Author Archives: Lila

Who has the gold?

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Came across this tidbit recently:
(Haven’t tried to verify its accuracy..just passing it along, since there was recently a debate among some Austrians and their detractors about whether the Rothschild controlled the gold market)

The Missionary Review of the World, Volume 29, printed in 1906 disclosed:

“The Possession of Wealth: One Jewish banking house is estimated to control $30,000,000,000. The Rothschilds in ten years loaned $482,000,000. Nearly one-half of the gold coined, of the entire world, is said to be in Jewish hands.”

How they figured that out is a bit mystifying, but there it is.

And more on the Rothschilds:

Dutch economist Ad Broere, in his 2010 book “Ending The Global Casino,” informs us that,

“The 19th century became known as the age of the Rothschilds when it was estimated they controlled half of the world’s wealth. While their wealth continues to increase today, they have managed to blend into the background, giving an impression that their power has waned. They only apply the Rothschild name to a small fraction of the companies they actually control.”

Claus von Stauffenberg: The Plot Against Hitler

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A movie about Operation Valkyrie – the plot to overthrow Hitler, headed by the aristocratic German officer, Claus von Stauffenberg.

This is what real resistance look like.
Compare his character and his actions to the people who claim to be leading resistance today.

I’ll save you the trouble by going down the list.

One won’t make a move without asking you for money which ends up in his family coffers.
Another poses in an evening dress before being arrested for jay-walking.
A third sells t-shirts and mugs to college students.
A fourth plans to vote fascists out of power.
A fifth doesn’t dare name any names.
A sixth identifies them as lizards.
A seventh hides in a mansion, emerging only for photo-ops in night-clubs, to sign books, or discuss movie deals.

I could go on, but you get the picture.

Vedic polytheism reflects infinity better than monotheism?

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Update:

I posted this piece because I’m interested in exploring the sources of the need to dominate others and many have located it in religion, specifically, in monotheism.  That is the tenor of the piece below.

However, on second thoughts, I want to add that this doesn’t accurately portray my thoughts on the subject, or the Hindu world view, which is not simply polytheistic, any more than it is monistic.

The Hindu view is best defined as radical pluralism based on dharmic principles.

Contemporary moral relativism or multiculturalism would be unacceptable to Hindus, since dharma categorically forbids certain actions and attitudes.

Because of neo-paganism, many associate polytheism with hedonism or alternative life-styles. But Hindu polytheism is firmly grounded in a traditional way of life and if anything requires a “stricter” and more austere life-style than that allowed by the monotheist.

Drinking, gambling, and eating meat, for example, are traditionally forbidden to Hindus.

ORIGINAL POST

Dr. Vijaya Rajiva argues that Hindu polytheism is a more faithful reflection of the universe’s infinite energy than the “one-godism” of the Abrahamic Middle Eastern faiths.

[I don’t endorse Rajiva’s criticisms of Rajiv Malhotra, whose work I think is extremely effective and does NOT concede the intellectual terrain to his Christian interlocuters, as she contends, see here.]

“The 1008 plus hymns of the Rig Veda are invocations to multiple male and female divine energies, Agni, Indra, Varuna, the Viswa Vedas, Saraswati (invoked 78 times), and they together represent the Vedic comprehension of terrestrial, atmospheric and cosmic powers. At various times, various deities are invoked without the least feeling that only one or two or groups of them are more important than the rest. Agni is invoked as the chief messenger who carries the worshipper’s message to the rest of the pantheon, but there is no rift or rivalry with the other deities in the pantheon.

The Vedic universe’s innumerable deities convey an impression of richness and variety, a deep spirituality absent in the limited monotheistic framework. Historically, the practitioners of a monotheistic faith (chiefly Islam and Christianity) have forced their belief in THEIR one god on peoples of other belief systems. This has been so since the inception of these monotheistic creeds, from the Nicene Council of 325 AD for Christianity, and since the 8th century AD in the case of Islam. In India, this process can be dated from the 7th and 8th centuries onwards and continues to this day through jihad and conversion.

Hindus need to question why the belief in ONE (Abrahamic) god is superior to polytheism or even whether such a belief is necessary. The ONE god is an abstraction. No mortal has either seen or heard this entity. There is only the testimony of other mortal individuals. Above all, Hindus must question WHY this one god of Abraham cannot coexist in peace with other faiths and belief systems? And when this one god is actually only a political weapon of the power wielding it, it has to be rejected without hesitation.

As a system of religious belief per se, the ONE god-ists are searching for an unattainable goal, as argued by French Indologist Alain Danielou in Hindu Polytheism (1964). Contemporary Hindus can use this methodology creatively to start an inquiry into the nature and structure of Hindu spiritual diversity and the limitations of a frantic search for the ONE god, as opposed to the UNITY of God. (The 1984 edition’s first chapter is available on the internet under, Indian Gods: Hindu Polytheism). Danielou himself creatively appropriated the work of Kant.

