Author Archives: Lila

A Real History Of Conservativism..

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Ah. At last, some truth in advertising.  Clyde Wilson at LRC brushes off some forgotten conservatives and sets them down against what passes for conservatism today. May he find some more of these old codgers and create an alternative line of descent for modern conservatives without a taste for bullying and bribing the world.

“The true conservatives have been those who wanted to let the American people alone and not hector and dragoon them into schemes of “progress” and foreign entanglement.

Conservatism, for us, has been a powerful and eloquent train of thinkers who have opposed the Hamilton/Lincoln regime of state-capitalism and the Roosevelt/Bush/Irving Kristol agenda of “global democracy.” Our conservatism stands strongly contra to the historic Republican party and to “neoconservative” imperialism. In this we are not so much out-of-step as some may think. Russell Kirk, “the father of modern conservatism,” considered Alexander Hamilton to be no conservative but rather a dubious “innovator.” And more than once Kirk lamented that “the conservative disposition” in the United States has too often been misunderstood by identifying it with rent-seeking behaviour.

As we have tried to show, many of the great figures of American literature – James Fenimore Cooper, H.L. Mencken, William Faulkner – fit well into our scheme of true American conservatism. The thinkers Dr. McClanahan and I have presented are perhaps not so much forgotten as they are unheeded, but they are all good men who have warned tellingly of the march toward the regime of regimentation and exploitation that is now established.”

Mitt Romney: Jerusalem Is Zionist and Jewish, not Christian Or Muslim

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itt Romney lands in his favorite country and declares for it (“In Israel, Romney declares Jerusalem to be capital,” AP, July 29):

“On Israeli soil, U.S. presidential candidate Mitt Romney on Sunday declared Jerusalem to be the capital of the Jewish state and said the United States has “a solemn duty and a moral imperative” to block Iran from achieving nuclear weapons capability.

“Make no mistake, the ayatollahs in Iran are testing our moral defenses. They want to know who will object and who will look the other way,” he said. “We will not look away nor will our country ever look away from our passion and commitment to Israel.”

Comment:

“Since when do Presidential candidates stand on foreign soil and pledge to conduct U.S. foreign policy in accordance with the desires of the foreign government on whose soil they are standing?” asks the DailyKos correctly (https://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/07/29/1114809/-You-re-not-President-yet-Mitt).

You’ll notice this is the same position that Ron Paul has recently taken (“Ron Paul shocks campaign staff with new position on Israel,” Business, April 13, 2012).…. albeit for constitutional reasons.

Does that bother me? Yes, I admit it does, even though Dr. Paul’s reasoning is perfectly valid….if you use strictly ideological arguments and forget politics,  history, and prudence.

It’s one more piece of evidence that Dr. Paul’s non-interventionism is weighted in favor of  Zionism.

I blogged as much last year – Ron Paul’s Zionist non-interventionism.

The whole thing bothers me, even though the campaign manager quoted in the piece, Douglas Wead (here he is blogging on the subject) has a tendency, reportedly, to put his own spin on Paul’s statements or actions.

It also bothers me that Ron Paul’s chief legal advisor is Bruce Fein, who has an extensive background as a lobbyist for foreign governments ( “Def(e)ining choice: Bruce Fein, the Turkish Lobby, and the Ron Paul campaign,” Nanour Barsoumian, The Armenian Weekly,January 20, 2012) that is completely at odds with Paul’s rhetoric against special interests.

I’ve blogged about Bruce Fein before and commented about him at other sites.

It was Bruce Fein who lobbied in support of US recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, instead of as an international city, belonging equally to Islam, Christianity, and Judaism — which has been the position taken by the US State Department these many years (http://jerusalem.usconsulate.gov/about_the_embassy.html).

Sure, the State Dept. is left-leaning. But the left gets many things right, and I’m neither ideologically rigid enough nor partisan enough not to recognize when they do..

