both the IMF and the Caribbean Development Bank (CDB) had close ties to BCCI. The CDB was founded by David Rockefeller’s International Basic Economy Corporation – which launched the Caribbean Basin Initiative.  CDB loans money to countries that agree to allow multinational corporations to set up tax-free operations within their borders to take advantage of cheap labor.  These areas become known as export processing zones and give the corporations additional tax benefits from the US government.

BCCI – launched by Bank of America – was a CIA drug money laundry which moonlighted as mugger for the IMF bankers. The IMF helped BCCI set up shop in numerous countries, including virtually every Latin American nation.  BCCI loaned the Jamaican government money to pay the IMF in return for Jamaican government deposits at BCCI.  Bolivia got BCCI loans under the same agreement, this time at the urging of the World Bank.  In Peru, the IMF/World Bank solicited Peruvian treasury deposits for BCCI.

None of these countries would ever see the over $1 billion in treasury funds which they collectively put down the BCCI black hole.  Peru later indicted a former IMF/World bank official for his role in the fleecing of Peru’s Central Bank.  While recycled petrodollars were being pumped into BCCI from the pockets of Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) oil sheiks, and drug profits were derived from contra cocaine and mujahadeen heroin, BCCI was simultaneously swindling the central banks of some of the world’s poorest countries with a wink and a nod from the IMF and World Bank.

As Alexander Cockburn put it in a Wall Street Journal column, when BCCI was closed by the Bank of England in July 1991, “The little guys went to the wall and the big fish swam off with the swag”.

The racket worked something like this: BCCI, in addition to providing loans for deposits, would offer to broker a country’s debt with the IMF if the central bank was willing to deposit funds at BCCI’s local branch.  Those countries that cooperated with the IMF would be rewarded with more loans.  Those that refused never saw their money again.  Most of the $20 billion that disappeared when BCCI was shut down belonged to Third World central banks whose governments had not bent over far enough for the IMF.  This outright theft left the poorest, most debt-ridden countries in the world even more impoverished.  African nations were hardest hit.

Cameroon, where US AID had been BCCI’s biggest customer, lost one-third of its hard currency reserves.  Nigeria lost $300 million when BCCI crony Alhaji Ibrahim Dasuki bribed central bankers, then split with the cash.  For his troubles he was appointed Sultan of Sokoto, the Muslim capital of northern Nigeria.  The central banks of Zambia, Zimbabwe, Congo, Ivory Coast, Sierre Leone, Gabon, Senegal and Ghana were all pilfered by BCCI.  All failed to satisfy IMF mandates for new loans or were in arrears on old debt.  BCCI sponged over $2 billion from the African continent.

Even in England, where $400 million was lost by depositors when BCCI closed shop, most of the money belonged to African immigrants of marginal means who believed BCCI’s claim of being “a bank for the world’s poor”.“

The timing and manner of the temporary court order (see my earlier blog post) that prevents access to the Deep Capture website interests me.

The order, reported at Stockwatch, was handed down on October 19, the same day by the Supreme Court of British Columbia (Canada), the home state of the Vancouver Stock Exchange, long recognized as a center of stock-market schemes of all kinds.

The order was the result of a complaint by a Vancouver stock promoter, that he is named in a libelous manner in all but five of the chapters of a book on Wall Street crime that Deep Capture was serializing. The book, “The Miscreants’ Global Bust Out” (a spin on the famous book about Michael Milken,  called “The Predators’ Ball”)  was by one of the three writers on Deep Capture, Mark Mitchell, a former Columbia Journalism Review editor.

1. My first point is that the allegedly defamatory material had been up at Deep Capture from much earlier this year. The first chapter, “Was The United States Attacked By Financial Terrorists?” was serialized at the site on April 29, 2011. And the promoter is only one of dozens of people placed in at least equally damaging light, many of them much higher up the food chain:

Patrick Byrne:

“Jim Chanos was Eliot Spitzer’s biggest donor. That’s all been publicly reported and acknowledged and Chanos said he didn’t know who she was, he didn’t know she was servicing Eliot Spitzer… Well that may all be.

