LILA RAJIVA: The Mind-Body Politic
Individuals Not Ideologies
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Archive for January, 2009
Financial Follies: How To Guard The Guardians
Apropos the Satyam case in India, fund manager Atim Kabra of Frontline Strategy writes:
“We would be erring if to the cast of Raju brothers, their ‘independent directors’, the infamous auditors, the bestowers of corporate governance awards, we forget to add the collective conscience of the ‘fund managers and brokers’ who, in my opinion, had a fair inking of not all being well at Satyam. Any broker or fund manager worth his salt would have heard not only of the huge real estate parcels said to be owned by the Rajus but also of their extremely close political connections. They would have known of the phoenix like rise of Maytas and the lucrative contracts housed in these ‘Satyam Group Companies’. They would have had an understanding of the nature of real estate transactions in
India and the significant cash component which accompanies these transactions. Yet, they chose to turn a blind eye to the shenanigan, invested and traded in Satyam Computers, contributed to the enhancement of its market capitalization and ironically now profess shock at the lack of corporate governance at Satyam. While the financial community needs to introspect at its own doing and the propensity to turn a blind eye to the going ons in Corporate India, I believe that collectively, the financial community can be one of the most significant agents of change. However, I worry that by the time change is implemented and percolates down the system, the same Satyam story might have been repeated in many companies in India and Satyam most certainly would not the last one to hit the can due to accounting fraud….” Atim Kabra, with a blueprint for how to improve corporate governance.
American Food Crisis Or Sustainable Farming?
“The proposals we’re discussing would increase employment opportunities in agriculture — sustainable farming will require more “eyes per acre,” and replacing fossil-fuel energy with human energy and ecological knowledge makes good economic sense. With the reduced need for the hoe or plow, and land management relying more on fire and grazing, we draw on the naturalist instinct in nearly all of us, rather than presenting farm work as nothing but the “sweat of the brow” amid “thistles and thorns.” This will be necessary to counter the longstanding denigration of the countryside and rural communities, which has been a feature of our so-called cosmopolitan culture.We’re seeing that on a small scale now, with more young farmers staying on the land, with creative new endeavors in community-supported agriculture. People recognize that life is more than working in a small cubicle and consuming in a big-box store. People are hungry for good food, and they’re also hungry for a good life. People are ready to explore what it would mean to come home, not to a romanticized vision of the past but to a sustainable future….”
Robert Jensen, “Is America on the Brink of a Food Crisis?” at Alternet
Global Games: The Shine Is Off the Shining
“The British economy will shrink by 2.8 per cent this year, says the IMF, with dire implications for jobs, house prices and the public finances. As recently as November, the IMF forecast a relatively mild downturn of 1.3 per cent in the UK.
In its latest World Economic Outlook, the IMF now sees economic activity contracting by around 1.5 per cent in the US, 2 per cent in the eurozone, and 2.5 per cent in Japan. Two of the brightest stars in the economic firmament, China and India, have seen their growth forecasts slashed, to 6.75 per cent and 5 per cent respectively. The global economy as a whole is perilously near to shrinking, with a mere 0.5 per cent growth predicted – the lowest since the 1940s. “We now expect the global economy to come to a virtual halt,” said Olivier Blanchard, the IMF’s chief economist.
The International Labour Organisation said global unemployment and poverty are set for a “dramatic increase” in the coming year. The UN agency added that in a worst-case scenario, recorded unemployment could rise by more than 50 million from the 2007 level to a total of 230 million, or 7.1 per cent of the world’s labour force, by the end of 2009.
The scale of economic decline forecast for Britain by the IMF suggests that the jobless figure would exceed three million within a year, surpassing peaks last experienced in the 1980s.
Yesterday, the Institute for Fiscal Studies said Britain faces a £20bn-a-year “double whammy” of tax rises and spending cuts to restore public finances to order – it will take until 2029 for government debt to recede to levels seen before the credit crunch. It warned taxes would rise and spending would be cut whoever wins the next election….”
And very significantly:
“The IMF says tax cuts and public spending and borrowing boosts all over the world will be useless unless the financial system is rebooted.
Its managing director, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, warned: “If there’s not a restructuring of the banking system, all the money you can put into [monetary and fiscal] stimulus will just go into a black hole.”
More at The Independent.
Comment:
So, think about the dollar’s future prospects this way: sure it’s on the road to hell. But it’s not a one-way road. Not when the euro and the pound are in such bad shape. As for those figures from China and India, after the Satyam fiasco (in which one of India’s most touted and best regarded companies confessed it had been running an Enron type scheme with faked cash flow – I blogged earlier) do you really think the shine in “Indian Shining” is all that shiny?
Another New Deal?
“In most discussions of the Great Depression, the macroeconomic profile of the subject is portrayed as follows: steep continuous decline from
1929 to 1933, sharp recovery from 1933 to 1937, severe but short “depression” from 1937 to 1938, and renewed rapid recovery from
1938 onward, with the economy having fully recovered by 1940 or, at latest, 1941. With regard to hours worked, the profile looks somewhat different.
Total hours worked fell substantially from 1929 to 1932. Then, unlike the standard depiction of the economy’s course, they hit bottom and stayed put in a virtually flat-bottomed trough for three years, 1932, 1933, and 1934. They then rose substantially until 1937, dropped by 7 percent in 1938, then rose again thereafter. However, even as late as 1940, total hours remained below the 1929 level by 6 percent, and only in 1941, with the population vigorously engaged in mobilization for war, did total hours exceed the 1929 value, by 3 percent. Meanwhile, of course, the population and the potential labor force had grown substantially, the former by 11.6 million persons, so simply getting back to the 1929 level of hours worked represented something less than a complete triumph.As the table shows, military employment remained quite low and did not vary substantially from 1929 to 1939. Similarly, farm hours worked varied little, although after remaining fairly steady from 1929 to 1933, they dropped in 1934 and never regained their previous level. This abrupt one-shot drop to a lower level probably represents the effects of the New Deal’s agricultural relief programs, some of which created incentives for farmers to reduce the amount of labor, especially sharecroppers’ labor, they used in their operations. [Update: Note comment below challenging this interpretation and attributing drop in farm hours worked in 1934 to the exodus]
(Whatley 1983).
Because neither military nor farm hours varied much between 1929 and 1939, the changes in total hours worked in that period are attributable
almost entirely to changes in civilian government hours and private nonfarm hours…”Robert Higgs in Libertarian Papers, Volume I, A Revealing Window On the US Economy In Depression and War: Hours Worked, 1929-1950
Sometimes, It’s NOT the Economy…..
”Obama in talking about the Middle East–the Palestine question and beyond–suffers from an acute case of “economism” or economic reductionism. He has the tendency to reduce all Arab and Muslim issues to job and medical care. It is NOT only the economy–stupid. It is also about pride and dignity and Palestine AND about freedom from the severe oppression that people suffer under governments that are coddled and armed by the very same US of A. So the words fall hollow here….”
From the Angry Arab
Timothy Geithner’s Confirmation Hearings
Questions from the Senate Finance Committee to Timothy Geithner, chief of the New York Federal Reserve and newly appointed Treasury Secretary under President Obama: http://www.cumber.com/special/geithnerquestions2009.pdf.
Good questioning, evasive or uninformative answers, and no mention of the biggest problem of all. Why put the very folks who fell down on the job back in charge? Geithner had supervisory responsibility for the failure of Citigroup - why should he be in this spot to begin with?
Washington: Where Principles Die
“Obama’s order to close Guantanamo Prison means very little. Essentially, Obama’s order is a public relations event. The tribunal process had already been shut down by US courts and by military lawyers, who refused to prosecute the fabricated cases. The vast majority of the prisoners were hapless individuals captured by Afghan warlords and sold for money to the stupid Americans as “terrorists.” Most of the prisoners, people the Bush regime told us were “the most dangerous people alive,” have already been released.
Obama’s order said nothing about closing the CIA’s secret prisons or halting the illegal practice of rendition in which the CIA kidnaps people and sends them to third world countries, such as Egypt, to be tortured.
Obama would have to take risks that opportunistic politicians never take in order for the US to become a nation of law instead of a nation in which the agendas of special interests override the law.
Truth cannot be spoken in America. It cannot be spoken in universities. It cannot be spoken in the media. It cannot be spoken in courts, which is why defendants and defense attorneys have given up on trials and cop pleas to lesser offenses that never occurred.
Truth is never spoken by government. As Jonathan Turley said recently, Washington “is where principles go to die.”
Paul Craig Roberts in Counterpunch
Wired And Watched In America
“When asked the scope of the information collected on Americans by the NSA, he said “the parameters that were set for how to filter it … were things like … if a terrorist would normally only make a phone call for 1 or 2 minutes, then you look for communications that are only 1 or 2 minutes long. Now that could also be someone ordering a pizza, and asking their significant other what sort of toppings they wanted on their pizza.”
When asked how the NSA would handle questions asked by congressional committees, Tice claimed: “the NSA would tailor some of their briefings to try to be deceptive, for whether it be a congressional committee or someone they really didn’t want to know exactly what was going on. There would be a lot of bells and whistles in a briefing and quite often the meat of the briefing was deceptive.”
When asked in a second interview by MSNBC if the information collected stopped at phone and email info, Tice responded: “as far as the wiretap information that made it to NSA, there was also data mining involved. At some point information from credit card records and financial records was married in with that information.”
As a result of the NSA program, uncounted thousands of Americans may have had their privacy compromised and are thus victims of an illegal spying regime. Says Tice: “the lucky U.S. citizens, tens of thousands of whom, that are now on digital databases at NSA that have no idea of this, also have that information included on those digital files that have been warehoused.”
More at Wired.
Comment:
The US Government spied on everyone
The Mind-Control Weapon In Your Living Room
One of Britain’s leading authority’s on children’s speech development, she completed a ten year study which showed that the background noise in the average two year olds day can delay his or her acquisition of a language by up to a year. Almost invariably the background noise came from television.
Amongst other things she found that:
· Children learn to speak from their parents and parents don’t play or talk enough with their children when the TV is on.· Background noise from TV or radio, confuses infants. In response they learn to ignore all noise and then they ignore speech.
· Children of two years or older should not be exposed to more than two hours of TV a day.
· Children of one year old or younger should not be exposed to television at all.
Sally Ward is currently preparing to focus on television and the way it affects our attention. In particular she will be looking at Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). “. . . a lot of people think it’s chemical,” she says, but in her view . . . “it’s very peculiar that at the onset of children’s television it got a lot more prevalent, and at the onset of children’s video’s it got a lot more prevalent.”
Her concern is being reiterated in America where child psychologist John Rosemond has stirred some controversy by suggesting that ADHD is environmentally created; a suggestion that is completely at odds with the pharmaceutical industry, which maintains that the disorder is genetically inherited and makes considerable profit as a result.
“Ritalin may work, temporarily,” says Rosemond, “But pharmaceutical intervention won’t change behavioural and motivational problems.” And these he blames on television – “the endlessly changing images, flickering like the attention spans of ADHD children.”“Television: The Hidden Picture” - Rixon Stewart, via Handmaiden’s Kitchen
Financial Follies: Dollar Uptrend
From a trader whose predictions I’ve liked, Nadeem Walayat:
“U.S. Dollar Forecast 2009
TREND ANALYSIS - The correction following the November peak was more severe than expected this implies a weakness, however the US Dollar did hold above the previous low of 75 before resuming the up trend. Immediate resistance lies at 88, given the violence of the correction this implies choppy volatile trading in the region of between 80 and 90, this is inline with the conclusion of October 2008 with regards trend expectations for 2009.
PRICE TARGETS - The upside price target for USD remains at 90 and then 92. The USD has significant resistance above USD 92 and therefore suggests the USD will find it tough to sustain a breakout above USD 93. This suggests a trading range with an upward bias. The key here is for the USD to continue making higher lows, with the last low being 77.7.
MACD - The MACD was extremely oversold and has helped contribute to the U.S. Dollar turnaround, how-ever the MACD has some way to go before it reaches what could be termed as an overbought state and therefore implies more immediate term U.S. Dollar strength.
