Tag Archives: propaganda

Rajat Gupta: Establishment Trying To Spin Jury’s Unholy Haste

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Ha ha. The establishment is trying to put out some good spin to cover up for the haste with which this obviously rotten case was tried and resolved.  Good try, but people are shocked with good reason, they can see the fix is in, and all the slanted articles aren’t going to hide the stink rising from this steaming pile of dung that just got offloaded in Manhattan.

Here’s the Wall Street Journal, spinning like top:

“During the four-week trial of former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. director Rajat Gupta, juror David Klein often glanced in different directions than his fellow jurors.

“When they were intently focused on a witness on the stand, Mr. Klein would be eyeing Mr. Gupta,” said defense trial consultant Julie Blackman.

Mr. Klein, 53 years old, initially voted to acquit Mr. Gupta on all counts, the only holdout among the 12 jurors in the insider-trading case, according to jurors.

In an interview, Mr. Klein said he wanted to approach the case methodically. “The case was based entirely on circumstantial evidence that warranted more scrutiny,” he said. “I didn’t think it was something we should rush into.”

Rajat Gupta: The N****** Of Wall Street

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(Source: Jury Representativeness: It’s No Joke In the State of New York http://papers.ccpr.ucla.edu/papers/PWP-DUKE-2011-001/PWP-DUKE-2011-001.pdf)

Ash Jen comments on an article at The Economist, “An Unlucky Man,” on the Rajat Gupta verdict:

1. David Sokol, an executive of Berkshire traded on his own account based on information available to Berkshire executives. There was NO case bought against him even when there is 10x more evidence available against him and who [sic] made couple of million dollars directly.

[Lila: Did they wire-tap Warren Buffet and Sokol?]

2. The other Goldman guy who provided information to Rajaratnam still works for Goldman. There was no case bought against him either.

[Lila; Commenter is referring to David Loeb. He doesn’t mention, mind you, Henry King and Mr. X, as well as a possible fourth person at Goldman tipping Galleon, and the multiple employees who had worked at both Galleon and Goldman. He doesn’t mention Blankfein and Gary Cohn who were named publicly by their own senior manager, Greg Smith, in March this year as being the source of Goldman corruption. Rajat Gupta was not mentioned by Smith.  Was Smith wire-tapped? Has he been subpoenaed. Of course, Smith, who joined in 2000, wants us to believe Goldman was just bouncing corporate babies on its knees until then. Haha, as the financial press, belatedly points out, and toldja! since we pointed this out repeatedly much earlier.

3. John Edwards clearly violated the rules of election fund [sic]. He got away scot free.

[Lila: He should have. It was a stupid vindictive case]

4. Mr. Corzine is another name.

[Lila: Now we’re talking]

All, I am saying is Indians are blacks of white collar crime in this country. For same level of evidence, they are prosecuted at a much higher rate than white guys. This is exactly what happens for blacks for low level criminal activity.

Black defendants are convicted at an 81 percent rate and white defendants at a 66 percent rate in an all white jury.

When the jury pool includes at least one black potential juror,conviction rates are almost identical.”


(Source: Jury Representativeness: It’s No Joke In the State of New York http://papers.ccpr.ucla.edu/papers/PWP-DUKE-2011-001/PWP-DUKE-2011-001.pdf)

Ames: Tax The 1% At 91%

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Mark Ames in a nutshell (which is exactly where nuts belong);

“The eXiled has set up an emergency “deficit crisis” website calling on America to restore President Eisenhower’s top tax rate on the wealthiest 0.1% Americans: RATFOCR. Everyone agrees that the Golden Age for America’s middle-class was under President Eisenhower, when the top tax rate reached 91% for the wealthiest Americans.”

There you have it. 91% taxes is confiscatory. Why not 100%, though? I mean, if it’s all so righteous, just take everything and split it up. Why stop at 91%?

The point is who decides what’s rich? $250000 sounds like a lot of money to most people, including me. But if you have a lot of expenses and are a businessman in New York, it might not be.  Of course, here comes Felix Salmon to say let’s just check your bank balance and tax you if you have $5 million plus. But, suppose you got that $5 million by not having a family, scrimping and saving, and suppose you actually earned much less than $250000, say $100,000? Suppose you have sick relatives or you wanted to bankroll some charity dear to your heart, or to spend the end of your life pursuing your dream, after years of deferring it? What if you hold the savings for an extended family or for relatives living in unstable countries? Who sorts all that out? Mark Ames?

How fair is that? You not only didn’t get the use out of your money, you didn’t get interest from it, because the banks were speculating on it and losing money, and now you have to subsidize the people who spent their money (and got the use of it) or actually debased or stole other people’s money?

I haven’t studied Eisenhower’s tax policies, but if this was his tax-rate, the economy was prosperous in spite of it.  Income disparities today are extreme, but they are caused by all kinds of hidden and open subsidies and redistribution schemes.  Undo them and you won’t have to confiscate property.