Last year, there was a seminal case that centered on whether a young Israeli-American dual citizen born in Jerusalem should have Jerusalem listed as his place of birth on his passport, or Israel. (“Court may rule on US stand on Jerusalem,” Barbara Ferguson and Tim Kennedy, Arab News, May 12, 2011)

The State Department  resisted all appeals from the parents and the case went to the Supreme Court, which decided in favor of having Israel on his passport, thereby setting a precedent for any judge who wants to overthrow US foreign policy from the bench.

That’s how the New World Order Works. Through judicial fiat.

The red-herring that constitutionalists dangle before everyone is the overweening power of the President and the constitutional limits that need to be set on it. That’s all very well and perfectly true,  except, again, the devil is in the details.

Who sets limits on Congress and the judiciary, both bribed and bought by  Zionists?

The media?

Also owned by Zionists.

It’s Zionists all the way down.

While the Paul/Rothbard anarcho-capitalist philosophy rails against secretive government and  executive over-reaching, you’ll notice that it also equates all commercial advertising and political donations with free speech.

Murray Rothbard, the principal intellect behind the hybrid movement,  also defended the decriminalization of bribery and blackmail. See M.N. Rothbard, Man, Economy and State, 443 n. 49, 1993, (http://mises.org/books/mespm.pdf).

Whom does that help? The Zionist financiers who buy  Congress and bribe and bully the Judiciary.

So, what the left hand (constitutionality) giveth, the right hand (anarcho-capitalism) taketh away.

Using the letter of the law to circumvent its spirit is legalism.

Depending on which sect of conspiracy theory you favor, you can blame this on Jesuitical or Talmudic casuistry… or on perfidious Albion.

I prefer more academic terminology. Like, phony-baloney.

You notice I didn’t use the politically correct terminology, which would be “pro-Israeli” Congress and “pro-Israeli” President.  Because Israel, the nation-state, is only one part of this and because nation-states seem to be slated for demolition in the near future.

Israel  is the cockpit, but not the whole plane.

If the Zionists want something, they can get it equally through extra-legal means or the most snow-white constitutionality. Paul’s constitutionalism, however well-meaning, has acted as nothing more than window-dressing.

I don’t think he can be blamed for it. It may not be something he or anyone can really help.

But it’s lesson should be clear.

Politics is not only not the answer. At this point, it is a diabolical diversion.

Ron Paul and Herman Cain Only Non-Deadbeats

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LRC blog comments on a Politico piece about presidential dead-beats (“Presidential also-rans stiff small businesses, ” David Leventhall and Robin Bravender, Politico, July 29, 2011):


Bachmann, other candidates stiff small businesses
Posted by Lew Rockwell on July 29, 2012 09:05 AM

Politico goes down the list of shame, but for some reason neglects to mention the one non-deadbeat, Ron Paul.

Comment:

Ron Paul wasn’t mentioned, true. But why did Lew Rockwell emphasize Bachmann? The Politico piece emphasized her too and buried the Democrat names at the back.

It also buried Herman Cain’s notable difference from the crowd. He paid his vendors personally and ended up being owed by his own campaign, as well as Gingrich’s.

Even Bachmann was actually less in debt to vendors than the other candidates (under a million compared to multiple millions for the others, all of whom are richer than she was).

So why would a former paleo-libertarian pick on Bachmann?

Pandering to the left?

Is Tolstoyan Anarchism The Same As Rothbardian Anarcho-Capitalism?

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I smell more smoke…and mirrors..

Agora-affiliated  Jeff Berwick

[in an interview today with Agora-affiliated Daily Bell]:

“Tolstoy was an anarchist.”

Agora-afflicted Lila Rajiva

[in a monologue with herself over coffee as she looks over Tolstoy’s astrological chart – just kidding! – and recalls the millions of words of  Lev she actually read decades ago, if only in translation]:

Yes, Tolstoy was an anarchist.

He was also anti-capitalist and anti-property, and, by the end of his life,  he was also anti-sex, anti-church, anti-religion, anti-mysticism, anti-technology, anti-capital punishment, and anti-art.

He worshiped the Russian peasant.

