Sherman Skolnick On Marc R(e)ich and Vince Foster

Sherman Skolnick:

“Marc Rich the commodity bandit and “spook” was so interwoven with the White House of George Bush The Elder and later, Bill Clinton, you could not hardly tell whether the White House dirty tricks department was in Washington or Zug,
Switzerland, one of Rich’s outpposts.

To escape being prosecuted, Rich did not return from Zug to face the big-time Federal Criminal music in the 1980s. At the time the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Rudolph W. Giuliani (later N.Y. city Mayor), wanted to put Rich in jail. A Bush Family confidant, Giuliani nevertheless found out too late that Marc Rich was the American CIA’s laundry man and was immune. When Rudy started to run for U.S. Senator from New York against carpetbagger Hillary Clinton, in the year 2000 Election, she was afraid he would mouth off about her and Foster and Marc Rich. So, Hillary’s press agents reportedly launched a pre-emptive strike planting details publicly of Giuliani’s marital troubles. And so, Rudy side-stepped the whole mess and the Election, by divulging what he must have already known, that he was ill with cancer.

The book author described him, “Marc Rich, the man whom the United States Justice Department privately called the most corrupt corporate executive in America”. [“Metal Men”, page 13.] After he took refuge in his Switzerland offices, the oil-soaked monopoly press, protective of high-level swindlers, agreed to be mostly silent. By 1990, Rich was a key player in the huge, mostly unpublicized Russian ruble affair, an attack by the American CIA and worldwide banks fronting for them, against the Soviet currency which led to the downfall of the Moscow government. The result was the dissolution of the Soviet Union into fighting-with-each-other provinces, each a fiefdom for mineral exploitation and speculation, Marc Rich’s specialty.

Another George Bush The Elder/American CIA darling was a fellow originally from Wisconsin, Leo Emil Wanta.

[Lila: Not sure about the Wanta story. I’m told by some it is disinformation}.

He played a key role in the attack on the Russian ruble to topple the Moscow gang. A CIA-friendly author, the late Claire Sterling wrote a book, a form of mixed and mixed up report on Wanta. “Thieves’ World- The Threat of the New Global Network of Organized Crime”, Simon & Shuster, N.Y., N.Y., 1994. As she described it, “The fact that scarecely anyone outside Russia has heard of the Great Ruble Scam may be explained partly by its seemingly unbelievable details, but partly, too, by Western reluctance to touch exquisitely sensitive political nerves.” (Page 177.)

To protect the CIA, Sterling has a picture of Wanta in the book under which she has the unfair and not balanced description “Leo Wanta, the American snake-oil salesman who stormed world money markets to crash the ruble in 1990-91.” She conveniently omits that Wanta’s cut of the action has been frozen in Russian banks, some of which were taken over by the Russian underworld, the mafiya,and the funds disappeared when some of the banks collapsed. On the other hand, trillions of rubles were successfully siphoned out of Russia by George Bush the Elder for his personal benefit, some through dope trafficking and weapons smuggling by the Bush Family as secretly authorized by Federal Reserve Commissar Alan Greenspan. [Visit our website series, “Greenspan Aids and Bribes Bush” with attached Federal Reserve secret wire transfers, authorized by Greenspan, to 25 worldwide secret Bush Family accounts to launder such illicit proceeds. One such account, as shown, is jointly with the Queen of England, at the bank she owns, Coutts Bank London.]

An American foreign correspondent based in Italy, Claire Sterling wrote occasionally for the CIA trumpet, the Washington Post. [The suppressed original edition of a book goes into that newspaper’s CIA links. Named for Katherine Graham, the long-time straw-boss for the newspaper, “Katherine The Great” by Deborah Davis.]

Not cheated out of his “commission”, Marc Rich stayed shut about himself and the American CIA, such as with the George Bush family, including the Elder Bush’s sons, Neil, Jeb, and George W. But cheated out of HIS “commission”, Leo Wanta talked openly. So, in 1993, when Wanta went to Switzerland, to await the expected arrival of Clinton White House Deputy Counsel Vincent W. Foster, Jr., Wanta fell into a trap. At the behest of Marc Rich, Hillary Clinton, Vince Foster, and Wanta were working on a money laundering deal involving the reputed CIA front under the innocent-sounding name “Children’s Defense Fund”. Participating behind the scenes was Tommy Thompson, then Wisconsin Governor, and Donna Shalala, once Chancellor of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and later, head of the Department of Health and Human Services, HHS.{In the alleged “President” George W. Bush administration, Thompson became the HHS successor to her.]

To shut him up, Wanta was grabbed by so-called “authorities” in Switzerland and clapped into a dungeon, he says. Foster never arrived. A short time later, a private “hit” team murdered Foster in or near the Clinton White House and dumped his body next to American Civil War cannons in the memorial Fort Marcy Park, Virginia. The true happening of his demise is recorded on satellite images compiled by the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office, NRO, super-secret satellite bosses. The head of the NRO imaging project, Daniel Potter, was later murdered.