Briefly, Danielou rebuked those who dogmatically describe God as the ONE:

“A supreme cause has to be beyond number, otherwise Number would be the First Cause. But the number one, although it has peculiar properties, is a number like two or three, or ten, or a million. If “God” is one he is not beyond number anymore than if he is two or three or ten or a million. But although a million is not any nearer to infinity than one or two or ten, it seems to be so from the limited point of view of our perceptions. And we may be nearer to a mental representation of divinity when we consider an immense number of different gods than when we try to stress their unity, for the number one is in a way the number furthest remove from infinity (Hindu Polytheism, Chapter one, p.7)”.

Fr. Bede Griffiths The Rig Veda celebrates these gods and goddesses and invokes them in profound Yagnas (ritual prayers). It is relatively easy for the determined non-Hindu with philosophical training to work his/her way into the profound philosophical speculations of Vedanta and even try to subvert them to his/her purposes by the process known as Inculturation. Bede Griffiths, after a prolonged study of Vedanta, eventually returned to the Christian Trinity. But the Vedic rituals cannot be so subverted; this is also the formidable obstacle faced by Islamic scholars. (See my article on Bede Griffiths, ‘Inculturation: The Frank Morales Jesus videos’)

The oral ritual tradition of the four Vedas may seem to be ‘regional’ and has been so dismissed in the past, as pointed out by American Vedantin Dr. David Frawley (aka Vamadeva Shastri) in his BIRD lecture of 24 March 2012. Dr. Frawley says that the universalism of Vedanta is gaining recognition in today’s world. But on the other hand, as the present writer has been stressing, it can be subverted owing to the nature of philosophical speculation, whereas the authenticity of Vedic mantras (and mudras) remains immutable.

Contemporary Hindus, therefore, must pay special attention to the preservation of this aspect of our Vedic heritage. – Vijayvaani, 4 April 2012

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The Ronald Reagan of Colombia?

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At The Daily Bell, Ron Holland describes Colombia’s Alvaro Uribe as a Latin “Ronald Reagan.”

Unlike knee-jerk leftists, I recognize that Reagan started out with some genuine free-market leanings. Contrary to the mythology, he was well-informed about economics. And he was a realist dove, not a neo-con hawk:

Mehdi Hasan at the Guardian:

“As the liberal US writer Peter Beinart argues in his book, The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris: “On the ultimate test of hawkdom – the willingness to send US troops into harm’s way – Reagan was no bird of prey. He launched exactly one land war, against Grenada, whose army totalled 600 men. It lasted two days. And his only air war – the 1986 bombing of Libya – was even briefer.”

In contrast, consider the blood-spattered record of his successors. George Bush launched Gulf war I and sent troops into Panama and Somalia; Bill Clinton bombed Iraq, Sudan, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia; George W Bush invaded Afghanistan and gave us Gulf war II and the war on terror. And the Nobel peace prize winner Obama had troops surging in Afghanistan, launched a war on Libya and sent drones into Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan.

Lest we forget, after America’s first encounter with jihadist violence in 1983 – when 241 US military personnel were killed – Reagan, to use the disparaging lingo of the neocons, chose to “cut and run”. Every single soldier was pulled out of Lebanon within four months. “Perhaps we didn’t appreciate fully enough the depth of the hatred and the complexity of the problems that made the Middle East such a jungle,” Reagan later wrote in his memoir, adding: “The irrationality of Middle Eastern politics forced us to rethink our policy there … If that policy had changed towards more of a neutral position … those 241 marines would be alive today.”

These are the words not of a hawk but of a dove; of a leader who did not share the neocons’ blind faith in the use of military force to spread freedom.

The truth is that Reagan wasn’t a Reaganite; he ended the cold war through negotiation and with far fewer military interventions than his successors have managed so far in the war on terror. His actions, rather than his occasionally bombastic words, reveal a president more interested in jaw-jaw than war-war.”

But, by the second half of his presidency, the shadow state had taken over. Neocons had infiltrated the offices of the executive, were conducting espionage, pulling strings to overcome  security blocks, and pushing agendas developed in their think-tanks.

Stephen Green at Counterpunch describes the decades-long take-over that started in the 1970s, accelerated in the second half of the Reagan administration, and came to full flower with Bush junior. The main figures are people like Richard Perle, Frank Gaffney, Michael Ledeen, Paul Wolfowitz  and Douglas Feith, with supporters like Norman Podhoretz, Midge Dector, and Jeanne Kirkpatrick.

Ledeen especially was deeply involved in the Iran-Contra affair and with Colonel Oliver North, a key figure in the drug-arms-money-laundering  that was the principal source of funding of the Shadow State.

