Make sure your name is Larry Fink, CEO of Blackrock.

“That BlackRock was awarded key contracts with no competitive bidding, in a process enveloped in secrecy, has also raised hackles in Congress and led to questions about Fink’s long-standing relationships with senior government officials, particularly former Treasury secretary Henry Paulson and Geithner, his successor.

“You see a lot of concentration now in the financial industry of people who are more connected than brilliant,” says Janet Tavakoli, the president of Tavakoli Structured Finance and the author of Dear Mr. Buffett: What an Investor Learns 1,269 Miles from Wall Street. “So why BlackRock? Not to take anything away from Larry Fink, but all the contracts awarded to BlackRock, in the way they’ve been awarded, deserves some question.”

Idi Amin’s expulsion of Indians from Uganda is the uneasy memory that many diaspora Indians live with.

An immigrant always has something of the migrant worker in his make-up.

You feel you need to keep your bags packed at all times, and an eye on the window. You never knew what might happen or who might show up to ask for your papers.

There was Enoch Powell in Britain in the 1960s, with his talk of “rivers of blood.” But Idi Amin’s Uganda is the nightmare scenario.

An interview with Vishwa Samani, a London-based freelance journalist descended from Asians dispelled from Uganda.

“IB TIMES: Idi Amin seized power in Uganda in January 1971 — the order to expel Asians came nineteen months later. During that interim were there any indications that he wanted to remove the Indian community, or did it come as a complete shock and surprise?

SAMANI: Most of the expelled Ugandan Asians I have interviewed who now live in the UK say the order came as a complete shock and there was no real indication it was going to happen. When Idi Amin came into power, he made the working conditions for business favorable. Many Indians — especially non-citizens that engaged in business, commerce and trade actually viewed Amin’s assumption of power with some relief. There had been fear surrounding measures introduced by his predecessor Milton Obote over entry permits and economic reforms that sought to redress the balance between Africans and non-Africans. But after 1971 Idi Amin had started offering residence permits, granting import licenses to businesses and generally opening up the market for importation, Asian businesspeople started to repatriate capital and investments back to Uganda. Early measures introduced by Amin were not exclusively beneficial to Asians, but as Asians operated the majority of business and trade, they benefited from them the most. Most expelled Asians felt settled in Uganda, indeed many of their parents were born in Uganda (2nd generation), and it was regarded as their home country……..

IB TIMES: Did the majority of African Ugandans support Amin’s decision to deport Asians?

SAMANI: African Ugandans themselves were strongly associated with their respective tribes, so it is difficult to lump them all together in one category of opinion. The general impression I have, from speaking to African Ugandans is that many were not in favor of the expulsion, especially those who were employed by Asians. The expulsion put many African Ugandans out of work. Some saw Asians as job-providers and essential to the proper functioning of the economy. There were others who welcomed the expulsion. This was mainly expressed by politicians who were aligned with Amin’s way of thinking.

IB TIMES: Did the order to expel “Asians” include other ethnic groups like Chinese or Arabs?

SAMANI: I have not come across any record of Chinese settlers in Uganda at this time. Arabs made up a very small proportion of the population; a fraction of the number of Indians. The order was directed at the large Indian community, particularly those in business and trade, the vast majority of whom had British passports.

IB TIMES: Were most Indians in Uganda at the time Gujaratis? Were there Sikhs and Muslims among them? If so, did Amin (a Muslim himself) spare Indian Muslims from the deportation order?

SAMANI: A large proportion of Indians, approximately 80 percent, were of Gujarati origin, including both Hindus and Muslims. There were a few other Indians from different states in India, including the Punjab. The official argument for expulsion seemed to hinge on national identity and economics rather than religious difference. Consequently, Muslim Indians were treated the same as Hindu Indians.

IB TIMES: Prior to expulsion, what was the legal status of Asians in Uganda? Were they citizens of Uganda?