The Foster “hit” team was paid five million dollars of laundered funds reportedly through Marc Rich/George Bush the Elder. [Some background details of the Foster murder are in our website series on “Greenspan Aids and Bribes Bush” Part Four.]

Wanta was brought back to the U.S. on alleged charges of mis-stating 14 thousand dollars in supposed taxes. Who wanted him silenced and jailed? CIA darling Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson and his dirty bird crony George Herbert Walker Bush, once head of America’s secret political police. Notice the different standards of so-called Justice. Wanta, complaining loudly about the freezing of his “commission” on the Russian ruble scam, has been put in jail, and he says, mis-treated. He says he keeps reporting to his jailers, to no avail, his medical ailments which require attention.

On the other hand, CIA darling/reputed assassination facilitator, Marc Rich, running from Switzerland a worldwide massive CIA proprietary money laundry, is pardoned in the final hours of the stinky Clinton administration. For Bill’s benefit, Marc Rich conveyed for use by Hillary and eventually Bill, somewhere between 30 and 100 million dollars. Our sources say it is closer to 30 million dollars. Gold experts and such on their website on 1/24/01 say quoting a knowledgeable source, “The White House provided no reasons for Rich’s pardon and I understand that the commodity crowd in New York speculates that Clinton ended up with a minimum of $100 million in his pocket somehow, somewhere as a payoff from Rich for the pardon. No one could corner or manipulate a market better than Mark Rich. I wonder if he has been part of the Gold cartel all this time?” http//www.LeMetropoleCafe.com Website of the Gold Anti-Trust Committee which contends the Federal Reserve and others are in a worldwide cabal that forced down the price of gold below the cost of production in order to save the paper-money gang.”

Lila:

Skolnick never cited/sourced his material, making it largely the province of speculation and vulnerable to the charge of “conspiracy.” However, in the matters I’ve been able to research (related to the Chicago exchange), he is accurate.

Heleen Mees Defends Strauss-Kahn, Attacks Maid

Comments at Village Voice about the Strauss-Kahn rape case:

LikeReply

Heleen Mees

Heleen Mees Jul 15, 2011

While they were holding a mini rally in Franklin Street, the Strauss-Kahns visited Tanglewood to celebrate Anne Sinclair’s birthday: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07…

LikeReply

missx

missx Jul 15, 2011

Do these people come out to harraas black men who are accused of rape?

LikeReply

cassandra777

cassandra777 Jul 15, 2011

The message, I hope, is that lying about being gang raped and lying to the grand jury about your rape accusations mean that you are not credible.

Of course its true that falsely claiming rape in the past doesn’t mean you can’t be raped, or that lying about circumstances surrounding your alleged rape doesn’t mean you were not raped…but it stretches credulity to the breaking point.

LikeReply

Heleen Mees

Heleen Mees Jul 15, 2011

The case should not be terminated because of the maid lying on her asylum application. After all that would mean that many asylum seekers would de facto be outlawed. But the maid also lied to the grand jury about her actions immediately after the incident. That is more serious. Moreover, she told the councillor in St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital right after the alleged attack that she stayed in the room and watched Mr. Strauss-Kahn getting dressed, which is not what she told the grand jury or the prosecution. Finally, her alleged injuries (a bruise on the vagina and a torn ligament) seem highly dubious. The DA’s office does not want to confirm them (while confirming that Mr. Strauss-Kahn did not incur any bruises or scratches), and according to the defense the medical report does not prove that force was used.

LikeReply

Rob Thorne

Rob Thorne Jul 15, 2011

“according to the defense the medical report does not prove that force was used.”If the defence lawyers had said there was proof of force, DSKwould be pleading guilty. It is a meaningless statement and you have to remember how Brafman lied to the press back in May about Kruger, to understand the context.

LikeReply

Heleen Mees

Heleen Mees Jul 15, 2011

I don’t think it is a meaningless statement. In Le Monde Mr. Taylor quite explicitly denies that there is prove of the injuries in the medical report. Also, why does the DA’s office not confirm the maid’s alleged injuries, even on a background basis, while the DA’s office does confirm that Mr. Strauss-Kahn did not have any?

LikeReply

buddgie

buddgie Jul 15, 2011

The medical report that “DSK didn’t incur any bruises or scratches” was prepared by the police, hence the DA.

LikeReply

Heleen Mees

Heleen Mees Jul 15, 2011

Sure. But I trust that the DA’s office also has access to the maid’s medical record. Moreover, the maid’s attorney did leak the psychological assessment in the medical report (to Le Parisien), as well as her account of the incident (to the New York Times), but he did not leak the part of the medical report that deals with her physical injuries. Odd, isn’t it?