“But if it isn’t, put it this way: if any hedge fund was involved in the procuring of hookers for Eliot Spitzer, that hedge fund owned himself the Attorney General of the state of New York. Right? If you bring him hookers, you own him. And if you look at the list of the companies shorted by [Steve] Cohen and Chanos and guys in that little circle, and then you compare it to the list of companies Eliot Spitzer went after, you’ll see a remarkable coincidence.”

However, the only response so far to these assertions, even on the web, has been  silence.

Even more interesting, there have been no claims of libel or defamation, until Nazerali’s claim.

Most interesting of all, just a month before this order, Deep Capture did suddenly begin to get “Nasty-Grams,” according to Byrne, September  20, 2011.

2. Point two. The only other person who did try to remove Deep Capture material is also directly linked to the target of a lawsuit by Patrick Byrne.

A video of well-known hedge-fund manager turned publisher, author, and TV personality Jim Cramer, in which he admitted to intentionally manipulating stocks, was taken down in 2010 from Jon Stewart’s Daily Show, as well as from other websites, by Cramer’s lawyers. It was Deep Capture that had supplied Stewart with the video.

Cramer is a former stock-broker for Goldman Sachs (the target, with Merrill Lynch, of Byrne’s current suit) who went on to run his own firm from the offices of Michael Steinhardt, well-known hedge-fund manager. Over the course of a lucrative career, Cramer invested money for such New York luminaries as Martin Peretz (who owns the New Republic), as well as for his old class mate Eliot Spitzer, son of a billionaire New York real estate developer, NY Attorney General, and Governor of New York.  Spitzer was brought down by a hooker scandal, subsequent to which the hooker, allegedly, stayed in the house of Jim Chanos, a short-seller accused of market-manipulation and manipulation of the financial media.

Other people, including libertarian financial adviser Barry Dyke, author of a 2007 book on Wall Street corruption (Pirates of Manhattan),  have also accused Cramer (ex of Goldman) of promoting  Goldman Sachs stock picks and  of defending the firm’s practices.  Eliot Spitzer (then Attorney General of New York) Byrne implies, went after a list of companies that strangely parallels the list targeted by short-seller Chanos.

Cramer made his admission of stock manipulation on the video in 2006. It’s since been removed from several sites, see here, according to this article (here). His video admission also made the rounds of the web in 2007, which you can see  here .

3. The third interesting point is that the injunction against Deep Capture came down on the same day that the promoter filed a claim against the site and its owners, and it came without any notice to them.

The date until which the temporary order remains is December 2, 2011. Oddly, or not oddly, depending on how you are disposed to think about Byrne’s naked-short-selling conspiracy theory, that is just before the December 5, 2011 trial date originally set for the suit by Mr. Byrne. The suit is filed against Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch,  but was first  filed in February 2007  against GS, Morgan Stanley and other prime brokers; then settled with all but two defendants in December 2010 for $4.4 million; and refiled in November 2010 against Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch, this time invoking RICO (the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act).

I’ve since learned that the trial date has been postponed to next year (March 5, 2012) and the petition to use RICO has been denied, so perhaps the closeness of the original date to the ending date of the BC court’s temporary order is nothing but coincidence.

In any case, for a view from his foes and targets, here is a suitably grim blog post from financial journalist Gary Weiss, summing up the complaint against Byrne. Byrne and Weiss have sparred for several years in one of the financial blogosphere’s most acrimonious and bizarre wrestling matches:

“I know a fellow who was the defendant in a libel suit who was subjected to two weeks of grueling cross-examination in a pre-trial deposition. The other side’s lawyers probed his private life in grim detail. And in that case he was dealing with an American court, the plaintiff was guilty as hell, and he was telling the truth!