This network has been called the Octopus by Danny Casolaro (who was murdered because of his investigations of it).

Other related or overlapping networks/operations include the Enterprise and Pegasus.

All of them are tied in different ways to prominent, seemingly disparate scandals of the period –  Operation Red Rock in Vietnam, the CIA-related Australian Nugan-Hand bank, the CIA-related BCCI bank, the Iran-Contra scandal, and the deaths of drug barons like Pablo Escobar and political bosses like Manuel Noriega.

To sum that up as briefly as possible, the New World Order was put in place through covert operations by a secretive element in government that is now so extensive as to control the entire government. That shadow government relies on the drug/arms trade for its funding and espionage and blackmail for its enforcement.

Uribe is an integral part of that story.

Mr. Holland is maybe naive.

But the Bell?

From the Guardian, some information tying Colombia’s Alvaro Uribe to Pablo Escobar:

“My brother Jaime died in 2001, married to Astrid Velez, they had two children … Any other romantic relationship that my brother may have had was part of his personal life and is unknown to me,” Álvaro Uribe tweeted on Sunday. He denied Jaime was ever linked to the drug lord Pablo Escobar.

According to the Nuevo Arco Iris investigation, Jaime Uribe was arrested and interrogated by the army in 1986 after detectives discovered calls had been made from his carphone to Escobar, leader of the Medellín cartel.

Álvaro Uribe acknowledged that his brother had been arrested but said he had been released and charges were dropped, claiming Jaime was recovering from throat surgery in a local hospital at the time the calls were made. “His car phone was cloned by criminals,” Alvaro Uribe tweeted.

The Uribe family has long faced accusations of ties to drug trafficking. A US intelligence report from 1991, declassified in 2004, identified Álvaro Uribe as a “close friend” of Escobar, who was “dedicated to collaboration with the Medellín cartel”. It also says Uribe’s father was murdered “for his connection with the narcotic (sic) traffickers”. Officially Uribe’s father died while trying to resist being kidnapped by leftist guerrillas in 1983.

The US state department disavowed the intelligence report when it was published, during Uribe’s second year in office, saying it had “no credible information” to substantiate the information.

Another Uribe brother, Santiago, isbeing investigated over the alleged founding and leadership of a rightwing paramilitary group, while Uribe’s cousin Mario lost his seat in the senate and was jailed for seven and a half years over ties to paramilitaries, main players in Colombia’s drug trade.“

Colombia Reports has more on Uribe’s ties to narco-trafficking:

“Uribe’s early political career has been the subject of much speculation, rumors and accusations over his alleged links to Pablo Escobar and the Medellin Cartel. He began his political career in the late 70s, holding the posts of Chief of Assets for the Public Enterprises of Medellin (EPM) in 1976 and serving as Secretary General of the Ministry of Labor from 1977 to 1978. However it was after he was appointed as Director of Civil Aviation in 1980 that the rumors began.

Uribe’s appointment coincided with the rise of Escobar as an international trafficker and Uribe has had to answer allegations that the unusually high number of pilot’s licenses and airstrip construction permits issued on his watch were a major contributing factor to Escobar’s success. According to Escobar’s former lover Virginia Vallejo, the drug lord held Uribe in high regard for establishing the infrastructure to transport cocaine to the U.S.

Accusations that Uribe was an ally of Escobar were to follow him into his first major political role. In 1982, Uribe became mayor of Medellin, a post he was to hold for less than half a year. His reasons for leaving remain unclear but several journalists and writers have alleged his mafia ties became an embarrassment to more senior political figures. In his short term, Uribe publicly supported two public works projects financed by Escobar; construction of new housing for the poor and a city-wide tree planting scheme. Further controversy followed after the death of his father when it was reported that Uribe flew to his father’s ranch in a helicopter belonging to Pablo Escobar.

In 2004, during Uribe’s presidential term, the U.S. National Security Archive (NSA) published a declassified 1991 intelligence report from the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) that listed Uribe on a list of prominent Colombians involved in the drug trade. The report described Uribe as a “close personal friend of Pablo Escobar” and “dedicated to collaboration with the Medellin cartel at high government levels.”

From Counterpunch, analysis of Uribe’s US-backed policy of fomenting divisions in Latin American solidarity (written in 2010, when Uribe was stepping down):

“A U.S.-Colombian offensive against Venezuela at the moment of political transition presents a huge threat to regional stability. Uribe has consistently relied on the visceral response of the international right, forces within the U.S. government and nationalist anti-Venezuela sentiment in Colombia to build a fear of Chavez that is based more on created perception than on cool-headed analysis. Obviously, the vast majority of FARC, ELN and rightwing paramilitary forces declared “terrorist”, operate within Colombia.”