SAMANI: In the lead up to Uganda’s independence, the colonial government offered British nationality to people of Indian origin. A majority chose to become British nationals, which seemed the obvious and more secure choice. A small number opted for Ugandan citizenship at this time. They were a negligible minority; at a guess, around 1,000 Indian families chose Ugandan passports. Choosing Ugandan citizenship enabled you to trade in any part of the country, without the same restrictions that were applied to those who carried British passports.

IB TIMES: Asians were expelled from neighboring Kenya in 1968 – did that set a precedent from Amin in 1972?

SAMANI: You would expect that it would have played a part but I am not aware of Amin referring to the Kenyan expulsion at any point. The Kenyan Indians were expelled in a much more civilized way; it was not at gunpoint. They were allowed to keep their possessions and leave with their money.

IB TIMES: Of the 90,000 or so Asians who left Uganda, did most of them go to Britain? If so, did they already carry UK passports and have the legal right to settle in Britain?

SAMANI: Around 30,000 Indians came to the UK, a small proportion went to India, and many of the Ismailis (an Indian Muslim community) went to Canada. Those who settled in the UK did have British passports, and did have the legal right to settle in Britain. However, most of them had never lived in the UK before.

IB TIMES: Did some Asians remain in Uganda in defiance of the expulsion order? If so, what did they do in the country?

SAMANI: A small number of Asians remained in Uganda. But that was not in defiance, some were allowed to stay because of their vocation, and a few had become Ugandan nationals at the time of independence. The general impression I have is that anyone who could escape, did escape. The army had turned on the Asian community, and everyone was afraid. Amirali Karmali, is a Ugandan Asian entrepreneur who stayed in the country, and rebuilt his business in the early 1980s; today, the Mukwano Group of Companies, is one of the biggest conglomerates in Uganda.

IB TIMES: Did Ugandan authorities strip the Asians of all their wealth and assets prior to their forced departure from the country.

SAMANI: Yes – all assets were confiscated, there were army checkpoints on all major roads, any gold, jewelry or money Asians were carrying with them was taken. Asians were also unable to access their bank accounts, so they landed in Britain without a penny to their name. A few of the wealthier Ugandan Asian families probably held foreign bank accounts, but the vast majority would have arrived in the UK with nothing.

IB TIMES: Amin claimed that Indians in Uganda were dominating and exploiting the economy at the expense of local Africans. Is there any validity to this assertion?

SAMANI: Indians did not really have any power to marginalize African Ugandans. They were operating under rules set by a colonial government. The economic segregation primarily arose due to ‘know how’ and trading instinct of the Indians. Even when trading regulations did not favor the Indians, they still prospered. It was mainly politicians of Amin’s persuasion that claimed the Indian community exploited Ugandans.

IB TIMES: Indians had lived in Uganda for about a century prior to the expulsion. How did they get along with African people? Did Indians remain isolated, or did they socialize with the African people?

SAMANI: Indians generally employed African Ugandans, and from what I understand, they did not really socialize. You could say the Indians were isolated, but every community in Uganda socialized and mixed only amongst its own people – the Indians were not unique in behaving in this way. This also applied to Ugandan tribes and Europeans.

IB TIMES: Were any Indians killed by Amin’s soldiers?

SAMANI: I have no recorded data of this, only anecdotal evidence that perhaps a hundred or so Indians were unaccounted for. There were not really any widely reported cases of murder. Most arrived in the UK having left in hostile circumstances, and there are some cases of individuals who disappeared and remain unaccounted for.

IB TIMES: After the Indians left, did Uganda’s economy collapse?

SAMANI: From 1971 to the National Resistance Movement (NRM) Party’s adoption of free market reforms in 1987, the Ugandan economy fell deep into a crisis under the strain of civil wars, the nationalization of certain industries and the expulsion of the Asians. The NRM overthrew Amin in 1979. The instability of the economy between 1971 and 1987 led to the rise of the informal sector. By 1987, President Yoweri Museveni had inherited an economy that suffered the poorest growth rate in Africa.“

Derrick Ashong at Huffington Post has the best comment about the whole Wikileaks model:

“You blow the whistle to spread the truth, not to hear the sound.”