SEASONAL TREND - The USD Rally into January is inline with the seasonal tendency, which suggests a corrective February.
ELLIOTT WAVE THEORY - Octobers elliott wave analysis proved accurate, given the power of the corrective wave, this suggests a more complex sideways elliott wave pattern during 2009 rather than a breakout higher.
Barack Obama Bombs Pakistan
“The CIA’s bombing campaign against al Qaeda leadership in Pakistan continued with two more attacks today, an indication, senior officials say, that President Barack Obama has approved the U.S. strategy that has killed at least eight of al Qaeda’s top 20 leaders since July 2008.
The two attacks today in Pakistan’s were the first since President Obama took office on Tuesday….”
More at the ABC blotter
Comment:
Hooray for change!
Note that Bush actually objected to bombing Pakistan without asking Musharraf’s permission, something Obama criticized. As this Huffington Post piece from last year points out, in this respect, Obama’s action today is worse than Bush’s and more in line with the CIA’s stated preference. (This is not an endorsement of Bush - at least, Obama got the country right).
Terror Wars: Mumbai Attacks Not About Kashmir
KABUL: Indian Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee said on Thursday international community should not link 26/11 attacks on Mumbai to the Kashmir dispute.
Addressing a joint press conference with his Afghan counterpart Rangeen Dadfar Spanta, Mukherjee said the international community has to take Mumbai attacks as a part of global terrorism,
Apparently referring to the recent statement made by the British Foreign Secretary David Miliband on Kashmir suggesting terror attacks in south Asia would stop with the resolution of the Kashmir dispute, Mukherjee said: These attacks (on Mumbai) are not related to Jammu and Kashmir and are a part of global terrorism.”
More at The Jang News, Pakistan.
Comment:
What’s with Miliband? Whence this common-sense approach so conspicuously absent from that little unpleasantness in Mesopotamia this past - what is it? - half a decade?
Oh, I see. The Brits don’t want the Wogs* to step out of their carefully allotted place in the terror theater. Can’t have Gunga-Din getting a piece of the global terror racket. No, let the regional empires stick to the regional market. And let the Anglo-American Empire collect on the global terror trade - where you get the best prices and the highest return on your money.
*Westernized Oriental Gentlemen
Are The Palestinians Jesus Christ?
“Precisely the language of the Catechism: “Love toward oneself remains a fundamental principle of morality. Therefore it is legitimate to insist on respect for one’s own right to life. Someone who defends his life is not guilty of murder even if he is forced to deal his aggressor a lethal blow.” Catechism 2264…..”
“I’d first like to explain why I identify the Palestinian people of Gaza with Jesus Christ. Fundamental to the gospel is God’s love and predilection for the weak and abused of human history. This is not based on their moral purity or piety, but because of who God is. In the Beatitudes, the word for “poor” is ptochoi, meaning the “stooped”, the “dismayed”. Note that it says nothing about whether they are Christian, righteous, or members of approved social groups, but only that they are the needy, the helpless. Likewise, the word “hungering”, peinontes in Greek, means to suffer deprivation resulting from evil acts of violence perpetrated over an extended period. The use of the verb klaiein, “weep”, in the Beatitudes, means profound suffering as a result of permanent marginalization. So it is that those without social status, the inconsequential, those whose lives are of no value to society, who will inherit the Kingdom.
What people can be more justly spoken of in these terms than the Palestinians living in Gaza? For the past two years, Gaza has been under a blockade that includes food, medicine, and gasoline. Their only means of survival were the tunnels to Egypt that have now been blasted. Their major sources of electricity were destroyed nearly a year ago, meaning no incubators for premature babies or pumps for water and sewage. And that was just to soften them up for what they’re getting now.”
From Non-violent Jesus
Comment:
Enough with the “fair and balanced” humbuggery. There is no fair and balanced when a burglar breaks into your house at night, grabs your family and bludgeons them to death in front of you for no reason except his greed and malice. If you are a human being of any kind, man, woman or child, you’re going to fight back.
Man, woman or child - those who feel they should avenge their family’s deaths are not evil.
They are noble, first, in their innocent suffering. And then in their innocent fight in the name of justice and retribution.
Madoff With It: Did Bernie Siphon Money Off Through Primex?
FINRA has found no evidence of trades by Bernie Madoff on behalf of his private investment fund through Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities, a commercial brokerage founded in 1960.
This appears to be a brick in the wall of ‘rogue trader’ status. He could do it himself because he made no trades at all.
However this was not Bernie’s only commercial operation in the securities business, in addition to his now nefarious private fund.
Primex was registered as Primex Holdings, L.L.C. in NYS in October of 1998. Primex is a joint venture involving a digital trading auction which operates out of Bernie’s 18th floor office at 885 Third Ave.
Madoff’s business partners in the Primex Exchange were Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and Merrill Lynch.
Did Bernie give any business to this joint venture? Did any of the above brokers have any investments or losses with the Madoff Fund? If not why not? It was one of the most successful funds, on paper, on the Street?
More questions than answers. Let’s hope this one does not disappear down a black hole like the enormous put option positions placed on the airline stocks just prior to 9/11.
Comment:
Haha, Jesse. Did I hear 9/11 put options? In DC-think that’s, “I am a certifiable loon, a gun-clinging survivalist-creationist with neo-Nazi leanings. Please ignore my ravings and leave me to dribble here in my corner.”
New Blinds On The Old Broken Window
The colorful face of empire:
“With a black first family in the White House and a diverse group of appointees and Cabinet nominees, the all-white dinner party feels all wrong. Certain hosts are suddenly grappling with a new reality: They need some black friends. Overnight, black politicians, lawyers and journalists are hot properties, receiving engraved invitations from people they never got invitations from before. (emphasis mine)
“This article, trumpeting the latest blend of powerbrokers, is about as far from the mark of what the real problem is as you can get without entering a vegetative state. As if we’re supposed to be all Woo Hoo! because the percentage of beltway players that could use a tan has gone down. Please…
See, the issue here isn’t what the people with influence look like. Their overwhelming whiteness has been historical coincidence due to previous factors, which is being dealt with already. No, the issue is this: as long as the same ideas and the same worldview are in charge, nothing will change, no matter how loudly the mainstream press cheers. If accepting the status quo is the price of admission then functionally we’ve not moved, and are merely sticking new blinds on a broken window….”
Read the rest of the post by libertarian blogger, Psychopolitik
Comment:
Now, tell me why you never hear this slant from most of the African American community’s representatives in the media? Instead, you get the voices of the “welfare establishment” - those who think the community must always look to Washington to address its problems. Less frequently, you hear the voices of conservatives, but they also think you need to have someone with a gun and a slogan as some kind of prop for their religious views.
You hear someone with libertarian or antistate views rarely.
But then, of course, why would you, with a media mostly beholden to the
gun-makerscorrection: weapons industry and the sloganeers?Update:Rereading this, I find it sounds as if I am opposed to gun ownership. I am not. I meant the weapons industry, as in weapons of war.
I’m all for responsible gun ownership and nurse unending dreams of that handy revolver I’ll have some day, hidden snugly in a hip pocket….
Google Disappearing Act
“My research indicates that this case of the disappearing blog is not unique. Another Perth-based blogger, Simone, suffered the same fate with her popular blog EnjoyPerth - but in her case the Google ex-communication was total. That is, all trace of her blog simply disappeared from Google’s listings overnight - even external links!
It turned out that her blog had been infiltrated by a hacker, who had planted a ‘hidden’ SPAM harvester at the bottom of her home page. Google had apparently detected the multiple inbound SPAM links reaped by the harvester and - as is fair enough - implemented their policy of penalising sites that illegitimately optimise themselves for search engines using dummy inbound links.
Simone, however, was innocent of utlising an illegitimate SEO strategy and Google didn’t bother contacting her to explain their drastic retaliatory action until Google’s Matt Cutts was made aware of the situation through the TechCrunch site’s expose of her dilemma. See When Google Strikes: The Story Of EnjoyPerth.net
All’s well that ends well; Simone’s blog was re-instated and before long was back in the listings gathering traffic. Without the assistance of the influential TechCrunch, though, and some tech-savvy friends, EnjoyPerth might have been obliterated and many months of effort on Simone’s part sabotaged by the dirty work of a hacker. And it seems to me that Google’s customer relations could do with some refinement.
Abrupt, unexplained de-indexing is a pretty savage measure, and in the case of some sites, could potentially destroy businesses and incomes and lead to real hardship. When people are innocent of transgressing Google’s rules - as Simone was - imposing a blog death sentence without trial or even notification that a capital offence has been committed seems nothing short of fascistic.
In fact, I do not believe that Google is the bully on the search engine block. Rather, it has grown too large for its own good. I’m guessing that it lacks the resources to action sound customer relations every time a serious SEO transgression comes on to their radar screens.
In effect, however, as Simone’s case demonstrates, Google’s punitive actions can be heavy-handed, unfair and damaging, not to mention personally traumatic to the victim. A company that was once seen as a maverick - a refreshing antidote to a stuffy, inhumane corporate system - is now in danger, by virtue of its staggering growth and size alone, of falling victim to its own success and being perceived as just another monster in an Establishment full of them.
To get back to my own case, I have received some good advice from the AussieBloggers Forum and my friend Christine, of Semfire Search Engine Marketing, which I am about to implement. For the benefit of interested onlookers and maybe other bloggers who wake up one morning to find their baby gone, I will detail my remedial attempts and provide updates as they happen.
Firstly, I should communicate Christine’s view that my disappearing blog listing may not be a result of any wilful action on Google’s part. She says my recent post,Boomtown Lament, was indexed by Google (cached on 21 January) and that she suspects the current crisis is just a glitch.
She has examined the coding on my home page and can find no trace of SPAM harvesters. And as previously mentioned, there are still external links and individual post links to my blog appearing in Google’s listings. So my situation appears to be different from Simone’s.
But what to do? This is what I have been advised:
1. Register for Google’s Webmaster Tools. I have done so, “verified” my blog (this is explained by Google after your WT registration is accepted) and sent a “Reconsideration Request” to Google, explaining the current situation and pleading innocent to any flouting of their rules - at least that I am aware of. I will post the gist of any response I receive from them.
2. Upgrade to the latest version of WordPress. This is a task I have been avoiding for months. The time has come - I can put it off no longer (sucking in deep breath as I write).
3. Install the WordPress “All-in-one-SEO-pack” plugin. In advising me thus, Christine stated: I’m putting my bet on the fact that your page titles are very similar and you don’t have a description metatag for your pages so Google sees your posts as possible duplicate content.
4. I’m also wondering whether self-referentiality in some of my recent blog titles (ie: referring to The Boomtown Rap by name in the titles) may have been interpreted by Google as some form of duplication intended to boost my listing…which it certainly was not. I was already being listed at number 1 - I had no reason to resort to such tactics. Besides, I work hard on my titles and would not compromise dramatic effect for some bloody SEO consideration. My self-referentiality was appropriate, since the posts concerned were about the blog itself….”
From the Boomtown Rapper
Comment:
Thanks to one of my readers, I got the search engine problem fixed. I’d checked off the box that keeps the blog out of search engine reach….must have done that in my sleep and forgotten about it. Duh! But, more nefariously, some links to one of my rather provocative posts were broken, after only a day. Very mysteriously. I repaired them, using this handy free tool - Xenu Link Sleuth (it’s recommended by reputable sites, like Site Point Tribute and Search Engine Journal, but as always, download at your own peril).
Brainy Bingers….
“Research by Dr G. David Batty and colleagues at the University of Glasgow, published in the American Journal of Public Health, compared the mental ability scores of 8,170 British boys and girls at the age of 10 with their alcohol intake and any alcohol problems when they were 30.Whereas most of the clever children grew up to drink as most people do, reasonably and moderately, the likelihood of developing a drinking problem if one were unusually bright increased 1.38 times in women and 1.17 times in men. …”
Hat tip to Lew Rockwell.
King Is Dead….Is King’s Dream Dead Too?