The same is true for any other person or entity associated with the site, including Byrne’s loyal hatchet person Judd Bagley, a former company spokesman who was moved back to Overstock in late 2010, and former message board stalker Evan Karpak [sic], who remains a principal of Deep Capture LLC and was, inexplicably, not named in the lawsuit. An oversight, I’m sure, that can be rectified in due course.

In Canadian courts, the usual burden is reversed and the defendant has to prove the truth of the libelous statements. Good luck, Mark.”

Weiss was apparently responding to a recent post by Byrne at Investor’s Hub, where he responds to the British Columbia SC order and cites a July 25 2011 executive order by Obama blocking the property of transnational criminal organizations, as well as a 2002 article about Vancouver stock scams that mentions  the promoter tangentially in connection to the halting of a penny stock operation called 800America.com.

Weiss contends that this response itself may violate the BC Supreme Court’s injunction against Byrne et. al. and the site.

Update:

Here is a piece from the Veterans Today website that contradicts the piece I posted below.  VT is an anti-Zionist website run by a former veteran that is obviously left-wing. It’s affiliated with the military, but within those limitations, has published a lot of interesting contrarian articles about US foreign policy. The level of quality and sourcing varies widely. Their analysis of Libya is completely different from that of most antiwar sites, and I’m linking it here to balance the post below. I honestly don’t know enough to judge for myself, so I’ll follow the libertarian prescription that meddling in other’s business cannot be a good thing, no matter what Gaddafi did or didn’t do. There may be a bankers’ interest in Libya. I can’t see what US national interest is served.

Ajitvadakayil.blogspot.com gives the view of an Indian who lived in Libya under Mohammed Gaddafi:

“I am a sailor and have visited Libyan ports Misurata, Tripoli, Sidra,Benghazi several times over the past 4 decades. I don’t need BBC or CNN to tell me how it was there.

Libya under Mohammad Gaddafi was a stable and happy country. Yes, indeed Gaddafi was a dictator, who liberated his country from a tyrant and puppet to the West King Idris Sanussi.

A couple of my friends have served on ships flagged in Libya, with full Libyan crew. As early as the seventies SCI ( Indian National Shipping Company ) has an office in Libya.”

Vadakayil suggests the Libyan uprising, which Assange took credit for, was simply a provocation and a  pretext for nothing more than a bloodthirsty, racist war for oil and the control of the banking system:

“Petrol and diesel was dirt cheap at 13 US cents. This will never be the same again, as the West has now spread its tentacles and will siphon off Libya’s oil, by putting grease money in the Rothschild’s Swiss banks for new leaders who will all be puppets. As of today the gasoline is 32 times more expensive, than what it was 8 months ago.

9) All farmers who would produce were given FREE land, and equipment. Livestock was given free too.

10) On 1st July 2011 , 2 million people rallied in Libya expressing support to Gaddafi.  Videos and reports of the count are there all over internet. This was 1/3 of Libya’s population.

11) The Central Bank of Libya was state owned, and NOT a Rothschild controlled bank or IMF stooge.

12) Food and infrastructure was subsidised.

Gaddafi’s dictator ship was a form of direct democracy, unlike Arabian oil rich kingdoms supported by the West, because they are their type of dictators.

If Gaddafi was indeed so unpopular with his people why has it taken NATO 8 months to dislodge him with rebels having superior weapons. Why did it take NATO 26.000 air missions and 150 US drone strikes?

The second biggest mistake he made was to try and start a new currency THE GOLD DINAR, to upstage the Dollar and the Euro, in collaboration with Arab and African countries for oil transactions . Th real reason of revolution was NOT Libyan people’s discontent , but IMF and Rothschild bankers discontent, who cannot tolerate plummeting Dollars and Euros.

The biggest mistake Gaddafi made was to warm up to the friendly overtures of West leaders in the recent past and allow NGOs funded by foreign bankers into his country. A lot of security private agencies cropped up mysteriously.