LikeReply

Wahrheit

Wahrheit Jul 15, 2011

The accuser could tell her (fake) life stories until even very experienced criminal investigators cried but she would later recant them and calmly said she just lied. The DA didn’t leak anything about medical reports but both the defense lawyer and accuser’s lawyer. The accuser said to a counselor from St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital that she watched her “attacker” DSK getting dressed in the room where she allegedly was raped. She sat there until he left. Incredible!

LikeReply

MJ

MJ Jul 15, 2011

You’re right Heleen, it’s not about her past, it’s about her lies about this crime to cops, da and grand jury. To tight it to her part, though, she also lied to investigators (cops and DA) about being gang-raped before coming here. She got so emotionally vested in her lie, she ended up crying on floor and a few of these seasoned investigators shed tears. Those people are so desperate to make it a race issue now, it’s completely ridiculous. This has nothing to do with this, this has to do with a “victim” who got caught lying too many times about the crime she allegedly lived through. And calling your boyfriend in his jail afterwards and already talk about potential financial gain is all the more suspicious. Unfortunately, no matter what happened, this is now a matter of impossibility to go beyond rational doubt. DNA is no proof of rape and DSK has no sign of fight on his body – what happened to the scratches he was supposed to have on his torso early on?

LikeReply

Heleen Mees

Heleen Mees Jul 15, 2011

I agree. The fact that she appeared to be traumatized after the incident (according to St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital’s psychological report that her lawyer leaked to Le Parisien), is not really strong evidence either. After all, she apparently had some previous experience lying about rape and appearing traumatized

Helen Mees: Women Working Part-Time Set Bad Moral Example

From The Grindstone:

Heleen Mees, a Dutch writer and economist is doing her best to push women into full-time employment. She’s sick of her fellow countrywomen sitting around and not being more active in participating in the feminist wave that has made such headway in terms of equality in the workplace. This part-time situation in the Netherlands is just helping to perpetuate the gender pay gap in Europe, which compared to America, is much greater. Says Mees:

“I think highly educated women have a moral obligation to take top positions, to set an example by their choices. When women just stay at home or work part-time, they don’t reach the top, and they set bad examples for their daughters and daughters’ daughters.”

Willem Buiter’s Bunny Boiler: Finance Capital Takes Down Its Foes?

Willem Buiter, an eminent economist, has been the victim, so it seems, of a stalker.

Heleen Mees, once on the short list for Secretary of Finance, has been charged, and now jailed, for harassing Mr. Buiter and his family, in the aftermath of an affair between the two.

At first reading, it seems to be a “Fatal Attraction” situation.

You remember the movie?

Attractive, talented, overly intense mid-life career woman has a brief affair with a married man.

Once the hormones have run their course, married man (the palpably lecherous Michael Douglas) wants to move on.

But horny, opera-loving mistress (Glenn Close) wants “happily ever after.”

Love deteriorates swiftly into obsession (her) and revulsion (him).  The obsessed lover turns into a stalker prone to hanging out on her victim’s lawn who, ultimately, cooks his kid’s pet rabbit.

[The term “bunny boiler” has since entered the lexicon as a hip signifier of (a tad too) crazy love.]

The movie managed to appeal to both piety and prurience by mixing a morality fable (see what happens when you cheat on mommy? – frown) with x-rated scenes in elevators (see what happens when you cheat on mommy!! – smile) .

So is Willem Buiter just suffering the aftermath of “crazy love”?

Or is something more going on?

On this blog, I’ve said I think about 85% of everything going on in the major media in the West (and thus all over the globe) is related to intelligence. Most of it is a psyop or propaganda/ disinformation of some kind.  The rest is commercial pumping or gossip intended to overpower more significant news.

How does the Buiter story rate?

Well, it sets off all of my BS-detectors. Here’s why:

1. Buiter is not just any “eminent” economist. He’s the chief economist of mega bank, Citigroup, the home of former Goldman Sachs honcho and Treasury Sec, Robert Rubin.

Buiter has also chaired the World Economic Forum and been a member of the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee. He was also the chief economist of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.

It doesn’t get more “elite” or connected than that.

Buiter has also been a professor at the London School of Economics, at Princeton, and at Yale. He’s written books. He’s voiced his opinions at a Financial Times blog and in articles in the major media.

Given that high profile, you’d think he’d take care of his private life a bit more.

2. Buiter is not just extraordinarily highly placed, he’s also been a vocal critic of the loose monetary polices of the Fed, more specifically, of Sir Alan Greenspan. Here’s a sample:

The Greenspan Fed: A Tragedy of Errors (April 8, 2008):

“………

1. The Greenspan Fed (August 1987 – January 2006) did indeed contribute, through excessively lax monetary policy, to the US housing boom that has now turned to bust

2.The Greenspan-Bernanke put is real. It is an example of an inappropriate monetary policy response to a stock market decline……….

