Author Archives: Lila

Business Managers Need To Change Their Framework

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The Economic Times notes the poverty of management frameworks rooted in the demands of mass manufacture (Fordism and Taylorism):

“Ramnath Narayanswamy, professor of economics and social science at the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Bangalore, who teaches a course on spirituality at the workplace, explains: “Management as a discipline quite literally originated in North America against the historical backdrop of Fordism and Taylorism. While its reach is indeed universal, its origins are very North American and in some respects, the discipline is still a prisoner of its historical orientation.

The excessive emphasis on analytical intelligence as opposed to emotional and spiritual intelligence is a case in point. The overwhelming predominance of “reason” and “science” when in fact it’s our daily experience that all life is based on faith and sacrifice, is another. Or the importance accorded to tools and techniques in MBA education at the expense of neglecting character, values and attitude might be yet another.”

There is a realisation that management theory has to be home grown and not just transplanted from the West. Satish Pradhan, executive VP-group HR, Tata Sons, says, “Western thinking has been dedicated to frameworks and metaphors, and the poverty of these frameworks is revealing itself — it’s not intellectually robust.”

In contrast, says Pradhan, thinking in this part of the world isn’t linear, so one cannot simply take ideas and replicate them. By the same token, this makes it difficult for Eastern concepts to be understood or grasped fully by Westerners. “It’s much like how the Americans wondered, ‘The Japanese are hiding something’ when they visited factory shopfloors of Japanese companies to learn the secrets of their success in managing costs and quality in the early ‘80s.”

Ron Paul On Fed Coverup Of Watergate, Saddam Funding

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Statement of Congressman Ron Paul
United States House of Representatives
Statement for the Record
February 25, 2010

Madame Speaker, I would like to enter into the record the following letter from Professor Robert D. Auerbach, a professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas. This letter provides additional information regarding remarks I made at yesterday’s Financial Services Committee Humphrey-Hawkins hearing, remarks which Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke categorized as “bizarre.”

I thank Congressman Ron Paul for bringing to the public’s attention the Federal Reserve coverup of the source of the Watergate burglars’ source of funding and the defective audit by the Federal Reserve of the bank that transferred $5.5 billion from the U.S. government to Saddam Hussein in the 1980s. Congressman Paul directed these comments to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke at the House Financial Services Hearing February 24, 2010. I question Chairman Bernanke’s dismissive response.

BERNANKE: “Well, Congressman, these specific allegations you’ve made I think are absolutely bizarre, and I have absolutely no knowledge of anything remotely like what you just described.”

The evidence Congressman Ron Paul mentioned is well documented in my recent book, Deception and Abuse at the Fed (University of Texas Press: 2008). The head of the Federal Reserve bureaucracy should become familiar with its dismal practices.

First, consider the Fed’s coverup of the source of the $6300 in hundred dollar bills found on the Watergate burglars when they were arrested at approximately 2:30 A.M. on June 17, 1972 after they had broken into the Watergate offices of the Democratic Party. Five days after the break-in, June 22, 1972, at a board of directors’ meeting of officials at the Philadelphia Fed Bank, it was recorded in the minutes [shown on page 23 of my book] that false or misleading information had been provided to a reporter from the Washington Post about the $6,300. Bob Woodward told me he thought he was the Washington Post reporter who had made the phone inquiry. The reporter “had called to verify a rumor that these bills were stolen from this Bank” according to the Philadelphia Fed minutes. The Philadelphia Fed Bank had informed the Board on June 20 that the notes were “shipped from the Reserve Bank to Girard Trust Company in Philadelphia on April 3, 1972.” The Washington Post was incorrectly informed of “thefts but told they involved old bills that were ready for destruction.”