Stephen Lendman cites the valiant James Petras on Uribe’s narco-state:

“Thanks to Plan Colombia and other support, the state is heavily militarized, more than ever now serving as Washington’s land-based aircraft carrier against regional targets, including neighboring Venezuela.

The Pentagon got expanded access, former President Alvaro Uribe agreeing to US forces on seven more military bases (three airfields, two naval installations, and two army facilities), as well as unrestricted use of the entire country as-needed for internal and external belligerency, including out-of-control violence and human rights abuses, the region’s most extreme to keep two-thirds of Colombians impoverished, millions displaced, corruption endemic, wealth concentration growing, and corporate predators freed to exploit and plunder.

Also to facilitate record amounts of Colombian cocaine from government-controlled areas reaching US and world markets, new President Juan Manuel Santos embracing the “Uribe Doctrine,” now his. It’s extremist, hard right, corrupt, brutal, corporate-friendly, and militarized in lockstep with Washington.

As Uribe’s Defense Minister, James Petras explained that Santos was an assassin, deploying military forces and paramilitary death squads “to kill and terrorize entire population centers, (murdering) over 20,000 people….falsely labeled ‘guerrillas.’

Pettis Versus Grantham on the commodity cycle

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Greenworld Investor has a piece on the debate between Michael Pettis and Jeremy Grantham on where we are in the commodity cycle:

“Two of the most respected market analysts have radically opposite positions on where the commodity cycle is right now. While Michael Pettis thinks that the commodity cycle has peaked and hard commodities will crash by 2015, Grantham thinks there has been a paradigm change in commodities which will keep on increasing in price.

Pettis’s Arguments are based on:

a) First, during the last decade commodity producers were caught by surprise by the surge in demand. Their belated response was to ramp up production dramatically, but since there is a long lead-time between intention and supply, for the next several years we will continue to experience rapid growth in supply.

b) Second, almost all the increase in demand in the past twenty years, which in practice occurred mostly in the past decade, can be explained as the consequence of the incredibly unbalanced growth process in China.

c) Third, and more importantly, as China’s economy re-balances towards a much more sustainable form of growth, this will automatically make Chinese growth much less commodity intensive

d) Surging Chinese hard commodity purchases in the past few years supplied, not just growing domestic needs but also rapidly growing inventory.

Grantham Thesis on Commodities

Global Commodity Parabolic Price Rise Bubble or Real- Is it Really Different This Time

The rise in global commodity prices is fueling inflation everywhere particularly in developing countries where food and energy forms a major percentage of the inflation basket. This has forced countries like India and China to accelerate interest rate hikes to cool down inflation. Rising Food Prices has caused distress in a number of places leading to food riots in Africa and have been said to be a leading cause of the revolutions in the Middle East. Oil Prices continues to increase unabated as dollar decreases with US Money Printing. Commodities are touching new all time peaks as rising global demand, finite resources, money printing by developed countries fuel price hikes. Silver has been increasing in a parabolic manner with other commodities too showing heart-stopping jumps in prices. The rise in global wheat,rice prices has been at a record as well. Almost all commodities have seen sharp prices increase.

Grantham has made a famous call

The rise in commodities is not a cyclical phenomenon but a secular long term one. He says that the rise in commodity prices is different from the past. Note Grantham has done an extensive study of bubbles and is one of the leading minds in the investment community. While every time in the past, the statement “this time is different” has led to a crash, Grantham’s call cannot be taken lightly. He says that the rise in population, shortage of resources, the growing consumption power of massive chunks of prosperous citizens in India and China will lead to a continued surge. Note commodity prices have declined secularly in the last century and since 2000 have managed to erase all their losses to form new peaks. Grantham also says there is a possibility of a massive short term decline which will give a historic opportunity to load on commodities. Jim Rogers is the most famous commodity bull and now Grantham has joined him.”

Joshua Holland on the myths behind Romney’s “47%”

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Joshua Holland at Alternet has a thoughtful piece on the intellectual fudging behind  Romney’s  “47%” who allegedly don’t pay taxes, don’t have skin in the game, and feel both entitled and victimized.

This notion of a non-paying half of the population omits a fact that the right usually understands – that these sorts of figures are not set in stone.

47% is a figure that represents mobile segments of the population.

That is, the people who are in the non-paying 47% in one year are in the paying 53%  in the next.

For instance, included in the non-payers are students, who eventually do pay taxes.

Furthermore, there are plenty of wealthy households that don’t pay taxes.

In fact, if Romney wants to find entitled people who cry victim at the drop of a hat, feel the government owes them bail-outs, contribute nothing and steal whatever isn’t actually nailed down, maybe he should check out some of his colleagues in the financial industry.

