“The worst thing about Occupy Wall Street is that it’s ruining a good cause: hating Wall Street.”

Ann Coulter

Update:

Note: I don’t subscribe to the view that this is a “flash in the pan” demonstration. On the contrary. It looks remarkably organized, although in a flexible and open-ended style.

Oaklandlocal.com

Consider this from Oakland local poster Richard Wright:

“Although the movement has been open, inviting and encouraging of People Of Color (POC) involvement, it still requires POC organizers to enter a space that can be culturally alienating, and the power dynamic of POCs bringing POC issues to a predominantly white forum, even with the best intentions of progressive and radical white folks…. can be problematic.”

Where to start with so dopey an observation? First of all, there is no “movement,” and Mr. Wright’s delusions of grandeur aside, there are no leaders to “invite or encourage” people of color. If it were a movement, invitations would not be necessary and people from across the social and cultural spectrum would be involving themselves as they did during previous social upheavals. That’s what happens in real social movements.

But second, and more tellingly, is the galling sense of patronizing self-importance of Mr. Wright and his cohorts who time and again involve themselves in flash in the pan demonstrations that serve only to underscore their impotence and cement their status as poseurs of the first order (or sadly to debase the memory of Oscar Grant by smashing windows and grabbing free sports shoes). Does Mr. Wright really think that “people of color” are so dim-witted and unaware that they need invitations? Or would he argue that such is the weight of social oppression upon them that they require aid to enlighten them?

Even the briefest of History lessons would clue Wright in that people of color have not in the past found protest to be “a space that can be culturally alienating.”  Perhaps instead most people, regardless of background, simply find these comic events to be self-defeating and stupid and would never consider being associated with them?”

Comment:

These are exactly my sentiments. What earthly good is accomplished by parading up and down, chanting slogans, and getting into confrontations? Media? Publicity? For what? This country is dying from too much media. What is so difficult about people instead getting together and doing the very simple things that are likely to have a real impact:

1. File suit against banks or universities or lenders who defrauded or misled them

2. Move money out of the big banks

3. Collectively boycott the stock market on a given day

4. Collectively boycott TV for a month.

5. Boycott specific companies associated with the banking scams.

6. Withdraw from universities, instead of begging for debt forgiveness, which methinks is some kind of racket. Anyway, where are the parents of the kids with the loans outstanding? Don’t they have a responsibility to pay?

But no. Gotta have some pointless exercise in annoying everyone that will eventually hurt the very people this is supposed to be assisting.

Out of politics (and this is a form of politics) can only come MORE politics.

Prosperity comes from individuals innovating, thinking, pursuing their own goals, forming businesses, buying and selling. Not as exciting as demagoguery, but guaranteed to put more money in your pockets than you had before. Which is the point, isn’t it?

Monthly Review Press:

The Anna Hazare Scam
by Analytical Monthly Review

Analytical Monthly Review, published in Kharagpur, West Bengal, India, is a sister edition of Monthly Review.  Its April 2011 issue features the following editorial. — Ed.

In the last weeks we have had an illuminating example of how a thoroughly corrupt regime can manipulate a thoroughly pliable media. One can hope that in time we will see some careful academic examinations of how Anna Hazare was put to use by the Manmohan Singh/Chidambaram regime in late March and early April of 2011.  It is too soon to speculate how long the Anna Hazare Scam will succeed in its goal of diverting outrage at the rising exposure of crimes at the highest level of government.  With Anna Hazare on the scene, supposedly now all will be well.  But already by the second week in April the “non-political Gandhian social activist” gives off a stench in the embrace of the blood-soaked Narendra Modi, and well-meaning persons momentarily caught up by the media frenzy may be experiencing a bit of disgust, or at least having some second thoughts.

Before the onset of the neoliberal regime in 1991, “anti-corruption” campaigns were a regular project of the business press.  Typically such reporting would involve a hero from a merchants’ association, who had succeeded in trapping into a bribery case some sub-inspector from the State Excise Department or the Railway Protection Force, or some hapless underpaid official of the local Municipal Corporation.  The steady drumbeat of such stories, combined with what everyone knew of the entrenched culture of real political corruption, contributed to the media campaign that accompanied the turn to neoliberalism.  In this story, the obstacle to development was the “license raj” that opened up prospects for such “corruption.”

