How Asian Governments Rob Asian Citizens

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How Asian governments rob Asian citizens:

“When a Chinese business exports to the U.S., the dollars earned are exchanged in a Chinese bank for local currency. Those dollars are then recycled by the Chinese Central Bank to buy U.S. Treasuries. America then creates more dollars (inflation) so that it can redeem those outstanding Treasuries. This mechanism props up the dollar and holds down the RMB. As a result, the Chinese are poorer and America richer. “

John Browne (Euro Pacific Capital).

My Comment

This is the pattern in many Asian governments. Effectively, the savings of Asian citizens are being destroyed by their government’s short-sighted pro-export policy. But for how long? Anyone who can is going to be buying land, gold, and other tangible assets and getting out of weak currencies to avoid losing any more.

Capital as Power Conference

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This looks as if it will be an interesting conference:

Rethinking Marxism Conference
To be held at the University of Massachusetts Amherst on November 5-8, 2009. (Other; English).

The sponsors are calling for papers on the subject of “Capital as Power”
Nitzan, Jonathan and Bichler, Shimshon. (2009).

Nitzan and Bichler’s (whose work I’ve posted on here before) look beyond a labor (Marxist) or utility (Neo-liberal/neo-classical) theory of value. Instead, they see prices reflecting power relations.

On that topic, here’s an interesting piece by Immanuel Wallerstein , the developer of ‘world systems theory.”
In it Wallerstein describes what he calls “hegemonic cycles.” Hegemonic cycles are cycles of power relations, as compared to economic cycles.

Hegemonic cycles are much longer than so-called Kondratieff cycles (50-60 years).

In terms of hegemonic cycles, the US reached a peak at 1945 and started to decline sharply from the 1970s onward. That decline matches the shorter Kondratieff cycle B-phase (the A-phase was the upswing from 1945 to 1967-73). This B-phase lasted a lot longer than any other only because of the intervention of the US Treasury, Federal Reserve and its supporters in Europe and Japan – which means prices and valuations during this period reflected nothing more than power relations.

The rest of the world, in other words, was subsidizing the valuation here….

Structural accounts of this kind sweep a lot under the carpet, but they can clarify what’s going on politically at the ground level. If the analysis is right, then greater and greater force will be needed to keep the lid on the pot here at home and elsewhere too. That explains the new efforts against “home -grown terrorists” (domestic dissidents) and against recalcitrant states abroad (Iraq, Afghanistan etc.)

Wiki Fudges Importance of Naked Short-Selling

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(Continued from previous post)

Many people (including this blogger) see naked short-selling as one of the central rackets used by Wall Street’s racketeers to pull off their heists. It’s a view with quite a few supporters in the industry, government, and major media. But you wouldn’t know it from the wiki entry on naked short selling.

In a piece earlier this piece, urging sharper treatment of Geithner during his hearing, an off-shore journalist Lucy Komisar pointed out that naked short-selling of US Treasury bonds artificially depresses the price of the bonds by increasing the number of shares. It’s in effect a theft from the portfolios of ordinary people who hold them, unaware that their brokers are lending them out and leaving them only with electronic IOUs.
In other words, they’re lending to their broker, rather than to the US government….

In fact, the most prominent critic of naked short-selling, Patrick Byrne, has this to say on his blog, Deep Capture:

“Notwithstanding thousands of articles such as the ones cited above, the current Wikipedia article on naked short selling insists that experts believe that it is not a problem. No mention is made of hearings, statements by economists and SEC Chairmen, emergency federal actions and emergency meetings of regulators from the G-20 to stop the world financial system from imploding, etc. ……… notwithstanding the thousands of articles such as the ones I cited above, the current Wikipedia page maintains that the mass media agrees that naked short selling is not a problem…”

— “The Hijacking of Social Media”

Byrne’s site has a useful video by Judd Bagley on naked short-selling:

Byrne is the CEO of Overstock, an online retailer of surplus and returned goods, which, he claims has been the victim of naked short-selling for many years. At one point, around 30% of Overstock’s float (shares held by the public and not institutional investors or insiders) consisted of fails (shares that did not deliver at settlement of the trade) and although fails can have many causes, naked short-selling is certainly the most important of them.