The Federal Reserve under the chairmanship of Author Burns not only kept the Fed from getting entangled in the Watergate coverup, which the Fed’s actions had assisted, it allowed false statements about bills the Fed knew were issued by the Philadelphia Fed Bank to stand uncorrected. Blocking information from the Senate and House Banking Committees [letters shown in my book, Chapter 2] and issuing false information during a perilous government crisis imposed huge costs on the public that had insufficient information to hold the Fed officials accountable for what they had withheld from the Congress. Had the deception been discovered the Fed chairmen following Burns may have been forced to rapidly implement some real transparency to restore the Fed’s credibility. That would have reduced or eliminated many of the lies, deceptions, and corrupt practices that are described in my book.

The second subject brought up by Congressman Ron Paul is the exposure of faulty examinations of the Federal Reserve of a foreign bank in Atlanta, Georgia through which $5.5 billion was sent to Saddam Hussein that a Federal Judge found to be part of United States active support for Iraq in the 1980s.
On November 9, 1993, several federal marshals brought a prisoner, Christopher Drogoul, into my office at the Rayburn House Office Building of the U.S. House of Representatives. The marshals removed the manacles. Drogoul took off his jump suit and changed into a shirt, tie, and business suit. He immediately looked like the manager of the Atlanta agency with domestic headquarters in New York City of Banca Nazionale. Drogoul had come to testify about a “scheme prosecutors said he masterminded that funneled $5.5 billion in loans to Iraq’s Hussein through BNL’s Atlanta operation. Some of the loans allegedly were used to build up Iraq’s military and nuclear arsenals in the years preceding the first Gulf War.”[1]

Drogoul’s “‘off book’ BNL-Atlanta funding to Iraq began in 1986 as financing for products under Department of Agriculture programs.”[2] The loans allegedly had been authorized by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Since Drogoul told the committee he was merely a tool in an ambitious scheme by the United States, Italy, Britain and Germany to secretly arm Iraq in their 1980-88 war, the testimony was politically contentious and unproven. He was sentenced in November 1993 to 37 months in prison and he had already served 20 months awaiting his sentencing hearing.

U.S. District Judge Ernest Tidwell found that the United States had actively supported Iraq in the 1980s by providing it with government-guaranteed loans even though it wasn’t creditworthy. The judge said such policies “clearly facilitated criminal conduct.”[3]

Gonzalez was drawn to Drogoul’s answer about the Fed examiner who had visited his Atlanta operation. Gonzalez said that:

“At the November 9, 1993 Banking Committee hearing I asked Christopher Drogoul, the convicted official of the Banca Nazionale Del Lavoro agency branch in Atlanta, Georgia, how the Federal Reserve Bank examiners could miss billions of dollars of illegal loans, most of which ended up in the hands of Hussein.

Mr. Drogoul stated:

“The task of the Fed [bank examiner] was simply to confirm that the State of Georgia audit revealed no major problems. And thus, their audit of BNL usually consisted of a one or two-day review of the state of Georgia’s preliminary results, followed by a cup of espresso in the manager’s office.”

Gonzalez was appalled at the of lack of effective examination of a little storefront bank and also appalled by the gifts exchanged by officers of the New York Federal Reserve and the regulated banks in New York City where the main U.S. office of BNL was located. A description of what followed is in my book.

The Fed voted in 1995 to destroy the source transcripts of its policy making committee that had been sent to National Archives and Records Administration. Chairman Alan Greenspan had the committee vote on this destruction, telling the members: “I am not going to record these votes because we do not have to. There is no legal requirement.” (p. 104 in my book.) Greenspan thus removed any fingerprints on this act of record destruction. Donald Kohn, who is now Vice Chairman of the Board of Governors at the Federal Reserve, answered some questions I had sent to Chairman Greenspan about this destruction. Kohn replied in a letter on November 1, 2001 to me at the University of Texas that they had destroyed the source records for 1994, 1995 and 1996, they did not believe it to be illegal and there was no plan to end this practice. That is one reason why the Federal Reserve audit supported by Congressman Ron Paul is needed. The Fed must stop destroying its records.