3. Nonetheless, Buiter was no anarcho-capitalist, keen on defending finance capital even in its criminal  manifestations. He was smart enough to see through this brand of market fundamentalism as a ploy whereby finance capital seizes power.

In his now defunct blog at the Financial Times, Maverecon, he has a piece about Greenspan in which he attacks Greenspan’s “naive” belief that capital markets are self-regulating.

Notice, however,  that Buiter apportions only a part of the blame to interest-rate manipulation.

Instead of seeing opportunism and very likely malicious intent in what Greenspan did (it’s considered anti-Semitic conspiracy theory to even suggest malice in the Fed Chairman), he also palms off Greenspan’s misdeeds onto his (Greenspan’s) view of capital markets, ostensibly a “libertarian” view.

Actually, the idea that Greenspan was a  “libertarian” at any time in in his political life (as opposed to his youth) is so much disinformation put out by the mainstream press. As Ayn Rand immediately recognized, Greenspan, after his Objectivist phase, was nothing more or less than a careerist, more interested in power than in principle of any kind.

Despite this error, a large part of  Buiter’s analysis focuses – correctly, in my opinion – on “too big to fail” institutions and the problem of “regulatory capture.”

The latter term has been popularized by regulator William Black, as well as by Deep Capture blog, which supports Black’s approach strongly.

I’ll repeat once more that I support Black’s (and Deep Capture’s) work on regulatory capture and think Austrians do themselves a disservice by dismissing that analysis. Regulatory capture is much more than just froth floating on top of the ocean of interest rate manipulation.

So my point is not to denigrate Buiter’s work, but to say that in effect it constructed a via media between the Austrian critique and mainstream economics, making it very effective.

Yet, though he was mainstream enough to be given a visible platform in the major media,  Buiter spoke truth to power as he saw it. He launched a sustained attack on elite financiers and bankers.

He called them out even by name (links to follow).

In April 2008, he and his wife Anne Sibert, herself an eminent economist at Birbeck College, London, wrote a paper about the Icelandic banking crisis that was presented in July to the government of Iceland. It was considered too market sensitive to be presented publicly and was  kept under wraps until August (W. Buiter, A. Sibert, The Icelandic banking crisis and what to do about it, CEPR Policy Insight No. 26).

Buiter wrote about it in a post called “All in the Family” on his Maverecon blog in March 2009:

My wife, Anne Sibert, has just been appointed an external member of the provisional Monetary Policy Committee of the Central Bank of Iceland (CBI).  The five-member provisional MPC has three executive or internal members:  CBI Governor Svein Harald Øygard, Deputy Governor Arnór Sighvatsson and Þórarinn G. Pétursson, the CBI´s Chief Economist, and two external experts, Anne Sibert and  Gylfi Zoëga. This Monetary Policy Committee will operate on a provisional basis, with formal appointments for the next five years likely to be made following national elections in Iceland in April.

Iceland’s largest three internationally active banks collapsed during the autumn of 2008; its currency collapsed and tight capital and foreign exchange controls are now in place.  That this was the likely outcome of Iceland’s unsustainable credit boom and banking sector over-expansion had been predicted in a paper by Anne Sibert and myself, written in April 2008 (for fruit flies, a shorter version can be found here).”

Now for my theory of an elite take-down:

It was later that same year,  in the summer of 2008, that a pulchritudinous, multi-lingual ultra-feminist lawyer and doctoral economics student, Heleen Mees, approached the eminent economist for help with her dissertation (I’m not sure in what capacity).

Ms. Mees would have been 39 then. Buiter would have been 58. That is not unheard of, certainly, but are ultra feminist theoreticians prone to taking up with men twenty years older than they are, who are, moreover, married with children? I don’t know. Perhaps they are.

But there is not only a large age gap, there is an ideological gap. Mr. Buiter is a liberal.

Ms. Mees seems to be a radical, who wants quotas for women mandated by the state. She has argued that 35% of top jobs should be set aside for women. She has attacked women who stay at home and do not take up independent careers:

“Women’s contribution to the Dutch economy is around 27%. A raw estimate shows that if women would work a bit more outside the home and thus increase their contribution to the Dutch economy to, say, 35%, this would generate an additional 11% in GDP growth, some €60 billion per year. Women would still be working only half as much as men outside the home. With the extra money women would generate, the government could take care of the aging population and still have billions to spend on education and childcare.” (The Cost of the Gender Gap)

Note: Finance capital is a major supporter of gender set-asides in the work-place.

Radical feminist lawyers I’m sure have jumped into bed with men of differing ideology, but let’s add it to the oddities in this case.