So weeks before the invasion of NATO controlled rebels, a new National Central bank was created under the control of Rothschild bankers and IMF.  Are we to believe that uneducated rebels running around with huge NATO provided guns , screaming Allaho Akbar made this bank, in a jiffy?

There has been open ethnic cleansing of BLACK SKINNED PEOPLE by the NATO supported rebel forces all over Libya, which only the Wall Street Journal had the guts to expose.”

(Lila: I added the link and tidied up some of the typos/errors. Also, I can’t vouch for his assertions, some of which are exaggerated. I just find them an interesting contrast from citizen opinion in the west).

This blog entry reinforces my own sense of what happened in Libya, but since I have become increasingly suspicious of anything that comes out of the Western media that I haven’t studied myself, I haven’t posted anything about the intervention before.

But here is an ordinary citizen from India, well-versed in the mechanism of central bank control, who actually lived in Libya, claiming that Libya was raped at the behest of human rights “liberventionists,” with the connivance of  Human Rights groups.

To give him credit, Assange condemned Nato’s intervention flatly, as exceeding the UN mandate.

But, of course, if Assange were an NWO asset, as I’ve wondered, there would be nothing unexpected in his distancing himself from the bloody outcome of a revolt that, if we are to believe him, he had a hand in starting.

At LRC blog Daniel McAdams writes,

“The savage torture and murder of former Libyan leader Gaddafi was on full display today to a bloodthirsty world. His capture was a curiously familiar tale: he was “caught like a rat” in a hole. Just like Saddam. One wonders which NGO was subcontracted to write these scripts.

It was perhaps fitting that Gaddafi’s final end was precipitated by a Predator drone strike courtesy of the US military as he attempted to escape his hometown of Sirte. It was NATO, after all, that has murdered the entire country.

French filmmaker Julien Teil’s incredible film, “The Humanitarian War in Libya: There is no Evidence,” lays out very clearly the truth behind the mountain of lies manipulated by NATO to justify its attack on Libya. In the film, the director of the Swiss-based Libyan League for Human Rights, Soliman Bouchuiguir, emerges as the key individual who initiated the UN action against Libya.

In February of this year, the Libyan League, along with the US Government-funded National Endowment for Democracy and 70 other NGOs, sent the initial petition to the UN for the suspension of Libya from the UN Human Rights Council. The petition was based on Bouchuiguir’s claims alone that some 6,000 had been killed by Gaddafi’s regime. Bouchuiguir provided the UN with lurid tales of Gaddafi’s “scorched earth policy” and his militia’s “massive attacks against civilians.” These acts are “crimes against humanity,” he testified to the UN. On May 31, Bouchuiguir’s NGO reported a staggering 18,000 murdered, 46,000 wounded, 28,000 missing, 1,600 rapes, and 150,000 refugees at the hands of the Gaddafi regime. Asked in the film where he got his figures, he replied that he got them from the National Transitional Council — the rebels!

It was this petition and Bouchuiguir’s claims that were the basis for everything that was to come, culminating in the NATO destruction of Libya and today’s bloody murder of Gaddafi and his entourage. The United Nations did not investigate Bouchuiguir’s claims before they were used by the UN Security Council to bolster their efforts to pass UN Security Council Resolution 1973, opening the door to NATO bombs!

In the film, Bouchuiguir is pressed to advise journalists who go to Libya how they can document his claims about the Gaddafi regime. I hate to be a film spoiler, but in the climax of the film we can see Bouchuiguir asked again and again for evidence to back up his claims. Finally, without a bit of shame, he flatly states, “there is no evidence.”

Libya was bombed by NATO based on a dirty lie. Just like Iraq. Now the sights are all set on Syria. Does anyone care?

(Thanks to Tony Cartalucci’s terrific blog, Land Destroyer, for originally writing about this film.)