Climate-Gate: The 2011 Edition

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James Delingpole at The Daily Telegraph breaks the latest from the Climatistas:

“Breaking news: two years after the Climategate, a further batch of emails has been leaked onto the internet by a person – or persons – unknown. And as before, they show the “scientists” at the heart of the Man-Made Global Warming industry in a most unflattering light. Michael Mann, Phil Jones, Ben Santer, Tom Wigley, Kevin Trenberth, Keith Briffa – all your favourite Climategate characters are here, once again caught red-handed in a series of emails exaggerating the extent of Anthropogenic Global Warming, while privately admitting to one another that the evidence is nowhere near as a strong as they’d like it to be.”

Some quotes from more scrupulous researchers are cited in the article:

/// The IPCC Process ///
Thorne/MetO:
Observations do not show rising temperatures throughout the tropical
troposphere unless you accept one single study and approach and discount a
wealth of others. This is just downright dangerous. We need to communicate the
uncertainty and be honest. Phil, hopefully we can find time to discuss these
further if necessary […]
Thorne:
I also think the science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it
which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run.”

The email writers recognize that public perceptions about ” global freezing” might be ruining the brand value of “global warming” as a technique of social change:

Minns/Tyndall Centre:
In my experience, global freezing is already a bit of a public
relations problem with the media
Kjellen:
I agree with Nick that climate change might be a better labelling than global
warming
Pierrehumbert:
What kind of circulation change could lock Europe into deadly summer heat waves
like that of last summer? That’s the sort of thing we need to think about.”

 [Some of my blogging on climate-gate can be found here and in other posts you can locate by using the Search function on this blog]

The blog Watts Up With That has links to a comprehensive timeline and graphics that display the thirty-year subversion of climate science behind climate-gate.

The Guardian suggests that the new climate emails probably date back to the first group, released in 2009, and that the motive is, again, to sabotage the Durban Climate summit, which starts on Monday:

“The emails appear to be genuine, but the University of East Anglia said the “sheer volume of material” meant it was not yet able to confirm that they were. One of the emailers, the climate scientist Prof Michael Mann, has confirmed that he believes they are his messages. The lack of any emails post-dating the 2009 release suggests that they were obtained at the same time, but held back. Their release now suggests they are intended to cause maximum impact before the upcoming climate summit in Durban which starts on Monday.”

 There are similarities to the first release, says the Guardian:

“In the new release a 173MB zip file called “FOIA2011” containing more than 5,000 new emails, was made available to download on a Russian server called Sinwt.ru today. An anonymous entity calling themselves “FOIA” then posted a link to the file on at least four blogs popular with climate sceptics – Watts Up With That, Climate Audit, TallBloke and The Air Vent.”

But there are also differences:

“The use of points instead of commas to mark the thousands when writing a number – highly unusual in both the UK or US – is sure to lead to speculation about the nationality of those responsible.”

The Guardian also indicates that although not all the emails have been confirmed genuine, the University of East Anglia claims that they have had no recent breach of security and says that the emails were probably held back from the original batch released in 2009.

Michael Mann, Director of the Earth Sciences Institute at Pennsylvania State University, whose messages are part of the release, is quoted in the piece dismissing the emails as more of the same. He calls the anonymous FOIA “agents” of the fossil-fuel industry and “criminal” hackers.

Ames Versus Wile

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Winter comes, says Anthony Wile:

“This is a very important movement … this movement that is perhaps the prelude to REAL world government. And yet …

Nothing shall grow in the gardens of world government. Fairness will reign. The guilty shall be punished and those who have been oppressed will mount the Throne of Theosophy, certain of their righteousness and rejoicing in their power. See here:

“He who protests is an enemy; he who opposes is a corpse.”

“If someone is very hungry, the Angkar will take him where he will be stuffed with food.”

“If you wish to live exactly as you please, the Angkar will put aside a small piece of land for you.”

(Sayings of the Khmer Rouge: “to be “stuffed with food” is to become a corpse, fertilizing the rice fields; and the ‘small piece of land’ refers to a burial pit.)

Ever read Chronicles of Narnia? Or the descriptions of the White Queen’s winter. It is a land where all things that are good are frozen and quiescent, where rivers have ceased to run, where people have ceased to speak and even the animals have ceased to sound. No history is available but that which is approved.”

“Pus-humpers Should Writhe In Hell,” says Mark Ames, Exile journalist and former colleague of Matt Taibbi:

“In 1985, Niskanen left Reagan’s side for the comfort of a lifelong sinecure in the Koch welfare program, safely protected from the ravages of the free-market, just like Hayek, just like all the pus-humpers in the libertarian nomenklatura.

And within a year, chief pus-humper himself, William Niskanen, chairman of the libertarian Cato Institute, was attacking Catholic bishops for daring to allege that Christianity is not all about free-markets and enriching the 1-percent:

A former economic adviser to President Reagan says the nation’s Roman Catholic bishops are ignoring the Bible as well as sound economics in their call for more government help for the poor.

