Author Archives: Lila

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.

Envy Is Not The Problem, Nor Greed

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Rob Urie in an excellent piece at Counterpunch about the libertarian accusation of “envy,” which, as I blogged here, is as misplaced as the socialist accusation of “greed”..and for pretty much the same reasons. The arguments are both inaccurate and circular in reasoning:

“One of the theories of the practice of psychology encountered in college is “egoism,” the argument that all people at all times act in their own self-interest. The theory is circular in that once the premise is accepted, any argument that runs counter to it is presumed to result from self-interest.”

I an earlier post, I argued this way:

The principal flaw in the socialist world view, as I see it, is a too great concern with appearances and an inability to see cause and effect in any complex way. It’s not the ‘materialism’ of dialectical materialism I object to. It’s the lack of ‘mind’ in the materialism. The reasoning is limited, superficial, and inaccurate. It lacks sufficient particularity, as Michael Oakeshott argued in “Rationalism in Politics” (1962).

And as Oakeshott argued there, that can be a problem in Hayek, as well.

Ure writes:

“Is there a difference in the degree of envy between the person holding the number two spot and the person holding the eight-billionth spot? The necessary answer is no because if so the person holding the eight-billionth spot might only want to move one spot up. This would mean that they aren’t envious of the rich and powerful at all, but rather only of the poor schmuck whose life is only microscopically, invisibly better than theirs. In that case, the only people envious of the rich and powerful are the rich and powerful just one step below them. There are a few people who fit that description that I’ve seen at Zuccotti Park, but they seemed neither driven by envy nor are they representative of the movement.”

Of course, Ure doesn’t apply the same acute reasoning to socialist arguments about greed.  In other words, if  envy is distributed equally among everyone, rich and poor, so is greed.

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.

Rajat Gupta Faces Possibly 100 Years In Prison

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Update 3

Please note: the charges against Gupta are just charges and that he denies having passed any information to Rajaratnam. He also denies having profited from any of his Galleon investments. In fact, he claims he lost his entire investment. Also, this is perhaps the first time someone of Gupta’s stature has ever been charged with insider trading, which is usually never brought against managers, and never against anyone of his reputation, which, from all accounts, is sterling.

Update 2: It seems Gupta has been involved has also been accused of some shady deals in India that involved off-shore accounts, shell accounts, price-fixing (hmm… the government doesn’t fix prices?), and money-laundering, including an attempt to buy the Tamil Nadu Mercantile Bank, a very important bank in a state that receives the most foreign investment (Toyota, Ford, Hyundai all have shops there).

Who are those foreign investors, I wonder? And why did they want to buy a 33% stake in that particular bank? Remember TN is the state where Tamil separatism is strong and the Afro-Dalit movement is being fueled by foreign-funded NGOs and missionaries with divisive and false theories of history.

Update (November 21): I’m going to correct myself here.  I think the insider-trading charges by themselves are a side-show, but I have a feeling that they are only the tip of something else. And that something else might lie in India.

ORIGINAL POST

I was wrong about the threat to the US economy. I thought it had something to do with a tidal wave of cheap money fueling massive fraud, corruption, and crime.

I was thinking big. Along the lines of  trillions of dollars of derivatives, world-wide depression, and collapse of the paper-money system. At the heart of it was the Federal Reserve and a network of firms and speculators with Goldman Sachs at the center.

I was wrong.  It seems Goldman Sachs is actually one of the witnesses, standing in the wings, ready to testify against the really bad guy.

That would be this bloke,  Rajat Kumar Gupta.

Gupta is the former Worldwide Managing Director at McKinsey, board member of Goldman Sachs and Procter & Gamble (among many others); director of the Qatar financial authority; chairman of the board of the Indian School of Business, Harvard Business School, MIT Sloan (among others); Co-Chair of the American India Foundation and member of the board of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (among others); and UN Sec. Gen. Special Advisor on UN Management Reform.

He is no longer any of these, of course.

He resigned his positions following his indictment on October 2, 2011 on six criminal counts of securities fraud and conspiracy in the Galleon Group investigation that has already led to a 11-year prison term for the head of Galleon, Sri Lankan born Raj Rajaratnam on 14 counts of insider trading and securities fraud (US v Rajaratnam). The Feds, bless their stony hearts, actually wanted to give him 19-24 years for doing what members of Congress do routinely, without a blink from anyone.

Insider-trading is not a victimless crime as it’s portrayed to be, but it’s also not out-and-out fraud.