From activist Lenni Brenner:
(Brenner is the author of Zionism in the Age of the Dictators (1983) among a number of other works and writes frequently for publications from the Nation to the Jewish Guardian.
DECLARATION RE DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING’S BIRTHDAY, JANUARY 19,
AND BARACK OBAMA’S INAUGURATION, JANUARY 20th.As if in celestial convergence, Martin Luther King’s birthday falls on the
eve of the inauguration of the nation’s first Black president. With the world
economy in free fall, amid spreading armed conflict, the classic question posed
from pulpits at this time – What would Dr. King do? – has never been more
urgent.January 19 and 20 are heavy with historical significance and contradiction.
Barack Obama proclaims that his presidency would be unthinkable were it not for
the civil rights struggle which King personifies. Yet he also hails John
Kennedy - who he knows criminally wiretapped King - as his role model. And is it
conceivable that King would be pleased with Obama after he broke his promise
to filibuster an electronic wiretapping bill if it included an immunity clause
for telecommunications companies that collaborated with Bush’s illegal
eavesdropping after 9/11?The New York Times correctly calls Obama’s orientation “center-right.” Never
an advocate of total withdrawal from Iraq, he called for the recruitment of
nearly 100,000 additional military, expanded war in Afghanistan, and more
aggressive US actions in Pakistan. In retaining Secretary of Defense Robert Gates
and other Republican Pentagon political appointees, Obama blurs the differences
between his foreign policy and George Bush’s. His United Nations ambassador,
Susan Rice, advocates “humanitarian” military intervention in Africa, and
Obama supports Bush’s latest US Africa Command (AFRICOM). He is silent on the
US-fomented war in Somalia.Obama is also silent re the onslaught on Gaza, even as the Israeli embassy
justified it by distributing videos of his campaign statement: “If somebody was
sending rockets into my house, where my two daughters slept at night, I’m
going to do everything in my power to stop that. And I would expect Israelis to do
the same thing.”Domestically, Obama has put his economic portfolio into the hands of Wall
Street hacks intimately associated with financial deregulation and the
plague-like spread of derivatives and other exotic “fictional capital” –- the witch’s
brew of meltdown — and backed Bush’s banker bailout.Is it difficult to project what Dr. King’s politics would be, were he alive
today? Faced with an administration committed to expansion of a military
already as costly as the combined armed forces of the rest of the planet, King
would join — indeed lead — a principled, active anti-war opposition.King called the America of his day “the greatest purveyor of violence in
the world,” and his characterization remains apt. He broke with Lyndon Johnson’s
White House, as he saw the Vietnam War obliterating the “shining moment” when
it “seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor – both black
and white – through the poverty program.” On April 4, 1967, King explained that
“America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in
rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills
and money like some demonic destructive suction tube.” Domestically, Obama’s
determination to put more military “boots on the ground” in multiplying
conflicts is an update of the “demonic destructive suction tube” King opposed.
He would doubtlessly view Obama’s military posture as “a war against the poor,”
as was LBJ’s war.Obama’s appointments have been made, his priorities amply recorded. Given
Obama’s declared politics, King would never grant a “honeymoon” season to an
incoming administration placing government economic levers in the hands of
plundering bankers diverting huge public wealth to the feeding of the dogs of war. He
became his day’s greatest “drum major” for social justice and peace, and we
have only one alternative before us. We call upon Americans and the world to
try to act now in Dr. King’s spirit and join us in opposing any and all imperial
administrations, in the media, in the voting booth and in the streets.Signatories (as of January 19, 2009)
Lenni Brenner, Pat Bryden, Tom Condit, Lenore Jean Daniels, Ph.D., Michael Dickinson, Ghassan El-Kadri, Vera Alice Vasques El-Kadri,
Dieter Elken, Per Fagereng, John W. Farley, Dermot Ferry, Glen Ford, John Glackin, Robert Glaser, Patricia Gray, David Halpin, Dove and Dolphin Charity, Norma J F Harrison, Tuma Hazou, Stanley Heller, Edward S. Herman, Tom Lacey, Ronit Lentin, David Letwin, Claran Mc Clean, Colm McGinn, David McReynolds, Chuck Mohan, Tinoush Moulaei, Liz Mulford, Judith Norman, Tolu Olorunda, Margaret Parrish, Ginger Pepper, James Petras, Millie Phillips, Karen Platt, Lila Rajiva, Roland Rance, Esther Rapoport, Mel Reeves, R. B. Riddle, Eugene E. Ruyle, Al Sargis, Tony Savin, Evalyn F. Segal, Martha Abu Shawish, Roger Sheppard, Roland Sheppard, Michael J. Smith, Kwame Somburu, William Steinsmith, Stuart Troy, C. T. Weber, Abraham Weizfeld, Derek Wharton, Jebsen & Company (Hong Kong) Ltd., Joan WileyFiat Laws and Fiat Currencies (Excerpt from “Mobs, Messiahs and Markets”)
Fiat Laws and Fiat Currencies - Vico’s barbarism of reflection and gold - Lila Rajiva
(Included in “Mobs, Messiahs and Markets”)
(originally published, December, 2006) [see also The Age of Lint by B. Bonner, 2009]**Link broken and repaired on January 22, 2009
(See my post entitled Email. Update: the post is now private. )
Statutory laws, the laws that get passed with pomp and circumstance in legislatures, are not the laws that really govern society. They only look like they do. But if they really did, why is it that the crimes committed by Soviet commissars or by the Nazi Gestapo. . . or by the CIA . . were all committed with the law books bulging at the seams? It’s not how many laws you have that matters, but how well those laws are obeyed. Which is a matter of culture and history, of what people expect…. and what they’re prepared to accept.
And to know that takes the study of history and manners; it needs a knowledge of morals and religion. The usual smoke and mirrors sideshow supplied by the political class won’t do. You need to turn to the accumulated wisdom of case law and precedent, of customary law and conventions.
The free market arises whereever there were laws and systems like that — whether in Europe or Africa or Asia. One way to think about this difference would be to see it as the difference between a fiat money, like paper, and a real store of value, like gold. You can print all the money you want, but if there’s nothing to back it up, then you’re in a bit of trouble. Your creditors are unlikely to put much store in you as a credit risk, just as the world’s wringing its hands today over the dollar. Pretty soon, they come calling for their loans with cudgels and pitchforks.Gold does not have the same problem, because there’s a limited supply of it. It has to occur in nature. It has to be found somewhere underground and then mined and refined. It’s an expensive business — that takes risk, time, and money. There are costs attached to it that some one has to pay. Paper money, on the other hand, can be printed any time you want. Just ask Ben Bernanke. He’s dropping it by the helicopter load from the clouds.
You can pass all the laws you want on the statute books, you can employ stables full of well-groomed and pedigreed lawyers. But if there’s nothing to back the laws, you’re in trouble. Businesses aren’t going to want to do business with you. Investors are going to want their investments back.
The problem arises because you can pass statutory laws as you like, even if they have little relation to how the masses of people actually think and act. That means you can have a country where theft and looting are the norm that might, nonetheless, have very intricate laws on the books against theft and looting. The statutes wouldn’t do a thing to change it.
Customary law, on the other hand, can’t be manufactured out of nothing. It grows organically from the soil in which it lives. It reflects the way people really think and act. It doesn’t run so far ahead of its times that it provokes either resistance or indifference from people. Customary law, like gold, reflects real value. And because it does, it’s also likely to be accepted by people more often. Ultimately, customary law works because it’s a more sensitive and complex measure of a society.
It contains more information from the past — from the history and traditions of the people. Like the pricing mechanism, it’s a communication system that allows people to signal their desires and expectations faster and better than they could otherwise.
Customary law doesn’t just communicate with living members of the group, as pricing does. It also reflects the desires of generations past, where statutory law reflects only the demands of one generation, the living. In that sense statutory law really isn’t democratic at all. Or, at least, not democratic enough. It only consults living citizens. It forgets the dead ones.
It’s to be expected… since statutory law is a product of pure reason.
And pure reason, Cartesian reason, is very good at technical and physical problems, but it’s not nearly as good when it’s turned on itself or on human life. Human brains aren’t made that way. We’re more likely to understand who and what we are by looking at things we’ve done in the past – which is what we call history — or things we’ve made — which is what we call culture, than by logic.
Man is, first of all, Homo faber (man the creator), and we understand him best by looking at his creations.
Customary laws work, in other words, because they come out of the history and culture of a society. They constitute verum factum (truth as an act), as the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico wrote in 1710.
“The criterion and rule of the true is to have made it. Accordingly, our clear and distinct idea of the mind cannot be a criterion of the mind itself, still less of other truths. For while the mind perceives itself, it does not make itself,” said Vico.
As more and more of our world is no longer made by us, we understand it less and less. We’re forced to fall back on theory and speculation, on isolated reasoning.
But thinking, as Vico pointed out, is hopeless when it remains isolated reason. It has to include practical wisdom and rhetoric. The Cartesian cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I am) is just not enough.
Vico liked to argue that the rise of pure rationality in history was one signal of a declining phase of human culture. He called it the barbarie della reflessione (the barbarism of reflection) and said that it characterized what he called The Age of Man.
This was the last phase of his cycle of civilizations. In the Age of Man, popular democracy would run amok and lead to tyranny and empires, which would end in chaos. Then the whole cycle would begin again, with the age of the gods. And so it goes on from eon to eon, said Vico. It makes you wonder. Does anyone ever learn?
Lila Rajiva
Excerpted from Minding the Crowd, Dissident Voice
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Dec06/Rajiva30.htm
Copyright, December 2006, All Rights Reserved
Global Games: Great Apes’ Lives Threatened By Palm Oil Production
“Hoping to unravel the mysteries of human origin, anthropologist Louis Leakey sent three young women to Africa and Asia to study our closest relatives: It was chimpanzees for Jane Goodall, mountain gorillas for Dian Fossey and the elusive, solitary orangutans for Birute Mary Galdikas.
Nearly four decades later, 62-year-old Galdikas, the least famous of his “angels,” is the only one still at it. And the red apes she studies in Indonesia are on the verge of extinction because forests are being clear-cut and burned to make”There are only an estimated 50,000 to 60,000 orangutans left in the wild, 90 percent of them in Indonesia, said Serge Wich, a scientist at the Great Ape Trust of Iowa. Most live in small, scattered populations that cannot take the onslaught on the forests much longer.
Trees are being cut at a rate of 300 football fields every hour. And massive land-clearing fires have turned the country into one of the top emitters of carbon.
Tanjung Puting, which has 1,600 square miles, clings precariously to the southern tip of Borneo island. Its 6,000 orangutans — one of the two largest populations on the planet, together with the nearby Sebangau National Park — are less vulnerable to diseases and fires.
That has allowed them, to a degree, to live and evolve as they have for millions of years……..”I am not an alarmist,” says Galdikas, speaking calmly but deliberately, her brow slightly furrowed. “But I would say, if nothing is done, orangutan populations outside of national parks have less than 10 years left.”
More from from AP here.
Comments:
Having often had to face families of aggressive, prowling monkeys on the way home from school, I’m firmly on the side of man when he goes mano a chimpo for survival. But there’s no reason to despoil the sacred heritage of nature when survival is not the issue. Land usage - part of the commons - is something that can be subject to government intervention, in my opinion.
I know this sounds anti-libertarian. It isn’t really, because dogmatic libertarianism in these areas ends up destroying its own foundation.
When land is ravaged by massive unrestricted development and speculation-driven usage (think of the vast over-cultivation of soy in Argentina that’s led to the depletion of its soil), that has to encroach on the liberty…indeed survival… of everyone on the planet.
Again, the problem is size. Libertarianism simply doesn’t work for a one-world society.
The answer to that is not to go collectivist. It’s to get rid of the idea of a one-world society. We want as many worlds as possible.
The socialists like to say, a different world is possible.
I like to say, a different world is impossible.
Because there’s no such thing as a world. Once you start thinking of a world you want to change, you’ll end up with the same problems - only somewhere else.