Joshua Holland writes:

“More than a fifth of households that pay no federal income taxes are elderly. This is a group that should feel entitled. They paid into Social Security and Medicare during their working years, and are now in retirement. Many are struggling to get by .

There are a good number of rich people among the 47 percent of households that pay no federal income taxes. According to the Tax Policy Center, 18,000 households with incomes over $500,000 – and 4,000 households bringing in over $1 million – paid no federal income taxes in 2011.

Because there is no discrete group of Americans who routinely pay no income taxes year in and year out, it’s impossible to say for sure what their partisan loyalties might be, but it’s highly likely that a majority of them are Republicans. Around four out of 10 of those households are divided between demographics that lean towards the Dems – students, the poor – and those that lean toward the Republicans – the elderly, disabled veterans. But a majority of that group – six in 10 – are just lower income working families whose incomes fell below a certain threshhold in a given year. And this is where they live:

Click to enlarge.

The Romney campaign is reportedly going to run with this narrative in the coming weeks. The problem is that it only resonates with a minority of hard-right voters who aren’t up for grabs anyway. Most Americans understand that half the country isn’t indolent and doesn’t see themselves of victims of anything but the depression in which we find ourselves today. And that’s why, according to a Gallup poll released on Wednesday , only 20 percent of registered voters say that Romney’s sneering remarks make them more likely to vote for him, while 36 percent say they’re turned of by them.”

The delusional nature of Romney’s math is matched by the delusional nature of his philosophy.

He was born with no silver spoon, he claims, except the silver spoon of being born in America.

Well, being born in America is surely an enormous advantage.

But consider what Mr. Romney does NOT consider a silver spoon:

“Romney was the son of a governor and an auto executive who gave him a wealth of connections, a private education, college tuition, a stock portfolio that he lived on while in graduate school, help buying a first house.”

Apparently, Romney thinks that had he been born Hispanic, his life would have been much easier.

Oh boo-hoo.

Last I looked, the financial industry, not noticeably underpaid, was filled with while males who are NOT Hispanic.

And their high incomes seem to have reflected no great competence on their part.

Indeed, the high incomes seem to have gone hand-in-hand  with extraordinary levels of incompetence and criminality.

The genetic downside of female higher education

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Alphagameplan compares the Iranian and the American approach to female higher education and concludes that the Iranian approach is more sustainable:

“The USA, and most of the West, has taken the approach that encouraging female participation in advanced education will strengthen their economies. Events have thus far failed to confirm those assumptions, and indeed, are increasingly calling them into question. That may be one reason Iran feels emboldened to take the opposite approach:

Iran will be cutting 77 fields of study from the female curriculum, making them male-only fields. Science and engineering are among those affected by the decree. ‘The Oil Industry University, which has several campuses across the country, says it will no longer accept female students at all, citing a lack of employer demand. Isfahan University provided a similar rationale for excluding women from its mining engineering degree, claiming 98% of female graduates ended up jobless.’ The announcement came soon after the release of statistics showing that women were graduating in far higher numbers than men from Iranian universities and were scoring overall better than men, especially in the sciences. Senior clerics in Iran’s theocratic regime have become concerned about the social side-effects of rising educational standards among women.”
According to the mainstream Western assumption, this should weaken Iran’s economy and impoverish its society. So, barring a war that will render any potential comparisons irrelevant, this move by Iran promises to make for an unusually informative societal experiment in comparison with the control group of the USA. If Iran sees non-immigrant-driven population growth along with greater societal wealth and scientific advancement, it will justify the doubts of those who questioned the idea that encouraging women to pursue science degrees instead of husbands and careers instead of children would prove beneficial to society at large.

Of course, the Iranian action presents a potentially effective means of solving the hypergamy problem presently beginning to affect college-educated women in the West. Only one-third of women in college today can reasonably expect to marry a man who is as well-educated as they are. History and present marital trends indicate that most of the remaining two-thirds will not marry rather than marry down. So, by refusing to permit women to pursue higher education, Iran is ensuring that the genes of two-thirds of its most genetically gifted women will survive in its gene pool.

No doubt the Iranian approach will sound abhorrent to many men and women alike. But consider it from a macro perspective. The USA is in well along the process of removing most of its prime female genetics from its gene pool as surely as if it took those women out and shot them before they reached breeding age. Which society’s future would you bet on, the one that is systematically eliminating the genes of its best and brightest women or the one that is intent upon retaining them?”

Anil Kumar’s dead lawyer or the small world of NY fixers

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The New York Times has a piece about the death of Robert Morvillo, who  happens to have been the attorney for Anil Kumar, the McKinsey manager, whose “cooperation” with the Federal investigation into the Galleon Group insider- trading ring, dragged down perhaps the highest rank manager ever to be so convicted. That was Anil Kumar’s mentor and one-time friend,  Rajat Gupta, three times director of global consulting behemoth McKinsey:

“Last spring, he represented Anil Kumar, a former senior executive at McKinsey & Company who was a key witness in the insider-trading trial of the former hedge fund manager Raj Rajaratnam.”

