Libertarian Living: Move Your Money

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Arianna Huffington has a web site called, Move Your Money, to get people to shift their money to smaller banks, something I´ve been advocating on this blog for a while.

“For starters, you could move your money to a small bank. To do so, click on the button that says Find A Bank. But there are dozens of other possibilities: You can get your friends or organizations to do the same. You can use your online social networks to help broadcast the idea. You can look into where your town government keeps its money and, if it uses a big bank, you could try to get it to use a smaller bank. Start your own website (to improve upon or replace this one), dive into the research about smaller banks, and help give rise to a bigger, broader effort.”

MindBody: Reading Between The Tea-Leaves

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When I was young – around 11 or 12 – I recall having very strong hunches about things that would pan out. Nothing weird, simply day-to-day things. I’d lose my stamp album and then I’d go to sleep and in my dreams I’d see it was in the bottom drawer of a cupboard. And when I woke up and went to the drawer, I’d find it. I  would have very strong feelings I’d pick up from other people’s emotions. When someone said something, I’d feel the emotion from which they spoke. I’d hear anger, and overlaid on that, jealousy or envy. I’d often have a sense of what someone was going to say before they said it.

None of this was overtly alarming. It blended very easily into what I considered normal and never made me feel different. I didn’t talk about it to anyone, except my mother, who dismissed it as “just imagination.” But I always knew it wasn’t either “just” or “imagination.” Continue reading →

Felix Salmon Gets It Right On Short-Selling

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Felix Salmon gets it right about short-selling this time round, at Seeking Alpha: (December 31):

“It’s not just short-sellers, either: most financial professionals are essentially parasitical on people who genuinely add value in the real world. Old-fashioned lending is important, and I’d say that stock markets in general also count as a positive financial innovation, since they make it vastly easier for companies to raise equity capital. But in my ideal world, people working for real companies like Kodak would make more money, in general, than people working for more parasitical financial-services companies. The fact that it’s the other way around worries me. While finance may or may not be good at the efficient allocation of capital, it seems to be positively bad when it comes to the efficient allocation of the labor of intelligent and perspicacious individuals.” Continue reading →

Swine-Flu Vaccine Facts That Should Frighten You

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One of the best read articles in 2009 on Lew Rockwell was  one by Bill Sardi on eighteen reasons you shouldn´t take the swine flu vaccine.  Here´s an excerpt, but it´s worth reading the whole piece.

“4. The vaccines will be produced by no less than four different manufacturers, possibly with different additives (called adjuvants) and manufacturing methods. The two flu inoculations may be derived from a multi-dose vial and in a crisis, and in short supply, it will be diluted to provide more doses and then adjuvants must be added to trigger a stronger immune response. Adjuvants are added to vaccines to boost production of antibodies but may trigger autoimmune reactions. Some adjuvants are mercury (thimerosal), aluminum and squalene. Would you permit your children to be injected with lead? Lead is very harmful to the brain. Then why would you sign a consent form for your kids to be injected with mercury, which is even more brain-toxic than lead? Injecting mercury may fry the brains of American kids. Continue reading →

Anarchism In the Kibbutz Movement

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Haaretz on a study of anarchism in the Kibbutz movement:

“If there is a vision of Israel that can avoid the polarization and mythmaking of much Diaspora and Israeli discourse, it requires an appreciation of the complexities of Israeli society. James Horrox’s “A Living Revolution: Anarchism in the Kibbutz Movement” provides a welcome reminder that Israel wasn’t always seen by radicals as an outpost of Western imperialism. Horrox unearths the utopian, anarchist influences behind the growth of the kibbutz movement in pre-state Israel. Anarchism may be a highly flawed ideology, but at the very least it offered a vision of Zionism that, in not aiming to build a Jewish state, held out the possibility of a land in which Jews and Muslims could coexist peacefully. This was never likely to happen, of course, but at the very least it’s important to remember that Israel didn’t have to be the place that its contemporary detractors and defenders imagine it to be – and it doesn’t have to be that place now.”

