M. J. Akbar in The Khaleej Times:

“In June Assange walked out of the deal after the first draft was written based on interviews he had given. All autobiography, claimed Assange in justification, is prostitution.

This is the sort of pompous aphorism, which has been polished for glitter before an image-enhancing mirror. Assange can no longer see the difference between an autobiography and PR press releases.

His defenders will doubtless argue that you need an unstable sense of self if you have the courage to challenge the Pentagon. Assange is a famous hero, but I wonder if he is more heroic than the American soldier, Bradley Manning who actually stole the documents and passed them on to Assange, and now sits in an anonymous cell rather than on the cover of magazines.

There is a poignant moment in this book. In 1996 Assange was tried in Australia for hacking into Nortel, the Canadian telecom system. When he rose to stand in the witness box he saw the face of a colleague who had turned state evidence against him. “It was the look,” Assange says, “that I would come to know: the look of betrayal, organised on the face to look like a high-minded interest in the truth.”

I wonder whether the American soldier jailed for life would recognise the same look if he were to see Assange’s face right now.”

Patrick Byrne’s Deep Capture was an important expose of the subversion of the major financial media; it also documented corrupt ties between the big banks and the speculators.

Now it has been shut down temporarily, reports EconomicPolicyJournal.com. The URL returns a blank page.

I will be adding links  as I find more.

[Sorry. I won’t be adding links to any of its pages. I read the court order and some of the current defamation law in Canada. It seems that even hyperlinks by a third-party, sans commentary, can be construed as defamatory.  There you go. You can yell the vilest invective all day long at ordinary people. But serious financial or political stories? Then watch for libel litigation, court injunctions, gag orders, and legal threats.

So copy or link to any scraped or republished pages at your own peril. You might have to defend yourself in Vancouver at your own expense.]

My own sense is that there is more involved here than simply Mr. Nazerali’s wounded reputation.

Two other sites shut down recently, The new Sanity Check by Bob O’Brian (aka The Easter Bunny) and Christoph Amberger’s Green Laser Reviews.

Note: The old Sanity Check (upto 2006) is still up.

They are all connected to the financial crisis, but I won’t be saying more about them to avoid any problems. If you want more information, I suggest you do your own research, bearing in mind that most of the links relevant to understanding what happened have been removed.

All three helped me a great deal in figuring out parts of the financial crisis, but it would be wise to understand that doing google searches alone isn’t going to help you do that. They had compiled a number of fascinating and suggestive facts, but putting them together in a way that can stand up in court or hold off libel suits is a different cup of tea altogether.

The investigative journalist is always on the losing end of the deal, fighting the ticking clock tracking down footnotes strong enough to hold up in court, and, if the footnotes do hold up, running risks to himself and his family.

Not a good deal. Which is why I don’t dabble in investigative stuff as such, but prefer analyzing the broader picture.

I notice by the way that Judd Bagley hasn’t been named.  I’m guessing it’s because his research was meticulous to the point of over-kill. He analyzed wikipedia manipulation technically to prove that interested financial journalists and a wikipedia cabal were controlling the message on a number of subjects, including naked short selling. Other subjects said to be controlled are 9-11 research and Zionism.

Here is Stockwatch’s Mike Caswell:

“Vancouver promoter Altaf Nazerali has won a court order that has at least temporarily shut down the deepcapture.com website. He complained that the site, which purports to expose stock market wrongdoing, posted material portraying him as a criminal and a fraud artist. The order, handed down in the Supreme Court of British Columbia on Wednesday, Oct. 19, instructs the site’s host to block access to any material referring to Mr. Nazerali and prohibits the domain’s registrar from allowing a transfer of the domain.

While it is not clear how much of deepcapture.com directly referred to Mr. Nazerali, attempts to access any part of the site only returned a blank screen on Friday. The order was granted without any prior notice to deepcapture.com. Unless extended, it remains in effect until Dec. 2, 2011.

Nazerali’s claim

The order came the same day that Mr. Nazerali filed a notice of claim against the site and its operators. He claimed that deepcapture.com linked him with Mafia figures and an associate of Osama bin Laden, among others. The defendants included naked short-selling conspiracist Patrick Byrne, who is the publisher of the site. (Mr. Byrne is also the chief executive officer of Internet retailer Overstock.com Inc.) Also a defendant was Illinois resident Mark Mitchell, who the suit identified as the author of much of the material that Mr. Nazerali complained of.