I looked up the Libyan League for Human Rights.

The website of the Geneva-based outfit explicitly invokes the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (which, as I blogged earlier, is part of the new “human rights” rationale for intervention, one that is far more expansive than traditional realpolitik considerations).

Axis of Logic editor,  puts the blame squarely on The National Endowment for Democracy in Washington, DC.

“Please note that the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), based in Washington, D.C., was at the root of this international crime against the government and people of Libya. NED also funded and helped organize the failed coup attempt against President Chavez in 2002 and many other U.S. violations of the sovereignty of nations.”

TruthIsTreason.net analyzes the Libyan story:

“The very nature of the Benghazi rebels has been deceptively presented to the public. In fact, they are a collection of extremists and mercenaries, many of whom had been fighting recently in Iraq and Afghanistan against US forces. These mercenaries, who have been backed by the CIA and MI6 for the last 30 years (see time line), are being portrayed as an “an indigenous political force” opposing Libya’s government. It has just been recently revealed that the rebel commander attempting to seize Tripoli is none other than Abdelhakim Belhadj, an Al Qaeda asset who was previously captured by in Malaysia, tortured by the CIA in Bangkok, Thailand in 2003, before being release back in Libya where he is now fighting on behalf of NATO.Additional disinformation comes in the form of media attempts to portray Qaddafi as a rambling madman who despite the disparagement, has turned out to be one of the few heads of state speaking any truth at all regarding the conflict besieging his nation. From his earlier claims that the uprising was foreign backed Al Qaeda, to now verified claims that the rebellion was nothing more than a means to usher in a foreign occupation and the despoiling of Libya’s resources, he has been spot on.

As rebels loot his home and his compound in central Tripoli, he is now being disingenuously portrayed as an opulent tyrant who hoarded state resources at the cost of his population. Betraying the duplicity of this lie is the UN’s own Human Development Index which lists Libya as one of the most developed nations in Africa and is ranked higher than many other nations including Russia, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, and Malaysia. Quite obviously Libya’s oil wealth was put to good use, and as Libya has ensured the West’s nefarious corporate-funded NGOs were excluded from Libyan society, no other explanation for Libya’s development exists beyond the government’s own initiatives.

What we are witnessing in Libya is a concerted, admitted war of aggression by corporate-financier interests who have openly conspired to carry out a campaign of military and economic conquest throughout the Middle East (and beyond), including Northern Africa and specifically including Libya. From Wesley Clark’s 2007 speech, to Newsweeks’ 1981 article, we have been handed a signed confession that “our” governments are the true enemies of free humanity, masking their agenda with the thinnest veneer of moral justification, almost as if to insult the intelligence of so many who eagerly continue to empower them as they maliciously move forward. Once again, we must commit ourselves to identifying the corporate-financier interests truly driving this agenda, lurking behind the military and political leaders paraded before us as the executors of “international policy.” We must also commit to boycotting and replacing these corporate-financier interests as well as ending the recognition of any of the legitimacy they endlessly heap upon themselves.”

Rediff.com:

“Consider this. N Murali, the managing director of The Hindu, in a widely circulated letter recently, after a 40-year-long career in the Chennai-based, family-owned newspaper goes on to allege that its editorial section was run like a ‘banana republic’.

“It is indeed unfortunate that editorial primacy has been sacrificed at the altar of excessive commercialism and vested interests to pander to the wishes of some of the directors who have a crass disregard of the values The Hindu has always stood for,” he adds.

Pointing to the blatant pro-CPI-M and pro-Chinese tilt in coverage, Murali puts the matter in proper perspective when he concludes, “When the media is used as a means to achieve private ends it undoubtedly becomes a calamity.”

Remember The Hindu is no ordinary newspaper —  it is held in high esteem by Chennai’s intellectual class. That allows someone to fashion the thinking of Chennai’s vocal class by influencing editorials and writing columns in The Hindu.”