No sooner had the turn to “de-regulation” and “economic freedom” been set in motion by a government that featured Manmohan Singh as finance minister and Chidambaram as commerce minister, than we were given a startling glance at the real corruption waiting in the wings.  The early days of the neoliberal turn was accompanied by a stock market boom.  As we have since seen ad nauseum, the business press loudly celebrated with drums and bells the rise in share prices, a proof of success for the emerging neoliberal policies.  Super-stockbroker Harshad Mehta was made into a media star, the “Big Bull”.

But quickly, as with every boom since, came the bust.  By the summer of 1992 it became known that Harshad Mehta had engineered much of the rise in prices through fraud. The mechanism was simple enough.  Agreements to sell and repurchase securities at a higher price after a period of time (“repos”) are among the leading options open to banks in their dealings with each other.  At the time such dealings were done through broker intermediaries.  The securities did not actually change hands, rather a “bank receipt” assured the purchasing (or lending) bank that the securities existed, and on its receipt the broker was furnished with the cash.  Harshad Mehta found some banks willing to issue bank receipts on non-existent securities for payment of a fee.  The cash was then invested in securities, and since prices were going up the “repurchase” was easily accomplished, leaving a growing sum of money in the hands of Harshad Mehta and his backers.  When the scam was exposed and prices collapsed, among the victims was president of Vijaya Bank, who committed suicide. In this single scam, a harbinger of what was to come, surely more money was lost than in a decade or more of all the “license raj” sub-inspectors’ bribes put together.”

“One man with courage is a majority”  –  Thomas Jefferson

From aangirfan.com

“Reportedly, the CIA wants to break up India.

In February of 2000, Indian intelligence officials detained 11 members of what they thought was an Al Qaeda hijacking conspiracy.

It was then discovered that these 11 ‘Muslim preachers’ were all Israeli nationals … India’s leading weekly magazine, The Week, reported ( Aborted Mission Investigation: Did Mossad attempt to infiltrate … ):

Map of a broken up india

On 28 March 2010, The Milli Gazette had an article by historian Amaresh Misra entitled “Headley Saga: 2008 Mumbai attack was a joint IB-CIA-Mossad-RSS project”

The SIM cards used by the ten 26/11 ‘terrorists’ were purchased by someone working for the IB (India’s Intelligence Bureau).

It is possible that the IB is heavily infiltrated by CIA and Mossad.

Rakesh Maria is the police chief responsible for investigating the Mumbai attacks of 2008.

He is said to have pro-Israeli links.

Who paid David Headley’s credit card bills? (Who paid David Coleman Headley’s credit card bill?)

The Bills were paid in the USA and Canada.”

Comment (Links to be added):

Someone might ask why a libertarian should care if the Indian state, a multiethnic state, were broken up. Wouldn’t that be a good thing?

For someone who cares for how things actually play out on the ground, the only answer would be, it depends. That holds true for every state.

For instance, I did not support the break-up of the Soviet state, surely a multi-ethnic empire by any definition, because it was apparent that the break-up was not a peaceful decision of the interested parties, with all rights considered, but rather the result of intense foreign subversive activity.

The result was quite predictable – tremendous suffering, the wholesale looting of assets by financial predators and cronies of the state, and vast criminality, which still has the country by its hair. Not to mention the problem of nuclear warheads on the loose.

I would be in favor of greater and greater decentralization, with a loose retention of the central government and the geographical boundaries of the old state, for the simple reason that those boundaries are natural ones, and make for better defense.

The idea is not to impose theory on the world. The idea is to increase real liberty for real people. Civil war, something tells me, does not do that.

So I will leave seductive and dangerous notions of insurgence and revolution to others. Peace is not the daughter of justice. She is the sister.

This is why I am adamantly opposed to those who support literal secession. Theoretically, it sounds libertarian. In practice, as India is constituted today, it would contribute to violence. Peace through strength is the motto of this realist.

I, like many traditionalist libertarians, thus, support the nation state in as much as it is a bulwark against the predations of the international financial order.

Just as ignorance and weakness signal to the predator a possible target, dissension and civil strife invite imperialists and corporate looters.

Actually, the power-elites, contrary to what some libertarian anarchists think, are promoting the break-up of nation states into regional trading blocks, because the administration of a world economic order would be much easier that way. Defining the states by regional economic zones makes defense difficult and the subjugation of some parts by the global powers much easier.