What made the case especially horrible, apart from appalling rulings from Judge Rakoff, was that so much of the charge of conspiracy made against Mr. Gupta relied on nothing more than circumstantial evidence and hearsay, in this case, the unreliable hearsay of Mr. Anil Kumar, a senior partner and director at McKinsey and a protege of the luckless Mr. Gupta.

Mr. Anil Kumar is a documented and admitted conspirator and criminal.

The Federal government rewarded him for his testimony by giving him probation.

If this “reward for cooperation” had been given by anyone outside the government, it would be called what it really is – bribery and perhaps suborning of perjury.

Meanwhile, we’ll never know what kind of bargaining went on between the government and Anil Kumar, because one crucial part of that history, his defense attorney, Robert Morvillo, is dead.

Curiously,  Morvillo’s death occurred in December 2011, which is just around the time that Rajat Gupta was demanding to see government files relating to the prosecutor’s deals with cooperating witnesses.

Those files were denied him by Judge Rakoff’s ruling, so the government’s not talking, either.

The ruling and others like it resulted in an erroneous verdict.

Based solely on flimsy evidence that should never have taken him to a federal criminal trial, Gupta now faces five years on the conspiracy charge and twenty years each on the three securities fraud counts (two of which pertain to a single alleged trade).

Adding to the complete media dereliction in this case, the newspapers have almost uniformly reported this incorrectly, claiming that Gupta only faces twenty years in total.

The truth is he faces 65 years in prison. Given that he is sixty-three years old, that is a life sentence.

In spite of itself, though, the  NY Times piece does do one good thing. It gives us a glimpse into the cozy web of connections between judges, defense lawyers, prosecutors, and corporations that has turned the courts into one of the most corrupt and tyrannical arms of the government:

“Mr. Morvillo was one of a group of lawyers who worked as federal prosecutors in the office in the 1960s under Robert M. Morgenthau’s leadership. He rose to become head of the office’s securities-fraud unit, which Mr. Morgenthau had formed. That unit, which had led to an increase in indictments against corporate executives, in turn created a need for white-collar defense. Later, Mr. Morvillo became chief of the office’s criminal division.

Today, many of the deans of New York’s criminal-defense bar, including Gary P. Naftalis and Charles A. Stillman, served with Mr. Morvillo as assistants under Mr. Morgenthau.”

To make the mix thicker, Judge Rakoff was a student of Morvillo’s:

“This past summer he was representing a defendant in a bribery case before Judge Rakoff, who as a federal prosecutor in the 1970s was supervised by Mr. Morvillo, then chief of the criminal division.”

The Manhattan D.A. also ended up a partner at Morvillo’s firm.

Cyrus R. Vance Jr., the Manhattan district attorney, was a partner at Morvillo Abramowitz for five years before his election in 2009.

Talk about a revolving door.

So Judge Rakoff, the presiding judge at the Galleon group trial,  is an old friend and junior colleague of the defense attorney, Morvillo,  whose firm is a cozy nest for ex-prosecutorial types.  The judge is also an old friend and colleague of  Rajat Gupta’s defense attorney, Gary Naftalis.

Naftalis, despite his stiff fees and reputation, actually failed to get even Judge Rakoff’s most ridiculous rulings overturned.

Robert Morvillo has a reputation, hinted at in the NY Times piece, as some kind of good guy.

But, if you read between the lines, another picture emerges.

What you see is a guy who, when he was working for government prosecutors,  begins a nifty racket. He starts going after the biggest corporate scalps.

The NY Times frames can frame this as a concern for equal justice.

But anyone familiar with the games prosecutors play knows that the are seamier reasons to pursue high-profile cases –  bigger targets add up to media clout for the prosecutor’s office, which adds up to bigger budgets, bigger salaries, and corporate or political office for an ambitious prosecutor.

“Ambitious prosecutor” would describe Rajat Gupta’s nemesis, Preet Bharara, the Indian-American (Sikh) prosecutor who took over the Galleon case, after B. J. Kang had laid all the ground work and was actually knocking on the door of the money0men who needed to be fingered – like mafia hedge-fund honcho, Steven Cohen.

The Cohen investigation mysteriously vanished off the table sometime in 2010, Kang vanished with it, and Batman Bharara shows up in full boot-strapping desi-wonderboy mode, going great guns after a relatively trivial expert-network run by dark-skinned yuppies yearning to play in the big-league with gora crooks.

This had zilch to do with the financial crisis, as even the gora crooks have admitted.