Comment:

Wondering what those pro-China, pro-Communist Party (Marxist), and commercial interests in Chennai could be? I’ll take a guess.

When I was interviewed by the Hindu in 2007 following the publication of “Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets,” I ended the interview with an endorsement of Ron Paul. I also said Naomi Klein’s book “Shock Doctrine” which came out at the same time, falsely blamed the excesses of neo-liberalism on the free-markets, where the proper term was state (managed)capitalism. I also pointed out that it was not Milton Friedman, but Jeffrey Sachs, who introduced “shock therapy” into the Soviet Union, and it was the Federal Reserve chairman Greenspan, as well as Robert Rubin and Goldman Sachs, Democrats both, who had the most hand in turning the markets into a casino in the late 1990s.  As I’ve mentioned on this blog, certain sections of this interview were cut out. I wasn’t sure at the time, but this quote from Murali clarifies things.

Goldman Sachs is a big player in Chennai real estate, along with many other multinationals. Goldman Sachs is left of center, a big funder of Democrats, and a major stake-holder in the Chinese market, heavily driven by the state. Chinese bankers have even trained at Goldman-run institutions in New York.

M. J. Akbar in The Khaleej Times:

“In June Assange walked out of the deal after the first draft was written based on interviews he had given. All autobiography, claimed Assange in justification, is prostitution.

This is the sort of pompous aphorism, which has been polished for glitter before an image-enhancing mirror. Assange can no longer see the difference between an autobiography and PR press releases.

His defenders will doubtless argue that you need an unstable sense of self if you have the courage to challenge the Pentagon. Assange is a famous hero, but I wonder if he is more heroic than the American soldier, Bradley Manning who actually stole the documents and passed them on to Assange, and now sits in an anonymous cell rather than on the cover of magazines.

There is a poignant moment in this book. In 1996 Assange was tried in Australia for hacking into Nortel, the Canadian telecom system. When he rose to stand in the witness box he saw the face of a colleague who had turned state evidence against him. “It was the look,” Assange says, “that I would come to know: the look of betrayal, organised on the face to look like a high-minded interest in the truth.”

I wonder whether the American soldier jailed for life would recognise the same look if he were to see Assange’s face right now.”

Patrick Byrne’s Deep Capture was an important expose of the subversion of the major financial media; it also documented corrupt ties between the big banks and the speculators.

Now it has been shut down temporarily, reports EconomicPolicyJournal.com. The URL returns a blank page.

I will be adding links  as I find more.

[Sorry. I won’t be adding links to any of its pages. I read the court order and some of the current defamation law in Canada. It seems that even hyperlinks by a third-party, sans commentary, can be construed as defamatory.  There you go. You can yell the vilest invective all day long at ordinary people. But serious financial or political stories? Then watch for libel litigation, court injunctions, gag orders, and legal threats.

So copy or link to any scraped or republished pages at your own peril. You might have to defend yourself in Vancouver at your own expense.]

My own sense is that there is more involved here than simply Mr. Nazerali’s wounded reputation.

Two other sites shut down recently, The new Sanity Check by Bob O’Brian (aka The Easter Bunny) and Christoph Amberger’s Green Laser Reviews.

Note: The old Sanity Check (upto 2006) is still up.

They are all connected to the financial crisis, but I won’t be saying more about them to avoid any problems. If you want more information, I suggest you do your own research, bearing in mind that most of the links relevant to understanding what happened have been removed.

All three helped me a great deal in figuring out parts of the financial crisis, but it would be wise to understand that doing google searches alone isn’t going to help you do that. They had compiled a number of fascinating and suggestive facts, but putting them together in a way that can stand up in court or hold off libel suits is a different cup of tea altogether.

The investigative journalist is always on the losing end of the deal, fighting the ticking clock tracking down footnotes strong enough to hold up in court, and, if the footnotes do hold up, running risks to himself and his family.