So not only does Ms. Mees approach Mr. Buiter, a prominent and very married man 20 years older than she is, to help her, she boldly dedicates her thesis to him (“For Willem – May You Live in Interesting Times”), even though a lawyer, even a feminist lawyer, would know that her own credibility might suffer if her professional achievements were intertwined with her sexuality.

“Women on Top” – the female empowerment group she founded – was surely not intended to represent the sexual modus operandi of women who reach the top.

Now take a look at Ms. Mees’ thesis, “Changing Fortunes: How China’s Boom Caused the Financial Crisis,” published last year, 2012.

It is an argument that the financial crisis was the result of a savings glut caused by the Chinese.

But when I read an article from 2011, Ms. Mees is definitely blaming loose monetary policy for the financial crisis,

In fact, at least in that article, Ms. Mees blames the financial crisis solely on monetary policy, and dismisses entirely any narrative about the misuse/criminal use of financial instruments and the misbehavior of the rating agencies.

In other words, Ms. Mees, remarkably, for someone of her gender feminist proclivities, seems to be blaming the government solely for the financial crisis and dismissing any criticism of bankers, financiers, and regulatory bodies.

A pure Austrian position from a statist.

Now isn’t that interesting? Whereas Mr. Buiter blames and attacks major financiers and bankers (including Mr. Paulson), in addition to interest rate manipulation, Ms. Mees does not.

She dismisses regulatory capture.

That, as I’ve blogged before, is a hall-mark of the financial establishment, some part of which embraces Austrian theory out of its own self-interest. Ms. Mees, you can be sure, is not blaming the Federal interest rate policy because of any hatred of government.

Even more interesting, Ms. Mees has contributed frequently to the Soros-funded Project Syndicate website…….

Returning to the love-affair, if such it was, we don’t know much so far about its history, but it seems that it was some time in 2010 that Ms. Mees began emailing Mr. Buiter in a harassing fashion.

That would be the year  Mr. Buiter left his bureaucratic posts and became the chief economist of Citigroup.

In 2011, the emailing escalated. From July of 2011, more than a thousand emails were sent to Mr. Buiter, including explicit self-portraits, erotic offers, and even subtle and overt threats to him. It seems that it was fear for his wife and kids, who also got emails, that finally pushed Mr. Buiter to go to the courts and get a restraining order.

One of the emails was a picture of dead birds. “Fatal Attraction” with an added overlay of “The Birds”?

Seems a little “stagey” to me.

And a thousand emails, some with naked women in them, would seem as if someone were trying to entrap Mr. Buiter? That is, if there ever was a “relationship” that was not set up by Ms. Mees in the first place.

Now another oddity: Didn’t Ms. Mees, an attorney and scholar who specialized in gender issues, know she was engaging in criminal behavior? Why didn’t she stop after Mr. Buiter sent her a cease and desist letter in February 2013?  She is, I repeat a 44 year old activist lawyer and PhD economics scholar/teacher at some of the world’s most prominent universities, a polyglot comfortable in 5 languages, including Mandarin, the published author of several influential books, an outspoken feminist, a fit attractive woman with a major media platform.

That is a life of self-discipline that is hard to reconcile with the complete loss of control shown in the emails.

And yet another strange aspect of this strange business is that Ms. Mees, a lawyer and NYU professor, doesn’t have $5000 for bail and needs a legal aid lawyer?

Even if she doesn’t have money herself, doesn’t she have friends and family who can spring for the money? She did move in rather well-educated professional circles.

But what if Ms. Mees wants to go to jail to get maximum mileage from the whole scandal?

That would also be psychologically in keeping with someone who wants to destroy an ex-lover.

But it is also what someone who wanted to get Mr. Buiter for other reasons might do. Keeps the story in the public gaze.

Another thought occurs to me.

If someone wanted to publicly diminish Mr. Buiter, provoking him into asking for a restraining order would make sense. It puts Mees’ raunchy emails into the public domain.

Forcing the situation into the legal realm also and more crucially makes Mr. Buiter’s own private emails a legitimate target for legal discovery.

If someone did “take down” Buiter in retaliation for his criticism of certain big names, there is precedence for it.

Remember what happened to Eliot Spitzer when he started getting too close to some of the financiers/bankers (Hank Greenberg, Hank Paulson) whose misdeeds shaped the financial crisis?