Thanks to Bharara, a product of the New Jersey political machine,  the prosecution of a whole bunch of South Asians, in lieu of the mostly Euro-Semitic criminals who actually scammed the markets, didn’t raise the suspicions it would have otherwise.

That’s how the game is played and knowing that gives us some insight into Mr. Morvillo and his ilk.

In essence, what Robert Morvillo did while a prosecutor was to create a market for highly-paid criminal defense attorneys. He did this by going after senior managers with a vengeance.

Then, when he left the government, he fulfilled that need…earning big bucks in the process.

Perhaps he was a good guy, as the Times suggests.

But, from what is in the Times piece, he doesn’t seem to have saved any corporate scalps in need of it.

He didn’t help Martha Stewart.

If anyone  deserved to have got off for  ridiculous over-prosecution it was Martha Stewart. But Morvillo lost her case.

Yet, he managed to save Maurice “Hank” Greenberg, even though, if there was anyone who deserved not to get off, it was Greenberg, whose decades-long shady dealings at AIG and CIA-related Starr are the stuff of legend among 9-11 researchers.

[to be continued]

Vox Day: Free trade often linked to war

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The provocative (some would use much harsher terms) Christian libertarian writer Vox Day pokes a hole in the venerable libertarian mantra –  free-trade uber alles:

“China and Japan have only been trading since diplomatic ties were normalized in 1972; China became Japan’s largest trading partner in 2004. A war between two of the world’s largest economies would permanently shatter the oft-heard argument that trade eliminates the possibility of war. It’s an argument that should always have been dubious, however, as England’s many wars against the various principalities in India and the USA’s Middle East wars have all followed the inception of large-scale trade with the region.

Once more, we see that free trade delivers precisely the opposite of what it promises. And, as Generational Dynamics adroitly points out, trade actually expands the range of warfare as well as providing an economic weapon that can be wielded against the trading partner. Even when trade is not a cause of the war, it provides a means of fighting it.

Lest anyone think I am setting up a strawman here, consider this article by a free trade advocate at the Mises Institute: “The Classical Liberals of the nineteenth century were certain that the end of the old Mercantilist system–with its government control of trade and commerce, its bounties (subsidies) and prohibitions on exports and imports–would open wide vistas for improving the material conditions of man through the internationalization of the system of division of labor. They also believed that the elimination of barriers to trade and the free intercourse among men would help to significantly reduce if not end the causes of war among nations.”

On the civilizational superiority of the West in regard to women…

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The article posted below should be read for the light it throws on the morals, manners, and breeding of some of New York’s most eminent and public financiers.

Wikipedia tells us:

“His father was a partner at the Los Angeles law firm of Irell & Manella LLP and general counsel for Williams-Sonoma. His mother is a historian. Loeb’s great-aunt, Ruth Handler, created the Barbie doll and co-founded Mattel Inc.[4]”

I do not know of a single financier born and bred in Asia who has ever engaged in this sort of thing.

Astute readers will note the close parallels between the type of invective used by this well-known, indeed, adulated financier, and the type used by the denizen of the underworld who has favored me with his obsession.

Note the nature of the victims – female, Gentile, working for/advocating positions antithetical to the interests of the colluding short-sellers.

Note the nature of the invective – scatological (queefs, farts, shit) and sexual (prostitutes,whores, bimbos, pimps); calculated to cause intense emotional and reputational injury by sheer association,  without offering  either reason or evidence, yet evading legal liability, under the West’s servile definition of freedom.

Notice how American “libertarians” (aka licensitarians), who find burqas objectionable, not only never voice any objection to this kind of barbarous public attack, they post the  self-serving rants of their perpetrators, with obvious pride in the association.

Such “liberty” shows itself to be nothing more than servility to the powerful and the malicious.

The very scurrility of the attacks assures this, since most ordinary people, especially women,  cannot/will not  counter with invective in kind, both from moral and prudential reasons.

Judd Bagley at Antisocialmedia.net:

“In late 2005, I spent over four hours interviewing Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne as part of a podcast series on entrepreneurship I created.

After I published the audio of the interview, somebody posted a link to it on the Yahoo Finance message board dedicated to Overstock.com.

Seeking the origin of the resulting surge in downloads led to my first stock message board visit.

It was really strange.

What first struck me was the flurry of responses to the original posts in which users with foul mouths and bad attitudes warned that the linked mp3s contained computer viruses.

Of course, no mp3 has ever carried a virus, as I’m fairly certain the posters knew.

These were followed up by all manner of lies meant to discourage others from listening to any of the three Byrne interviews I would eventually publish.

[Lila: And that is evidently the reason for Mr. Ryals’ verbal assaults against me and others. They are intended to thoroughly confuse and intimidate.]

Worse, they posted all manner of lies about Patrick Byrne personally – something I was in a unique position to recognize having just interviewed him at length.