Not a good deal. Which is why I don’t dabble in investigative stuff as such, but prefer analyzing the broader picture.

I notice by the way that Judd Bagley hasn’t been named.  I’m guessing it’s because his research was meticulous to the point of over-kill. He analyzed wikipedia manipulation technically to prove that interested financial journalists and a wikipedia cabal were controlling the message on a number of subjects, including naked short selling. Other subjects said to be controlled are 9-11 research and Zionism.

Here is Stockwatch’s Mike Caswell:

“Vancouver promoter Altaf Nazerali has won a court order that has at least temporarily shut down the deepcapture.com website. He complained that the site, which purports to expose stock market wrongdoing, posted material portraying him as a criminal and a fraud artist. The order, handed down in the Supreme Court of British Columbia on Wednesday, Oct. 19, instructs the site’s host to block access to any material referring to Mr. Nazerali and prohibits the domain’s registrar from allowing a transfer of the domain.

While it is not clear how much of deepcapture.com directly referred to Mr. Nazerali, attempts to access any part of the site only returned a blank screen on Friday. The order was granted without any prior notice to deepcapture.com. Unless extended, it remains in effect until Dec. 2, 2011.

Nazerali’s claim

The order came the same day that Mr. Nazerali filed a notice of claim against the site and its operators. He claimed that deepcapture.com linked him with Mafia figures and an associate of Osama bin Laden, among others. The defendants included naked short-selling conspiracist Patrick Byrne, who is the publisher of the site. (Mr. Byrne is also the chief executive officer of Internet retailer Overstock.com Inc.) Also a defendant was Illinois resident Mark Mitchell, who the suit identified as the author of much of the material that Mr. Nazerali complained of.

According to the suit, deepcapture.com posted the defamatory material in a series of chapters. One, dated July, 2011, stated that Mr. Nazerali was an important figure at Bank of Credit and Commerce International, “the massive criminal enterprise that did business with everyone from La Cosa Nostra and the Russian Mafia to Colombian drug cartels.” His business partners, as listed in the passage, included Mufti al Abbar, “chief market manipulator for Muammar Qadaffi,” and “an impressive number of securities traders who are also narco-traffickers (such as Paul Combs, until Combs was whacked by Nazerali’s mobster friend Egor Chernov).”

Another chapter claimed that Mr. Nazerali’s associates included Yasin al Qadi, “Osama bin Laden’s favorite financier.” It also linked with other Middle Eastern figures. “Nazerali, recall, has working relationships with … members of Al Qaeda’s Golden Chain, the regime in Iran, Pakistan’s ISI, the chief of Saudi intelligence, the ruler of Dubai, the royals of Abu Dhabi, La Cosa Nostra, the Russian Mafia, and others in the Milken network.”

Comment

Obviously, I don’t want to link anything from Deep Capture’s webcache, but there are links going back to 2002 that you can research for yourself.

From Dr. Zhivago (by Boris Pasternak):

“Are these landlords’ or peasants’ fields? Nikolay Nikolayevich asked Pavel, the publisher’s odd-job man who sat sideways on the box, shoulders hunched and legs crossed to show that driving was not his regular job.

‘These are the masters’.’ Pavel lit his pipe, drew on it and after a long silence jabbed with the end of his whip in another direction: ‘And those are ours! -Get on with you,’ he shouted at the hones, whose tails and haunches he watched like an engine driver’s instrument panel. But the hones were like horses all the world over, the shaft horse pulling with the innate honesty of a simple soul while the off horse arched its neck like a swan and seemed to the uninitiated to be an inveterate idler who thought of nothing but prancing in time to the jangling of its bell.

Nikolay Nikolayevich had with him the proof of Voskoboynikov’s book on the land question; the publisher had asked I the author to revise it in view of the increasingly strict censorship.