He excoriated himself for having written “War and Peace” and “Anna Karenina”.  He wanted to give away everything he owned, even though his children and his poor wife (who had slaved over his manuscripts for years) opposed him.

And most of this extremism came out of his own psychodrama (as Gandhi’s “issues” came out of Gandhi’s psychodrama).

Tolstoy killed a man in a duel in his youth, fought in wars in which he killed his enemies, and contracted an STD from an early experience of sex (perhaps his earliest).

He had such an enormous sexual appetite that he was always taking up with underclass women and then suffering bouts of self-loathing and revulsion toward them.

He often threatened his wife with a gun, while cussing her out.

Then he had a “dark night of the soul” and became a different man.

You know what happens. An alcoholic swears off drink. Then he becomes even more of a nuisance than he was before. He follows you around, a thermos of coffee clutched to his heart, the lingo of AA on his lips. You feel sorry for him. He’s off liquor. But he’s not cured.

Same thing with Tolstoy.

For the Mises-Agora-hard-money (gold-bug) libertarian circle of co-investors and co-thinkers (to which Jeff Berwick belongs) to pretend that Tolstoy’s anarchism is equivalent to the anarcho-capitalism of the gold-bug, secessionist, philo-Semitic-yet-Dixiecrat, finance-capital-friendly, anti-democratic, Rothbardian  wing of American political and economic thought is, frankly, nonsense.

But it’s terrific marketing if you want to neutralize the anger of a  whole bunch of  anarchist youngsters, oldsters, and hipsters,  by channeling it into anti-nation state ideology in the service of the new KKK – Korporatist-Krisismongering-Kleptocrats.

And make a few bucks doing it too.

Wink.

Murray Rothbard: Hooray For Che!

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File under ideological insanity – Rothbard gives props to the people’s poseur, Che Guevara, whom even the anarchist left today has rejected:

“What made Che such an heroic figure for our time is that he, more than any man of our epoch or even of our century, was the living embodiment of the principle of Revolution. More than any man since the lovable but entirely ineffectual nineteenth-century Russian anarchist, Mikhail Bakunin, Che earned the title of “professional revolutionary.” And furthermore, to paraphrase Christopher Jencks in a recent perceptive, if wrongheaded, article in the New Republic, we all knew that his enemy was our enemy–that great Colossus that oppresses and threatens all the peoples of the world, U. S. imperialism.

Trained as a physician in Argentina, witnessing CIA-fomented counter-revolution by the thug Castillo Armas in Guatemala, Guevara dedicated the rest of his life to the Revolution. He found a promising field first in Cuba, where, as everyone knows, Che was second only to Fidel Castro in waging and then winning the revolution there.”

and this:

But in his mighty heart Che could not refrain from leaping a whole raft of stages, from plunging romantically but recklessly into the premature adventure of armed struggle in Latin America. And so, with tragic irony, Che Guevara, in his daring and courage, was betrayed by the very Bolivian peasantry whom he was trying to liberate, and who barely understood the meaning
of the conflict. Che died from violating his own principles of revolutionary war.

And this, enthusiastically quoting from Fidel Castro’s praise of Che:

“Newspapers of all tendencies have univermlly recognized Che’s virtues… . He is an almost unique example of how a man could win the recognition and respect of his enemies, of the very enemies he faced with his arms in his hands, of those who have been ideological enemies and have nevertheless expressed feelings of admiration and of respect toward Che.”

Murray Rothbard, “Ernesto Che Geuvara: RIP,” Mises.org http://mises.org/journals/lar/pdfs/3_3/3_3_1.pdf

See also this article from a strict anarcho-capitalist position about Rothbard’s misrepresentation of his views to placate or mislead followers: The 10 Points Of The Libertarian Party Abolitionist Caucus.pdf.

Note – My main objection to an-cap positions is that they are easily manipulated by the state (national and transnational) for its own ends. An an-cap world is possible, but only spottily.