Rajiv Malhotra on Postmodern Imperialism

The postmodern insistence on denying such identities as “Indian” and “Western” leaves non-Western cultures vulnerable to even further exploitation because they are denied the security of possessing a difference which is real and defensible. Postmodernism, then, tends to undermine the particular reality of the non-Western culture that might be in need of being affirmed, protected and developed.

The London-based Indian Muslim cultural critic Ziauddin Sardar points out that the postmodern criticism of nation-states and their related identities actually empowers imperialism insofar as it “softens the prey” on behalf of the predator empires by advocating the abandonment of distinctiveness in a one-sided manner. This is so because the West does not practice what it exports. The call to abandon distinctiveness is propagated and promoted through a network of intellectuals in the Third World nurtured and sustained by the First World.[ii]

[Lila: I’ll call this coconut imperialism, coconut being urban slang for “brown on the outside, white inside,” that is, Indians who have no connection to or knowledge of their own cultural heritage and simply ape/adopt Western culture wholesale]

Malhotra:

Postmodern philosophers have made many attempts to deconstruct the West’s “meta-narratives,” as they are often called, rightly pointing out that such claims of universalism are in fact parochial and arrogant views of what is merely one cultural tradition among many others. It is perhaps a paradox that the West is simultaneously protecting itself by rewriting its story in a new and renewed chauvinistic mode in which deconstruction itself is seen as the culmination and fruit of its long, singular and ineffably superior philosophical trajectory.

Without an outside perspective on the Western mentalities, the postmodern critiques assume an unfolding consciousness in which Westerners are the leaders and agents. They tend to project their latest theories back into Western intellectual history, thereby enhancing the Western collective identity rather than dissolving it. Although it decries identity, postmodernism is itself the product of a history that has been shaped by particular attitudes to difference and that cannot be assumed to be the template for world history. Postmodernism is highly critical of imperialism and colonialism, yet it has a grand narrative of its own which remains largely outside the bounds of the deconstruction process. Indian traditions are marginalized by the postmodernists.

[Lila: Thus, you have the meeting of minds between Slavoj Zizek, post-modern radical, and Julian Assange,  the publisher of Wikileaks, the two who are now the de facto spokesmen for millions, if not billions, of non-whites affected by empire.  Beneath the libertarian language, Assange is known to be deeply controlling. Zizek is the European icon of the new Uncle Comms – leftist or communist ideologues from the third-world doing the work of  our new remote imperialism ]

The two are now uncritically embraced by anarchists and peace-lovers, under the misleading assumption that they are simply public intellectuals, whereas, all signs so far point to Assange at least being a hybrid creation of the corporate-intelligence complex.]

Malhotra:

The power of the U.S.A. and the European Union remains unaffected by the fringe activities of its own liberal postmodern scholars. Ironically, many of the “leftist radicals” of the counterculture in France and the U.S. later became neo-conservatives — because of the temptations of the marketplace and because the sacrifices required by the left proved unsustainable. Only a few years after participating in strikes and anti-war and civil liberties marches, these “radicals” found themselves calling for the defense of “Judeo-Christian civilization” and advocating aggressive but selective “humanitarian” intervention into other countries. The U.S. military has used liberal social scientists to foment conflict in countries such as Chile and, more recently, Iraq. In fact, much of the research into foreign “area studies” is done by liberal scholars and ends up serving the interests of the state and/or church.[iii] At the same time, the West is secure in its sense of history and identity, and that’s because postmodernist discourse in the West is limited to academic cocoons and applied mainly to pop culture – it is not allowed to change the education system of policymaking, for instance.