Wall Street Powerhouses Invested Alongside Madoff
“Primex Trading’s Dark Pool Operations
There has been much debate among Wall Street veterans as to why major European investment banks suffered serious damage from the Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme while our biggest U.S. investment banks escaped unscathed.
For the past two decades, Wall Street watchers could count on four U.S. firms to land in the middle of every securities scandal. From Nasdaq price fixing to fake research to rigging the IPO markets to peddling toxic subprime assets, one could rest assured that Citigroup’s Smith Barney, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs would be heading the lineup. Their complete absence from the greatest Ponzi scheme in history raises the question: what did they know and when did they know it?
The answer may reside in a pentagonal structure created in 1999 to serve the interests of a Wall Street cartel.
On September 14, 1999, it was officially announced that Citigroup’s Smith Barney, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs had partnered with Bernard Madoff to compete head on with the New York Stock Exchange in a venture called Primex Trading.
Madoff had bought the rights to a new technology called Financial Auction Network (FAN) created by Christopher Keith, a 17-year veteran of technology creation at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). Mr. Keith had retired from the NYSE and started a technology think tank in lower Manhattan in the early 1990s called Exchange Lab. FAN was one of the early technology offerings and the rights to develop it were bought by Madoff. The firm that emerged was Primex Trading, a division of Primex Holdings. (Primex Holdings holds two patents and may be part of those secret Madoff assets the court won’t release to the public.)
In addition to harnessing the brains of Mr. Keith from the New York Stock Exchange, Primex hired Glen Shipway, the Executive Vice President of the over the counter stock market, Nasdaq, whose duties had included market surveillance of broker dealers like this gang of five.
The partners made a big splash in the press at the time, extolling altruistic intentions of getting better prices for their customers in an electronic version of the New York Stock Exchange. Here’s an excerpt from the New York Times on September 19, 1999:
“Primex is aiming to be an electronic version of the New York Stock Exchange. Participants will not only be able to buy and sell stocks at prevailing market prices, as they now do through many traditional and electronic exchanges, but also interact openly with one another — in effect, bargain — to find the best prices possible. ‘I think the fact four of the world’s largest securities firms have backed this system suggests that it brings something new and unique to our ability to obtain the best execution for our customers,’ said Bill Hart, a managing director in equity trading at Salomon Smith Barney.”
In reality, a very different motive was at work. One of the best kept secrets from the public is a benign sounding process on Wall Street called internalization. That’s where broker dealers like Madoff’s Primex partners match their customers’ buy and sell orders in-house rather than sending them off to the New York Stock Exchange or some other transparent stock exchange. The entities that engage in this trading process are called dark pools. (Recall that “pools” were the same secretive creatures that rigged the stock market leading up to the crash of 1929.)
While the investing public was being served up visions of Primex creating a more transparent and fairer pricing market mechanism, the goal for Madoff’s partners was to legitimize the highly questionable trading practice of internalization….”
– Pam Martens at Counterpunch.
Pigs At The Trough
What regret can you have? I have given you life -
Take the sharp end from a thorn and the edge from the knife,
The ache from the leg and the back, and never old age,
And from the enjoyment of sin remove me the wage,
Let me devour the surplus without any work,
Let every error of choice be an innocent quirkI have given you life to enjoy all the beauty I make -
Let me use up what I have and undo the mistake,
Let me have health in abundance without any pain,
And if I abuse it permit me to have it again,
Let me have privilege, rank without any duty
Let me loot, pocket and steal without calling it bootyLet me throw craps for a living, come seven eleven,
Let me take chances and gamble my way into heaven,
Let me be good if good is the way to get in,
But if there’s no heaven there’s nothing as pleasing as sin,
Let me live, Master, this life, and live it forever,
Not as you are little piglet, and so I say ‘never’!Not as you are little pig, as you grunt at the trough,
A windfall of apples I gave you, desist and be off!“Not As You Are” -
Pavel Chichikov at Catholic Exchange.
Vandals At The Gate - Updated
“We won’t cede an inch to squeegee men, turnstile jumpers, and graffiti vandals who breed a sense of disorder and lawlessness,” the mayor said.
That’s Mayor Rudi -er - Mike Bloomberg, according to this piece in the NY Daily News, announcing his plans to step up law enforcement against “quality of life criminals” in the city. He’s going to go after the “dirty dozen” in this bunch, he says.
Brave lad. That’s what I’m lying awake agonizing over. Some one jumping a turnstile.
A couple of hustlers with buckets and squeegees. That’s what’s rmenacing the republic and breeding unrest in the population.
(Meanwhile, says Alan Nairn, in an interview with Amy Goodman on the appointment of the genocide-supporting Admiral Blair (I posted it recently), ”Mayor Bloomberg of New York just went to Israel and gave a press conference where he said that the international law of proportional response was stupid. He rejected it.”
It’s not lawless for a state to retaliate out of all proportion when the state is legally and morally in the wrong, but hustling for pennies on the street is a monstrous crime.
Please.
I don’t know about you, but this is what cast a pall over me when I rolled out of bed this morning:
1. What was the point of the last 4 years of my life writing and petitioning against the Iraq war, torture, and financial criminality?
2. How come I have to prove myself on a job but no one in Washington or New York does?
3. Is this country revving up for more war and if so, when, where, and for how long?
4. Why work and save? Just get a bail-out.
5. Why the heck can’t I get Tor to work on my computer and anyway, aren’t they turning over stuff to the government?
6. Why doesn’t this site (www.mindbodypolitic.com) show up on google searches but my wordpress blog does? [this site shows up on altavista and yahoo)
7. How do you make yourself invisible without getting the powers- that-be interested in you.
8. What’s the use if the credit bubble crashed but the bubble in disinformation’s still going strong…
9. How soon before the government clamps down on the net and confiscates gold… and should I even bother buying physical?
10. Where do you escape to? There’s no place to run from the kleptocracy….
You’ll notice that squeegee men didn’t figure once. Not even in a supporting role.
The Madoff And Pony Show…
“Each month, Madoff sent out elaborate statements of trades conducted by his broker-dealer. Last November, for example, he issued a statement to one investor showing he bought shares of Merck & Co Inc, Microsoft Corp, Exxon Mobil Corp and Amgen Inc among others.
It also showed transactions in Fidelity Investments’ Spartan Fund. But Fidelity, the world’s biggest mutual fund company, has no record of Madoff or his company making any investments in its funds.
DISCREPANCIES
“We are not aware of any investments by Madoff in our funds on behalf of his clients,” Fidelity spokeswoman Anne Crowley said in an e-mail to Reuters…”
Another “Mobs” Review On Seeking Alpha
“I have a confession to make. Twice while reading the book Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets: Surviving the Public Spectacle in Finance and Politics, by William Bonner and Lila Rajiva, I felt a compelling need to refer to the first few pages and refresh my memory on when the book was published. For your information, it was published in the year 2007 (I believe in August) and well before the mega crisis and financial blowup of the second half 2008 unfolded. If not for anything else, then you have to read this book for its clairvoyance alone.The authors have been bang on target painting what was then a potentially scary scenario which ended up becoming one of the biggest blowups in the financial history of the world as it unfolded. They deserve credit for having faith in their contrarian doomsday vision when everyone else was going all out buying mortgage originator companies and expanding prop desks funded by banks’ leveraged books without any due regard for the inherent risks…..”
Comment:
It’s nice to be complimented about abilities…even if you don’t have them! And I can’t say that a little green man popped out of the corner to tell me to do it, either.
Clairvoyant? Who would want to be….since the essence of playing Cassandra is you’re doomed not to be believed at the time it counts.
What’s more, we weren’t the only ones who predicted a credit crisis and global financial collapse.
I found out recently that economics professor and author Ravi Batra also did - only so frequently that by the time it actually came around, he’d moved out of the spotlight. (His doomsday books are 15 years old).
Austrian-oriented libertarians have been warning about an impending train-wreck for years. Seems like it didn’t get through to the mainstream press - which, of course, had every reason not to want it to come through…
But ours is the most wide-ranging analysis and we were certainly the first ones to get a best-selling book out about it. [I should correct that - one of the first ones….I see that Peter Schiff’s Crash Proof and Michael Panzner’s Financial Armageddon were out in April that year. So was Bookhaber’s “industry insider” peek into hedge-fund risk management that I posted about earlier. But I didn’t get to read them and only skimmed Schiff’s and Bookhaber’s book after the publication of ours. And I still think ours was the most wide-ranging…and spookily timed - Mobs came out exactly as the first banks started collapsing.
And, even if I do accept credit only for doggedness, not prescience, it’s true that I’m mildly fey. I sometimes feel I was led to this project by a series of events that go back to 2001…. by strange coincidences, uncanny repetitions, chance encounters where the past and the future were entangled.
So, thanks for the thumbs up, Mr. Kabra - maybe I’ll pass it on to the green man.
Financial Follies: Eurozone Debt Near Unsustainable
“In Portugal, one in every €8 of economic turnover goes overseas to settle its trade deficit. Rome owed 109% of Italy’s annualized GDP on the latest data.Today the Irish prime minister, Brian Cowen, warned trades union leaders that without public-sector pay cuts and job losses, he may seek a rescue by the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
Dublin’s budget deficit is now running at 6.2% of Ireland’s annual economy, and the cost of credit-default swaps on its sovereign debt has now risen 7-fold since Sept.Default insurance on serial bankrupt.Mexico, in contrast, has fallen according to CMA Datavision.” The comeuppance of the Euro was long overdue, which is why I’ve suspected that the short term prospects of the dollar are better than most give it credit for. In the mid-term, its prospects are 50-50.
In the long term, it’s down. But then, in the long-term, to paraphrase someone, all currencies are dead anyway.
Asia-Europe Shipping Rates Plunge to Zero
“Idle ships are now stretched in rows outside Singapore’s harbour, creating an eerie silhouette like a vast naval fleet at anchor. Shipping experts note the number of vessels moving around seem unusually high in the water, indicating low cargoes.
It became difficult for the shippers to obtain routine letters of credit at the height of financial crisis over the autumn, causing goods to pile up at ports even though there was a willing buyer at the other end. Analysts say this problem has been resolved, but the shipping industry has since been swamped by the global trade contraction.
The World Bank caused shockwaves with a warning last month that global trade may decline this year for the first time since the Second World War. This appears increasingly certain with each new batch of data.
Mr de Trenck predicts Asian trade to the US will fall 7pc this year. To Europe he estimates a drop of 9pc – possibly 12pc. Trade flows grow 8pc in an average year. ”
Says Ambrose Evans-Pritchard at The Daily Telegraph, in a piece on the drop of Asia-Europe shipping rates to zero.
Pension Plans Going Down Across US and Canada
“Pension plans are a bubble that is now bursting wide open. Five major factors contribute to the crisis: mounting stock market losses, optimistic plan assumptions, longevity (retirees living longer), overly generous payouts, and a surge of boomer retirements….”
More at Mish’s Global Economic Analysis.
Boycott Israel
“When I think of all the millions of dollars that people wasted on “change” I want to vomit.
Peace groups, don’t tell me to write or call these unspeakable political lowlifes. Start thinking up ways to disrupt their lives and the lives and fortunes of all the self-satisfied racists who make life hell for Palestinians.
Some suggestions:
1. Demonstrate in the Streets. Not just in front of the government buildings, but in front of Israel Bonds offices, El Al Airlines, the homes of members of Congress, and the businesses of people who give massive amounts of money to Israel. There’s a weekly picket of the Manhattan diamond store owned by Israeli settlement builder Leviev. In a city like New York there should be enough people to picket 9-5 every day it’s open. There are plenty more places to picket. In 2007 Donald Trump gave a quarter million dollars to the “Friends of the Israeli Defense Forces”. Why not demonstrate in front of his ailing Atlantic City casinos?
2. Buy a Keffiyeh. Wear a Keffiyeh. During the Holocaust the Nazis in many countries made Jews wear Jewish stars so that they could be singled out and humiliated or attacked.. According to the Yad Vashem institute in France many non-Jews won the Jewish star as an act of solidarity. According to legend the Danish King Christian X put on a Jewish star for the same reason.