And Gupta had a sterling reputation in the corporate world for decades before these charges.

Just for contrast, the Crazy Eddie case, perhaps the most notorious case of fraud before Enron, involved routine embezzlement of millions in company funds, falsification of accounts, money-laundering, securities fraud, and insider trading.  It earned Eddie only eight years in jail, of which he served less than two.

This is equality before the law?

Gupta was first charged by the SEC on March 2011 with administrative civil insider-trading charges for passing material non-public information to Rajaratnam, an old friend. He counter-sued, and both suits were dropped in August 2011.  Then came criminal charges, and Gupta surrendered to the FBI on October 26, before he was released on $10 million bail.

A lower middle-class boy from Calcutta who lost both parents in his teens, Gupta rose to become the first Indian-born CEO of a multinational  and a multimillionaire who hobnobbed with the richest men on Wall Street.

It was Some speculate that perhaps the proximity to the easy money of the hedge-fund crowd that led to the tragic end of what looks like an extraordinary career. Gupta was not just professionally successful but well-respected for his contributions to India’s development and humanitarian needs (especially in the wake of the Gujarat earthquake).  Apparently, whatever he did, he didn’t do it with an easy conscience, if Rajaratnam’s taped conversations are to be believed.

But something tells me there’s a whole lot more going on here than these details.

Trading on non-public information is a big no-no, true. But, Goldman Sachs gets to testify against Gupta? Look up the dictionary for “racketeer” and there’s a picture of G-Sachs,  as I’ve written before.

But I don’t see any charges, let alone a decade of jail-time, for, say, Hank Paulson.

Isn’t it strange that people like Robert Rubin (Citigroup’s corrupt chair who as Treasury Secretary tried to pull strings to prevent the downgrading of Enron’s debt rating when Citi was its biggest creditor); Hank Greenberg (whose years at AIG turned it into a hairball of corruption); Alan Greenspan (currency counterfeiter and market manipulator); Ben Bernanke (currency counterfeiter); and all the other malefactors who really did the damage to the world economy are still in business?

One of the insider tips for which Gupta was indicted was this one:

“Jurors in Rajaratnam’s trial also heard a telephone conversation, secretly wiretapped on Sept. 24, 2008, in which Rajaratnam tells Horowitz he had gotten a phone call saying “something good may happen to Goldman.” Prosecutors said Rajaratnam was referring to a tip from Gupta that Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. would invest $5 billion in Goldman Sachs.”

Say what?  Rajaratnam gets 11 years in jail for getting a tip about Buffett’s investment in GS?

And Buffett? Wasn’t that investment insider-dealing on Buffett’s part?

Economic Policy Journal notes:

” It appears that Warren Buffett has been given a pass for many years. His investment in Goldman Sachs at the height of the recent financial crisis, just before the government announced a bailout of Goldman and other investment banks, is highly suspicious. The purchase sure looks like a crony government-Buffett deal.
Early on I raised questions about Buffett’s timing on his recent Bank of America purchase. Now, NyPo is featuring questions about Buffett’s timing.”

I blogged about Buffett’s sweetheart deals in 2009, in this post and this one.

Let’s have a little proportion here, or else some of us are going to start thinking that these show trials (because that’s what they are) are just a convenient way to keep Asian Indian businessmen in their place and make it so they can’t challenge the older, more entrenched and powerful networks on the Street.

This is how a CFO from Infosys sees it:

“The government seems to have gathered enough evidence to show his complicity. What hurts is that Gupta’s punishment, if he is found guilty, will be disproportionate to his crime. And he, and Raj Rajaratnam of Galleon, are being publicly shamed and scanned while the Wall Street perpetrators of the U.S. sub-prime crisis which has led to massive joblessness and global economic recession, are being bailed out with taxpayer money and apparently forgiven their sins. “No one is punishing those who caused the global financial crisis through fraudulent means,” says Mohandas Pai, chairman of Manipal Universal Learning and former chief financial officer of Infosys Technologies, Bangalore.”

Still, as I’ve said, I still think there’s more than meets the eye here.

There is something much bigger than a few shady insider deals at stake.

This has to do with the whole anti-corruption and anti-money laundering drive in India. And, sure enough, the Indian government is investigating Gupta for his deals in India, as well.

I’ll bet all this is about fueling the Anna Hazare movement, with its weird resemblance to OccupyWallStreet, which, by the way, let out cheers when it heard about Gupta….