…In a lengthy teaching letter approved last month, the bishops declared that significant poverty in such a rich nation is “a moral and social scandal that must not be ignored.” They said government as well as individuals and businesses should do much more to help the poor and powerless take part in economic life.

Niskanen, identifying himself as “an economist and a Protestant,” said, “one has reason to question the moral authority of a letter that has little apparent basis in the Scriptures of our shared religious heritage. The letter seeks to provide an agenda for the state. The New Testament is a message of individual salvation through Christ,” he said. “The bishops encourage us to seek justice through political action. Jesus counsels us that the Kingdom of God is not of this world.’ The central theme of the letter is economic justice. The New Testament provides no concept of secular justice, economic or otherwise,” he said.

Now William Niskanen is dead. For all I know, Niskanen may be in Heaven, bouncing on Calvin’s lap. Or maybe–one hopes–he’s dealing with a very Guantanamo-like wrathful god. The only thing we can say for sure is that William Niskanen did everything possible to create a kind of Hell on earth for the 99% of Americans who weren’t as blessed with Koch-funded sinecures as he.

May the bastard writhe in pain.”

Comment

Ames, like Taibbi, and, disappointingly, like even Bill Black, who as a former government official has an even higher standard to meet, refuses to argue honestly. Whatever you might think of an opponent,  ad hominem is the least persuasive way to make your case.

In the first place, Ames sweepingly puts all libertarians in one category.

(Of course, some libertarians do the same too).

Then he confuses the position of the minarchists Friedman, Mises and Hayek with the current Mises libertarians, who are mostly pure anarcho-capitalists.

Next, he confuses minarchists with the oligarchs who espouse  libertarianism, the Koch brothers, although the Kochs (as the libertarians have been the first and more vociferous to point out), are state capitalists or mercantilists.

Then, Koch is conflated with Alan Greenspan, who abandoned libertarianism for the state, and Greenspan is associated with Ayn Rand, who was a minarchist who expressly considered crony capitalism and criminal capitalism “looting”.

What an ignorant rant.  And in the middle of it all, Ames invokes Jesus, about whom his crowd has nothing good to say otherwise, unless it’s to get the long-suffering Galilean to brand their wretched marketing campaign to reelect whichever lame is on the ticket this time.

Jesus wouldn’t have approved of very much in modern life, left or right.   [Nov. 23: On second thoughts, I don’t think this is necessarily true, but it would take too long a digression for me to address it here]

Jesus would likely not have approved of this kind of violent debate, not Wall Street, nor DC. Who knows what he would have demanded. He could have been a mystic revolutionary, for anything we know.

But a Democrat re-election campaign funded by Soros and the ruling elites, astro-turfed by a bunch of liberal- to-left outfits and led by professional activists, that threatens global violence as a way to get the kulaks to pay for its agenda isn’t exactly a change from the status quo.

That’s exactly what the terrorist attack of 9-11 was.

It’s exactly what the financial terrorism of 2008 was.

So, this is the third time we’re hearing the mantra,  Give us what we want or else.

That’s not the population demanding. That’s Soros and assorted other elites, speaking through their intelligence and media assets, provoking and co-opting popular rage.

But guess what.

Strike three …right?

This time, it’s Mr. Soros who might be out.

Update 1: I should add that I am not on either side of this debate theoretically.

Practically, however, I believe less government is better, just because government is far too large and centralized now. But I don’t believe that a small republican government in a city is automatically the same as an empire. It is simply not true, from the evidence of history, and from my own personal experience, having lived in small villages in small countries, and in the heart of the empire in the US, in the DC area.

If force and fraud are the reasons why government coercion is wrong, then it stands to reason that force and fraud by themselves are a kind of “government,” one without legitimacy. Corporations, often, are mini-governments that depend on state-created law to protect them from the results of their actions. There is no hallowed ground anymore. It’s all rotten and so ideological arguments start from a false premise.

Both sides, like those who see terrorists everywhere and those who see them nowhere, are thus bound together in opposition. They become locked into their respective positions, which is where the elite wants them to remain, because it allows the “shadow government” to steam ahead with no opposition.

Update 2 (Nov. 23) :

In keeping with my position on ideology, I also think Jesus was not an ideologue. He was a poet, that is, someone whose “thinking” is an image of existential reality not a logical superstructure arising out of inherently flawed assumptions.

A recent piece at CNN’s Belief blog makes this point well, and suggests how something like “microfinance’ can be remedied by adapting to this reality:

“The discussion at the AEI event revolved around the Biblical parable of the Good Samaritan and the problem of providing immediate relief for compounding and overwhelming needs but still being able to make the transition to sustainable development.

The concept of microfinance and microcredit, for which the founder of the Bangladeshi Grameen Bank was awarded the Nobel Peace prize, has been applied under HOPE International to 14 countries serving more than 250,000 clients. I asked Greer whether he thought microfinance could become a broken system, and about the phenomenon of loan sharks emerging in India’s microfinancing world:

“What’s happening right now in the microfinance base shows why it’s necessary to have something else than just access to capital or some new way of providing loans to the poor; that in and of itself is insufficient to see real transformation that happens in communities.