(To Be Continued)

William Blake: A Prophecy

On Independence Day, in this first year of America’s full subjugation by the New World Order of  London (“the City”), an  excerpt from William Blake, “A Prophecy” seems apt:

“The Terror answer’d: `I am Orc, wreath’d round the accursèd tree:
The times are ended; shadows pass, the morning ‘gins to break;

The fiery joy, that Urizen perverted to ten commands,
What night he led the starry hosts thro’ the wide wilderness,
That stony Law I stamp to dust; and scatter Religion abroad
To the four winds as a torn book
, and none shall gather the leaves;
But they shall rot on desert sands, and consume in bottomless deeps,
To make the deserts blossom, and the deeps shrink to their fountains,
And to renew the fiery joy, and burst the stony roof;
That pale religious lechery, seeking Virginity,
May find it in a harlot, and in coarse?clad honesty
The undefil’d, tho’ ravish’d in her cradle night and morn;
For everything that lives is holy, life delights in life;
Because the soul of sweet delight can never be defil’d.
Fires enwrap the earthly globe, yet Man is not consum’d;
Amidst the lustful fires he walks; his feet become like brass,
His knees and thighs like silver, and his breast and head like gold.

`Sound! sound! my loud war?trumpets, and alarm my Thirteen Angels!
Loud howls the Eternal Wolf! the Eternal Lion lashes his tail!
America is dark’ned; and my punishing Demons, terrifièd,
Crouch howling before their caverns deep, like skins dry’d in the wind.

They cannot smite the wheat, nor quench the fatness of the earth;
They cannot smite with sorrows, nor subdue the plough and spade;
They cannot wall the city, nor moat round the castle of princes;
They cannot bring the stubbèd oak to overgrow the hills;
For terrible men stand on the shores, and in their robes I see
Children take shelter from the lightnings: there stands Washington,
And Paine, and Warren, with their foreheads rear’d toward the East.
But clouds obscure my agèd sight. A vision from afar!
Sound! sound! my loud war?trumpets, and alarm my Thirteen Angels!
Ah, vision from afar! Ah, rebel form that rent the ancient
Heavens! Eternal Viper self?renew’d, rolling in clouds,
I see thee in thick clouds and darkness on America’s shore,
Writhing in pangs of abhorrèd birth; red flames the crest rebellious
And eyes of death; the harlot womb, oft openèd in vain,
Heaves in enormous circles: now the times are return’d upon thee,
Devourer of thy parent, now thy unutterable torment renews.
Sound! sound! my loud war?trumpets, and alarm my Thirteen Angels!
Ah, terrible birth! a young one bursting! Where is the weeping mouth,
And where the mother’s milk? Instead, those ever?hissing jaws
And parchèd lips drop with fresh gore: now roll thou in the clouds;
Thy mother lays her length outstretch’d upon the shore beneath.
Sound! sound! my loud war?trumpets, and alarm my Thirteen Angels!
Loud howls the Eternal Wolf! the Eternal Lion lashes his tail!’

For an explication of the symbolism of this profoundly significant poem, indispensable to understanding such terms as “empire,” “elites,” and “illuminati,” see here.

At this blog I’m both too lazy and too discreet to say everything I want – or need- to say….

You readers out there will have to put two and two together at least once in a while.

Judgment At Nuremberg

“(An old post from my archives (May 2007):

“Just watching – intermittently – Stanley Kramer’s Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) – with Montgomery Clift in the role of the mentally defective man questioned by Maximilian Schell (who won an Academy Award for his performance) about his sterilization under the Nazis. Clift is riveting in his scene but to my mind Schell is even better as counsel for the defense.

In the scene following, there is a dialogue about the culpability of ordinary people in the government’s actions. I don’t necessarily agree, given the power of the government to propagandize and coerce and its apparent immunity to criticism. But it still makes you think..

“There are no Nazis in Germany – the Eskimos invaded and took over the country. It wasn’t the fault of the Germans; it was the fault of those damn Eskimos…. “

And in a later scene about the concentration camps:

“They say we killed millions of people..millions..how could it be possible? How?”

And the response:

“It’s not the killing that’s the problem..it’s the disposing of the bodies…”

And after Marlene Dietrich denies knowing anything about what was going on,

“As far as I can tell, there was no one who knew anything…”

A lot of interesting performers in the film – Judy Garland, Marlene Dietrich, Burt Lancaster, Spencer Tracy, William Shatner and the son of the conductor Otto von Klemperer. (A friend writes to tell me that he is T.V.’s Colonel Klink (in Hogan’s Heroes). I’ll take his word for it… 

Other quotes stand out:

“Once again it was done for love of country..”

Maybe we didn’t know the details. But if we didn’t know, maybe it was because we didn’t want to know….”

“But if he is to be found guilty, there are others who went along who also must be found guilty”

“Why did we succeed, your honor? What about the rest of the world? Did it not know the intentions of the Third Reich, did it not read the words of Mein Kampf? Where is the responsibility of the Soviet Union….where is the responsibility of the Vatican…….where is the responsibility of Winston Churchill? Where is the responsibility of those American industrialists who helped Hitler?Is Germany alone guilty…

the whole world is as responsible for Hitler as Germany is.