Today our symbol of solidarity must the keffiyeh, the head scarf worn in different styles by Arab men and women. You could see it everywhere among the 15,000 who marched in New York City last week, a march of mostly Arab and Islamic people. It needs to be worn proudly by the “whites”, too. Wear it to work and see what conversations it starts.
3. Demand unions publicly sell their Israel Bonds. 1700 unions own Israel Bonds. Last September the head of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store was honored at a dinner of the Israel Bonds National Labor Division where $40 million was raised for the bonds in one night. See him beaming at Hillary Clinton in a picture here. How many of the members of those 1700 unions have any notion that their leaders are buying these bonds with their dues or pension money?
It’s time to play hardball. The union movement is desperate to get a card check bill passed. Word is that Obama has already decided not to make it a top priority. So it’s going to be a fight. The last thing unions want is bad publicity in a dispute with human rights and Islamic groups about their owning bonds that support an apartheid state. I love unions and have been a union member for 40 years, but enough is enough.
4. Meet up with Muslims. Muslim people in the U.S. have been arrested, demonized and demoralized since 9/11. The horror of Gaza is making U.S. Muslims furious and they’re starting to get active in the streets. A good place to work with them is through the local chapter of CAIR, the Council on American Islamic Relations. www.cair.com
5. Boycott Israeli goods. I haven’t bought as much as a Hanukah candle from Israel in years. I won’t buy a computer made with an Intel processor because Intel has a huge factory in Israel on confiscated Palestinian land. Here’s one list of Israeli products and here’s another courtesy of a site urging you to buy Israeli goods!If you need more arguments see Naomi Klein’s recent article And if a boycott is to have any effect it has to be an active boycott. Ask store owners to remove offending goods and picket the stores that stubbornly trade in the “forbidden” goods. For tips google the Jewish anti-Nazi boycott of the 30’s.
6. Boycott Israeli personalities. Not everyone of course, not Israelis who will speak out against apartheid and war crimes. (There are some Arab countries which stupidly make it a crime to deal with any Israeli!) Obviously picket any Israeli political speaker. (Screw dialogue with them.) If your college works with Israeli institutions campaign to have it stopped. Try to keep the Israeli Philharmonic or Israeli athletes out of your city. No team would ever play against a South African team during the heyday of apartheid protests.
7. The corporate media sucks, but use it as much as possible. Write letters and op-eds. If they’re not published call the editors and bug them about denying equal time. Closely monitor what the editorial page and news page publish. If they don’t cover your protests call the news desk, call or email the publisher. Ask for meetings. The Israeli embassy does it all the time. Get all the coverage you can, but at the same time raise money for your own publicity.
8. Raise money, lots of money. You gave it to stonehearted politicians. Now give it to human rights groups. Rent billboards. Put ads on buses or in college newspapers, or on internet sites. Plaster signs on walls. Run 30 second spots on cable TV. If the stations object to running a “controversial political message” announce a run for political office. Legally they have to run ads by candidates!
9. Give money to Gaza. Eventually some of it will get through. Give to the UN via UNWRA.
10. Insist the national peace coalitions act together. We have UFPJ, ANSWER and the IA Center all calling their own demonstrations. The differences in their programs are less than the length of a gnats toenail. Press them to cooperate. Insist they have open planning meetings.
11. Start thinking of ways to boycott Egypt. Their dictator Mubarak is a full partner to war crimes. By international law people being massacred have a right to flee and become refugees. Mubarak’s troops maintain the Rafah-Egypt wall and shoot and Palestinians who try to break it down. Stay away from Egypt. You can see the pyramids some other time.
12. Think of new ways to put the heat on. Try them out and publicize them. Invent Wiki-Protest.”
Stanley Heller in Counterpunch.
Several Jewish women are at the forefront of protests here in the US, according to Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now.
“Tens of thousands of people took to streets over the weekend in cities across the globe to demonstrate against Israel’s assault on Gaza. Some of the protests have been organized by Jewish groups who are speaking out against Israel’s actions. We speak with two Jewish women for peace: Dorothy Zellner, one of fifteen Jews who have signed a call for a protest in front of the Israeli consulate in New York, and Judy Rebick, who organized a sit-in comprised of Jewish Canadian women at the Israeli consulate in Toronto. “
Comment:
As a libertarian, I don’t think sanctions against a population, whether Palestinian or Israeli, are just.
But targeted boycotts are a different thing.
And the keffiyah idea is a good one.
Hitchens On Then And Now In Gaza
“To read Benny Morris is to be quite able—and quite free—to doubt that there should ever have been an Israeli state to begin with. But to see Hamas at work is to resolve that whatever replaces or follows Zionism, it must not be the wasteland of Islamic theocracy.”
Christopher Hitchens in Slate.
Hitchens is always an interesting writer and the full article is worth reading….even if it is infuriating.
Erich Fromm On Reverence For Life
“Every act of irreverence for life, every act which neglects life, which is indifferent to and wastes life, is a step towards the love of death. This choice man must make at every minute. Never were the consequences of the wrong choice as total and as irreversible as they are today. Never was the warning of the Bible so urgent: ‘I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life, that you and your children may live.’ (Deuteronomy 30:19)”
Erich Fromm
Activism: Fight Land Cancer With Exnora
From my friend Nirmal Basu, the guiding spirit of the remarkable community environmental group, Exnora, comes a call to battle what he calls Land Cancer. Land Cancer is nothing more than the degradation and diminution of fertile land as pollution and intensive cash farming damage it and large corporations buy it up in huge tracts that they convert into housing developments. Basu has a simple but tremendously effective program for individual and community response - practice Exnora. By this he means do the simple things you can do in your own backyard, house, or even flat to green your environment.
There’s an immediate reason why you should. Food prices are set to mount seriously over the next years.
Some of his ideas:
Compost at home to make soil fertile
Use waste water in your garden
Grow a garden on your window sill…or on your terrace…..on a parapet..or on a gate
or even a water pipe
More ideas here at this Home Exnora flyer
and at the Exnora website.
I should quality this post: if things continue in the same line as they have so far, food prices are set to go up. As usual, we tend to project things in a linear fashion from our current perception of the past (itself inaccurate). It’s a form of modeling especially unsuited to predictions about large, complex groups - and there are very few things larger and more complex than the global economy - if you can even talk of it as a single entity. But that said, even if some technological advance or improvement in distribution or networking leads to lower food prices in the future- we’ll still have a greener environment, fresher air, and a more restful living space. All good things.
And no government money involved.
I came across something similar here in the US that was started by a retired engineer - Square Foot Gardening.
I plan to try my hand at it since I spend a lot of time in front of my computer. A nice box of basil, coriander, and mint on the desk makes an office decor I can live with.
Tell Senate To Reject Admiral Blair Petition
Tell The Senate To Reject Nominee Admiral Blair Who Greenlighted
GenocideTrue progressives have found various Obama appointments so far to
leave much to be desired . . . even to the point of being disturbing.
But the nomination of Admiral Dennis Blair for Director of National
Intelligence cannot be permitted to pass under any circumstances.As reported by Democracy Now, when genocidal monsters in the
Indonesian military were committing massacres in East Timor, Admiral
Blair DEFIED his orders to get them to stop, and instead gave them
encouragement to continue. He then lied to Congress about it all. No
such loose cannon with such blood on his hands can be allowed in the
new administration. The links to both these video stories can be
found on the Reject Blair Action Page below:Reject Blair Action Page: http://www.usalone.com/reject_blair.php
Director of National Intelligence requires Senate confirmation, so
please also call your Senators directly tollfree at 800-828-0498,
800-473-6711, especially if you have new Senators coming in, ask for
them by name and leave your message opposing this appointment.IOUSA’s Cheerleader-In-Chief Is Former NY Fed Chair
“In 1969, Peterson was invited by philanthropist John D. Rockefeller 3rd, Council of Foreign Relations Chairman John J. McCloy, and former Treasury Secretary Douglas Dillon to chair a Commission on Foundations and Private Philanthropy, which became known as the Peterson Commission. Among its recommendations adopted by the government were that foundations be required annually to disburse a minimum proportion of their funds.
In 1971, Peterson was named Assistant to the President for International Economic Affairs by U.S. President Richard Nixon. In 1972, he became the Secretary of Commerce, a position he held for one year. At that time he also assumed the Chairmanship of President Nixon’s National Commission on Productivity and was appointed U.S. Chairman of the U.S.–Soviet Commercial Commission.
Peterson was Chairman and CEO of Lehman Brothers (1973–1977) and Lehman Brothers, Kuhn, Loeb Inc. (1977–1984).
In 1985, he co-founded the prominent private equity and investment management firm, the Blackstone Group, for which his current position is Senior Chairman.
In 1992, Peterson was one of the co-founders of the Concord Coalition, a bipartisan citizens’ group that advocates reduction of the federal budget deficit. Following record deficits under President George W. Bush, Peterson commented in 2004: “I remain a Republican, but the Republicans have become a far more theological, faith-directed party, not troubling with evidence.”[2]
In February 1994, President Bill Clinton named Peterson as a member of the Bi-Partisan Commission on Entitlement and Tax Reform co-chaired by Senators Bob Kerrey and John Danforth.Peterson also serves as Co-Chair of The Conference Board Commission on Public Trust and Private Enterprises (Co-Chaired by John Snow).
Peterson has been Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations since 1985, when he took over from David Rockefeller. He also serves as Trustee of the Rockefeller family’s Japan Society and the Museum of Modern Art, and was previously on the board of Rockefeller Center Properties, Inc..
He is founding Chairman of the Peterson Institute for International Economics (formerly the Institute for International Economics, renamed in his honour in 2006), and a Trustee of the Committee for Economic Development. He was also Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York between 2000 and 2004….”
So says wiki about Pete Peterson.
Comment:
And why am I interested in Pete Peterson? Because he’s the chief backer of the film IOUSA (directed by Patrick Creadon). IOUSA is a spin-off of “Empire of Debt,” a book written in 2005 by my former boss/co-author, Bill Bonner (owner and President of the newsletter holding company, Agora Inc.), with Addison Wiggin, the financial director of Agora Financial, a partner and/or affiliate and/or subsidiary (?) of Agora Inc.
[Note: in some places the film is described as a spin-off of "Demise of the Dollar"(2005) by Addison Wiggin].
IOUSA was aired on CNN this weekend on Saturday and Sunday, hence this post. Now, I’m not comfortable, obviously, commenting on the work of former colleagues. It’s not appropriate… and I would not ordinarily.
But we live in extraordinary times. Then too, having written a book with Bonner, I now have a stake in clarifying that my own work and credibility isn’t compromised by this particular spin on his writing.
First, to do a documentary on US finances that gets a lot of people to discuss things they would otherwise consider insufferably arcane and dry is a good thing. Second, it’s also a good thing to get people to consider the future, limit their consumption, and behave more soberly. I hope a lot of people watch the film and I hope it wins an Oscar, if for nothing more then its pioneering effort to bring a mass audience to the usually deadly dull topic of budgets.
Now for my caveat.
The book, as Lew Rockwell blog has noted, is quite different from the film. I did one of the edits of the book, so I know it well. It’s a convincing account of why empires are a bad idea. The analysis of debt and deficits is placed in a meaningful context that makes it genuinely libertarian. That means the book has a point of view. A point of view is not partisanship. Both “Empire” (broader in scope and more entertaining) and “Demise” (narrower and less literary) are spot-on in their analysis and I would recommend them heartily to anyone interested in Austrian economics.
The film is a different creature. It features a road tour by David Walker ( Comptroller-General and Head of the General Accounting Office from 1998-2008, Walker left to chair the Peterson Commission - see above - at Peterson’s request) and interviews with, among others, former Federal Reserve Chairman, Alan Greenspan; former US Treasury Secretary, Robert Rubin; former head of the Office of Management and Budget and former governor of the Federal Reserve, Alice Rivlin; Arthur Laffer of Laffer Curve fame; legendary investor and fund manager Warren Buffett; former Chairman of the Federal Reserve and current Obama economic advisor, Paul Volker; and former Treasury Secretary and current chairman of the Rand Corporation, Paul O’Neill.