‘People are getting pretty rough here,’ he told Pavel. ‘A merchant has had his throat slit and the stud farm of the zemsky has been burned down. What do you think of it all? What are they saying in your village?’

‘What do you expect them to say? The peasants have got out of hand. They’ve been treated too well. That’s no good for the likes of us. Give the peasants rope and God knows we’ll all be at each other’s throats in no time. – Get a move on there!’

This was Yura’s second trip with his uncle to Duplyanka. He thought he knew the way and, every time that the fields ran out on either side with a thin line of forest in front and behind, he, expected the road to turn right and give a fleeting view of the Kologrivov place with its ten-mile stretch of open country, the river gleaming in the distance and the railway beyond it. But each time he was mistaken. Field followed field and was in turn swallowed by forests. The succession of huge views aroused in the travellers a feeling of spaciousness and made them think and dream of the future.

The books which later made Nikolay Nikolayevich famous were still unwritten, but his ideas had already taken shape. Yet he did not know that his hour was close at hand.

Soon he was to take his place among the writers of his time university professors and philosophers of the revolutionary movement as one who, though he shared their preoccupations, had nothing in common with their way of thinking except its terminology. AU of them, without exception, clung to this or that dogma, and were satisfied with words and outward appearances, but he, Father Nikolay, a priest, had been both a Tolstoyan and a revolutionary idealist and was still travelling on. He craved for an idea, inspired yet concrete, that would show a clear path and change the world for the better, an idea as unmistakable even to a child or an ignorant fool as lightning or a roll of thunder. He craved for something new.”

Yura liked being with his uncle. He reminded him of his mother. Like hers, his mind moved with freedom and welcomed the unfamiliar. He had the same aristocratic sense of equality with all living things and the same gift of taking in everything at a glance and of expressing his thoughts as they first came to him and before they had lost their meaning and vitality.”

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I don’t subscribe to the view that this is a “flash in the pan” demonstration. On the contrary.

It looks  organized, although in a flexible and open-ended style. My thought is that it might have had its origin in some spontaneous brain-wave, but that it was quickly hooked into a previous network.

The only previous network that fits that description and draws Hollywood celebrities as well as the tolerance, if not blessing, of Nancy Pelosi and Warren Buffett,  Reason Magazine, Mother Jones, The Guardian, the New York Times, Mayor Bloomberg, Anonymous, and Julian Assange is a government-related network that is not radical anarchist.

The only one that fits is the civil society network that is closely allied to the left-liberal end of the US government and intelligence services in terms of ideology (pro-choice, pro-gay, anti-war, anti-capitalist), but tolerated by the left-liberal wing of capitalism. Yes, there’s a left-radical wing of capitalists. Most of the hedge-fund crowd is liberal. Like George Soros. Finance capital acts in a manner that undermines capitalism, as Marx himself recognized.

Think about it. OWS’s advocates emphasize the “rule of law” (Naomi Klein);  use rad chic language and theory (“cultural spaces”, Zizek, subject-object dissolution, post-structural types of notions); is driven by university intellectuals (David Graeber) and alternative journalists (Matt Taibbi and David De Graw).

The same guys who voted in Obama. So no, the commies aren’t coming, nor the jihadis, at least, not so far. [Added on Oct 21: So far, it’s just the van guard. And they’re making noises. Show of force]

But a few misguided would-be radicals, colored or colorless, who jump into the fray, might find themselves the target of a government entrapment operation.  And then things could really spin out of control. Would that be good? Isn’t that a libertarian outcome?  Maybe. But it could also provoke an authoritarian reaction. Or be used to justify one.  Betting on the rationality and good will of a mob of people is not what I’d call a smart bet.

So buyer beware.

#OWS is being sold as a product. Treat it like one.

What’s it for? Who’s selling it? Do you need it? What’s it going to cost? Can you afford it? Can you get what you want somewhere else, cheaper?  Can you do without?

On all counts, yes is my answer.