The Afro-Dalit movement, from this viewpoint, is simply an ideological penetration of the country that serves to draw away a large and prosperous part of India, to westernize and Christianize it, and then position it as a counterforce to the surrounding Hindu and Muslim populations.

Notice how truncated the northern part of India has become in the map. The entire Kashmir area in the North, long coveted by the West for its strategic position, is outside the boundaries of the new state.

Historically, when the state has receded from its natural physical boundaries, it has diminished even further, shrinking to just around the capital of Delhi.

As author/philanthropist/entrepreneur Rajiv Malhotra points out, while fringe activists in the West claim to be deconstructing their own countries, the truth is quite different. Federal power here is immense and there is little or no terrorism or infiltration compared to the enormous foreign activity in and around India.

Thus, Indian activists, drawn by the money and status of the foreign activist circuit, are misled by various gate-keepers to think their deconstruction of their own countries is equivalent to what American and European activists are doing. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Activism here is firmly under the control of the intelligence services, and the boundaries of discourse are ruthlessly maintained by the policing system known as political correctness, as well as by endless secret surveillance, whereby anyone who strays into genuinely subversive truth is immediately branded an anti-Semite or some such thing and sentenced to the cybergulag of irrelevance and obscurity.

This is made possible by the fact that, unknown to such brainwashed and servile activists, the entire web is the domain of thousands, if not tens of thousands of intelligence analysts, spies, instigators, sayanim, and ordinary snitches, who make sure that the apparent decentralized nature of the web is actually covertly controlled in a totalitarian mind-control system. That system encompasses everything from the corporate media giants to Hollywood, from academia to policy think-tanks, from the prestigious awards to the big publishing houses, from NGOs to social media.

And beyond all that of course, the very technology of control is firmly in the hands of closely interlocked mega corporations like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, and other internet giants, all of whom are part of the extra-governmental government, the supragovernment, of the spy agencies, as well as partnered with finance capitalism itself, centered in the US around the Federal reserve system (but more and more around the IMF and BIS), which controls the money supply, and thus the whole capital market and the life-blood of corporations.

The Balkanized India in the map above might seem like a good libertarian goal only if one were completely naive, ignorant of the context and history, or ill-intentioned. Indian history has been one long recitation of imperial expansion and contraction, interstate intrigue and betrayal, and foreign invasion, making trade difficult and dangerous, and forceful secession the last thing needed.

Now, in libertarian anarchy small states can join together for their defense, of course. And this is especially so if the individual states are constituted as republics and linked in a federated structure. But that is already the case in India, where the states are quite divergent and differentiated in structure, population, and functioning.

Those who make arguments for secession and balkanization thus betray their ignorance of contemporary India and her history.

Some ideologues even claim that there was never an India until the British came along and that the unity of the country is a recent creation. This is Eurocentric fiction, generated by the academic left, beholden to the globalists, as anyone who knows Indian history will be aware. The subcontinent has been unified, more or less, many times, before the British.

The Moghul emperors Aurangzeb and Akbar were just two who brought nearly the whole of India under their rule. Aurangzeb was no doubt a murderous despot, but my point is not to endorse empire but to say that anyone who suggests there was no entity called India until the British came along has been brainwashed by colonial fantasists.

Before the Muslims, there were also Mauryas who united the whole subcontinent. And, even between these eras and before them, there is plenty of evidence to show that the subcontinent had a history of its own and was seen as a separate region from the rest of Asia, divided from it by the definite physical boundaries of the Himalayas and the Hindukush.

But most importantly, the objection to the break-up of the nation states, which some libertarians consider preferable, is that it can and will end up playing into the hands of the economic elites, who have been planning for it a long while.

Professor Vaidyanathan at DNA India, describes the grossly wasteful and nefarious activities of foreign NGOs, which cost the US taxpayers heavily, while destablizing the country:

“The funding for these NGOs is substantially international. The international flow of funds is regulated by the Foreign Contributions Regulation Act (FCRA). Table-1 provides the trends in the number of reporting registered associations and the amount of money received under the Act.