Assembling this bipartisan group of prominent enablers/theorists of empire over the last twenty years lets IOUSA claim it goes beyond partisanship. In reality it does no such thing. Omitting a context for its arguments, the film actually lends itself to being interpreted in ways quite contradictory to the tenor of the original work. At times it even subverts the book thoroughly.
IOUSA lends itself to a very anti-libertarian, statist moralizing of the debt issue: thus, spendthrift population needs to be forced to save by government. Now that really alarms me. Watch out - forced savings accounts ahead!
Dean Baker (co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research) makes a similar critique at Huffington Post, only from a different angle. He’s afraid the film amounts to propaganda against Social Security and Medicare.
Well, as a libertarian, I am not a fan of any entitlements. Also, Baker’s Keynesianism is wrong-headed. (Correction - January 27, 2009: I shouldn’t say that. I dislike the vulgar version of Keynes that passes for Keynesianism, but to give him his due, Keynes never said you should spend money you don’t have, which is what we’re doing. He said you should spend the money you’d saved from the good times to reinvest in the bad times - to put it very roughly. Now, that’s quite a different kettle of fish…
But that said, taking apart entitlements without considering everything else that is leeching from the body politic is unjust in my view.
And taking it apart without mentioning empire or war or the financialization of the economy or the activity of the Federal Reserve is dishonest.
Selective libertarianism is not libertarianism any more. It’s reactionary statism in the service of big business, big banks, and big financiers.
But once you see that you also begin to see why the Chairman of Blackstone Inc. and former Chairman of the New York Federal Reserve might have gotten interested in adopting a stray documentary…..
Drag your friends to see IOUSA, but keep the resume of the backer-in-chief in mind.
From the Baker-Rosnick critique:
” For example, former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan allowed for the unchecked growth of a $10 trillion stock bubble in the 90s and an $8 trillion housing bubble in the current decade…..Former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin was an active proponent of the high dollar policy in the late nineties that led to the record trade deficits that are highlighted as a serious danger in the film…..
Peter Peterson is a wealthy investment banker who made millions of dollars from the “fund managers’ tax break,” a clause in the tax code that allows some of the wealthiest people in the country to pay a lower tax rate than school teachers and fire fighters. He even lobbied Congress to
protect this tax break. If every person in the country benefited from government largess [sic] to the same extent as Mr. Peterson, the problem of the debt would be hundreds of times larger than that indicated in IOUSA.”Here’s what libertarian writer Doug French, a fan of the original book, says:
“After I.O.U.S.A. concluded, CNBC’s Squawk Box honey Becky Quick moderated a panel of wise ones live from Omaha, led by Tout TV’s favorite guru, Buffett. The panel assured everyone that government Ponzi-scheme Social Security would be there when they retire. The Cato Institutes’ freedom-loving chairman William Niskanen even thinks people should be forced to save for retirement. Bill Novelli, CEO of AARP, believes the five guys on the panel could solve all of the country’s problems. And more than one panelist blamed everything on partisanship in Washington. If our representatives in this great republic could just learn to get along, everything will work out fine, was the claim. After all, America has faced greater challenges and triumphed.”
And here’s what Lew Rockwell had to say:
“The notion that government is the source of this problem and unlikely to be the solution was never raised. The book made this point clear, the movie carefully ignored it. The movie focussed exclusively on the problems of paying this government debt; the book explored other, more realistic options, such as repudiation and inflation. The book explored the enormous malinvestments, misallocation of resources, folly, and harm caused by the same policies that allow such a monstrous pyramid of debt and credit to be created in the first place. The movie studiously ignored any mention of the harm these policies have caused to civil society.”
Three High-Profile Suicides Related To Financial Losses In 6 Months
I forgot to post this interesting news from earlier in the week (January 5, Monday) :
“The patriarch of a German family whose assets include a majority stake in HeidelbergCement died on Monday in an act his family attributed to “the desperate situation of his companies caused by the financial crisis”…….
Merckle’s situation echoes those of Olivant chief operating officer Kirk Stephenson and Access Partners’ Rene- Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet, both of whom committed suicide last year. All faced large, rapid financial losses. All were caught out by forces that may have been hard to accept. Merckle was a once-conservative industrialist seduced by the returns available through heavy leverage. Unable to refinance loans taken out to cover trading losses, including an estimated E400m from short-selling VW shares, he faced a very public liquidity crunch…”
More at The Telegraph
Comment:
The first of the suicides was by Kirk Stephenson, the New Zealand born COO of Olivant Advisors.
He apparently threw himself in front of a 100 MPH train at Taplow railway station in Berkshire while under increasing financial pressure from the credit crisis. Olivant is a private equity firm that tried to buy a 15% (1 million P ) stake in Northern Rock before the bank was was nationalized. Stephenson, 47, married and with an 8 year old son, was a well-respected millionaire City financier.
Merckle, 74, known as the German Warren Buffett and once the 92nd richest man in the world according to Forbes, was until the financial crisis worth $9.2 billion. His holding company owed $6.7 billion to the banks when he was found dead on the tracks outside his home town of Blaubeuren. He left a suicide note behind. Merckle expanded his grandfather’s pharmaceutical business from 80 employees to over 70,000 but seems to have run it like a family firm, giving employees as many as six years at home to raise children. That might have been the reason he took his losses so personally. The last straw apparently came when his holding company shorted Volkswagon and the shares went on to quadruple.
The third suicide (which I posted earlier) was that of Rene-Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet, the French manager of Access International, one of the European “feeder funds” for Madoff. Villehuchet was found dead, his wrists and biceps slashed with box cutters, at his NY office, after losing clients over a billion (1.4 at least) dollars. That sum included his own money as well as the money of family and friends. Villehuchet was a French aristocrat whose ancestors made a fortune in shipping in the 17th century and the (apparent) suicide is attributed to the loss of honor and reputation he suffered. Villehuchet did not leave behind a suicide note. Villehuchet’s brother insisted that the return he and others received from the Madoff fund (which he described as 17 percent distributed over 4 years) was far from excessive. He also insisted that his brother was a modest and honorable man, not a greedy socialite, as he was being portrayed in the media. However, it does look like Villehuchet used excessive leverage (150 percent) that left him with losses greater than his investment.
Item: There was no suicide note in the Villehuchet case.
Item: Villehuchet lived in Westchester County in New York and worked in New York city.
Item: Villehuchet co-founded Access International Advisors with Patrick Littaye in 1994. Littaye had been investing with Madoff for a while. It was Littaye who brought Villehuchet into Madoff’s ambit. Access raised funds in Europe to invest with Madoff (75% of it was with him) through LUXALPHA SICAV-American Selection, a fund managed by the bank, UBS. Its objective was “to provide a consistent performance” for investors, who included the Rothschilds and Liliane Bettencourt.
Item: Prior to founding Access, Villehuchet was CEO and Chairman of Credit Lyonnaise Securities, the US Investment Banking arm of the French bank, and prior to joining there in 1987, he ran Interfinance, a broker firm specializing in the European markets that he founded in 1983. Before that, he worked at Banque Paribas from 1970 and it was then he met Littaye who worked there too.
Item: He was working closely with American financiers from at least 1987, from this account. Twenty years of living in New York where most top fund managers were reportedly aware that something was not right with Madoff, and he didn’t know? Shouldn’t he at least have diversified? Instead, one report says he actually put all of his brother’s money into the fund and 20 % of his own (another report reverses the figures). That sounds as if he knew enough about Madoff to be absolutely sure about the deal. How could he so sure? Could he have been oblivious to the complaints going on from 1999 and earlier?
Not likely. In fact, I would say impossible. Just as it’s impossible that the SEC was simply incompetent on this. As my previous post shows, the SEC was quite capable of rooting out Ponzi schemes of just this sort in several cases. Note the number of times (8) there were investigations into Madoff:
(1) 1992 - an SEC probe of Florida accountants who allegedly sold unregistered securities brings up Madoff’s name (2) 1999 -SEC examiners review trading practices at Madoff’s investment advisory firm (3) 2001 - The SEC’s Boston office notified by Harry Markopolos about questionably stable returns of Madoff’s firm (4) 2004 - SEC investigates Madoff for improper trading practices (5) 2005 -SEC interviews Madoff and family and finds no improper trading practices (6) 2005 - industry-based regulatory office finds no improper trading practices by Madoff’s firm (6) 2005 - SEC investigators meet Markopolos, who calls Madoff’s firm “the world’s largest Ponzi scheme” (7) 2006 - SEC enforcement investigation says Madoff and a client misled regulators and Madoff agrees to register as an investment adviser (8) 2007 -Financial Industry Regulatory Authority examines Madoff’s firm but takes no action.
No. Someone with oversight of the SEC squashed the investigation.
And Villehuchet, whatever his personal sense of honor, very likely knew what Madoff was all about.
Why Didn’t The SEC Act In 2006?
More questions about the SEC’s role:
“Finding exactly when Madoff “turned Ponzi” will have important implications for the tsunami of lawsuits expected in the wake of his collapse, not least for the regulators.
If it was only in 2001 Madoff turned crook, then he was only operating for four years before the authorities received their first major warning something was amiss.
Because it was in November 2005 the Securities and Exchange Commission received a 21-page document entitled “The World’s Largest Hedge Fund is a Fraud“, which listed 21 “red flags” for believing Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme.
The author, financial fraud investigator Harry Markopoulos, had been trying to warn the SEC about Madoff for at least two years.
His document set out in detail why it was mathematically impossible for Madoff’s investment strategies to be producing the returns he claimed.
He also claimed every senior manager who understood derivative trading believed “Bernie Madoff was a fraud”, which explained why Madoff would not let feeder fund investors mention his firm’s name in their performance summaries or marketing literature.
“Madoff does not allow outside performance audits,” Mr Markopoulos wrote.
“One London-based hedge fund, fund of funds, representing Arab money, asked to send in a team of accountants to conduct a performance audit during their planned due diligence.
“They were told ‘No, only Madoff’s brother-in-law who owns his own accounting firm is allowed to audit performance’.”
What happened next is the subject of a Congressional investigation……
The SEC’s inaction has fuelled suspicion Madoff had friends in Washington who might have pressured regulators to lay off.According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Madoff, his companies and his wife, Ruth, have spent almost $1.4 million on donations and lobbyists since 1991….”
More at The Herald Sun.
Comment:
The SEC investigated Madoff 8 times over 16 years and still didn’t manage to catch the fraud. Meanwhile, Meaghan Cheung, who, as the SEC’s NY branch chief in 2006, looked at Madoff’s books and gave him a clean bill of health, shrugged off blame. She said she couldn’t be faulted for not knowing the books were false. Markopolous has suggested she didn’t have the mathematical background to understand what was wrong.
So, after Markopolous had alleged that Madoff was running the world’s largest Ponzi scheme, three SEC staffers authorized the January 2006 enforcement case: Cheung, attorney Simona Suh, and Assistant Director Doria Bachenheimer. After interviewing Fairfield Group, the NJ feeder fund involved, they closed the case, finding no fraud, in November 2007. The SEC didn’t respond in 2008 when Markopolous tried to reopen the issue.
It’s interesting that the case was assigned to three female staffers, who seem to be mid-level management. Especially after Markopolous’ very persuasive charges and a whole litany of complaints for years. That smacks of forethought. It’s often the case that women or minorities or people at the middle-level are brought into an investigation as future scapegoats, who can conveniently be rubbished as incompetent should the need arise.That allows for legal claims to be framed against the government.
Is that what happened here?
Otherwise, a matter like this would normally be the fault of the investment advisers who failed to do due diligence and to properly diversify their clients’ assets.
Madoff & Co. - How The SEC Tackled Other Scams
The SEC is going after the small fry, now that’s it’s been caught with its pants down in the case of the biggest fry of them all.
A Philadelphia investment manager, Joseph Forte, has been charged with having swindled around $50 million from 80 investors in a mini Madoff scheme.
It’s not the only such case in the SEC’s files. The Commission just closed up a civil case against Renaissance Asset Fund, Inc.’s Ronald J. Nadel, and Joseph M. Malone, which charged them with swindling over $16 million from more than 190 investors nationwide, most elderly and belonging to Jehovah’s Witnesses congregations.