According to the suit, deepcapture.com posted the defamatory material in a series of chapters. One, dated July, 2011, stated that Mr. Nazerali was an important figure at Bank of Credit and Commerce International, “the massive criminal enterprise that did business with everyone from La Cosa Nostra and the Russian Mafia to Colombian drug cartels.” His business partners, as listed in the passage, included Mufti al Abbar, “chief market manipulator for Muammar Qadaffi,” and “an impressive number of securities traders who are also narco-traffickers (such as Paul Combs, until Combs was whacked by Nazerali’s mobster friend Egor Chernov).”

Another chapter claimed that Mr. Nazerali’s associates included Yasin al Qadi, “Osama bin Laden’s favorite financier.” It also linked with other Middle Eastern figures. “Nazerali, recall, has working relationships with … members of Al Qaeda’s Golden Chain, the regime in Iran, Pakistan’s ISI, the chief of Saudi intelligence, the ruler of Dubai, the royals of Abu Dhabi, La Cosa Nostra, the Russian Mafia, and others in the Milken network.”

Comment

Obviously, I don’t want to link anything from Deep Capture’s webcache, but there are links going back to 2002 that you can research for yourself.

From Dr. Zhivago (by Boris Pasternak):

“Are these landlords’ or peasants’ fields? Nikolay Nikolayevich asked Pavel, the publisher’s odd-job man who sat sideways on the box, shoulders hunched and legs crossed to show that driving was not his regular job.

‘These are the masters’.’ Pavel lit his pipe, drew on it and after a long silence jabbed with the end of his whip in another direction: ‘And those are ours! -Get on with you,’ he shouted at the hones, whose tails and haunches he watched like an engine driver’s instrument panel. But the hones were like horses all the world over, the shaft horse pulling with the innate honesty of a simple soul while the off horse arched its neck like a swan and seemed to the uninitiated to be an inveterate idler who thought of nothing but prancing in time to the jangling of its bell.

Nikolay Nikolayevich had with him the proof of Voskoboynikov’s book on the land question; the publisher had asked I the author to revise it in view of the increasingly strict censorship.

‘People are getting pretty rough here,’ he told Pavel. ‘A merchant has had his throat slit and the stud farm of the zemsky has been burned down. What do you think of it all? What are they saying in your village?’

‘What do you expect them to say? The peasants have got out of hand. They’ve been treated too well. That’s no good for the likes of us. Give the peasants rope and God knows we’ll all be at each other’s throats in no time. – Get a move on there!’

This was Yura’s second trip with his uncle to Duplyanka. He thought he knew the way and, every time that the fields ran out on either side with a thin line of forest in front and behind, he, expected the road to turn right and give a fleeting view of the Kologrivov place with its ten-mile stretch of open country, the river gleaming in the distance and the railway beyond it. But each time he was mistaken. Field followed field and was in turn swallowed by forests. The succession of huge views aroused in the travellers a feeling of spaciousness and made them think and dream of the future.

The books which later made Nikolay Nikolayevich famous were still unwritten, but his ideas had already taken shape. Yet he did not know that his hour was close at hand.

Soon he was to take his place among the writers of his time university professors and philosophers of the revolutionary movement as one who, though he shared their preoccupations, had nothing in common with their way of thinking except its terminology. AU of them, without exception, clung to this or that dogma, and were satisfied with words and outward appearances, but he, Father Nikolay, a priest, had been both a Tolstoyan and a revolutionary idealist and was still travelling on. He craved for an idea, inspired yet concrete, that would show a clear path and change the world for the better, an idea as unmistakable even to a child or an ignorant fool as lightning or a roll of thunder. He craved for something new.”

Yura liked being with his uncle. He reminded him of his mother. Like hers, his mind moved with freedom and welcomed the unfamiliar. He had the same aristocratic sense of equality with all living things and the same gift of taking in everything at a glance and of expressing his thoughts as they first came to him and before they had lost their meaning and vitality.”

\

I don’t subscribe to the view that this is a “flash in the pan” demonstration. On the contrary.

It looks  organized, although in a flexible and open-ended style. My thought is that it might have had its origin in some spontaneous brain-wave, but that it was quickly hooked into a previous network.

The only previous network that fits that description and draws Hollywood celebrities as well as the tolerance, if not blessing, of Nancy Pelosi and Warren Buffett,  Reason Magazine, Mother Jones, The Guardian, the New York Times, Mayor Bloomberg, Anonymous, and Julian Assange is a government-related network that is not radical anarchist.