[1] Marcy Gordon, “Banker Imprisoned in BNL Case Tells Story to House Committee,” The Associated Press, November 9, 1993.

[2] U.S. Newswire: “Former Executive of Atlanta Agency of Italian-Owned Bank Pleads Guilty to Conspiracy”, from U.S. Department of Justice, Public Affairs, June 2, 1992.

[3] Peter Mantius, “Drogoul given 37 months Judge in BNL case also blasts actions of U.S. prosecutors,” The Atlanta Journal and Constitution, December 10, 1993, Section A, p. 12.

Robert Auerbach is Professor of Public Affairs at the Lyndon Baines Johnson School of Public Affairs, The University of Texas at Austin. He was an economist with the House of Representatives Financial Services Committee during the tenure of four Federal Reserve Chairmen: Arthur Burns, William Miller, Paul Volcker, and Alan Greenspan. Auerbach also served as an economist in the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Domestic Monetary Affairs during the first year of the Ronald Reagan administration and as a financial economist with the U.S. Federal Reserve System. Auerbach has been a professor of economics at the American University in Washington, D.C. (1976-83), and a professor of economics and finance at the University of California-Riverside (1983-93). He has written numerous articles, and two textbooks in banking and financial markets. He received two Masters degrees in economics, one from the University of Chicago and one from Roosevelt University, where he studied under Abba Lerner, and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago, where he studied under Milton Friedman.

Why The Establishment Is Attacking Ron Paul

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“If the guy is such a sure loser in 2012, why all the attacks? In his quiet way, Paul must have tapped into something. And you can get an idea of that something from what Pat Buchanan wrote the other day about the CPAC poll.

After asking “how do conservatives justify borrowing hundreds of billions yearly from Europe, Japan and the Gulf states — to defend Europe, Japan and the Arab Gulf states?” Buchanan answered his own question by making the case that such policies are not conservative at all.

“Ron Paul’s victory at CPAC may be a sign the prodigal sons of the right are casting off the heresy of neoconservatism and coming home to first principles,” Buchanan concluded.

Buchanan has put his finger on why the unemotional Texas congressman produces such an emotional reaction. The party establishment has to dread the prospect of a candidate who can unite the youthful libertarian conservatives with the Buchananite America-first types. Such a character might win a plurality running against Romney, Huckabee and neocon Barbie doll Sarah Palin.

And Paul might have the most money of them all, thanks to the support of those young voters who actually understand how the internet works. I suspect this is what all the shouting is about, even though the subject of it all never raises his voice.”

Paul Mulshine, NJ Star Ledger, via Lew Rockwell.

Sibel Edmonds On Traitors In High Places

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“Sibel Edmonds: The Traitors Among Us,”

by Brad Friedman, Hustler Magazine, March 2010

“Edmonds’s most disturbing allegations, however, may be against high-ranking appointed officials in the Bush Administration. Elaborating on testimony she laid out in her sworn deposition, Edmonds told American Conservative magazine’s Phil Giraldi—a 17-year CIA counterterrorism officer—very specific details of alleged traitorous schemes perpetrated by top State and Defense Department officials. As already noted, these included Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz and, perhaps most notably, former Deputy Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman, the third-highest-ranking official in the Bush State Department.

Edmonds said that Feith and Wolfowitz were involved in plans to break Iraq into U.S. and British protectorates months prior to 9/11. She also claimed that the duo shared information with Grossman on how to blackmail various officials and that Grossman had accepted cash to help procure and sell nuclear weapons technology to Israel and Turkey—and, from there, on to the foreign black market. There the technology would be purchased by the highest bidder, such as Pakistan, Iran, Libya, North Korea or possibly even al-Qaeda.

Additionally, Edmonds claimed that Grossman, the U.S. Ambassador to Turkey before taking his State Department post, had tipped off Turkish diplomats to the true identity of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson’s front company, Brewster Jennings & Associates, a full three years prior to their being publicly outed by columnist Robert Novak. That in itself, according to George H.W. Bush, would be an act of treason carried out by “the most insidious of traitors.”