Curiouser and curiouser…

The Lazarus Smile: A Review

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I have a review of Christoph Amberger’s conspiracy fiction debut, “The Lazarus Smile” at Amazon. You can read it later in this post. But first, here’s a bit about Amberger.

Excerpt from a biography of Christoph Amberger:

“In 2005, Amberger published “Hot Trading Secrets: How to Get In and Out of the Market with Huge Gains in Any Climate” for New York-based John Wiley.

From 2007-10, he turned his attention to create Agora Inc.’s first internet video platform, TodaysFinancialNews.com. His weekly political show, “Amberger’s Smackdown”, was a favorite of his up to 200,000 readers of his daily e-letters. Amberger retired from Agora Inc. in January of 2010.

An avid competitive fencer and collector of fencing-related art and literature, he is considered one of the foremost authorities on Western swordplay. From 1994-2000, he published the trailblazing “Hammerterz Forum”… a journal devoted to the exploration of historical western swordplay. His 1998 book, “The Secret History of the Sword”, continues to be one of the perennial bestsellers of Western martial arts historiography.

In 2009, Amberger made his debut as a novelist with his conspiracy thriller “The Lazarus Smile”.

The book is published by Secret Archives Press and is serialized on Facebook, if you want to read it that way.

Here’s my Amazon review:

“I debated whether to give this exceptionally well-written book 4 or 5 stars only because it does jump around a bit. The plot is tricky and there are dozens of characters, ranging from first-century rivals of Nero to slum-dwellers in Sadr City. But the writing is so crisp it all comes together pretty soon, and if you’re willing to flip back and forth until you get the details, you will soon be engrossed. Amberger’s book isn’t your typical historical novel. It’s fast-paced and rich in detail. The wry insights and colorful imagery make its Byzantine century-spanning plot not just credible, but unnervingly plausible. An ancient manuscript contains proof that Saint Paul was actually part of a political conspiracy, thereby undermining the Roman church’s claim to enshrine the authentic teachings of Jesus. Naturally, everyone wants to get their hands on the papers, among them, the Vatican, the Nazis, and the Muslim Brotherhood. In the middle is Sebastian Stahl, a German immigrant and expert swordsman, whom a mysterious neighbor has given the papers to guard. Stahl sounds suspiciously like Amberger, a renowned fencer, scholar, and financial analyst, but he is a likeable everyman who manages to hold together the world-historical scheming around him.

What also holds it together are observations like this one about some would-be enemies of empire:

“American jihadis couldn’t tell a Shiite from a shiitake…..They were white boys with olive skins who’d get caught playing holy war with paintball guns. Osman was an American who resented Americans, because he thought in their eyes he wasn’t American enough.”

If you’re wondering how that fits in with Tiberius Alexander and Heinrich Himmler, read the book.

Now that I have, I’ll be busy trying to find out what really DID happen on the road to Damascus and whether much of what is taught to us as history is anything more than a form of mass manipulation.”

Comment:

What’s really interesting is that a conspiratorial view of Saint Paul is something David Icke, a prominent anti-NWO activist endorses.

Icke, however, not only thinks Paul was a Roman agent, he thinks Jesus didn’t exist historically.  There he crosses the line, as far as I know, since there is as much evidence for the existence of Jesus as for many other figures. The historical problems lie elsewhere, in the veracity of specific claims about resurrection or miracles, for example.

Amberger’s  book cites David Strauss’s criticism of the historicity of the Bible.  Strauss and Renan (Vie de Jesus) dealt severe blows to orthodox belief in the nineteenth century, but it is not clear that they had the last words.

Hail Hillary, Smart-Power Chief To Come..

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I put on my pointy black hat (I actually have one) when I wrote this in August 3, 2010 about Ms. Clinton:

After reading all the hoopla about Chelsea Clinton’s wedding, I felt…once again… that the future of the US, for good or bad, will have more of Hillary Clinton in it. In fact, if I were a witch, I might venture the following prophecy as I stirred my brew:

“All Hail M’Clinton!/Wife of Bill/Secretary of State/That shall be President hereafter…..

“I don’t know why I’ve always felt this was in the cards. Perhaps because of the sustained ferocity of her ambition…or perhaps because she’s a committed Zionist, with Jewish roots…and only a committed Zionist seems likely to be able to do anything about the Israel-Palestine issue….perhaps because she was once a Goldwater Republican and I see a certain kind of conservatism (a populist kind) marrying itself to a certain kind of liberalism. Pat Buchanan made a similar point about Mrs. Clinton during the 2008 campaign….and he makes it again, predicting that Biden and Clinton will trade places in 2012. Meaning, she’ll be Veep and he’ll be Secretary of State. But I wonder if she’ll go farther.