Now, in contrast to Rothbard’s glowing portrait, here is a more candid assessment of Che’s actual record from the anarchistlibrary.org (Che Guevara: why anarchists should view him critically):

Organise, Issue 47, Winter 1997/1998
flag.blackened.net

QUOTE: “After all, the Che cult is still used to obscure the real nature of Castro’s Cuba, one of the final bastions of Stalinism.”

QUOTE: “He demanded the death penalty for “informers, insubordinates, malingerers and deserters.” He himself personally carried out executions. Indeed the first execution carried out against an informer by the Castroists was undertaken by Che. He wrote: “I ended the problem giving him a shot with a.32 pistol in the right side of the brain.” On another occasion he planned on shooting a group of guerrillas who had gone on hunger strike because of bad food. Fidel intervened to stop him. Another guerrilla who dared to question Che was ordered into battle without a weapon!”

QUOTE: “With the Castroite victory in 1959, Che, along with his Stalinist buddy Raul Castro, was put in charge of building up state control. He purged the army, carried out re-education classes within it, and was supreme prosecutor in the executions of Batista supporters, 550 being shot in the first few months. He was seen as extremely ruthless by those who saw him at work. These killings against supporters of the old regime, some of whom had been implicated in torture and murder, was extended in 1960 to those in the working class movement who criticised the Castro regime. The anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists had their press closed down and many militants were thrown in prison. Che was directly implicated in this.”

QUOTE: “Photo opportunities with the peasantry and proletariat, good looks and a dramatic death in no way exonerate him from his historical role in the suppression of the popular classes, state terror and capitalism, and changing Cuba from the semi-colony of one great power the US, to another, the USSR.”

QUOTE: “I’d like to confess, papa, at that moment I discovered that I really like killing” “Hate will be an element of the battle, a merciless hate for the enemy, that will inspire the guerrilla-soldier to superhuman efforts of strength and changes him into an effective, violent, selected, in cold blood killing machine”

Stupid Party Leader Tells Stupid Party To Keep Being Stupid

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H/T LRC blog:

“Former Texas Rep. and House Majority Leader Dick Armey said Thursday that while Mitt Romney will receive diligent support from tea party activists across the country, he’s not exactly everything they’re looking for.”

Sure. That’s why all those social- conservative activists went to bat yet again for the GOP. They get called everything from “bat-shit crazy” to American Taliban, only to have the party commissar tell them that crony-capitalist, socialistic fascist finance-capital in white-face is really, really different from crony-capitalist, fascistic-socialist finance-capital in black-face.

Dr. Paul, this is what you did by going light on Romney and hitting hard at everyone else.

Of a bad lot, Herman Cain was the best choice for the right….if you had to choose from the two parties. [Correction: I meant, to run along with Ron Paul. I think on his expressed positions, Paul was the best choice, but one the establishment would never have let win. Cain was the best among those it would have accepted and Paul could have hopped on to that ticket.]

Personally, much as I disagree with her methods and objectives, Lila Rose did more for social conservatives on her own than the whole party.

She actually almost got me rethinking my pro-choice stance.

Herman Cain would have trumped the race card. He came from outside politics and outside the financial sector.

He was smart and would have been teachable on economics. He and Paul would have been an unbeatable team, from a marketing perspective.

This year’s elections was the GOP’s to lose.

And, predictably, they’ve just about done that.

The End Of Chinese Manufacturing?

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Vivek Wadhwa at Forbes:

The End of Chinese manufacturing?

“There is great concern about China’s real-estate and infrastructure bubbles.  But these are just short-term challenges that China may be able to spend its way out of. The real threat to China’s economy is bigger and longer term: its manufacturing bubble.

By offering subsidies, cheap labor, and lax regulations and rigging its currency, China was able to seduce American companies to relocate their manufacturing operations there. Millions of American jobs moved to China, and manufacturing became the underpinning of China’s growth and prosperity. But rising labor costs, concerns over government-sponsored I.P. theft, and production time lags are already causing companies such as Dow Chemicals, Caterpillar, GE, and Ford to start moving some manufacturing back to the U.S. from China. Google recently announced that its Nexus Q streaming media player would be made in the U.S., and this put pressure on Apple to start following suit.