My Comment:

Notice the reflexive genuflection to the state. Why is anarchism that promises coexistence a flawed ideology? Isn´t “flawed” a much truer description of the statist ideology rooted in race and faith (Zionism) that guarantees displacement of one people by the other?

Wikipedia Scanner and Deletionpedia

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This Wired article by John Borland from August 2007 references a handy tool – the wikipedia scanner – for anyone interested in finding out what sorts of edits are being made at wikipedia. The author argues that while most edits, even from interested parties, seem relatively minor and informational, it´s also true that corporations like Diebold (the maker of the Diebold voting machine), Walmart (among many corporations), and the CIA have all been involved in altering information.

“Wikipedia Scanner — the brainchild of Cal Tech computation and neural-systems graduate student Virgil Griffith — offers users a searchable database that ties millions of anonymous Wikipedia edits to organizations where those edits apparently originated, by cross-referencing the edits with data on who owns the associated block of internet IP addresses……

The online encyclopedia allows anyone to make edits, but keeps detailed logs of all these changes. Users who are logged in are tracked only by their username, but anonymous changes leave a public record of their IP address.”

Though it´s nice to see a mainstream publication like Wired, take up this topic, I wonder if it´s only touching the tip of the iceberg.

It´s not the suppression of so-called “conspiracy theory” type articles or their authors that I worry about. It´s the skewing of mainstream topics  and the tarring of perfectly respectable publications that are well-sourced and written by well-educated and informed people, and that have broken or explored important stories, often long before and far better than the mainstream media.  By removing those sources and sending researchers to so-called mainstream media sources the establishment keeps a tight control of whose voice gets heard, and more importantly, whose voices are annointed with authority.  Since many of the alternative voices are those of foreigners, working class or disenfranchised people, immigrants, or political dissidents, this skewing is both censorship as well as a form of cultural imperialism, with a distinct racial, religious, and linguistic bias, i.e. in effect,  the skewing tends to promote Anglo-European, state-centric, non-religious or anti-religious, English-language  perspectives over others.

If you want to search for articles that have been deleted that you think should be put back on wikipedia, check out deletionpedia. You need to look in the deletionpedia archive, and even then, not all deleted articles end up there.

More Apparent Wiki Whacking On Naked Short Selling

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Deep Capture has more on wiki manipulation in its latest post:

“In the past (as you can read about here), we know Weiss spread misinformation relating to stock fraud via Wikipedia on behalf of the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC), the Wall Street firm considered a key enabler of illegal short selling. Exactly who’s sponsoring Weiss these days is unclear; however, as the evidence that follows will demonstrate, his concerted effort to whitewash DTCC’s Wikipedia article makes that company the prime suspect.

Now that his ruse has been uncovered – yet again – the focus becomes one of identifying and repairing the damage done. A brief review of some of the thousands of changes made by Weiss will give you a sense of both the scope of the problem and the nature of his motives. I’m organizing the following tiny sampling of Weiss’s Wikipedia edits by topic, with the content as it originally appeared on the left, with Weiss’s changes on the right. Words added or removed appear in red.”

My Comment

For now, I am just posting this as an interesting development that I haven´t personally verified.  Also, I think any notion that the tide has turned on wiki manipulation is overly optimistic.  I doubt, for example, that Weiss´ media bosses don´t know what´s happening. That to me is an incredibly naive position to take.

DTCC Board Stuffed With Kleptocrat Banks/Funds

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The DTCC (Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation) is the largest depository in the world, and, along with its subsidiaries, the place where all transactions in equities, money market funds, corporate and muni bonds, MBSs and derivatives are cleared and settled.  Activists have been demanding detailed release of trades which haven’t been settled or have failed to deliver (FTD), because of the obvious potential for manipulation, A glance at the board of directors, which consists of leading figures from the banks and funds, many of whom profited hugely from the government bail-out, shows that concern is amply warranted.