So the situation in India – we also operate in India – but have a different operating model; we make sure that the profits that we’re generating are reinvested back into those areas. We emphasize training, we emphasize savings, and we don’t have the belief that if you just give individuals 50 dollar loans that that’s gonna result in huge transformation.

That’s an important piece. It takes money to make money. But it’s only a piece of a bigger picture of what it takes to transform a community.”

I’m not certain that AEI, a neoconservative outfit, best known to the general public for its hawkish positions, is the best place to be having this discussion, and I don’t know what assumptions are at work in this discussion, but at least the authors are correct in warning against appropriating Jesus for any partisan political model.

Obama: Normalizing The Police State

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Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic asks the liberal faithful (Ezra Klein and David Remnick, specifically) to stop marginalizing peace and civil liberties by defending Obama and blaming criticism of him on Republican partisanship and a bad economy he had no hand in creating:

“These are the sorts of treatments that permit well-educated Obama supporters to evade certain uncomfortable truths, like the fact that the president to whom they’ll give campaign contributions and votes violated the War Powers Resolution when he invaded Libya; that in doing so he undermined the Office of Legal Counsel, weakening a prudential restraint on executive power; that from the outset he misled Congress and the public about the likely duration of the conflict; that the humanitarian impulse alleged to prompt the intervention somehow evaporated when destitute refugees from that war were drowning in the Mediterranean.

In saying that Obama has “awakened to the miserable realities of Pakistan and Iran,” Remnick elides an undeclared drone war that is destabilizing a nuclear power, the horrific humanitarian and strategic costs of which Jane Mayer documents at length in The New Yorker; “Obama is responsible for an aggressive assault on Al Qaeda, including the killing of bin Laden, in Pakistan, and of Anwar al-Awlaki, in Yemen,” Remnick writes, never hinting that al-Awlaki was an American citizen killed by a president asserting the unchecked write to put people on an assassination list that requires no due process or judicial review, and that the administration justifies with legal reasoning that it refuses to make public. “He has drawn down forces in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Remnick writes, obscuring the fact that there are many more troops in Afghanistan than when Obama took office, and that in Iraq he has merely stuck to the timetable for withdrawal established by the Bush Administration, after unsuccessfully lobbying the government of Iraq to permit US troops to stay longer — instead, he plans to increase the presence of American troops elsewhere in the Persian Gulf, and to leave in Iraq a huge presence of State Department employees and private security.

Klein’s piece relies heavily on the reality that, for all his hope and change rhetoric, Obama was constrained in dealing with the economic crisis when he took office. Quite right. Only unjustifiable extrapolation permits Klein to reach the larger conclusion that GOP opposition and a bad economy explain his broken promises. Had Klein tried to come up with a control group to test his hypothesis, he might’ve looked to the policies over which Obama has substantial or complete control. Is Obama’s war on whistleblowers, also documented in the New Yorker by Jane Mayer, something that Republicans and a bad economy forced on him? Are they responsible for the White House’s utter failure to deliver anything like the transparency that Obama promised, and its abuse of the state secrets privilege? How does the economy explain the escalation of the drug war and federal raids on medical marijuana dispensaries in states where they are legal, or the Department of Homeland Security’s escalation of security theater to the point that Americans are being groped and undergoing naked scans in airports?……

Is Obama better than all the Republican candidates on these issues? Certainly not. He is worse than Gary Johnson and Ron Paul; arguably worse than Jon Huntsman too. Is he better than anyone likely to win the GOP nomination? Perhaps. Does it matter?…….

..What few of us saw in 2008 is that Bush Administration wasn’t “a temporary detour from our history’s long arc toward justice,” and the Obama Administration wasn’t a vehicle for change — it was the normalization of the post-9/11 security state.”

Who Guards The Guardian?

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Gate-keeper of the left, The Guardian, has been attacking Gilad Atzmon for the “anti-Semitism” of his book on Jewish identity “The Wandering Who?” which tackles controversial questions about origin myths, race, and religion. It’s not the first time, and Atzmon is not the only one.

Wikileaks and Assange, as well as Chomsky, Hermann, and others, have come in for bashing.

Of course, I, like others, have had my problems with Assange and with Chomsky too. But for altogether different reasons.  Both seemed to me to be engaged in a kind of misdirection. Others whom I respect have agreed with that take.

But The Guardian‘s criticism, especially of Assange, seems to stem from professional rivalry.  I say that because The Guardian supported the intervention in Libya, while Assange, though he has distanced himself from NATO’s bombing, takes credit for inspiring the rebels.

So it is likely not really a difference in ideology that’s split them.