The only one that fits is the civil society network that is closely allied to the left-liberal end of the US government and intelligence services in terms of ideology (pro-choice, pro-gay, anti-war, anti-capitalist), but tolerated by the left-liberal wing of capitalism. Yes, there’s a left-radical wing of capitalists. Most of the hedge-fund crowd is liberal. Like George Soros. Finance capital acts in a manner that undermines capitalism, as Marx himself recognized.

Think about it. OWS’s advocates emphasize the “rule of law” (Naomi Klein);  use rad chic language and theory (“cultural spaces”, Zizek, subject-object dissolution, post-structural types of notions); is driven by university intellectuals (David Graeber) and alternative journalists (Matt Taibbi and David De Graw).

The same guys who voted in Obama. So no, the commies aren’t coming, nor the jihadis, at least, not so far. [Added on Oct 21: So far, it’s just the van guard. And they’re making noises. Show of force]

But a few misguided would-be radicals, colored or colorless, who jump into the fray, might find themselves the target of a government entrapment operation.  And then things could really spin out of control. Would that be good? Isn’t that a libertarian outcome?  Maybe. But it could also provoke an authoritarian reaction. Or be used to justify one.  Betting on the rationality and good will of a mob of people is not what I’d call a smart bet.

So buyer beware.

#OWS is being sold as a product. Treat it like one.

What’s it for? Who’s selling it? Do you need it? What’s it going to cost? Can you afford it? Can you get what you want somewhere else, cheaper?  Can you do without?

On all counts, yes is my answer.

“The worst thing about Occupy Wall Street is that it’s ruining a good cause: hating Wall Street.”

Ann Coulter

Update:

Note: I don’t subscribe to the view that this is a “flash in the pan” demonstration. On the contrary. It looks remarkably organized, although in a flexible and open-ended style.

Oaklandlocal.com

Consider this from Oakland local poster Richard Wright:

“Although the movement has been open, inviting and encouraging of People Of Color (POC) involvement, it still requires POC organizers to enter a space that can be culturally alienating, and the power dynamic of POCs bringing POC issues to a predominantly white forum, even with the best intentions of progressive and radical white folks…. can be problematic.”

Where to start with so dopey an observation? First of all, there is no “movement,” and Mr. Wright’s delusions of grandeur aside, there are no leaders to “invite or encourage” people of color. If it were a movement, invitations would not be necessary and people from across the social and cultural spectrum would be involving themselves as they did during previous social upheavals. That’s what happens in real social movements.

But second, and more tellingly, is the galling sense of patronizing self-importance of Mr. Wright and his cohorts who time and again involve themselves in flash in the pan demonstrations that serve only to underscore their impotence and cement their status as poseurs of the first order (or sadly to debase the memory of Oscar Grant by smashing windows and grabbing free sports shoes). Does Mr. Wright really think that “people of color” are so dim-witted and unaware that they need invitations? Or would he argue that such is the weight of social oppression upon them that they require aid to enlighten them?

Even the briefest of History lessons would clue Wright in that people of color have not in the past found protest to be “a space that can be culturally alienating.”  Perhaps instead most people, regardless of background, simply find these comic events to be self-defeating and stupid and would never consider being associated with them?”

Comment:

These are exactly my sentiments. What earthly good is accomplished by parading up and down, chanting slogans, and getting into confrontations? Media? Publicity? For what? This country is dying from too much media. What is so difficult about people instead getting together and doing the very simple things that are likely to have a real impact:

1. File suit against banks or universities or lenders who defrauded or misled them

2. Move money out of the big banks

3. Collectively boycott the stock market on a given day

4. Collectively boycott TV for a month.

5. Boycott specific companies associated with the banking scams.

6. Withdraw from universities, instead of begging for debt forgiveness, which methinks is some kind of racket. Anyway, where are the parents of the kids with the loans outstanding? Don’t they have a responsibility to pay?

But no. Gotta have some pointless exercise in annoying everyone that will eventually hurt the very people this is supposed to be assisting.

Out of politics (and this is a form of politics) can only come MORE politics.

Prosperity comes from individuals innovating, thinking, pursuing their own goals, forming businesses, buying and selling. Not as exciting as demagoguery, but guaranteed to put more money in your pockets than you had before. Which is the point, isn’t it?

Monthly Review Press:

The Anna Hazare Scam
by Analytical Monthly Review

Analytical Monthly Review, published in Kharagpur, West Bengal, India, is a sister edition of Monthly Review.  Its April 2011 issue features the following editorial. — Ed.

