LILA RAJIVA: The Mind-Body Politic
Individuals Not Ideologies
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Archive for February, 2009
Group Mind and the Stopping of Thoughts…
“John McMurtry writes that the first rule of the “Group-Mind” is that it cannot adopt itself as an object of critical reflection:
“When the most self-evident line of thought has been blinkered out across a people, only an a priori thought system can account for it. As with other great problems of our era, the group-mind disconnects by stopping thought before it arises.”
Christian ascesis is the practice of giving attention to thoughts as they first appear, thus it is a practice wholly at odds with a priorism and with all forms of mechanical, psychic or associative activity which masquerades as “thought.” According to Father Sylvan, a hundred, a thousand times a day, thoughts that challenge or contradict assumptions and beliefs, thoughts that might provoke self-questioning or discomfort about some fact or emotion or received wisdom, thoughts that might force one to confront one’s own laziness, anger, lack of love, lack of integrity — such thoughts are continually circling the perimeter of the mind and sometimes even penetrate its arena. And yet they come to nothing, they are quickly repelled, conveniently forgotten, dispersed, and covered over by compulsive action, rationalization, explanation, or emotional reaction. Father Sylvan calls this incessant activity of covering over the Question the “First Dispersal of the Soul.” It means that the force of attention is wasted, degraded by absorption into one part or another of the psycho-physical organism, and rendered useless for the growth of the soul. Man becomes trapped in an “automatism of non-redemptive experience,” which he likens to
The struggle of Christian ascesis is to contain the energy of the Question within oneself so that the Soul can come into being. Thus, the existence of the Soul is not a given, not an a priori assumption. It is an energy formed through the confrontation with question and contradiction, an energy that has to be sought, recognized, collected and accumulated - “pondered in the heart.” This is why “God can only speak to the soul,” according to Father Sylvan, “and only when the soul exists.”
Comment:
This is a fascinating post. The teaching of Philokalia is not different from that of Raja Yoga texts, or, for that matter, from the writings of Jiddu Krishnamurthi, if you put aside the doctrinal content and focus on the psychological observation. Thoughts that arise in the mind involuntarily seem to correspond to the samskaras of Hinduism and Buddhism, those predispositions and unconscious impulses which attract us to the situations in which karma (fate, moira) plays out.
What has all this to do with politics and the markets?
Much….
i) Being “embodied minds,” the nature of our thinking alters what we perceive - both in the past and in the present. That alteration in perception allows us to strategize action, anticipate problems, and to form coalitions, none of which we would be able to do if we remained obsessed with rigid mental constructs.
ii) Self-awareness of our own internal contradictions permits us to be more generous in our assessments of our antagonists and cures us of the rancid self-righteousness and inflamed dogmatism with which we approach every issue….That, in turn, gives our opponents space to rethink their own self-righteousness…..and draws thoughful people out of neutrality…
Digital Reading Encourages Risk-Taking
“While the testimonials of digital literacy enthusiasts are replete with abstract paeans to the possibilities presented by screen reading, the experience of those who do it for a living paints a very different picture. Just as Griswold and her colleagues suggested the impending rise of a “reading class,” British neuroscientist Susan Greenfield argues that the time we spend in front of the computer and television is creating a two-class society: people of the screen and people of the book. The former, according to new neurological research, are exposing themselves to excessive amounts of dopamine, the natural chemical neurotransmitter produced by the brain. This in turn can lead to the suppression of activity in the prefrontal cortex, which controls functions such as measuring risk and considering the consequences of one’s actions.Writing in The New Republic in 2005, Johns Hopkins University historian David A. Bell described the often arduous process of reading a scholarly book in digital rather than print format: “I scroll back and forth, search for keywords, and interrupt myself even more often than usual to refill my coffee cup, check my e-mail, check the news, rearrange files in my desk drawer. Eventually I get through the book, and am glad to have done so. But a week later I find it remarkably hard to remember what I have read.”
As he tried to train himself to screen-read—and mastering such reading does require new skills—Bell made an important observation, one often overlooked in the debate over digital texts: the computer screen was not intended to replace the book. Screen reading allows you to read in a “strategic, targeted manner,” searching for particular pieces of information, he notes. And although this style of reading is admittedly empowering, Bell cautions, “You are the master, not some dead author. And that is precisely where the greatest dangers lie, because when reading, you should not be the master”; you should be the student. “Surrendering to the organizing logic of a book is, after all, the way one learns,” he observes.