Wikispooks explains:

“The Guardian’s discrediting of the “left” – the left being a concept never defined by the paper’s writers – is far from taking place in a fair battle of ideas. Not least the Guardian is backed by the huge resources of its corporate owners. When it attacks dissident writers, they can rarely, if ever, find a platform of equal prominence to defend themselves. And the Guardian has proved itself more than reluctant to allow a proper right of reply in its pages to those it maligns.

But also, and most noticeably, it almost never engages with these dissident writers’ ideas. In popular terminology, it prefers to play the man, not the ball. Instead it creates labels, from the merely disparaging to the clearly defamatory, that push these writers and thinkers into the territory of the unconscionable.

A typical example of the Guardian’s new strategy was on show this week in an article in the print edition’s comment pages – also available online and a far more prestigious platform than CiF – in which the paper commissioned a socialist writer, Andy Newman, to argue that the Israeli Jewish musician Gilad Atzmon was part of an anti-semitic trend discernible on the left……..

….As is now typical in this new kind of Guardian character assassination, the article makes no effort to prove that Atzmon is anti-semitic or to show that there is any topical or pressing reason to bring up his presumed character flaw. (In passing, the article made a similar accusation of anti-semitism against Alison Weir of If Americans Knew, and against the Counterpunch website for publishing an article on Israel’s role in organ-trafficking by her.)

Atzmon has just published a book on Jewish identity, The Wandering Who?, that has garnered praise from respected figures such as Richard Falk, an emeritus law professor at Princeton, and John Mearsheimer, a distinguished politics professor at Chicago University.

But Newman did not critique the book, nor did he quote from it. In fact, he showed no indication that he had read the book or knew anything about its contents…..

… the Guardian was happy to offer its imprimatur to Newman’s defamation of Atzmon, who was described as a conspiracy theorist “dripping with contempt for Jews”, despite an absence of substantiating evidence. Truly worthy of Pravda in its heyday.

The Atzmon article appeared on the same day the Guardian carried out a similar hatchet job, this time on Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks. The paper published a book review of Assange’s “unauthorised autobiography” by the Guardian’s investigations editor, David Leigh…..

…..The low point in Leigh’s role in this saga is divulging in his own book a complex password Assange had created to protect a digital file containing the original and unedited embassy cables. Each was being carefully redacted before publication by several newspapers, including the Guardian……

….Some of this clearly reflects a clash of personalities and egos, but it also looks suspiciously like the feud derives from a more profound ideological struggle between the Guardian and Wikilieaks about how information should be controlled a generation hence. The implicit philosophy of Wikileaks is to promote an ever-greater opening up and equalisation of access to information, while the Guardian, following its commercial imperatives, wants to ensure the gatekeepers maintain their control.”

OWS-Connected Manifesto Calls For Global Government

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From the October 14 Manifesto endorsed, apparently, by Eduardo Galeano (socialist), Naomi Klein (socialist), Noam Chomsky (allegedly left-anarchist) and Vandana Shiva (environmentalist):

“Undemocratic international institutions are our global Mubarak, our global Assad, our global Gaddafi. These include: the IMF, the WTO, global markets, multinational banks, the G8, the G20, the European Central Bank and the UN Security Council. Like Mubarak and Assad, these institutions must not be allowed to run people’s lives without their consent. We are all born equal, rich or poor, woman or man. Every African and Asian is equal to every European and American. Our global institutions must reflect this, or be overturned.

Today, more than ever before, global forces shape people’s lives. Our jobs, health, housing, education and pensions are controlled by global banks, markets, tax havens, corporations and financial crises. Our environment is destroyed by pollution in other continents. Our safety is determined by international wars and international trade in arms, drugs and natural resources. We are losing control over our lives. This must stop. This will stop. The citizens of the world must get control over the decisions that influence them at all levels – from global to local. That is global democracy. That is what we demand today.

Comment:

If this weren’t so serious, it would be funny.

“Global Mubarak, Assad, and Gaddafi,” eh? All brown-skinned Muslims? No mention of  Barak Obama or George Bush or Bill Clinton? No mention of Paul Wolfowitz?

The Global Wolfowitz Is At The Door has a nice ring…..

Global Netanyahoo? Too polysyllabic for comfort.

And George Soros, many megawatts more powerful than some Middle Eastern dictators? But Global Soros sounds too much like a disease….

Talking about Soros, check back this to post of mine from June 2010, which analyzes a Soros proposal for global democracy, from 2009. This adds weight to what I said about the push-back against the Tea Party starting in 2009.  When he talks about  “demagogues” in the piece, he means the middle-class that rose up against the bail-outs.

Oh dear. A bunch of professional activsts, westerners all (Vandana Shiva notwithstanding), sharing the same old world view (all leftists), speaking for the six billion plus people of this planet, hundreds of nations, hundreds if not thousands of languages and dialects, scores of religions, ethnicities, millions of companies and associations, most of whom are going about their business and have nothing to do with OWS.

How’s that for Global Chutzpah?