Note: Byrne claims that this isn’t the principal motivation for his campaign against the practice and points to his other philanthropic initiatives as proof. Major media business reporters, including Joe Nocera and Gary Weiss, have argued otherwise.

Note: Bagley has been accused of cyberstalking Weiss over Weiss’s alleged complicity in the social engineering of wikipedia.

Update: Note also that several experts have contradicted Byrne’s assessment of the effects of naked short selling on the price of the stocks he’s analyzed.

Still, whether Byrne is a hero or an out-of-control conspiracist is beside the point.

With the scale of criminality on Wall Street now, you’d have to be a hero and out-of-control to go after any of it successfully.

And conspiracy-mongering seems to be largely in the eye of the beholder.

Byrne deserves credit.

Update: To be fair to Byrne’s critics here is a criticism by one Sam Antar (a reformed felon who now consults on white collar crime) of Overstock’s accounting practices.

To be fair to Byrne, Antar’s original fraud was extensive and involved his whole family. Antal also admits to profiting from short positions in the companies he criticizes for fraud.

Wiki Fake Quote Shows Up Journalists

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In the news:

“When Dublin university student Shane Fitzgerald posted a poetic but phony quote on Wikipedia, he said he was testing how our globalized, increasingly Internet-dependent media was upholding accuracy and accountability in an age of instant news.

His report card: Wikipedia passed. Journalism flunked.

The sociology major’s made-up quote — which he added to the Wikipedia page of Maurice Jarre hours after the French composer’s death March 28 — flew straight on to dozens of U.S. blogs and newspaper Web sites in Britain, Australia and India.

They used the fabricated material, Fitzgerald said, even though administrators at the free online encyclopedia quickly caught the quote’s lack of attribution and removed it, but not quickly enough to keep some journalists from cutting and pasting it first.

A full month went by and nobody noticed the editorial fraud….”

More here

My Comment

Only a 22 year old would be shocked by this, of course. Any one else knows that very few journalists double check sources or go to the original print report and look for an additional sources. But I’m not convinced that Wikipedia is such a paragon of journalistic rectitude either.

And I wonder whether this story coming out now doesn’t conveniently bolster wiki’s own reputation? I like wiki as much as the next person, but, among other instances, when I was writing about Virginia Tech, I noticed some manipulation of the time-line (which I’ve written about on this blog).

The fact is Wiki has its own slant and it often editorializes very strongly. Of course, bloggers do it too.

But bloggers are supposed to editorialize, push the envelope and move faster than the print media. Wiki, on the other hand, is supposed to be the definitive online, interactive, “wisdom of crowds.”

Again – don’t get me wrong. I love wiki and find it mostly a reliable source, at least of references and pointers. But it’s been known to engineer a few things too….

(Continued in the next post)

Pakistani Strike Creates Nearly 1/2 Million Refugees

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Hundreds of thousands of people have become refugees and scores of civilians (including children) killed during Pakistan’s latest offensive against what it terms extremist militants in the Taliban-held districts of Pakistan that border Afghanistan.

From a report on the weekend (May 9) by AP:

“The offensive has prompted the flight of hundreds of thousands of terrified residents, adding a humanitarian emergency to the nuclear-armed nation’s security, economic and political problems. Desperate refugees looted U.N. supplies in one camp, taking blankets and cooking oil….”

PM Gilani calls the full-scale offensive that was launched on Thursday at Washington’s behest

“a fight for the country’s survival.”

My Comment

Here’s a problem that’s festered decades. Why would a military solution work now when it hasn’t worked in all this time? That’s the blundering logic of the state. Defending against militants doesn’t justify creating what could amount to half-a-million refugees, by UN estimates and has the potential to destabilize what’s often considered the top “hot-spot” of the world –  the Indo-Pak border and Kashmir.