India’s postmodernist scholars who brag about their Western training and connections are encouraged to deconstruct Indian civilization, showing it to be a scourge against the oppressed. The deconstruction of India by Indian thinkers has a destabilizing effect which invites a new kind of colonialism. The most fashionable kind of difference being championed by Indian postmodernists is on behalf of the subalterns, i.e. “from below,” seen as the oppressed underclass. But many of these “oppressed minorities” have been taken over by global nexuses (Western churches, Chinese Maoists and Islamists, to name only the major ones) with the result that they are not truly autonomous and independent but satellites serving a new kind of remote-controlled colonialism. Thus the postmodern posture on difference has had the overall effect of causing native cultural identities to become vulnerable to imperialism – which is exactly the opposite of what the postmodernists claim they want to achieve. This is a serious topic of inquiry outside the scope of this book and which I cover in my previous book, Breaking India.[iv]

Indians are rather evidently being scape-goated on Wall Street (“we stole their jobs, remember?”), although it was the Indian middle-class and Indian businesses on whose backs American investors and the middle-class saved what could be saved of their ruined portfolios.

It was also India where American corporations squeezed profits they could from their firms.

You’d think some one would for once remember that….

Meanwhile, India’s PM Manmohan Singh is only too happy to help even more – this time,  the oppressed of the earth, in Europe.

Firstpost:

“At the G20 meet on Wednesday, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh pledged $10 billion for bailing out crisis-hit eurozone.

…..At around the time that Manmohan made the announcement in Mexico, his number two in the cabinet, Pranab Mukherjee, was holding perhaps his last EGoM (empowered group of ministers) to decide on another kind of excess: too much food grains.

He gave away $ 10 billion, that is Rs 56,000 crore, in the blink of an eye. PTI

Not for the first time in this decade, India’s food production and food procurement have broken records. As a result there is nearly 82 million tonnes (MT) of food grain with the Food Corporation of India (FCI) which does not know where to keep it……..

The government buys wheat at about Rs 12.85 from farmers. Storage, transportation and other costs add another Rs 5.35, taking it to about Rs 18.20 per kg. But at the PDS outlets, it sells wheat at an average of Rs 5 per kg. Hence for every kilogram of wheat sold, the government loses about Rs 13 (very rough, back of envelope calculations). This is what is referred to as subsidy. Similarly for rice and other food grains which would take the total subsidy for releasing 13 MT to about Rs 17,000 crore.

It is cheaper for the government and better for the Indian economy to let the food grains waste than feed the hungry. Excess food grain is not as easy to give away as spare cash.

The Pranab Mukherjee EGoM was meeting to take a final call on this excess headache. It decided to pare down Rangarajan’s recommendation for release of 13 MT to just 8 MT to bring the subsidy burden down from Rs 17,000 crore to Rs 10,000 crore only, a saving of Rs 7,000 crore.

Back to Manmohan and his Mexico munificence. He gave away $ 10 billion, that is Rs 56,000 crore, in the blink of an eye. That is, he wrote off eight times more money to save the world than his finance minister saved by snatching away 5 MT of food from the plates of hungry Indians.

This place at the world’s high table sure costs a lot, a few million empty stomachs here in India. Suddenly, I’m not feeling so good about this superpower act. Are you?

Tehelka, a muck-raking journal in India, has a critical account of the public-private wheeling and dealing that made Rajat Gupta enemies in India. It doesn’t have links or other evidence, so take it with some skepticism.

Now, no sympathies for Public-Private deals from me.

But, here’s my point, this is an INDIAN ISSUE, not an American one.

The fact that Gupta invested with a Pakistani minister in the Indian telecom sector, or that the he got land at cheap rates from the government, should be addressed in the Indian legal system.

It seems mind-boggling that charges in one country (which I don’t know for sure are true, either) should somehow justify conviction somewhere else on unrelated and insubstantial evidence.

If there is a civil/ criminal issue in India, that is a matter for the courts there.

Moreover, some of the charges against Gupta in his dealings in India through New Silk Route, first arose in Wikileaks, if I recall right…..