From Citizen Economists:

DTCC BOARD OF DIRECTORS

The DTCC’s board includes 20 directors.

Art Certosimo, Senior Executive VP, Bank of New York Mellon
Norman Malo, President and CEO, National Financial Services LLC; Fidelity Investments
Stephen P Casper, Partner, Vastardis Capital
Gerald A. Beeson, Senior Managing Director, COO. Citadel Investment Group
Donald F. Donahue, Chairman and CEO, DTCC
William B. Airnetti, President and COO, DTCC
J. Charles Cardona,  CEO Bank of New York Mellon – Cash Investment Strategies,  President of the Dreyfus Corporation
Randolph L. Cowen, Co-Chief Administrative Officer, Goldman Sachs Group Inc
Norman Eaker, CAO, Edward Jones
Timothy J. Theriault, President – Corporate & Institutional Services, Northern Trust Company
Neeraj Sahai, Managing Director and Global Business Head, Securities and Fund Services, Citi
Gerard La Rocca, Chief Administrative Officer, Americas Barclays Capital
David A. Weisbrod, Managing Director and Risk Executive, JP Morgan Chase Bank
Stephen Luparellyo, Vice Chairman and Senior Executive Vice President of Regulatory Operations, FINRA
Mark Alexander, Managing Director, Global Wealth and Investment Management – Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, Head of Technology Operations, Broadcort Clearing
Ronald Purpora, ICAP Securities USA LLP
Robert Kaplan, Executive Vice President, State Street Bank and Trust Company
Michele Trogni, Managing Direcotr and Global Head of Operations, UBS Investment Bank
Ian Lowitt, Administrative Officer, Lehman Brother

Steve Cohen, Third Biggest Owner of Sotheby’s In 2009 (Corrected)

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Modern Art Obsession has a post from April 2009 (see below) about Steve Cohen exhibiting a collection of his art at Sotheby’s, (where he  is the third largest owner). The exhibition ran exactly at the same time as Sotheby´s Spring Modern and Contemporary Auction. The Cohen art was not for sale.

Quote:

“So.. we guess there are other ways to dump an art collection skin a cat.

Hmmm… Maybe the page from the Billionaire Art Opportunist Collector playbook could be :

  • Step 1.. Buy lots of Art, push prices way up, and tell everyone who’ll listenin the media you’re a wise long term buyer.
  • (Photo #1, Richard Prince, “Graduate Nurse, 2002”,Ink jet print and acrylic on canvas,89 in x 52 in.   FYI… A description from Sotheby’s.. “This work is one of the best paintings Prince ever made, particularly because of its monumental scale and the rich, painterly quality of the brushstrokes”)
  • Step 2.. Buy an art auction house (or a Whopping controlling interest in one),
  • Step 3.. Stage a show of the great works having auction house experts tout your collection..
  • Step 4..Tell everyone these art works, on proud display, are not for sale
  • Step 5… Wait for someone stupid enough to say.. I wish I could have a collection like the one by this well known art collector, which just happens to be on display in the auction house.
  • Step 6.. To be determined…. Hmm.. possibly.. Cash out..??

Note: Cohen’s SAC Capital amassed its position in Sotheby’s in the 6 months upto March 31, 2009, and  Sotheby’s shares doubled by June 2009 from a low in February.

Correction (January 7, 1020):  Cohen sold his stake in June:

The fund acquired its Sotheby’s stake between September and April, a period in which the auction house’s stock was battered by the financial crisis and a shrinking art market. The share price was below $10 for much of that period, down from a high of $61.40 at the end of the boom. This spring, the stock rebounded somewhat –­ it was $14.48 a share on June 30­, so SAC’s sale of its roughly four million shares was likely to have netted several million dollars

Edward Bernays On Why Conspiracies Work

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“In almost every act of our lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons […] who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world.”

—  Edward Bernays