At Cato, Malu Innocent has similar thoughts:

“Also, if America is worried about Pakistan’s imminent demise, U.S. policymakers and defense planners must understand that the coalition’s presence in Afghanistan threatens to further destabilize Pakistan. The vast majority of Pakistanis are not radical. But the spread of tribal militias in the northwest, tens of thousands of refugees (and certainly some militants) fleeing into major cities from aerial drone strikes, and widespread distrust of America’s intentions in the region, all place undue stress on a nation already divided, weak and fragile.”

Pakistani President Says Bin Laden is Dead

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In the news:

“Two weeks ago, Pakistan President Asif Ali Zadari suggested that Osama bin Laden might be dead, saying that U.S. and Pakistani intelligence agencies had been unable to detect any sign of the world’s most wanted man since an audio recording of his voice was released in March.

Sunday morning, Zadari went further: “I don’t think he’s alive,” the president told NBC’s David Gregory. “I have a strong feeling and reason to believe that.” Zadari continued: “I have asked my counterparts in the American intelligence services and they haven’t heard [from] him in seven years.”

More at Raw Story.

Libertarian Living: Switch to Organic Farming

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A libertarian solution to food shortage and increasing environmental damage – switch to organic farming voluntarily. You”’ have the satisfaction of knowing that you will be financing methods and trends that don’t damage the environment or the weakest part of the population. And the market is growing, as this VVH-TV News report Organic Farming on Eastern Long Island (Karl Grossman Chief Investigative Reporter) indicates.

From Tree-hugger blog:

“Rodale Institute has proved (explanation by downloadable PDF file here) that organic agricultural methods can remove about 7,000 pounds of carbon dioxide from the air each year and store it in an acre of farmland. If all 434 million acres of American cropland was converted to these practices, it would be the equivalent of eliminating 217 million cars from the road, or a car for every two acres of farmland.

Our studies, which are the longest-running side-by-side studies of conventional and organic farming in the nation, also show that the organic approach does not compromise yield – in fact in drought years it increases it since more carbon in the soil allows it to hold more water. In wet years, the additional organic matter in the soil wicks water away from plant roots, limiting erosion and keeping plants in place.

Organic, regenerative farming is a site-specific approach that can affordably be adapted to any location. Most importantly, it helps people feed themselves with the materials that they already have, without hooking them on an increasingly expensive dependency on chemical inputs and high-cost seeds that are bred to only work with synthetic herbicides and pesticides. This holds farmers hostage to patented varieties at prices that continually rise – a practice that hurts all farmers, but especially those in developing countries where such hikes can mean the difference between a subsistence crop and starvation.”

The New York Times Complains About Chinese Torture

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And no – I don’t mean that someone dripped water into the eyes of the editorial staff until they squealed. I mean they  referred to torture  – committed by the Chinese – and they did it without using quotes, their standard practice when referring to American torture.  The reference was in an obituary for Colonel Harold E. Fisher, an American pilot who died at the age of 83. Here’s what Fisher underwent:

“kept in a dark, damp cell with no bed and no opening except a slot in the door through which a bowl of food could be pushed. Much of the time he was handcuffed. Hour after hour, a high-frequency whistle pierced the air.”

Contributing to the general tone of hypocrisy, Barack Obama has recently ruled out holding the CIA responsible for torture, even though many experts have argued that at least the lawyers who wrote the authorizing memos, Jay Bybee and Steven Bradbury, should be prosecuted.

Just for comparison, here’s what Human Rights had to say about the lack of accountability so far at every level:

“Since August 2002, nearly 100 detainees have died while in the hands of U.S. officials in the global “war on terror.”