But, here’s my point. Will Goldman Sachs or other foreign investors in India, who came in the door that Gupta opened, pull out, because Gupta is tossed out?

I doubt it…

Point Two.

Tehelka itself has been severely criticized for its tactics (including conducting private stings, invasions of privacy and extortion). And some of its journalists are accused of financial improprieties, as well.

And, even more intriguingly, and very much like it is here in the US, some of these journalistic exposes of business deals are written by people with skin in the game themselves, i.e., they profit by the negative stories.

So my guess is that the Gupta story is better explained as a bankster take-down of a convenient patsy, even if the patsy himself was once a prominent part of the globalist agenda.

Tehelka.com:

“According to sources, Gupta was provided land at throwaway or rather no price for his projects across India–be it in Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Orissa or Punjab due to patronage received from the highest levels. The Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs (CCEA) in July 2006 sanctioned a one-time grant of Rs 65 crore to him to launch the Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI). Gupta was later sanctioned another Rs 36.15 crore in the 2007-08 budget without any explanation.

….Then PM’s Principal Secretary T Kutty Aiyappan Nair, who is now his adviser, is among four senior bureaucrats appointed on the governing board of PHFI at the time of sanction of the first grant while Planning Commission Deputy Chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia is on its advisory board. Gupta, former director of Goldman Sachs and Procter and Gamble, is chairman of the foundation.

Another organisation of Gupta promoted by the PM is the Indian School of Business (ISB). The Centre didn’t object to hefty sums of money Gupta has been collecting as fees while claiming it to be one of his philanthropic activities. The PM persuaded the Punjab government to acquire 70 acres of prime land worth Rs 105 crore from farmers in Mohali for leasing it to the school for 99 years at a token rate of Rs 1 per acre. The ISB website says it plans to enroll 280 students at the Mohali branch in 2012.

The $1.4 billion New Silk Route, a firm started by Gupta with Galleon Group chief Raj Rajaratnam–who has been sentenced to 11 years’ jail for inside trading—to focus on investments in India, secured a licence for broadband wireless services in Madhya Pradesh in June last year through its subsidiary Augere Mauritius. One of the founding partners of the firm is Pakistan Finance Minister Abdul.

The power Gupta wields in the corridors of power in New Delhi is such that nobody in the Home Ministry raised any questions on the deal despite Augere Mauritius providing broadband Internet services in Islamabad, Rawalpindi, Lahore and Karachi.

It was because of Gupta’s proximity to the PM that Sberbank, Russia’s largest state-run bank, appointed him to its board as the first and only foreigner at five times the salary of its Russian directors to use his good offices for entering the Indian banking sector. It got the Reserve Bank of India’s clearance to open a full service branch in New Delhi in August 2009. Since then, Gupta has been retained as a strategic adviser just, in case, his influence is needed again.”

Barry Dyke in Pirates of Manhattan II

“Much of Americans’ wealth resides in retirement plans managed by the asset management industrial complex (mutual funds, private equity, hedge funds, banks, etc)—which the author estimates to be a minimum $18 trillion. However, management fees eat up investor returns—creating headwinds virtually impossible to overcome. The author, citing Morningstar data, estimates that mutual fund shareholders—where most 401(k) funds resides—pay a minimum of 0.90 percent for every $10 thousand invested (and much higher when trading costs and other costs are factored in). Private equity and hedge fund managers—extract  a much higher fee schedule, commanding 2 to 3% manager fee, plus 20 to 30% incentive compensation fee known as “carried interest.” [Private equity is where Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney made his fortune].

The author comments, “On a whole, investment performance from highly paid investment managers has been horrible over extended periods of time. According to Morningstar, over 61 percent of stock mutual funds have lagged the S&P 500 index over the past five years.  In 2011, only 20 percent of funds beat the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index, the worst showing for active fund manages in over a decade.  Returns for private equity and hedge funds [both get much of their money from state pension funds] have been inconsistent, opaque, self-serving and hard to measure.”