“According to the complaint, from at least March 1999 through April 2004, the defendants raised funds for multiple purported projects, including a general fund, an outlet mall, an international currency exchange, and a Swiss bank. Some of the purported projects did not exist, and others were unsuccessful. The defendants misrepresented to investors that their investments would earn returns ranging from 10% to 25% in as little as four months. The defendants also sent quarterly account statements to investors setting forth the fictitious profits their investments had purportedly earned. Based on the representations in these account statements, many investors reinvested their principal and purported profits in other Renaissance projects.
The defendants operated Renaissance’s programs as a Ponzi scheme, paying earlier investors with funds raised from later investors. Nadel also used investor funds to pay for lavish expenses, including country club memberships, car leases, and retail purchases. The majority of investors in Renaissance never received the interest or return of their principal the defendants had promised. …”
Read more at Jehovah’s Witness.Net. Here’s the link to the original SEC complaint in 2006 and here’s the record of the SEC’s administrative proceeding (January, 2008) barring Nadel from selling securities for 5 years.
Comment:
I am posting material that creates a context for the Madoff business. Florida is one place to start because the state is notorious for attracting scamsters lured by its population of wealthy seniors. Reports like the ones I’ve posted show that while the SEC sat on its hands during the Madoff scam, it was doing its job when it came to the smaller fry. In other words, it isn’t the lack of laws or regulation that is the problem. It’s the selective enforcement of laws. And that’s a problem not of structure, as the liberals would have it, but of political culture and corruption.
Supporting that take, here’s another, older piece (1992), “An Oasis Rich in Shady Operators,” Diana Henriques, NY Times, October 4, 1992 which describes scams in the booming 1990s, supposedly the golden age of the markets.
“College Bound is not unique in Boca Raton. Indeed, in the past year, this expensive enclave has experienced the financial equivalent of a cancer cluster. Six local corporations, including College Bound, have fallen under S.E.C. investigation; a seventh has been shut down and its chairman arrested and accused of running a Ponzi scheme. Dozens of other companies based here are little more than corporate shells created by boiler-room brokers, or financially flimsy companies whose chief products seem to be their own stock and news releases boasting of their prospects.
Regulators policing the penny stock market refer to the area’s unsavory brokers as the Boca Bunch, and state investigators have dubbed the area “the Maggot Mile.” The United States Attorney’s satellite office next door in West Palm Beach, once a three-person operation, now keeps 14 attorneys busy. ‘Very Appealing Location’
“Once it was North Miami that had become notorious, then Fort Lauderdale,” said Caroline Heck, executive assistant United States Attorney in Miami. “Now, Boca is a very appealing location.”
Charles A. Harper, the regional administrator for the Miami office of the S.E.C., agrees. “We’ve definitely seen problems moving up the coast.”
And this excerpt below (also from the same Times piece) shows that money-laundering often accompanied the fraud:
“According to court records in Miami, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, which has since emerged as one of the largest bank frauds in history, opened a branch here just to cater to Munther Ismael Bilbeisi, a Jordanian businessman and Boca Raton resident indicted in August 1991 on tax evasion charges stemming from a coffee-smuggling scheme financed by B.C.C.I. Mr. Bilbeisi left Boca a fugitive.
Cary Maultasch, who testified under a grant of immunity against Michael R. Milken in 1990, still lives here, as do other former Wall Street lions from the scandals of the 1980’s, including Martin A. Siegel, who pleaded guilty to insider trading charges involving Ivan F. Boesky.”
Drugs often played a role in many suspect firms, as this piece from Sept, 08, indicates:
“In 1987, Jerold Weinger was the CEO of a Wall Street brokerage firm crushed under an avalanche of coke.
One of the firm’s partners, six brokers and a receptionist were arrested in a massive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration Wall Street sweep called Operation Closing Bell. A ninth employee was arrested in the firm’s Florida office. Partner Wayne Robbins ultimately pleaded guilty to drug charges, and seven of the eight others either pleaded or were found guilty of possession, distribution or conspiracy to distribute cocaine, according to the DEA’s New York office.
According to federal court documents filed in the Southern District of New York, brokers at Brooks, Weinger, Robbins & Leeds regularly traded stock tips for cocaine. In one instance, a broker gave cocaine to a principal of another company in exchange for $10,000 worth of stock in that company’s initial public offering. At one point during the sting, a broker was arrested on drug charges and fired from the firm. A day later, he was rehired “because he was a good, trusted source of cocaine.” (“ Fool’s Gold: Desperate clients hand over thousands of dollars for a chance at a job,” Craig Malisow)
814 Palestinians Dead So Far
“At least 814 Palestinians, roughly half of them civilians, have died since war broke out on Dec. 27, according to Palestinian medical officials. Thirteen Israelis, including 10 soldiers, have been killed.
Weary Palestinians watched from apartment windows as thousands of leaflets fluttered from aircraft with a blunt warning: Israeli forces will step up operations against Islamic militants who have unleashed a daily barrage of rocket fire on southern Israeli towns.
“The IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) is not working against the people of Gaza but against Hamas and the terrorists only,” the leaflets said in Arabic. “Stay safe by following our orders.”
The leaflets urged Gaza residents not to help Hamas and to stay away from its members. There was no immediate sign of an escalation, though earlier in the day, witnesses said Israeli troops moved to within one mile of Gaza City before pulling back slightly.
Israeli defense officials say they are prepared for a third stage of their offensive, in which ground troops would push further into Gaza, but are waiting for approval from the government. Early on Sunday, Israeli tanks were heard moving near the central Gaza border as Israeli artilley pounded the area, indicating the possibility of a larger operation.
Palestinian witnesses said Israeli forces fired phosphorus shells at Khouza, a village near the border, setting a row of houses on fire. Hospital official Dr. Yusuf Abu Rish said a woman was killed and more than 100 injured, most suffering from gas inhalation and burns. Israeli military spokesman Capt. Guy Spigelman categorically dened the claims.”
And this:
” The U.N. estimates two-thirds of Gaza’s 1.4 million people now lack electricity, and half don’t have running water.”
And the Independent breaks the numbers down:
“In the day’s bloodiest incident, an Israeli tank shell landed outside a home in the northern Gaza town of Jabaliya, killing nine people as they sat in their garden. They were all from the same clan, and, said health administrator Adham Hakim, their bodies were so mangled they were brought to hospital in the boot of a civilian car. Two were women and two were children. This wretched pair will be added to the nearly 300 Gaza children who have been killed by Israeli fire. In the perversely disproportionate mathematics of this conflict, 13 Israelis have been killed – four of them by militant rockets. According to the Hamas-run Palestinian health ministry, the overall death toll now exceeds 800, more than a third of them children. The United Nations corroborates this, a report two days ago from the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs putting the number of children killed at 265. The Israelis respond that Hamas often uses schools and homes, and therefore are the ones bringing down fire on Gaza’s children. Last week, an Israeli attack outside a UN school killed nearly 40 people.”
Comment:
IDF math runs like this: 8 of us, 800 of you. 4 soldiers among us; 300 children among you. There is no way to call this war or reprisal. It is indiscriminate civilian massacre.
S. Korean Blogger Arrested For Spreading Economic False Information
“SEOUL, South Korea – A South Korean blogger pleaded not guilty Saturday to charges that he spread false economic information on the Internet, a news report said, in a case that drew heated debate over freedom of speech.
The blogger, identified only by his surname Park, gained prominence among South Koreans because some of his dire predictions about the global economy, including the collapse of Lehman Brothers, later proved to be correct.
Known widely by his pen name “Minerva,” the mythological Greek goddess of wisdom, the 31-year-old Park was accused of spreading false information on an Internet discussion site last month that the government had ordered major financial institutions and trade businesses not to purchase U.S. dollars.
Kim Yong-sang, a judge at the Seoul Central District Court who issued an arrest warrant for Park following Saturday’s court hearing, said the case “affected foreign exchange markets and the nation’s credibility,” Yonhap news agency reported.
Park told the judge he wrote articles to help underprivileged people and did not seek any personal financial gain or harm the public interest, Yonhap said….”
Eva Pierrakos On Becoming Objective
“I suggest that you take certain general subjects on which you have strongly formed opinions
and examine them in the work you are doing by yourself and with your coworker. Take politics,
religion, your idea about love and sex, or whatever it is that concerns everyone to some extent.
What do you really think about it? Why? Think whether you would have the same opinion if you
had grown up in a different environment, if different influences around you had prevailed, or if your
life circumstances were different? This self-questioning is healthy because it will give you a more
objective outlook. One can find justification for almost any viewpoint. There is also always a point in the
opposite view. Try to see it. And then try to detect how subjective you may have been so far. It
will already be great progress if you can admit that you have a personal stake in holding on to your
opinion — that it is not based solely on objective deliberations. This self-honesty is of great benefit
to the soul.” -Eva Pierrakos
Propaganda Nation: Some Inequalities Are More Unequal Than Others…
“If inequality in things that matter is important, there is a basic inequality that the worriers about inequality should be paying attention to: the inequality in life expectancy between men and women. In 2005, life expectancy at birth was almost seven percent higher for American women than for American men (80.4 years for women vs. 75.2 years for men). Governments could certainly reduce this life-expectancy inequality by redistributing medical research funding on women’s health to research on men’s health, and general medical care funding from women to men. Consider that men are more likely to die from prostate cancer than women are from breast cancer. Yet in 2005 federal expenditures for prostate cancer research were $390 million compared to $698 million for breast cancer research, and the American Cancer Society contributed almost three times as much for breast cancer research ($98 million) as for prostate cancer research ($36 million).
When I talk to people, I find that they generally agree with, and rarely strongly oppose, forcible government transfers of income from the rich to the poor to reduce income inequality. But when I suggest that the government transfer medical expenditures from women to men to reduce life-expectancy inequality, I get a very different reaction. Often, the listener will simply give me a strange look and quickly depart. Those who do respond verbally, however, typically say that I couldn’t possibly be serious because my idea is outrageously silly. I agree. It is silly. But I am completely serious in suggesting it.”
More at the Library of Economics and Liberty.
Comment:
To forestall anyone who writes to me anxiously that this sort of argument - even tongue-in-cheek - is dangerously sexist and anti-feminist, let me just say I am a feminist, if feminism means advocating that women be treated as individuals and as fully human. I am enough of a feminist to recognize that women and men are biologically and culturally different and have different histories that need to be taken into account.
But if feminism means declaring the other half of the species the enemy - and some of what is passed off as progressive opinion on this topic is just that - I’ll say no to the label. There’s a kind of feminism out there that’s just public posturing by people who get social and economic benefits from doing so that they wouldn’t be able to get otherwise.
And if they were to gain equal benefits from holding the opposite bias, they would switch sides in an instant….
Note: I said some progressive opinion on this…
Free Kareem Amer
Egyptian law student and blogger Kareem Amer has been in jail 795 days for opposing his university’s gender segregation policy and criticizing Islam in articles and on his blog .
He writes:
“Freedom’s denial of restrictions does not mean that the human being has the complete freedom to do everything he is able to do. Being powerful does not mean that I am free to subjugate he who is less powerful than I am. For one of the most important principles of freedom is to not trespass on the limits of others’ freedoms; this is so that freedom will be meaningful, and not be merely a justification for the actions of those who take advantage of their power to subdue others. ……
The arrival of the individual preceded the formation of the societal organization, and this formation is what founded the law. And as is known, one of the most important functions that this organization was formed for is the protection of the rights of the individuals from degradation under the protection of the law. Therefore, it is the individual, whose arrival had preceded these legislations, who must enjoy sanctity and respect, and not the law (the follower), which is supposed to protect the rights of the individuals, not degrade these rights.”