Here is Vandana Shiva calling for global democracy and name-checking George Soros and Mikhail Gorbachev (ANC.net/au):

“And you might remember Gorbachev was a very keen free marketer, and he was speaking with me at the opening plenary of this meeting and said “it’s turned out to be very different from what I had imagined. I thought it would bring democracy; it brought mafia rule.”

And then the person who’s really won out in this game of globalisation — George Soros — he was there too, and this is what he said. (my italics and emphases throughout)

He said: “free markets were supposed to have created open societies, free societies, but we cannot speak of the triumph of democracy. Capitalism and political freedom do not go hand in hand. We cannot leave freedom and democracy to market forces. We need to create our own institutions and different institutions from those that serve capitalism to take care of it.

“And anyone,” this is not my words, it’s not your words, it’s George Soros’, “who thinks they can leave freedom to free markets is a market fundamentalist, that’s not how societies work”.

Ms. Shiva, we love your work.  But don’t be taken in by this Hegelian dialectic, this Mighty Wurlitzer of media manufactured global consensus between faux free-marketers (Soros) and faux -anarchists (Chomsky). The missing term from both adjectives is “state”. Soros is a state capitalist and Chomsky is a state socialist. It is the capitalist-communist convergence.

State-capitalists fund the think-tank circuit and foundation activism. The corrosive effects of this on democracy have been established many times by serious analysts.  In what sense then can foundation activists call for democracy? A polarised dialectic is created by the state-capitalists to co-opt reform, and people like Ms. Siva are there to put a diverse face on the resolution of the dialectic and make it acceptable to the non-western world.

Step back and think about the invisible hand here.

Who is this George Soros?

Even Magasaysay Award-winning Medha Patkar, according to renowned anti-globalization activist Arundhati Roy, has allowed herself to be bamboozled by the Wikileaks-blessed Anna Hazare circus.

Now, it is becoming clear to many that behind the attractive “anti-corruption” agenda, which is dear to many, many ordinary Indians, the globalists are showing their hand, by trying to hustle through legislation favorable to them (the Janlok Pal Bill) in the hubbub of the cynically named so-called “Second Indian Independence.”  The government must be “transparent,” but foreign-funded non-governmental organizations promoting chauvinism and wedge-issues, mixing legitimate grievances with bogus accusations, must be exempt from transparency requirements.

Jeff Blankfort Deconstructs Chomsky On America and Israel

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Update

I should make it clear that, as a libertarian, I don’t support sanctions against any country. I wouldn’t have supported sanctions against South Africa, didn’t support them on Iraq, and don’t support them on Israel. However, targeted boycotts against specific, responsible parties (journalists, academics, government officials, businessmen or military officials directly involved in genocidal crimes or in their cover-up) would be defensible under international law. General sanctions only impoverish people and undermine resistance.

So my problem here is less with Chomsky’s position on divestment – whatever it is – so much as his apparent double-standards on the issue – one standard for South Africans…… and another for Israel.One for Israel…and another for Palestine. One for the US…and another for Israel.

If the Jews deserved a homeland, and they did, the Palestinians surely deserved land that was already their home and had been their home for centuries…

Original Post [all varieties of emphasis –  underlines, capitals, and italics – are mine, not Blankfort’s]:

The indefatigably brave and honest Jeff Blankfort analyzes Noam Chomsky’s writings on Israel and Palestine. I’ve  been very conflicted about Chomsky’s blind-eye on  9-11 for some time now. What to think about it? This analysis convinces me finally that Chomsky’s bias is not simply an emotional blind-spot, but a deliberate obfuscation that in such a prominent, sophisticated, and powerful voice, must be called out and questioned closely.

“His reluctance to label Israel’s control of the Palestinians as “apartheid” out of concern that it be seen as a “red flag,” like describing it as “inflammatory,” was a red flag itself and raised questions that should have been asked by the interviewer, such as who would be inflamed by the reference to ‘apartheid’ as a “red flag” in Israel’s case and what objections would Chomsky have to that?

A more disturbing exchange occurred later in the interview when Chomsky was asked if sanctions should be applied against Israel as they were against South Africa. He responded:

“In fact, I’ve been strongly against it in the case of Israel. For a number of reasons. For one thing, even in the case of South Africa, I think sanctions are a very questionable tactic. In the case of South Africa, I think they were [ultimately] legitimate because it was clear that the large majority of the population of South Africa was in favor of it.

Sanctions hurt the population. You don’t impose them unless the population is asking for them. That’s the moral issue. So, the first point in the case of Israel is that: Is the population asking for it? Well, obviously not.”

Obviously not. But is it acceptable to make such a decision on the basis of what the majority of Israelis want? Israel, after all, is not a dictatorship in which the people are held in check by fear and, therefore, cannot be held responsible for their government’s actions. Israel has a largely unregulated, lively press and a “people’s army” in which all Israeli Jews, other than the ultra-orthodox, are expected to serve and that is viewed by the Israeli public with almost religious reverence. Over the years, in their own democratic fashion, the overwhelming majority of Israelis have consistently supported and participated in actions of their government against the Palestinians and Lebanese that are not only racist, but in violation of the Geneva Conventions.