Intrigued, I started examining the posting histories of the most prolific sources of this disinformation, trying to identify patterns that might in turn reveal their underlying motives and, often enough, their real identities……..

Consider the following notable example.

I’ve previously written about evidence received demonstrating that hedge fund Third Point, LLC contracted with convicted stock fraudster Michelle McDonough, whose duties included coordinating the efforts of message board bashers and inducing certain captured journalists to report negatively on targeted companies.

I’ve also written about Third Point founder Daniel Loeb’s well-known history of posting on the Yahoo and Silicon Investor stock message boards under the alias Mr. Pink.

Before getting to the rest of the story, here’s some background.

About the same time I first visited Yahoo Finance, a company called SFBC International (now PharmaNet Development Group) came under a blistering attack by Daniel Loeb, who very publicly announced Third Point’s sizeable short interest in the company.

SFBC got hit from all sides, and its share price withered.

In particular, there was a deluge of libelous (though tame compared to others I’ve seen) posts to Yahoo’s SBFC message board. Most notable were the attacks leveled against then-SFBC Chairwoman and President Lisa Krinsky.

Krinsky responded by filing a lawsuit against ten anonymous posters: Does 1 through 10.

In order to discover the identities of the ten Does, Yahoo was served with a subpoena.

In accordance with policy, Yahoo alerted the posters, giving them two weeks in which to contest the subpoena – an expensive proposition few bashers have the financial ability to pursue.

And indeed, none of the ten Does opted to put up a fight.

With one exception: Doe number 6, known on Yahoo Finance as Senor_Pinche_Wey (which is a slang Spanish term that is as obscene as you can imagine).

A typical post by Senor_Pinche_Wey reads:

…I will reciprocate [fellatio] with Lisa [Krinsky] even though she has fat thighs, a fake medical degree, “queefs” and has poor feminine hygiene…

Doe-6 fought the subpoena, was rejected, and appealed to California’s Sixth Appellate court.

Clearly, Doe-6 had some resources backing him up…to say nothing of a deep motivation not to be exposed.

And, fortunately for Doe-6, his appeal was successful and the subpoena was quashed.

This decision – handed down in February of this year – essentially affirms the First Amendment rights of message board bashers to say whatever they want about the officers of public companies. (An excellent analysis of the decision can be viewed here.)

In their decision, the Court noted:

We likewise conclude that the language of Doe 6’s posts, together with the surrounding circumstances — including the recent public attention to SFBC’s practices and the entire “SFCC” message-board discussion over a two-month period — compels the conclusion that the statements of which plaintiff complains are not actionable. Rather, they fall into the category of crude, satirical hyperbole which, while reflecting the immaturity of the speaker, constitute protected opinion under the First Amendment.

Interesting.

Daniel LoebReady for the other shoe to drop?

I’ve learned, through multiple sources, that the immature speaker in this case, Doe-6 (aka Senor_Pinche_Wey) was none other than Daniel Loeb himself.

As a matter of fact, Senor_Pinche_Wey is one of many abusive message board identities used by Loeb to harass officers of companies Third Point was shorting, often illegally.

On August 12, 2005, Patrick Byrne first publicly accused several hedge funds of working in coordination to illegally manipulate the share price of Overstock.com and many other small, public companies. Within 48 hours, armies of bashers arrived for the first time on the Overstock.com stock message boards across the web, all working off of a the same obvious set of talking points. Among the points these bashers took the greatest care to make, time and again: that Byrne was crazy for thinking that any two hedge funds would ever work together when shorting.

In case there are any doubts left regarding Byrne’s claims, I invite you to look at this message board exchange, between Senor_Pinche_Wey, LaseriumQueen, bobbingbargains, disgustedinvestor, kidstockjoec, jidoo, and Polytechnic_Trader.

What makes it so interesting is that at least 72% of the participants are hedge fund managers shorting the company they’re smearing.

Specifically, Senor_Pinche_Wey belongs to Daniel Loeb, while LaseriumQueen, bobbingbargains, disgustedinvestor, and kidstockjoec all belong to Robert Chapman, founder of hedge fund Chapman Capital.

Polytechnic_Trader and jidoo may or may not belong to Loeb or Chapman…I don’t know either way.

I do know that Chapman also posts under the aliases tautologicaltrader, ghaulty_lodgick, notably_absent, and herniatedgorilla – all of which can be seen, time after time, posting things I’m quite certain Chapman would not dare say in person.

Do hedge funds coordinate their attacks?

Yes.

And as you’ll read in a soon-to-be-published-post, message board bashing is only the beginning.”

[Lila: Based on my experience, I’d say that after the bashing, comes investigation, surveillance/monitoring, threats, and even physical stalking. In short, criminal behavior by criminals. What a shock.]