And, more controversially, here is a sample of his criticism of Islamic extremism that some people have argued doesn’t deserve protection because it “insults Islam”:”I have seen with my own eyes the thugs as they break into our Christian brothers’ stores after the whole area of Maharram Beh was completely out of control of the government authorities, and I saw them as they ransack the contents of the store right and left, amidst cheering and shouting extremist Islamic slogans, and I saw them stealing the money from inside the drawers of the cash registers and splitting it among themselves as if it is justified by being owned by what they call the infidels and the worshippers of the cross….”
Read more of his articles here.
And here’s a site where you can sign the petition to release him from prison.
Comment:
I am not being anti-Islamic in posting this. My primary training is in American government, politics, and culture and so my criticism is usually directed at corruption and crimes that affect me here. But I need to be even-handed in criticizing other governments for the sort of things I oppose here. And I need to show solidarity with bloggers who face dire threats to their physical existence in a way people here don’t. So while I don’t know if Kareem’s portrayal of Islamic extremists attacking Christians in Egypt is accurate or not, I am comfortable with supporting his right to voice his opinion on politics and religion without restraint - the core of the First Amendment rights we in the US sometimes take for granted… and which are being eroded when government constantly encroaches on our privacy.
Henry Ford On The Necessity of Failure
“Let them fail; let everybody fail! I made my fortune when I had nothing to start with, by myself and my own ideas. Let other people do the same thing. If I lose everything in the collapse of our financial structure, I will start in at the beginning and build it up again.”
-Henry Ford (1934)Dow Jones NewsWire On Sentier 2
Just to make sure this news report doesn’t vanish into the murky depths of Google, I’ve posted it below in toto.
http://news.morningstar.com/newsnet/ViewNews.aspx?article=/DJ/200812111307DOWJONESDJONLINE000860_univ.xml
(downloaded, 12:40 PM January 9, 2009)
Note that the report is dated 12-11-08. Madoff was arrested on Dec 11 (Thursday).
SocGen, Barclays Cleared Over Franco-Israeli Money Laundering12-11-08 1:07 PM EST
PARIS (AFP)–A Paris court Thursday cleared the banks Societe Generale SA ( 13080.FR) and Barclays PLC (BCS) of complicity in money-laundering between France and Israel, but convicted a top Pakistani bank and a U.K.-owned lender. The court also sentenced a former French prosecutor to 20 months for corruption, and gave two executives from the
National Bank of Pakistan (NBP.KA) two-year suspended jail terms following a mammoth trial. Judges heard how the four banks handled money from merchants in Paris’ Sentier garment district - the proceeds of tax evasion, embezzlement or stolen checks laundered through banks or money exchange offices in Israel. The banks had all denied any wrongdoing in the case, dubbed “Sentier 2.”
A previous “Sentier” trial saw dozens of clothing merchants from the district convicted of defrauding banks, and investigators looked at whether the firms had made proper checks before handling the merchants’ payments.
One hundred and fifty-two people were on trial alongside Societe Generale, the French units of
Barclays and of the National Bank of Pakistan, and Societe Marseillaise de Credit, owned by HSBC Holdings PLC (HSBA.LN). Daniel Bouton, the chairman of Societe Generale - which was hit by a massive rogue trading scandal at the start of this year - was acquitted along with his bank and three other senior managers at the lender. They were accused of handling the equivalent of EUR32 million in ill-gotten funds.Investigators told the court that Societe Generale knew of the fraudulent origin of this money but the judge accepted defense arguments that there was no “intentional element” on the part of the bank.Bouton’s lawyer welcomed what he said was a “coherent” decision. Bouton had been charged with aggravated money laundering and faced 10 years in jail.Barclays- France and four of its former or current executives were also cleared of wrongdoing.The court fined the National Bank of Pakistan EUR200,000 and gave two-year suspended jail sentences to two of its bosses for failing to spot EUR1.8 million in illegal transfers.The pair were also fined EUR20,000 each. Two other executives from the NBP, one of the largest commercial banks in Pakistan, were acquitted.Societe Marseillaise de Credit was also convicted of failing to spot EUR1.8 million in illegal transfers and fined EUR100,000. One of its executives was given an eight-month suspended sentence.A former French prosecutor was convicted of for corruption and influence peddling and given a three-year jail sentence with 16 months of it suspended. He was fined EUR30,000.Click here to go to Dow Jones NewsPlus, a web front page of today’s most important business and market news, analysis and commentary: http:// www.djnewsplus.com/al?rnd=OBSC4tG5tv93CjIHwO9G9A%3D%3D. You can use this link on the day this article is published and the following day. Sentier 2 - Franco-Israeli Bank Money Laundering Ring
“One hundred and fifty-two people were on trial alongside Societe Generale, the French units of
Barclays and of the National Bank of Pakistan, and Societe Marseillaise de Credit, owned by HSBC Holdings PLC (HSBA.LN). Daniel Bouton , the chairman of Societe Generale - which was hit by a massive rogue trading scandal at the start of this year - was acquitted along with his bank and three other senior managers at the lender. They were accused of handling the equivalent ofEUR32 million in ill-gotten funds.Investigators told the court that Societe Generale knew of the fraudulent origin of this money but the judge accepted defense arguments that there was no “intentional element” on the part of the bank.
Bouton’s lawyer welcomed what he said was a “coherent” decision. Bouton had been charged with aggravated money laundering and faced 10 years in jail.
Barclays-
France and four of its former or current executives were also cleared of wrongdoing.The court fined the National Bank of Pakistan
EUR200,000 and gave two-year suspended jail sentences to two of its bosses for failing to spotEUR1.8 million in illegal transfers.The pair were also fined
EUR20,000 each. Two other executives from the NBP, one of the largest commercial banks inPakistan , were acquitted.Societe Marseillaise de Credit was also convicted of failing to spot
EUR1.8 million in illegal transfers and finedEUR100,000 . One of its executives was given an eight-month suspended sentence.A former French prosecutor was convicted of for corruption and influence peddling and given a three-year jail sentence with 16 months of it suspended. He was fined
EUR30,000 ….”And this:
“Judges heard how the four banks handled money from merchants in
Paris ‘ Sentier garment district - the proceeds of tax evasion, embezzlement or stolen checks laundered through banks or money exchange offices inIsrael. The ba nks had all denied any wrongdoing in the case, dubbed “Sentier 2.A previous “Sentier” trial saw dozens of clothing merchants from the district convicted of defrauding banks, and investigators looked at whether the firms had made proper checks before handling the merchants’ payments.”
That’s the crux of a Dow Jones Newswire report (Dec 11, 2008) that I came across while following up on the Madoff case. Seems to fit in with my hunch about money laundering.
No More Blank Check For Israel
STATEMENT ON THE CRISIS IN GAZA
A group of New Jersey peace activists prepared an ad to appear in the Montclair Times, and we found ourselves in broad agreement with its content. We have modified the ad for use as a Campaign for Peace and Democracy sign-on statement.
In its massive military attacks on Gaza, Israel has again engaged in actions contrary to morality, international law, the cause of peace, and to the long-term best interests of the people of Israel. And, once again, the United States government has been the enabler of Israeli actions:
* The bombers that unleashed death and destruction on Gaza were U.S.-supplied F-16s.
* The attack helicopters were U.S.-supplied Apaches.
* The government that blocked international demands for an immediate cease-fire was Washington.
* And the source of more than $3 billion a year in tax-payer funded military aid to Israel has been the United States.
No country should have to face rockets fired at its citizens, and we condemn Hamas’s launching of rockets into Israeli civilian areas. But the solution is not raining bombs and missiles down on one of the most densely populated sites in the world, making massive civilian casualties inevitable, and which, apart from its immorality, guarantees only another generation of hatred towards Israel.
The solution — as the Israeli peace movement, human rights groups, and the United Nations have urged — is to lift the economic blockade imposed on Gaza and end the Occupation.
This blockade holds one and a half million Palestinian civilians hostage, and creates a horrendous humanitarian crisis. Malnutrition is rife, people have died from being denied the right to travel for medical care, and electricity and clean water are scarce. Meanwhile the 40-year Occupation not only continues, but is also strengthened by increased settlements.
We condemn the policies of our government that support the ongoing oppression and murder of the Palestinian people.
” We urge the incoming Obama administration to refuse to give Israel the U.S. blank check it has long enjoyed.
And we call on everyone to join in telling the President and Congress that we want an immediate end to U.S. military aid to Israel. We do not want our tax dollars or the leaders who speak in our names to continue supporting the attacks on the Palestinian people. …”
Sign a petition to end US military aid to Israel by the Campaign for Peace and Democracy.
Madoff Madness: Real Victims Might Sue Virtual Victims To Recoup Real Losses…
Now it seems that lots of people didn’t actually lose the money they put into the Madoff scheme at all! (I predicted that would be the case on this blog).
But that’s not going to stop them from filing for the return of their (paper) principle…..nor is it going to stop people who actually lost their investment from going after some of the winners for a chunk of real profit, claiming it was only virtual.
I know your head is spinning. But that’s the latest news:
“No one knows yet how many people will emerge as net winners in the scandal, but the numbers appear to be substantial. Many of Madoff’s long-term investors have, over time, cashed out millions of dollars of their supposed profits, which routinely amounted to 11 percent to 15 percent per year.
Jonathan Levitt, a New Jersey attorney who represents several former Madoff clients, said more than half of the victims who called his office looking for help have turned out to be people whose long-term profits exceeded their principal investment.
“There are a lot of net winners,” he said.
Asked for an example, Levitt said one caller, whom he declined to name, invested $1.8 million with Madoff more than a decade ago, then cashed out nearly $3 million worth of “profits” as the years went by.
On paper, he still had $4 million invested with Madoff when the scheme collapsed, but it now looks as if that figure was almost entirely comprised of fictitious profits on investments that were never actually made, leaving his claim to be owed anything unclear.
Other attorneys report getting similar calls.
Under federal law, the court-appointed trustee trying to unravel Madoff’s business can demand that people who profited from the scheme return some or all of the money.”
100 Checks For $173 Million Found On Madoff Office Desk (Added link on 1/10/09)
“NEW YORK – Prosecutors said Thursday that investigators found 100 signed checks worth $173 million in Bernard Madoff’s office desk that he was ready to send out to his closest family and friends at the time of his arrest last month.
The detail was provided in a court filing Thursday as prosecutors argued that Madoff should have his bail revoked and be sent to jail. They said the checks were further evidence that he wants to keep his assets away from burned investors….”
More at The New York Times.
And a report from December that I missed:
PARIS (AFP)–AParis court Thursday cleared the banksSociete Generale SA The court also sentenced a former French prosecutor to 20 months for corruption, and gave two executives from the( 13080.FR) and Barclays PLC (BCS) of complicity in money-laundering between France andIsrael , but convicted a top Pakistani bank and a U.K.-owned lender.National Bank of Pakistan (NBP.KA) two-year suspended jail terms following a mammoth trial. Judges heard how the four banks handled money from merchants in
Paris ‘ Sentier garment district - the proceeds of tax evasion, embezzlement or stolen checks laundered through banks or money exchange offices inIsrael .The banks had all denied any wrongdoing in the case, dubbed “Sentier 2.”
Read more of this Dow Jones newswire report on a money-laundering investigation in France.
(I found this link Friday 1/09/09)
UK Begins Madoff Fraud Investigation
LONDON (AP) — Britain’s Serious Fraud Office opened an investigation into the British business operations of Bernard Madoff on Thursday, raising the prospect that the alleged Wall Street fraudster could face criminal charges here.
The fraud office, which is cooperating with its U.S. counterparts, said its investigation would focus on British victims and “any criminal offenses that might have been committed in the U.K.”
Responding to criticisms that it has moved too slowly in the past against illegal activity in London’s huge financial sector, the agency said the inquiry showed its “new, faster approach to tackling fraud.”
Scientists Discover How Levitation Can Work….
”U.S. scientists have found a way to levitate the very smallest objects using the strange forces of quantum mechanics, and said on Wednesday they might use it to help make tiny nanotechnology machines.They said they had detected and measured a force that comes into play at the molecular level using certain combinations of molecules that repel one another.
The repulsion can be used to hold molecules aloft, in essence levitating them, creating virtually friction-free parts for tiny devices, the researchers said….”
More at Reuters.
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