Chomsky made his position clear:

“So calling for sanctions here, when the majority of the population doesn’t understand what you are doing, is tactically absurd-even if it were morally correct, which I don’t think it is. The country against which the sanctions are being imposed is not calling for it.”

The interviewer, Lee, understandably puzzled by that answer, then asked him, “Palestinians aren’t calling for sanctions?

Chomsky: “Well, the sanctions wouldn’t be imposed against the Palestinians, they would be imposed against Israel.”

Lee: “Right… [And] Israelis aren’t calling for sanctions.”

That response also disturbed Palestinian political analyst, Omar Barghouti, who, while tactfully acknowledging Chomsky as “a distinguished supporter of the Palestinian cause,” addressed the issue squarely:

Of all the anti-boycott arguments, this one reflects either surprising naiveté or deliberate intellectual dishonesty. Are we to judge whether to apply sanctions on a colonial power based on the opinion of the majority in the oppressors community? Does the oppressed community count at all? [7]

For Chomsky, apparently not……

………In an exchange with Washington Post readers, Chomsky was asked by a caller:

Why did you sign an MIT petition calling for MIT to boycott Israeli investments, and then give an interview in which you state that you opposed such investment boycotts? What was or is your position on the proposal by some MIT faculty that MIT should boycott Israeli investments?

Chomsky replied:

As is well known in Cambridge, of anyone involved, I” was the most outspoken opponent of the petition calling for divestment, and in fact refused to sign until it was substantially changed, along lines that you can read if you are interested. The “divestment” part was reduced to three entirely meaningless words, which had nothing to do with the main thrust of the petition. I thought that the three meaningless words should also be deleted… On your last question, as noted, I was and remain strongly opposed, without exception — at least if I understand what the question means. How does one “boycott Israeli investments”? (Emphasis added). [10]

I will assume that Chomsky understood very well what the caller meant: investing in Israeli companies and in State of Israel Bonds of which US labor union pension funds, and many states and universities have purchased hundreds of millions of dollars worth. These purchases clearly obligate those institutions to lobby Congress to insure that the Israeli economy stays afloat. This isn’t something that Chomsky talks or writes about.

The caller was referring to a speech that Chomsky had made to the Harvard Anthropology Dept. shortly after the MIT and Harvard faculties issued a joint statement on divestment. It was gleefully reported in the Harvard Crimson by pro-Israel activist, David Weinfeld, under the headline “Chomsky’s Gift”:

MIT Institute Professor of Linguistics Noam Chomsky recently gave the greatest Hanukkah gift of all to opponents of the divestment campaign against Israel. By signing the Harvard-MIT divestment petition several months ago—and then denouncing divestment on Nov. 25 at Harvard—Chomsky has completely undercut the petition.

At his recent talk for the Harvard anthropology department, Chomsky stated: “I am opposed and have been opposed for many years, in fact, I’ve probably been the leading opponent for years of the campaign for divestment from Israel and of the campaign about academic boycotts.”

He argued that a call for divestment is “a very welcome gift to the most extreme supporters of US-Israeli violence… It removes from the agenda the primary issues and it allows them to turn the discussion to irrelevant issues, which are here irrelevant, anti-Semitism and academic freedom and so on and so forth.” [11] …….

….

Chomsky’s rationalization of Israel’s criminal misdeeds in The Fateful Triangle should have rung alarm bells when it appeared in 1983. Written a year after Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, in what would become a sacred text for Middle East activists, he actually began the book not by taking Israel to task so much as its critics:

In the war of words that has been waged since Israel invaded Lebanon on June 6, 1982, critics of Israeli actions have frequently been accused of hypocrisy. While the reasons advanced are spurious, the charge itself has some merit. It is surely hypocritical to condemn Israel for establishing settlements in the occupied territories while we pay for establishing and expanding them. Or to condemn Israel for attacking civilian targets with cluster and phosphorous bombs “to get the maximum kill per hit.” When we provide them gratis or at bargain rates, knowing that they will be used for just this purpose. Or to criticize Israel’s ‘indiscriminate’ bombardment of heavily-settled civilian areas or its other military adventures, while we not only provide the means in abundance but welcome Israel’s assistance in testing the latest weaponry under live battlefield conditions... .In general, it is pure hypocrisy to criticize the exercise of Israeli power while welcoming Israel’s contributions towards realizing the US aim of eliminating possible threats, largely indigenous, to American domination of the Middle East region.[ 21]

First, the PLO was seen as a threat by Israel, not by the United States in 1982, particularly since it had strictly abided by a US-brokered cease-fire with Israel for 11 months, giving it a dangerous degree of credibility in Israeli eyes. Second, whom did Chomsky mean by “we?” Perhaps, President Reagan and some members of Congress who gently expressed their concern when the number of Palestinians and Lebanese killed in the invasion and the wholesale destruction of the country could not be suppressed in the media. But he doesn’t say. It certainly wasn’t those who took to the streets across the country to protest Israel’s invasion. Both political parties had competed in their applause when Israel launched its attack, as did the AFL-CIO which took out a full page ad in the NY Times, declaring “We Are Not Neutral. We Support Israel!” paid for by an Israeli lobbyist with a Park Avenue address. The media, in the beginning, was also supportive, but it is rare to find an editorial supporting US aid to Israel. It is rarely ever mentioned and that’s the way the lobby likes it. So is Chomsky creating a straw figure? It appears so.