We find that the number of reporting associations has declined (percent wise) over the period and the numbers of those not complying with the laws have increased. For instance, the ministry has placed 8,673 associations under “prior permission” category in 2005 for failure to furnish annual returns for the three previous consecutive years. There exists substantial under-reporting.

We also find that in the last three years, the amount received has shown a phenomenal increase and it was 56% more in 2006-2007 than in the previous year. The report of the home ministry also provides other information regarding the states receiving the largest amount and purpose, etc pertaining to the year 2006-2007.

It suggests that important states or union territories are Tamil Nadu (Rs 2,244 crore) –

(Lila: this is where the Afro-Dalit movement and Tamil separatism have flourished, not coincidentally)

followed by Delhi (Rs 2,187 crore), Andhra Pradesh (Rs 1,211 crore) and Maharashtra (Rs 1,195 crore). Among donor countries, USA leads in the list of donor countries (Rs 2,972 crore), followed by Germany (Rs 1,649 crore), UK (Rs 1,425 crore) and Switzerland (Rs 605 crore).

The leading donor agencies are Misereor Pastfach, Germany (Rs 1,244 crore), World Vision International USA (Rs 469 crore), Foundation Vicente Ferrer Spain (Rs 399 crore) and ASA Switzerland (Rs 302 crore).

The largest recipients are Ranchi Jesuits of Jharkhand (Rs 622 crore), followed by the Santhome Trust of Kalyan, Maharashtra (Rs 333 crore), Sovereign Order of Malta, Delhi (Rs 301 crore), World Vision of India, Tamil Nadu (Rs 256 crore), Jesuit Educational and Charitable Society, Karnataka (Rs 230 crore).

Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh are some of the states with a large number of NGOs. It is curious to note that the poorest states like Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, etc do not have as many numbers.

(Lila: Why is that? If they were interested in helping the poor, that’s where they’d be).

Among the top 15 recipients, each with more than Rs 90 crore receipts from abroad, at least 14 are easily identifiable as Christian charity organisations from their names.

The interesting information is regarding the purpose of the donations (see Table-2). Establishment expenses top the list, followed by relief and rehabilitation, rural development, child welfare and construction and maintenance of schools and colleges. Substantial sums are spent on construction of places of worship and maintenance of priests.

Establishment expenses consist of buying land, buildings, jeeps, setting up fancy offices, mobiles, laptops, expensive cameras, salaries, consultancy fees, honorarium, and importantly, foreign travel etc, which make up 35-70% of the expenses. This goes against the grain of service motto where the ultimate recipient is supposed to get the maximum.

By definition, NGO activity is voluntary and hence one expects that the overheads of the organisations are lean. In financial parlance, the fixed cost is expected to be relatively small.

Contrary to this belief, we find that the establishment expenses are the major reasons for receiving donations from abroad. In other words, NGOs are perhaps becoming like top-heavy government departments wherein a substantial portion of developmental expenses is spent on salary wages and other expenses such as telephone, travel (both domestic and international), etc. Nowadays, they even recruit “executives” from management institutions.

NGOs are active in pointing out the deficiencies in the functioning of the government, be they on human rights or the Right to Information or Tribes Act or dam oustees.
Hence, it is all the more important that their activities are transparent, particularly from the point of view of their sources and uses of funds.”

From the Daily Paul, a blast from the past:

“Email this Dolt Matt Taibbi and tell him what for matt.taibbi@rollingstone.com

This guy is making a living by marginalizing our movement and claiming every one of us are racists. Hes completely misinformed and some establishment shill. He completely dogs Rand Paul in one column and in his latest he claims the tea party is full of hypocrites. (I dont consider myself “tea party” but every one of us on this forum was around during the tea party fund raising record) and he hates and demonizes the movement that spawned as a result. I am sick of this clown. Feel free to give him what for or if you’re so inclined (I cant see why) give him praise. I cant stand his columns myself and want as much email headed his way as possible to hopefully educate and perhaps shut him up.”

Comment:

Yep.  There speaks authentic history. The Tea-Party, of course, began much much before 2010. In 2007. And the MSM did its best to quash it until by 2008 things boiled over with the bail-outs.  Matt was on the case by then. His buddies followed. By 2009, the story was wrested from the Tea-Party which was painted as a Koch-snorting bunch of middle-class racists. Rolling Stone’s circulation shot up. The MSM were once again “truth-tellers” and the lefty activists, instead of having to listen to economics from what they considered their inferiors, got back their more familiar role of mandarins for the yokels.