Former CIA counterterrorism officer Giraldi summed up Edmonds’s disclosures to me in blunt terms: “This was a massive coordinated espionage effort directed against United States nuclear secrets engineered by foreign agents who successfully corrupted senior government officials and legislators in our Congress. It’s that simple.”

According to a declassified version of a 2005 Department of Justice Inspector General’s report, Sibel Edmonds’s allegations are “credible,” “serious” and “warrant a thorough and careful review by the FBI.”
Perhaps more damningly, the FBI’s John Cole recently confirmed a key element of Edmonds’s claims when he revealed the existence of “the FBI’s decade-long investigation” of the State Department’s Grossman. Edmonds claimed that Grossman was perhaps the top U.S. ringleader for the entire foreign espionage scheme. The probe, Cole added, “ultimately was buried and covered up.”

More at Antiwar by Philip Giraldi, on Edmond’s credibility.

Here is an op-ed written by Sibel Edmonds about the role of foreign agents in “hijacking” the country.

I should note that Edmonds herself has been seen by some as playing a sophisticated role of disinformation by overemphasizing Arab involvement in 9-11.

Frankly, I don’t know enough about her to argue if that’s plausible or not. In any case, even if her revelations serve an ulterior purpose, they are bad enough as they stand….

Vandana Shiva on Nishkama Karma

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Physicist and environmental activist Vandana Shiva on the practice of Right Attitude, or in Hindu terms, devotion to work without attachment to reward (nishkama karma):

“If you do anything with a narrow mindset, it makes you think according to a calculus of success and failure. Obviously when you are up against powerful interests, there are greater chances of failure than success. But when your work is inspired by a way of life and thinking, that process becomes a reward unto itself. That’s also what the Gita says, that you don’t count the results, you do the right thing according to your context. A spiritual outlook helps you see what the right thing in your context is. What matters is fulfillment, and that cannot be measured by the yardstick of society and its view of you, but by how your soul feels. Then the awards don’t matter, the brickbats don’t matter, the lousy rumors don’t matter. Nothing affects you.”

Mercedes Sosa Sings Solo Le Pido A Dios

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Argentine singer Haydee Mercedes Sosa (July 9, 1935 – October 4, 2009) was dubbed “the voice of the voiceless ones” for her socially conscious music. She became popular through out Latin America as a leading exponent of nueva cancion , a type of song that combined Latin American folk music, rock rhythms, and highly politicized lyrics, and was often associated with left-wing politics. Many nuevo cancion artists went into exile in the 1970s and 1980s, when right wing military dictatorships came to power in their countries. Sosa herself went into exile in Spain.

Solo le pido a Dios

Solo le pido a Dios
I only beg God
Que el dolor no me sea indiferente
To let me not be indifferent to pain
Que la reseca muerte no me encuentre
May death never find me indifferent
Vacio y solo sin haber echo lo suficiente
Empty and alone without having done enough
Solo le pido a Dios
I only beg God
Que lo injusto no me sea indiferente
To let me not be indifferent to injustice
Que no me abofeteen la otra mejia
So I don’t turn the other cheek
Despues que una garra me arane esta frente
When a claw has already scratched my face

Chorus:
Solo le pido a Dios
I only beg God
Que la guerra no me sea indiferente
To let me not be indifferent to war
Es un monstro grande y pisa fuerte
It is the great monster that tramples
Toda la pobre inocencia de la gente
The poor innocence of the people
Es un monstro grande y pisa fuerte
Toda la pobre inocencia de la gente

Solo le pido a Dios
I only beg God
Que el engano no me sea indiferente
To let me not be indifferent to deceit
Si un traidor puede mas que unos quantos
If one traitor is stronger than the rest of us
Que esos quantos no lo olviden facilmente
May the rest of us not forget too easily
Solo le pido a Dios
I only beg God
Que el futuro no me sea indiferente
To let me not be indifferent to the future
Deshauciado esta el que tiene que marchar
Helpless are those who are forced to leave
A vivir una cultura diferente
And live in a foreign land..