Despite these numbers, four years since the first known death in U.S. custody, only 12 detainee deaths have resulted in punishment of any kind for any U.S. official. Of the 34 homicide cases so far identified by the military, investigators recommended criminal charges in fewer than two thirds, and charges were actually brought (based on decisions made by command) in less than half. While the CIA has been implicated in several deaths, not one CIA agent has faced a criminal charge. Crucially, among the worst cases in this list – those of detainees tortured to death – only half have resulted in punishment; the steepest sentence for anyone involved in a torture-related death: five months in jail.”

The HR report also specified just how brutal the torture could get:

“Abed Hamed Mowhoush, a former Iraqi general beaten over days by U.S. Army, CIA and other non-military forces, stuffed into a sleeping bag, wrapped with electrical cord, and suffocated to death. “

Here’s the whole HR report.

Scott Horton has proved that the documentary evidence of wrong-doing goes straight up the chain of command to the President (I made that argument as early as 2005 based only the record available at the time). So the NYT’s selective treatment of the subject has simply no justification.

Fortunately Glenn Greenwald was at hand to give the paper a thrashing:

“The NYT’s incoherence and double standards, equally, are self-evident. But I would like to know if Bill Keller will remove the t-word from this obit and replace it with “harsh interrogations” as he does when referring to the US government’s use of identical techniques. If not, why not? Remember: these people won’t even use the word torture to describe a technique displayed in the Cambodian museum of torture to commemorate the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge – as long as Americans do the torturing.

I mean: the NYT isn’t just a vehicle for US propaganda, is it? It’s a newspaper, right? It has standards that it maintains across its copy. Right?”

My Comment:

We’re still waiting for the answer on that one. But, meanwhile, Glenn Greenwald and Salon prove that they’re the real press.

And talking about double standards, Al Jazeera poses this question: Torture still continues in Iraq (this time, at the hands of Iraqis), but why is there no global outcry over it?

Legislation to Oversee Fed Watered Down

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Ryan Grim at Huffington Post has a piece about the watering-down of legislation intended to give Congress greater oversight over the Federal Reserve.

He writes –

“On page five of Grassley’s amendment, he intends to give the Comptroller General of the Government Accountability Office power to audit “any action taken by the Board under…the third undesignated paragraph of section 13 of the Federal Reserve Act” — which would be almost everything that it has done on an emergency basis to address the financial crisis, encompassing its massive expansion of opaque buying and lending.

Handwritten into the margins, however, is the amendment that watered it down: “with respect to a single and specific partnership or corporation.” With that qualification, the Senate severely limited the scope of the oversight.

On the Senate floor, Grassley named the top Republican on the banking committee, Richard Shelby of Alabama, as the man pouring the water.”

In case you haven’t been keeping up, the Fed’s been lent much more than the $700 billion odd money of the original bail-out.  By January 2009, the figure had exceeded $2 trillion, as this video on the oversight problem indicates. Note that the number is now at least $3 trillion plus, according to the Special Inspector-General’s Report on TARP (SIGTARP).

.

My Comment

The HuffPo piece is just more confirmation of systemic rot, as delineated in this belated but useful Wall Street Journal report on the selling-out of America by Wall Street and Washington.

I only skimmed the report, but I notice that it seems to be blaming the whole mess on deregulation, pinpointing the late 1990s (and onward) as the culmination of  bad practices arising from what it calls without irony the “prevailing laissez-faire ideology of the Bush administration” – this, about the most interventionist administration in modern American history.  I like to take a nuanced position on regulation but this sticks in my craw.

Sounds like someone’s hustling the plebes away from the scene of the crime, clapping both hands over their eyes, just in case one of ’em catches a glimpse of the plates on the back of the get-away car –  FED1917*

For the WSJ it’s all about the late 1980s. It has nothing – repeat, nothing –  whatsoever to do with pre-New Deal policies…… nothing, I tell you.

No one’s defending junk-bond kings here, but that sounds a bit loaded to me.

Why am I getting the feeling that for a cynic the fun only begins now…

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* i.e. the creation of the Federal Reserve itself