In the last weeks we have had an illuminating example of how a thoroughly corrupt regime can manipulate a thoroughly pliable media. One can hope that in time we will see some careful academic examinations of how Anna Hazare was put to use by the Manmohan Singh/Chidambaram regime in late March and early April of 2011.  It is too soon to speculate how long the Anna Hazare Scam will succeed in its goal of diverting outrage at the rising exposure of crimes at the highest level of government.  With Anna Hazare on the scene, supposedly now all will be well.  But already by the second week in April the “non-political Gandhian social activist” gives off a stench in the embrace of the blood-soaked Narendra Modi, and well-meaning persons momentarily caught up by the media frenzy may be experiencing a bit of disgust, or at least having some second thoughts.

Before the onset of the neoliberal regime in 1991, “anti-corruption” campaigns were a regular project of the business press.  Typically such reporting would involve a hero from a merchants’ association, who had succeeded in trapping into a bribery case some sub-inspector from the State Excise Department or the Railway Protection Force, or some hapless underpaid official of the local Municipal Corporation.  The steady drumbeat of such stories, combined with what everyone knew of the entrenched culture of real political corruption, contributed to the media campaign that accompanied the turn to neoliberalism.  In this story, the obstacle to development was the “license raj” that opened up prospects for such “corruption.”

No sooner had the turn to “de-regulation” and “economic freedom” been set in motion by a government that featured Manmohan Singh as finance minister and Chidambaram as commerce minister, than we were given a startling glance at the real corruption waiting in the wings.  The early days of the neoliberal turn was accompanied by a stock market boom.  As we have since seen ad nauseum, the business press loudly celebrated with drums and bells the rise in share prices, a proof of success for the emerging neoliberal policies.  Super-stockbroker Harshad Mehta was made into a media star, the “Big Bull”.

But quickly, as with every boom since, came the bust.  By the summer of 1992 it became known that Harshad Mehta had engineered much of the rise in prices through fraud. The mechanism was simple enough.  Agreements to sell and repurchase securities at a higher price after a period of time (“repos”) are among the leading options open to banks in their dealings with each other.  At the time such dealings were done through broker intermediaries.  The securities did not actually change hands, rather a “bank receipt” assured the purchasing (or lending) bank that the securities existed, and on its receipt the broker was furnished with the cash.  Harshad Mehta found some banks willing to issue bank receipts on non-existent securities for payment of a fee.  The cash was then invested in securities, and since prices were going up the “repurchase” was easily accomplished, leaving a growing sum of money in the hands of Harshad Mehta and his backers.  When the scam was exposed and prices collapsed, among the victims was president of Vijaya Bank, who committed suicide. In this single scam, a harbinger of what was to come, surely more money was lost than in a decade or more of all the “license raj” sub-inspectors’ bribes put together.”

“One man with courage is a majority”  –  Thomas Jefferson

From aangirfan.com

“Reportedly, the CIA wants to break up India.

In February of 2000, Indian intelligence officials detained 11 members of what they thought was an Al Qaeda hijacking conspiracy.

It was then discovered that these 11 ‘Muslim preachers’ were all Israeli nationals … India’s leading weekly magazine, The Week, reported ( Aborted Mission Investigation: Did Mossad attempt to infiltrate … ):

Map of a broken up india

On 28 March 2010, The Milli Gazette had an article by historian Amaresh Misra entitled “Headley Saga: 2008 Mumbai attack was a joint IB-CIA-Mossad-RSS project”

The SIM cards used by the ten 26/11 ‘terrorists’ were purchased by someone working for the IB (India’s Intelligence Bureau).

It is possible that the IB is heavily infiltrated by CIA and Mossad.

Rakesh Maria is the police chief responsible for investigating the Mumbai attacks of 2008.

He is said to have pro-Israeli links.

Who paid David Headley’s credit card bills? (Who paid David Coleman Headley’s credit card bill?)

The Bills were paid in the USA and Canada.”

Comment (Links to be added):

Someone might ask why a libertarian should care if the Indian state, a multiethnic state, were broken up. Wouldn’t that be a good thing?

For someone who cares for how things actually play out on the ground, the only answer would be, it depends. That holds true for every state.

For instance, I did not support the break-up of the Soviet state, surely a multi-ethnic empire by any definition, because it was apparent that the break-up was not a peaceful decision of the interested parties, with all rights considered, but rather the result of intense foreign subversive activity.

The result was quite predictable – tremendous suffering, the wholesale looting of assets by financial predators and cronies of the state, and vast criminality, which still has the country by its hair. Not to mention the problem of nuclear warheads on the loose.

I would be in favor of greater and greater decentralization, with a loose retention of the central government and the geographical boundaries of the old state, for the simple reason that those boundaries are natural ones, and make for better defense.