Robert Byrd On The Abuses of Majorities

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“Minorities have an illustrious past, full of suffering, torture, smear, and even death.   Jesus Christ was killed by a majority.”

—  Senator William Ezra Jenner of Indiana speaking in opposition to invoking cloture by majority vote on January 4, 1957, cited by Senator Robert Byrd, Senate speech on March 1, 2005, warning against a procedural effort being considered by some senators to shut down minority voices in senate debates.

Random Thoughts On My Return

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My thoughts on the last leg of my schlepp back to the US were mixed….how did my 4 month jaunt get stretched to double the length, for starters..

And why does a continent as rich in natural resources as South America have poverty of any kind….and why is customer service such a difficult concept for some cultures….

But let me rewind a bit.

I left you in Salta, where I spent a two days recovering from a 33 hour bus trip from Montevideo sans any food.

That wasn’t provoked by an attack of asceticism.  When I got to Buenos Aires, I had no Argentine pesos on me, the banks were closed, the ATM wouldn’t take my card for some reason, and it was pouring too  heavily for me to venture out into the city. The restaurants at the station wouldn’t accept Uruguayan pesos or a card. So, between Friday morning in Uruguay and late Monday in Salta I literally ate nothing, except for a soggy white bread sandwich with watery cheese and ham. I didn’t really feel hungry, though, until I got off at Salta….

But more on all that in another post, when I’ll give you my impressions of my trip back..

Today, I’m still catching up and will just leave you with a few random thoughts….

1. The infrastructure and organization of the United States is still unparalleled and impressive in every way, in spite of deterioration and neglect…

2. Americans should get over their love affair with politics. They’re bad at it, it doesn’t suit their style, and it annoys everyone else. America is at her best making things happen. The business of America really is business.

3. I love the English language. With a smattering of Asian and European languages for comparison, I still find everything I want in English.

4. You can lead a rich, well informed, and not uncomfortable life without a car or a bicycle, without air conditioning, a fan, internet, a phone, an I-Pod, a blackberry, wireless, a TV, or even a radio.

5. If you’re willing to drink tap water and eat stall food, you can eat every meal out on 2 dollars a day in Peru, and have meat/fish at least once a day. If you cooked at home, you could eat well for under 15 dollars a month.

6. America has been a unique experiment in history, made possible because several favorable elements lined up in one spot on the globe. One of those elements – in fact, one of the cardinal ones – was the puritan work ethic. What it does it say that our intelligentsia, by and large, despises it.

7. A man can be free with just economic freedom. Even if he cannot act politically, or speak his thoughts, he can think them. If he can think his own thoughts, he is still his own man. But a man without economic freedom can think only his master’s thoughts….and his master will be the state.

8. It isn’t the politicians we need to worry about. They have to stand election. It isn’t even the financiers. They have to reckon with bankruptcy.

But the media faces neither elections nor a balance-sheet. There you have the tyrant.

Financiers Used 9-11 Diversion of FBI to Loot American Middle-Class

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Great interview at Forbes, between Steve Forbes and Senator Ted Kaufman on the capital markets, naked short selling, the uptick rule, sponsored access, HFT (high frequency trading) and digitalization, dark pools, and fraud…

“Forbes: Finally, Fraud Enforcement Recovery Act.
Kaufman: Yeah, yeah.
Forbes: You’re proud of it.

Kaufman: Yeah, I am.

Forbes: What it does, and what will it do?