This isn’t something I look forward to. It’s something I fear will take place.”

I wrote this on October 26, 2011:

“Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, presumably Syria and Iran as well. The Zionists – for that is who they are – declare themselves against all standards. The pretense of humanism and secularism has long been dropped. The glorying in power is evident in the response of the elites to the killing of Gaddafi.

Hillary Clinton, uncrowned queen of the future feminist supranational order of Gaia, heiress apparent to the bankers’ throne, cackled.”

Now I see a cover story at Time Magazine, lauding the rise of “smart power” (a notion developed during Bill Clinton’s time). Smart power is something about which we’ve written in Language of Empire.

Smart power includes things like “no-touch torture” (sexual or religious torture), mind-control through social media manipulation, humanitarian interventions (liberventionism is my term for it)*, psyops, black ops, the melding of the military into domestic security operations, war masquerading as peace-keeping or policing, creation of a “grey zone” in which war and peace, civilian and military blend.

I recall coining this term in a discussion of Jean Bricmont, but find it has been used much earlier by Joseph Stromberg.

[Note: I came across this piece because I noticed a blog at LRC by David Kramer, who seems to read this blog (and why shouldn’t he, looks who’s writing it (wink)…and who’s reading it),

I’ve had this notion for a few years for several reasons:

1. Ms. Clinton fulfills the ruling class requirement whereby a white conservative Christian (George Bush) and a black radical leftist (Obama) do the dirty work of putting the transnational order in place and take the negative fall-out. [Nov 25: I mean, these are their respective ideologies. In practice, of course, their policies fed the elites, in Bush’s case, the oil and defense crowd; in Obama’s case, the hedge-fund/speculator complex].

That spares the reputation of the so-called centrists (the ideological establishment) from blame. Then someone from that class, a white feminist and environmentalist, from the heart of ideological and power networks (wife of Bill Clinton, etc. etc.) presides over the new order, someone whose dirty laundry has already been publicly washed, someone who is a hard worker and a natural politician (to give her credit)….

2. Two people as far apart and as experienced as Alex Cockburn and Patrick Buchanan have both noted her popularity among the ruling classes.

3. She was a Goldwater Republican originally. She has the confidence of many in the “permanent government ” (a.k.a. bureaucrats and spy agencies). She is unlikely to surprise…

4. There is a faint whiff of the androgyne about her, and the androgyne is revered in many occult traditions, and even in the traditional practices of Hinduism, from which the occult traditions take their inspiration, if not their direct descent. The ethos of the androgyne is embodied in popular language as the “strong woman” and the “metrosexual”. ….

Those are my reasons…and of course, as always, they’re just good guesses. Meanwhile, keep your stop-losses tight, and hold onto your (regular) hat..

OWS Unites Against Corporate Personhood

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Occupy Wall Street unites around abolition of corporate personhood (via Tikkun Daily):

“There is only one way to reclaim democracy and make our government one of, by and for the People. We must make support of a constitutional amendment to abolish corporate personhood a campaign issue in 2012 and beyond. Candidates around the country are taking a pledge to amend. As they challenge incumbents and better-known challengers in the upcoming primaries, the issue will gain prominence in other races. Eventually it will become generally recognized that when faced with a choice between candidates willing to prove that they are seeking office in order to serve the interests of their constituents and not those of their corporate patrons and themselves, the choice will be obvious. As voters in more and more elections respond by electing candidates who have taken the pledge to amend it will become clear that the amendment will pass.”

Pick-Pockets On The Subway Train

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Phil Rockstroh:

“The corporate/national security state, by its very nature is anti-liberty and anti-freedom. Of course, its defenders give lip service to the concept of freedom…much in the manner a pick-pocket working a subway train is very much in favor of the virtues of public transportation.A heavy police presence has ringed Zuccotti Park from the get-go, and whose ranks have now staged a military style raid upon it, a defacto search and destroy mission–because the ruling elite want to suppress the very impulse of freedom. These authoritarian bullies don’t want the concept to escape the collective prison of the mind erected and maintained by the corrupt jailers comprising the 1% who claim they offer us protection as, all the while, they hold our chains…all for our own good, they insist…for our safety and the safety of others.

Although, from studying on these prison walls, the thought occurs to me…that what we might need is protection from all this safety.”