But rising costs and political pressure aren’t what’s going to rapidly change the equation. The disruption will come from a set of technologies that are advancing at exponential rates and converging.

These technologies include robotics, artificial intelligence (AI), 3D printing, and nanotechnology. These have been moving slowly so far, but are now beginning to advance exponentially just as computing does.  Witness how computing has advanced to the point at which the smart phones we carry in our pockets have more processing power than the super computers of the ’60s—and how the Internet, which also has its origins in the ’60s, went on an exponential growth path about 15 years ago and rapidly changed the way we work, shop, and communicate.  That’s what lies ahead for these new technologies.

The robots of today aren’t the Androids or Cylons that we used to see in science-fiction movies, but specialized electro-mechanical devices that are controlled by software and remote controls. As computers become more powerful, so do the abilities of these devices. Robots are now capable of performing surgery, milking cows, doing military reconnaissance and combat, and flying fighter jets. And DIY’ers are lending a helping hand. There are dozens of startups, such as Willow Garage, iRobot, and 9th Sense, selling robot-development kits for university students and open-source communities. They are creating ever more-sophisticated robots and new applications for these. Watch this video of the autonomous flying robots that University of Pennsylvania professor Vijay Kumar created with his students, for example.

The factory assembly that the Chinese are performing is child’s play for the next generation of robots—which will soon become cheaper than human labor. Indeed, one of China’s largest manufacturers, Taiwan-based Foxconn Technology Group, announced last August that it plans to install one million robots within three years to do the work that its workers in China presently do. It found Chinese labor to be too expensive and demanding. The world’s most advanced car, the Tesla Model S, is also being manufactured in Silicon Valley, which is one of the most expensive places in the country. Tesla can afford this because it is using robots to do the assembly.

Then there is artificial intelligence (AI)—software that makes computers do things that, if humans did them, we would call intelligent. We left AI for dead after the hype it created in the ‘80s, but it is alive and kicking—and advancing rapidly. It is powering all sorts of technologies. This is the technology that IBM’s Deep Blue computer used in beating chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov in 1997and that enabled IBM’s Watson to beat TV-show Jeopardy champions in 2011. AI is making it possible to develop self-driving cars, voice-recognition systems such as Apple’s Siri, and the face-recognition software Facebook recently acquired. AI technologies are also finding their way into manufacturing and will allow us to design our own products at home with the aid of AI-powered design assistants.

How will we turn these designs into products? By “printing” them at home or at modern-day Kinko’s: shared public manufacturing facilities such as TechShop, a membership-based manufacturing workshop, using new manufacturing technologies that are now on the horizon.

A type of manufacturing called “additive manufacturing” is making it possible to cost-effectively “print” products.  In conventional manufacturing, parts are produced by humans using power-driven machine tools, such as saws, lathes, milling machines, and drill presses, to physically remove material to obtain the shape desired. This is a cumbersome process that becomes more difficult and time-consuming with increasing complexity. In other words, the more complex the product you want to create, the more labor is required and the greater the effort.

In additive manufacturing, parts are produced by melting successive layers of materials based on 3D models—adding materials rather than subtracting them. The “3D printers” that produce these use powered metal, droplets of plastic, and other materials—much like the toner cartridges that go into laser printers.  This allows the creation of objects without any sort of tools or fixtures. The process doesn’t produce any waste material, and there is no additional cost for complexity. Just as, in using laser printers, a page filled with graphics doesn’t cost much more than one with text, in using a 3D printer, we can print sophisticated 3D structures for about the cost of a brick.

3D printers can already create physical mechanical devices, medical implants, jewelry, and even clothing. The cheapest 3D printers, which print rudimentary objects, currently sell for between $500 and $1000. Soon, we will have printers for this price that can print toys and household goods. By the end of this decade, we will see 3D printers doing the small-scale production of previously labor-intensive crafts and goods. It is entirely conceivable that in the next decade we start 3D-printing buildings and electronics.”