However, asset managers saw their compensation soar. According to reports filed with the SEC in 2012, in reporting to go public,  the private equity firm The Carlyle Group [which gets a great of  investment money from state  pension giant CalPERS] reported that three billionaire founders David Rubinstein, William Conway and Daniel D’Aniello reported a combined payday of $402 million in 2011.  Most of this compensation was in cash dividends, where financiers enjoy a highly favorable 15% capital gains taxation rate on income.

Dyke notes while 401 (k) mutual fund investors were hammered, fund managers compensation soared. “

Well… you decide, after reading this,  just why Rajat Gupta ought to pay for Wall Street excesses….

And why he should be equated with Ivan Boesky.

Mind you, this writer wants him to get much, much more than the three years Boesky got.

Richard Levick, who takes his role as a pundit super seriously:

“Rajat Gupta an unwitting dupe? That seems a gross underestimation of a man who’s circumnavigated the financial markets as ably as anyone in recent history.

Here the jurors may have missed the compelling tie that bound Gupta to Rajaratnam but, if so, it’s not the jurors’ fault. They just don’t happen to live and work in a world like Wall Street where favors are done and relationships cultivated at any cost; where informal conversations slip into illegality with amazing nonchalance; where secrets are traded like marbles; where insider trading is, as Gupta’s prosecutor, U.S. Attorney Preet Bahara put it, a “performance-enhancing drug.”

It’s called “intangible benefits.” Because he sought and savored those benefits so avidly, Rajat Gupta, for all his virtues, must do time. The question is, how much time? – which brings us to October 16, 2012 when Judge Rakoff will decide that very question….

…No doubt, the very fact that someone of Gupta’s stature will go to jail sends a welcome message, not just to those managers but to investors who still pine for a marketplace not gamed by a handful of insiders.

But the best argument for a relatively stiff sentence takes us back to that issue of motive by which Gupta supporters would seek to at least partially excuse him. To the contrary, Gupta’s motive ought to work against him. The very fact that he was driven by those “intangible benefits,” rather than money, proves that Wall Street’s culture itself, and its whole mélange of winks and nods, faces sentencing on October 16.”

Comment:

This morally and intellectually bankrupt piece sounds all the establishment left memes.

“Greed” is what must be punished, not specific wrongs doing. A legal case must be turned into a morality play.

Gupta must be punished for wanting to be a player (a  fact that hasn’t been established yet and one that is not a crime by any definition).

Media stories have repeatedly said that the jury was terribly sympathetic, although it doesn’t look like it, from the speed with which they decided.

And it doesn’t look like it, from the racial composition of the jury.  Fairness, let alone sympathy, would have demanded at least one Indian or South Asian.

The propaganda to cover up the gross inequity of the case started almost immediately, with pieces about how “conflicted” the jury was and how some jury members cried.

Then there were pieces that dwelled on the defendant’s family attendance at the trial, claiming that the defense amounted to not much more than “he’s a good guy,” and explaining, ponderously, why that wouldn’t fly in such a stronghold of justice as New York City.

Then, just so you don’t miss it, Levick quotes Preet Bharara’s completely unprofessional comments about Wall Street culture and  performance-enhancing drugs.

What, Mr. Bharara’s not only running for New York governor, he wants to be Solon now too?

What kind of a prosecutor sounds off like this publicly about his cases?

The sneer at the idea that Gupta might not been confident about being able to navigate the world of private equity is also misplaced.

Management consulting (Gupta’s background) is far removed from the world of private equity and sovereign wealth funds.

He might not have been intimidated, but it’s not at all implausible that he was cautious, insecure, and unsure about how to make the transition from one world to the other.

Apparently, Rajaratnam had figured out he was insecure, because he asked a co-conspirator if  Gupta was a “big boy,” after swindling him of his money.

Levick should actually crack open a book  sometime.

What truly evil ignorant drivel…