If we follow Chomsky’s “logic,” it would be an injustice to bring charges of war crimes against Indonesian, El Salvadoran, Guatemalan, Haitian, or Filipino officers, soldiers, or public officials for the atrocities committed against their own countrymen and women since they were funded, armed and politically supported by the US. Perhaps, General Pinochet will claim the Chomsky Defense if he goes to trial.

He pressed the point of US responsibility for Israel’s sins again in his introduction to The New Intifada, noting that as one of the High Contracting Parties to the Geneva Conventions, “It is therefore Washington’s responsibility to prevent settlement and expropriation, along with collective punishment and all other measures of violence… .It follows that the United States is in express and extreme violation of its obligations as a High Contracting Party.” [22]

I would agree with Chomsky, but is the US refusal to act a more “extreme violation” than the actual crimes being committed by another signatory to the Conventions, namely Israel? Chomsky would have us believe that it is.

It is a point he made clear at a talk in Oxford in May, 2004, when he brought up the killing a week earlier of the Hamas spiritual leader, Sheik Ahmed Yassin by the Israeli military as he left a Mosque in Gaza. “That was reported as an Israeli assassination, but inaccurately” said Chomsky. “Sheikh Yassin was killed by a US helicopter, flown by an Israeli pilot. Israel does not produce helicopters. The US sends them with the understanding that they will be used for such purposes, not defense, as they have been, regularly.”

Chomsky is correct to a point. What is missing from his analysis is any reference to the demands from Congress, orchestrated by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Israel’s officially registered lobby, to make sure that the US provides those helicopters to Israel to use as its generals see fit. (In fact, there is not a single mention of AIPAC in any one of Chomsky’s many books on the Israel-Palestine conflict). What Chomsky’s British audience was left with was the conclusion that the assassination of Sheik Yassin was done with Washington’s approval.

While its repeated use of helicopters against the Palestinian resistance and civilian population has been one of the more criminal aspects of Israel’s response to the Intifada, absolving the Israelis of blame for their use has become something of a fetish for Chomsky as his introduction to The New Intifada [23] and again, in more detail in Middle East Illusions, illustrates:

On October 1, [at the beginning of the Al-Aksa Intifada] Israeli military helicopters, or, to be more precise, US military helicopters with Israeli pilots, sharply escalated the violence, killing two Palestinians in Gaza… . The continuing provision of attack helicopters by the United States to Israel, with the knowledge that these weapons are being used against the civilian Palestinian population, and the silence of the mainstream media is just one illustration of many of how we live up to the principle that we do not believe in violence. Again, it leaves honest citizens with two tasks: the important one, do something about it; and the second one, try to find out why the policies are being pursued. (Emphasis added) [24]

What to do Chomsky again doesn’t say, but he does try to tell us why:

“On that matter, the fundamental reasons are not really controversial… It has long been understood that the gulf region has the major energy sources in the world… ” [25]

Chomsky then goes on for two pages explaining the importance of Middle East oil and the efforts by the US to control it. It is the basic explanation that he has repeated and republished, almost verbatim, over the years. What it has to do with the Palestinians who have no oil or how a truncated Palestinian state would present a threat to US regional interests is not provided, but after two pages the reader has forgotten that the question was even posed. In his explanation there is no mention of the lobby or domestic influences.

Chomsky does acknowledge that “major sectors of American corporate capitalism, including powerful elements with interests in the Middle East [the major oil companies!]” have endorsed a “two-state solution” on the basis that

the radical nationalist tendencies that are enflamed by the unsettled Palestinian problem would be reduced by the establishment of a Palestinian mini-state that would be contained within a Jordanian-Israeli military alliance (perhaps tacit), surviving at the pleasure of its far more powerful neighbors and subsidized by the most conservative and pro-American forces in the Arab world… .This would, in fact, be the likely outcome of a two-state settlement.” [26]

Such an outcome would have little direct influence on regional Arab politics, except to demoralize supporters of the Palestinian struggle in the neighboring countries and around the world, a development that would clearly serve US interests. It would, however, curb Israel’s expansion, which is critical to Israel’s agenda, not Washington’s. Chomsky also fails to recognize a fundamental contradiction in his argument. If the support of Israel has been based on its role as protector of US strategic resources, namely oil, why does not that position enjoy the support of the major oil companies with interests in the region?…”

(Lila: My emphasis)