Totalitarian Games: The London Summer Olympics, Z0iZ

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Dahlia Lithwick at The National Post describes the militarization of the creepy, totalitarian London Summer Olympics (July 27, 2012 – August 12, 2012):

“At the London Olympics, we’re seeing unprecedented restrictions on speech having anything to do with, erm, the Olympics. There are creepy new restrictions on journalists, with even nonsportswriters being told they should sign up with authorities……….

…Spectators have been warned they may not “broadcast or publish video and/or sound recordings, including on social networking websites and the Internet,” making uploading your video to your Facebook page a suspect activity. Be careful with your links to the official Olympic website as well.

..Know that wherever you go and whatever you do, you will enjoy, at the Olympics, “the biggest mobilization of military and security forces seen in the U.K. since the Second World War.” According to a report by Stephen Graham in the Guardian, “More troops — around 13,500 — will be deployed than are currently at war in Afghanistan. The growing security force is being estimated at anything between 24,000 and 49,000 in total.

Such is the secrecy that no one seems to know for sure.” There will be an aircraft carrier docked on the Thames, surface-to-air missile systems and a “thousand armed U.S. diplomatic and FBI agents and 55 dog teams will patrol an Olympic zone partitioned off from the wider city by an 11-mile, £80-million, 5,000-volt electric fence.”

Throw in the new scanners, biometric ID cards, number-plate and facial-recognition CCTV systems, and disease-tracking systems that will long outlast the games, and you have a sense of what’s to come in terms of big public events.

Protesters, participants and citizens aren’t parasites or background noise. Addressing threats of terror or real violence is one thing. Treating all speech and protest and media as inherently dangerous and violent is something entirely different. Brandishing the wrong sign in the wrong place isn’t protest, and brandishing the wrong French fry in the right place isn’t dangerous. Corporate cleanliness is just a short hop from corporate godliness, and by then it’s much too late for speech.”

Black-On-White Racist Violence Increasing

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From AIM.org, a report about black on white mob violence that looks instigated:

“What makes this even more startling is that it is just one of many examples of racial mob violence occurring around the country, without any comment from national figures such as President Obama or Attorney General Eric Holder. But if whites were attacking blacks in this manner, you can bet it would have already have become a national story worthy of comment from national political figures.

Consider these incidents:

  • At the Wisconsin State fair, groups of black teens numbering anywhere from 25 to 100 “were targeting anyone who was white or appeared to look white,” and beating them, according to the local police chief. At least 18 people were injured, and 30 have been arrested.
  • In Denver, couples leaving restaurants were being attacked by a group of black men with baseball bats.
  • A young white man named Carter Strange had his skull fractured by a mob in South Carolina. He was attacked at random while jogging.
  • A young white man named Dawid Strucinski was beaten into a coma by a mob in Bayonne, NJ.
  • Anna Taylor, Emily Guendelsberger, and Thomas Fitzgerald were beaten to the ground and stomped in separate Philadelphia flash mobs.
  • “Every weekend in July,” according to local news, “police have battled large, flash-mob beatings and vandalism” in Greensboro, NC.
  • In a mostly-white suburb of Cleveland, witnesses reported large groups of young blacks walking through the streets, “shouting profanities and racial epithets,” and one man was viciously beaten while leaving a restaurant with his wife and friends.
  • A young white lady named Shaina Perry was taunted and beaten by a black mob in Milwaukee who remarked “Oh, white girl bleeds a lot.”

The similarities among these attacks point to a trend: First of all, these are not run-of-the-mill crimes. They typically involve group attacks against defenseless, random victims who have no means to resist and did nothing to provoke their attackers. These flash mobs often stomp their victims even after they are down, as most of the news reports describe.