Ernst Janning said he was guilty..if he was guilty, then his guilt was the world’s guilt no less, no more.. ”

More:

“What difference does it make if a few political extremists lose their rights? What difference does it make if a few racial minorities lose their rights?”

And this, again, about the camps:
“Break the body, break the spirit, break the heart..”

But the best line may be at the end, when Burt Lancaster calls Spencer Tracy into his cell and says, “I never thought it would come to this,” and Spencer Tracy responds,

“The first time you convicted an innocent person you knew it would come to this.”

Ilana Mercer: Language Police Should Go To Hell

Ilana Mercer has the guts to say what Paula Deen apparently can’t:

“Ms. Deen appears to be a productive person who works hard and leads a good life. The Food Network, Wal-Mart and Caesars Entertainment have purged Paula, but her fans—hungry for the treacle of her voice and cooking—are packing into the “Paula Deen Cruise” liner, and buying up her latest cookbook from Amazon.

“Go to hell” is what Ms. Deen should tell her detractors and wishy-washy, condescending defenders alike. The latter, it would seem, are offering up in her defense nothing but mitigating circumstances, the kind that attach to a crime.”

Comment:

The entire globe is being spied on at all hours of day and night by a totalitarian network; the financial system is in slow-motion collapse everywhere; and the outrage du jour is some woman saying n***** aeons ago…or maybe, once to an employee…or thereabouts.

Who cares?  On the street, n***** is the least of the things I’ve heard.  Call a women a “c***”, a “b****” and a “whore” all day long, and you’re ready for prime-time. No smelling salts needed.

Crawl through the forums on Asian sites and you’ll see us brown devils outdoing each other in PUBLIC name-calling.

I haven’t noticed any apologies….

Black people say “cracker” and “honky” all the time.  Tamils call Europeans and Americans “vellakaras” (whites in a slightly derogatory fashion). Maybe you think “whitey” doesn’t carry the history of degradation that the “n” word does.

True. But if I ask you to stop using the “n word” then I must be prepared to fore-go “cracker,” “honky,” “polack,” “kike,” “wog”…. and all the rest.

Something tells me most of us aren’t prepared to do that.

People use nasty language when they feel mad about something. It’s normal and it’s human.

Some of us do it more than others, for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with growing up white in the pre-Civil Rights South.

Afterthought:

Question for Ms Mercer.  After posting the video of a white woman beaten up during a horrific home invasion by a black man, you write:

“The hate crime you endured will not mitigate or explain any future slip-of-the-tongue. You may stereotype an elderly, highly successful white woman, based on her tribe’s past wrongdoing; but you dare not attach statistical significance to the misdeeds of a black man, because of his group’s considerable contribution to crime.”

If, after a video of the financial crimes of Mr. Blankfein, Mr. Greenberg, Mr. Paulson, Mr. Cohen, Mr. Madoff, Mr. Milken, Mr. Boesky, Mr. Soros…..and after another video of the “shock-and-awe” treatment of Baghdad, the bombing of Libya, the attack on the USS Liberty, and, for good measure, the espionage of Mr. Pollard, I were to write in the same vein of other groups, would you still stick with your brave argument?

Edward Snowden’ World Historical Leak, In Context…

Business Insider:

“Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971, described the

Snowden’s disclosures — which amount to the first concrete evidence of the NSA’s domestic surveillance apparatus — as the most important leak in American history.”

So, now girls and boys, since I know you aren’t all as juvenile as you sound (“It’s a hero!…. it’s a spy!….it’s super—man!”), here’s a little run-down from the world of boring non comic-book adults. To wit, here’s

a brief history of the public exposure of the surveillance state, prior to the apotheosis of Edward Snowden, formerly of Fort Meade, Maryland, now of Russia, Ecuador, Hongkong, etc. etc.:

In 1996 ( that would be 17 years before Snowdon), Nicky Hager, a New Zealand journalist, exposed New Zealand’s involvement in Echelon, a satellite network, run by the Western powers, that had the ability to intercept practically all communications across the globe.

I blogged about it at length way back in 2010  here: – http://mindbodypolitic.com/2010/06/27/echelon-the-global-spy-system/.

“ECHELON links together all these facilities, providing the US and its allies with the ability to intercept a large proportion of the communications on the planet.

The computers at each station in the ECHELON network automatically search through the millions of messages intercepted for ones containing pre-programmed keywords. Keywords include all the names, localities, subjects, and so on that might be mentioned. Every word of every message intercepted at each station gets automatically searched whether or not a specific telephone number or e-mail address is on the list.

The thousands of simultaneous messages are read in “real time” as they pour into the station, hour after hour, day after day, as the computer finds intelligence needles in telecommunications haystacks.”