Kaufman: OK, here’s what it did. After 9/11, we moved a lot of FBI agents over to cover terrorism, which we should have done. But we left only like 250 FBI agents in the country to cover financial fraud. We did more financial fraud cases in 2001 than we did in 2007, can you believe that? So, what we did with this financial and regulatory forum, with Pat Leahy, who is chairman of judiciary committee and Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican. It’s a bipartisan bill and we got a bill passed to give us more FBI agents, give us more prosecutors and to go after these folks. And so that’s basic what we passed, and we’re getting organized. Had a really good hearing of the judiciary committee. Rob Khuzami at the Securities Exchange Commission, Lanny Breuer’s head of the criminal division, Kevin [Perkins] from the FBI financial thing.

And we’re really, we’re going after this thing. And I know you agree with me. You know, if you, the folks that committed crimes while this thing was going on, we can all argue about what caused it or not, anybody who took advantage of this situation and lined their own pocket for it should go jail.”

The Corporate Media: Suffering From Truth Emergency

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We have an elite that has a stranglehold on what gets heard through its grip on professional societies and the major print and TV news. Prizes, media attention, peer approval go to very few media outlets. It’s well- known that only reporters and columnists at a handful of papers get serious attention. That’s a truly dangerous state of affairs and we’re suffering the fall-out from it. What makes it even worse is that news itself is more and more swept aside by trashy, sensation-seeking reporting, which leaves the audience with misinformation or simply a great black hole of ignorance.

Mickey Huff and Peter Phillips analyze the “truth emergency” ravaging the corporate media in the West (and to a lesser degree, everywhere):

“Truth Emergency: Keeping the Facts at Bay

The truth comes as conqueror only because we have lost the art of receiving it as guest.
– Rabindranath Tagore

What are some of these truths, that not knowing them creates a literal state of emergency for human society? Here are two of many possible examples. A 2008 report from The World Bank admitted that in 2005, over three billion people lived on less than $2.50 a day and about forty-four percent of these people survive on less than $1.25. Complete and total wretchedness can be the only description for the circumstances faced by so many, especially those in urban areas of so-called developing nations. Simple items Americans take for granted like phone calls, nutritious food, vacations, television, dental care, and inoculations are beyond the possible for billions of people.6

In another ignored but related story, Starvation.net logged the increasing impacts of world hunger and starvation. Over 30,000 people a day (eighty-five percent of children under five) die of malnutrition, curable diseases, and starvation. The number of deaths has exceeded three hundred million people over the past forty years. These stories should be alarming headlines, certainly more significant than celebrity tripe and tabloid hype.7

Continuing on the theme of human poverty and its ramifications, farmers around the world grow more than enough food to feed the entire world adequately. Global grain production yielded a record 2.3 billion tons in 2007, up four percent from the year before, yet, billions of people go hungry every day. The website Grain.org describes the core reasons for continuing hunger in a recent article “Making a Killing from Hunger.” It turns out that while farmers grow enough food to feed the world, commodity speculators and huge grain traders like Cargill control the global food prices and distribution. Starvation is profitable for corporations when demands for food push the prices up. Cargill announced that profits for commodity trading for the first quarter of 2008 were eighty-six percent above 2007. World food prices grew twenty-two percent from June 2007 to June 2008 and a significant portion of the increase was propelled by the $175 billion invested in commodity futures that speculate on price instead of seeking to feed the hungry. This results in erratic food price spirals, both up and down, with food insecurity remaining widespread.“

My Comment:

Some of this commentary of course paints speculation with too broad a brush. Futures markets can, and do, provide efficient allocation of resources if they function as they should. The problem is not the futures market but the corruption of the market and the constant meddling in it by the state, which blunts the normal checks that the market would otherwise provide.

And again that goes back to public culture and professional standards that have become debased. The deeper question is how they became debased.

Which, of course, leads us to the government’s manipulation of the interest rate. That is where the problem lies.

But meanwhile, where is the media in all this? Providing the context so people can understand what’s going on?

No. It’s rooting around in John Edward’s trash can……