Then there are the racial similarities: The attackers are invariably black. Philadelphia’s mayor conceded as much when he condemned flash mobs, addressing the rioters with the charge, “You damaged your own race.” The victims are usually not black. Several qualifications are in order: It is clear that only a small number of black teens take part in these attacks. Blacks are more likely to be victims of violent crime than any other group due to black-on-black crime. Also, interracial crime is a fraction of all crime, and hate crime is an even smaller fraction of that. Nonetheless, these flash mobs are a social problem that needs to be addressed. If the races were reversed, we would be witnessing an outpouring of guilt of biblical proportions. Instead, the victims are white and we get an outpouring of ignominious silence. So far, precious few leaders in academia, politics, the legal system, or the media have spoken out directly against this troubling trend.

Far from being isolated incidents, violent flash mobs are part of an emerging social problem that turns the traditional story of American racism on its head. If opinion makers reported accurately about these flash mobs, most Americans would probably alter their views about racism and conclude that these flash mobs are the worst form of racial violence in our nation today. Not all of the flash mobs meet the strict criteria of a hate crime. However, they do represent a growing wave of racial violence.

The national media should acknowledge what a serious and potentially widespread social problem they are, but instead the press has concealed the racial aspect of this problem.”

Comment:

I should add that black people are by far the biggest victims of violent crime (black-on-black). So this isn’t meant to suggest, as white nationalists do, that black-on-white crime is generally motivated by racial animosity. The evidence suggests it’s not usually so. [Correction: I should add, until recent years].

But, given that there was a program to stir racial tensions floating around in the summer of 2011 among some political and activist groups, and given that this administration has shown itself ready to frame the debate in that way, this new violence should be examined a bit more closely. There is a good chance it might be orchestrated, at some level.

Gangster Bankster Sandy Weill Comes To Jesus…Not

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Here is an example of why following politics is not about “what” but about “who”.

That means it’s imperative that names are named and context provided in as much detail as needed.

There are many people, including me, who blame the repeal of Glass-Steagall for enabling the financial crisis. Who lobbied for it? Sandy Weill, of Citibank, among others. The repeal profited Weill.

Now, ten years and counting after that heist, here comes Weill to co-opt, for his own motives, the perfectly legitimate demand to break up the banks.

Except, since it comes out of Weill’s mouth, it’s not longer a legitimate move to defend against financial terrorism against the population.

It will have to be rejected.

Naturally, those who are hip to this kind of thing (like the ever so sharp Bob English over at EPJ) then look like turn-coats or defenders of the status-quo.  Of course, they are not. They are just too clever to be played.

But you would need to know the concrete particulars of what’s happening to know that. You can’t just follow some ideological script.

Following the twists and turns takes unremitting hard work, which Mr. Wenzel and Mr. English  amply provide on their deservedly popular masculinist and finance-capital-friendly blog.

[They like to retweet Rupert Murdoch more than I would be happy to. But when they catch one of these kinds of moves, it’s worth putting up with Uncle Rupert…]

“Bob English emails to explain how Weill should make a few more bucks if the Return of Glass-Stegall [sic] comes to a bank near you:

This is like when Lord Evelyn  [Rothschild] condescends himself to an interview with the Money Honey. Something big is in the works and Weill is the oligarch delivering the message today. This is likely part of the battle for the new payments system. But, Weill, post-Citi, isn’t lobbying on behalf of the banks anymore. As you probably know, Weill is ex-AmEx, but he also now has links to MasterCard:

http://newsroom.mastercard.com/press-releases/mastercard-and-sonoma-state-university-unveil-long-term-relationship-in-support-of-the-performing-arts/

Someone has to take the fall as part of the generation of political will to enact drastic new legislation that splits retail and institutional banking (if not the currency system itself, per Mervyn King’s suggestion). This is far bigger than the pusillanimous Volcker Rule, and I think it will eventually involve the repeal or amendment of the BHC Act, as I alluded to on the last CA appearance. LIBOR would seem to be but one battle front against the banks (though a major one).”

None of the entrenched financial interests want to be left in the dust when tech is allowed to enter the field (especially, the CIA vis a vis AmEx and MC). So the Weill interview looks like the payment processors are throwing the banks under the bus to keep as much of the action as possible.”