Mind you, Hager’s book, based on an article for the magazine, Covert Quarterly, was itself late in the game, as she herself he himself acknowledged. Here’s the relevant part from the my blog post in 2010:

“Per Cryptome, the earliest public report on Echelon is in 1972. The first reporter to write on it is British intelligence reporter, Duncan Campbell: “They’ve Got It Taped,” New Statesman, August 12, 1988 (republished at Cryptome.org). Campbell testified before Congress on the subject in 1999 and prepared a report for the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) that was refused by EPIC’s director Marc Rotenberg, on the grounds that much of the information hadn’t been substantiated (see this correspondence between Rotenberg and Young). After that, there was debate between Campbell and Bamford over what the main focus of the espionage was.”

That would place the earliest public exposure of Echelon in 1972, which would be, let’s see, only FORTY TWO YEARS before the one by the TrueHooha (Snowden’s nick-name on the Ars Technica forum).

To be fair to the lad, he hadn’t yet been born..

But Hager is a journalist, not a whistle-blower from within the system, so maybe Snowdon, or, at least, his real-life predecessor, William Binney, are first off the mark there?

No.

It turns out that as far back as the 1970’s, Margaret Newsham, who designed programs for Echelon’s network, had described her work to Congress in 1988 and, in 1999, to the press:

[thanks to a commentator at American Everyman for alerting me to Newsham]

In interviews with Denmark’s Ekstra Bladet in 1999  (posted by the real American hero who runs Cryptome.org) Newsham stated:

“I know Echelon exists, because I helped make the system.”

Here’s an excerpt from one of the interviews with her, forwarded on the cypherpunk list and published at Cryptome, “I Sold My Life To Big Brother”

“For the second day running, former Echelon spy Margaret Newsham tells about the ‘Black World’ of espionage – and the fatal consequences it is had on her life. Half of her espionage colleagues are dead today.

“The surveillance was incredibly target-oriented. We were capable of singling out an individual or organization and monitoring all electronic communication – real time – and all the time. The person was monitored without ever having a chance to discover it, and most of the information was sent with lightening speed to another station using the enormous digital capacity at our command. Everything took place without a search warrant.”

Was all the information forwarded to NSA headquarters at Fort George Meade in Maryland?

“Not all of it, but quite a lot.”

Does the system use programs that are capable of virtually scouring the airwaves based on certain categories and trigger words?

“That’s one of the ways it functions, yes. It’s like an Internet search engine. By restricting your search to specific numbers, persons or terms, you get results that are all related to whatever you enter.”

Tell me, what did Snowden reveal that wasn’t revealed by Newsham?

This and dozens of equally devastating pieces are freely available at Cryptome.org, which is where I read them a few years ago. They’ve been there a lot longer, and so far as I know, the USG hasn’t hunted the authors or publishers across the globe.

Censorship doesn’t operate that way in the US. The powers-that-be have no objection to exposes appearing in small-circulation sites or in academic journals. To some extent they welcome it, since it blunts any charge of “censorship.”

But try and get a larger audience, and then the iron hand of the state emerges, as Nicky Hager found, when her his book, after initially creating a sensation, simply vanished from the public view.

From the same site, Cryptome, here is Duncan Campbell, the earliest journalist on the story:

They spy on companies and interest groups,” says Duncan Campbell, who has looked at the listening post at Aflandshage near Copenhagen in Denmark. “The facilities at Aflandshage are hardly distinguishable from the Echelon installation in New Zealand.”

Physicist and technology expert Duncan Campbell has no doubt. Denmark is involved in illegal surveillance together with the other primary participants in the so-called Echelon system, the US, England, Australia, Canada, Hong Kong and New Zealand.

“My best guess is that the facilities at Aflandshage were additionally expanded shortly after the end of the Cold War. In 1990 or perhaps a little later.”

What does that mean?

“Well it means that Aflandshage is in any case not part of NATO’s defense against Russia and the other East Bloc countries like it was before. Everything indicates that the large parabolic antennas and accompanying buildings are used in the same way as the facilities in the other countries: to intercept communication from commercial satellites that transmit the phone and fax conversations of ordinary people. And to forward the intercepted information.”

And in this excerpt, also dated 1999, the Danish Minister for Defense admits that Denmark participates in a network of surveillance and has been doing so since World War II, and refuses to rule out the possibility that all civilian communications might be included as targets:

“Denmark participates in a global surveillance system,” admitted the Minister for the Defense Hans Hækkerup under heavy pressure.

As one of the first governments in the clandestine Western intelligence cooperation, Hækkerup acknowledged during a joint council in the Danish Parliament’s Europe Committee last Friday that the FE (Intelligence Agency of the Danish Armed Forces) participates in the interception of electronic communication.

Does this occur in cooperation with the NSA, which manages the so-called Echelon?

“I can’t confirm that, but I can tell you that the FE has been intercepting signals ever since the Second World War – and we’re still doing it.”