The idea is not to impose theory on the world. The idea is to increase real liberty for real people. Civil war, something tells me, does not do that.

So I will leave seductive and dangerous notions of insurgence and revolution to others. Peace is not the daughter of justice. She is the sister.

This is why I am adamantly opposed to those who support literal secession. Theoretically, it sounds libertarian. In practice, as India is constituted today, it would contribute to violence. Peace through strength is the motto of this realist.

I, like many traditionalist libertarians, thus, support the nation state in as much as it is a bulwark against the predations of the international financial order.

Just as ignorance and weakness signal to the predator a possible target, dissension and civil strife invite imperialists and corporate looters.

Actually, the power-elites, contrary to what some libertarian anarchists think, are promoting the break-up of nation states into regional trading blocks, because the administration of a world economic order would be much easier that way. Defining the states by regional economic zones makes defense difficult and the subjugation of some parts by the global powers much easier.

The Afro-Dalit movement, from this viewpoint, is simply an ideological penetration of the country that serves to draw away a large and prosperous part of India, to westernize and Christianize it, and then position it as a counterforce to the surrounding Hindu and Muslim populations.

Notice how truncated the northern part of India has become in the map. The entire Kashmir area in the North, long coveted by the West for its strategic position, is outside the boundaries of the new state.

Historically, when the state has receded from its natural physical boundaries, it has diminished even further, shrinking to just around the capital of Delhi.

As author/philanthropist/entrepreneur Rajiv Malhotra points out, while fringe activists in the West claim to be deconstructing their own countries, the truth is quite different. Federal power here is immense and there is little or no terrorism or infiltration compared to the enormous foreign activity in and around India.

Thus, Indian activists, drawn by the money and status of the foreign activist circuit, are misled by various gate-keepers to think their deconstruction of their own countries is equivalent to what American and European activists are doing. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Activism here is firmly under the control of the intelligence services, and the boundaries of discourse are ruthlessly maintained by the policing system known as political correctness, as well as by endless secret surveillance, whereby anyone who strays into genuinely subversive truth is immediately branded an anti-Semite or some such thing and sentenced to the cybergulag of irrelevance and obscurity.

This is made possible by the fact that, unknown to such brainwashed and servile activists, the entire web is the domain of thousands, if not tens of thousands of intelligence analysts, spies, instigators, sayanim, and ordinary snitches, who make sure that the apparent decentralized nature of the web is actually covertly controlled in a totalitarian mind-control system. That system encompasses everything from the corporate media giants to Hollywood, from academia to policy think-tanks, from the prestigious awards to the big publishing houses, from NGOs to social media.

And beyond all that of course, the very technology of control is firmly in the hands of closely interlocked mega corporations like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, and other internet giants, all of whom are part of the extra-governmental government, the supragovernment, of the spy agencies, as well as partnered with finance capitalism itself, centered in the US around the Federal reserve system (but more and more around the IMF and BIS), which controls the money supply, and thus the whole capital market and the life-blood of corporations.

The Balkanized India in the map above might seem like a good libertarian goal only if one were completely naive, ignorant of the context and history, or ill-intentioned. Indian history has been one long recitation of imperial expansion and contraction, interstate intrigue and betrayal, and foreign invasion, making trade difficult and dangerous, and forceful secession the last thing needed.

Now, in libertarian anarchy small states can join together for their defense, of course. And this is especially so if the individual states are constituted as republics and linked in a federated structure. But that is already the case in India, where the states are quite divergent and differentiated in structure, population, and functioning.

Those who make arguments for secession and balkanization thus betray their ignorance of contemporary India and her history.

Some ideologues even claim that there was never an India until the British came along and that the unity of the country is a recent creation. This is Eurocentric fiction, generated by the academic left, beholden to the globalists, as anyone who knows Indian history will be aware. The subcontinent has been unified, more or less, many times, before the British.

The Moghul emperors Aurangzeb and Akbar were just two who brought nearly the whole of India under their rule. Aurangzeb was no doubt a murderous despot, but my point is not to endorse empire but to say that anyone who suggests there was no entity called India until the British came along has been brainwashed by colonial fantasists.

Before the Muslims, there were also Mauryas who united the whole subcontinent. And, even between these eras and before them, there is plenty of evidence to show that the subcontinent had a history of its own and was seen as a separate region from the rest of Asia, divided from it by the definite physical boundaries of the Himalayas and the Hindukush.

But most importantly, the objection to the break-up of the nation states, which some libertarians consider preferable, is that it can and will end up playing into the hands of the economic elites, who have been planning for it a long while.