Yawn. All attempts to change this history must be relegated to the dustbin of history along with the flat earth society and the platypus.

“Human rights” is the mantra behind the civil society network that constitutes groups like George Soros’ Open Society Institute. Human rights, however,  is a very open-ended term that, without checks and balances, can easily turn into an excuse for endless war and interventions into other countries’ national sovereignty – this is what “liberventionism” is. And liberventionism is just what George Soros promotes.

Most of these civil societies groups, thus, act as simply legitimizers of imperial/state violence, first providing the human rights justification for intervention by compiling dossiers of “rights violations”; then by surveilling the target and destabilizing it; next, by funding insurgencies or revolutionary movements, thus creating the pretext for ongoing international interference and mediagenic confrontations; then, by covert assistance to the war, including propagation of disinformation, by providing fora for the distribution of pysops material as well as by assisting in the cover up of real atrocities committed by their parent country; then, the civil society group, under the guise of aid, allows the aggressor to continue to monitor the post-war situation and create the most advantageous situation for the aggressor’s cronies, both strategically and economically, by policing and by looting; finally, these outfits assist in pursuing rights litigation against the target nations, creating a convenient justification for the impoverishment of any remaining centers of local power or autonomy, and not unintentionally, setting up the region for more Balkanization and lucrative interventions in the future.

Thus one commenter writes in “Why Human Rights are Wrong”:

“A human right is an ethical construction used to justify a harmful act against another person, by claiming that undergoing the harmful act is an absolute moral entitlement, and that accordingly the harmful action can not be judged morally wrong. For instance, a man who wants to rape a woman would say, that women have a ‘right to sex’, and that his action was beyond moral judgment, because in raping the woman he was respecting a universal right. Rights are not intended to improve the conditions of the person who gets the rights, but to legitimise the actions of the person who declares them. In practice, it is not individuals but states which declare rights, and they are used to justify state policy………It is obvious, even from this summary, that the logic of rights interferes with the principle of moral autonomy.

Formally, what happens when a right is declared? The standard answer is: it creates a moral duty to respect it. But that is not all that happens. A right, once its existence is recognised, effectively divides all possible human actions into three categories: actions which respect that right, violations of the right, and actions which are neutral with respect to that right. Declaring a right is a declaration of a desired course of action, not necessarily action by the holders of the right. Implicitly, the declaration of a right promotes and legitimises actions to enforce that right. The ‘right not to be tortured’ is at first sight a classic claim right of torture victims. It appears to create en entitlement for the victim, the entitlement that the torture stops. But the present political reality is that it is interpreted as an entitlement to prevent torture. This entitlement is claimed to legitimise a wide variety of acts, usually hostile acts by one state against another state. In other words, although the ‘right not to be tortured’ appears to be a concession by states to individuals, in reality it is a power claim by states. It is the creation of an entitlement to make war and impose sanctions. The formal declaration may say “right not to be tortured”, but the Pentagon reads this as ‘”right to bomb torturers” – including a right to cause collateral damage.”

Update:

And to confirm my take,  take a look at the team that’s going to “reform the Fed”: Bernie Sanders, Joseph Stiglitz,  William Black, Dean Baker,  etc. and then, get this, Jeffrey Sachs.  Democrat “homies,” in other words.

ORIGINAL POST

I am tired of the comparisons of OWS to the Tea Party.

The Tea-Party was an original and genuinely intellectual movement (yes, the initial Tea Party was driven by ideas) that essentially came out of the conservative Christian old right. It ideological core came out of the old John Birch Society, the Patriot movement, home-schoolers and such like.

Occupy Wall Street, on the other hand,  comes out of the same old media elites, think-tanks, foundation activists and Hollywood-MSM complex that rejected and smeared the Tea Party in the most vicious way, co-opted whatever part of the message it could put to its own use, and, starting from 2008, has, with its vast global network of civil society activists and its unparalleled media clout, come up with its own movement, one that will offer nothing more than what the same elites who run foundation activism, want.

The real template for Occupy Wall Street is not the Tea Party, but “Yes We Can”, the “grass-roots” movement that elected another “dark knight”, Obama…and that has continued to be used in the civil society and human rights community, world wide.