How strategic and targeted are we when we read on the screen? In a commissioned report published by the British Library in January 2008 (the cover of which features a rather alarming picture of a young boy with a maniacal expression staring at a screen image of Darth Vader), researchers found that everyone, teachers and students alike, “exhibits a bouncing/flicking behavior, which sees them searching horizontally rather than vertically….Users are promiscuous, diverse, and volatile.” As for the kind of reading the study participants were doing online, it was qualitatively different from traditional literacy. “It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense, indeed there are signs that new forms of ?reading’ are emerging as users ?power browse’ horizontally through titles, contents pages, and abstracts going for quick wins.” As the report’s authors concluded, with a baffling ingenuousness, “It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.”
More by “People of the Screen’” The New Atlantis.
Comment:
Aha! Here’s the real reason for the financial crash! Glued to their computer trading screens, all those “quants” and geeks who bundled up risk into little packages and shot them across the globe in a viral campaign addled their pre-frontal lobes. More seriously, computer interaction does encourage a kind of virtual reality of quick response, immediate gratification, high-wire devilry and flaring tempers.
Examples:
The Internet porn industry has higher levels of addiction than off-line porn.
Video games are used by the Department of Defense to desensitize potential recruits. Popular games like Grand Theft Auto, for instance, allow players to mimic and experience criminal activity.
Online addiction is even categorized by some people as a separate category of compulsive behavior. Whether that’s excessive or not, it’s true that what’s on our screen affects us in a quite different way than what’s on a printed page. And that’s why one of the best ways to counter government control of the web is to practice a little self-restraint in posting on it.
Libertarian Living: Depression Era Cooking With Clara
Household thrift is back in fashion. The latest rage is nonagenarian Clara, with her recipes for tasty recipes from the Depression. A Youtube of her cooking pasta with peas and potatoes is quite the rage on the net.
I found it mildly amusing, because that’s just how I’ve been cooking in non-Depression America. Sometimes, it was because I wasn’t making enough money. Sometimes (for instance, when I was in graduate school), there just wasn’t enough time to do anything more. Sometimes, I’ve had the time but lacked the inclination to do more. But a lot of the time, it’s because I like simple hearty food. I like being able to experiment and cook different ways. I like making do with whatever’s around….or on sale….or in season.
That makes for some unhappy endings, once in a while. But you also end up with delicious surprises. And the best taste is the feeling of being self-reliant. Maybe that’s due for a come-back too.
To give you an idea, for about 4 years of my life (all told), I lived on a food budget that never went above $45/month and mostly hovered around $25-30. That included a couple of meals outside, vitamin supplements, and even some “luxuries,” like tea and chocolate.
No tricks. Indian cooking is relatively cheap, although labor intensive. You can use fairly inexpensive vegetables and the rest is mostly rice, lentils (dals), and spices. If you buy those at an Indian store, they won’t cost you very much.
Mind you, this isn’t the Indian cooking you get in upscale restaurants, which is usually Mughalai (Moghal -style). Mughalai is typical of the wealthy and is also often Westernized to suit palates in America. It’s delicious, but all those butter sauces are incredibly fattening, and so are the stuffed parathas. And the rich spices and additions can add up to good money.
My own cooking tended to pick up on the lighter, simpler South Indian recipes, like rasam (a delicious, very thin tomato, onion, pepper and tamarind soup that’s very healthy for you), sambhar (a soup of dhal), and vegetable poriyal.
To that, add a few simple stir-fries, salads, vegetable soups and spreads, some hummus and pita, a few tins of tuna, mackerel or salmon, and of course, rice, and you have a repertoire that shouldn’t take you more than 20 minutes, will save you megabucks, and shed a few pounds for you too.
You can say a lot about the downside of recessions (and even depressions), but they can be excellent for your body.
Fellow Counterpuncher (do I qualify any longer?), poet, and chronicler of torture programs Douglas Valentine also shares my culinary predilections. He writes:
“That’s funny. I like cook shows. I do a lot of cooking too. Yesterday I made my special pea and lentil soup with carrots, celery and garlic, bay leaves and sometimes spices. Um, good, and good for you…”
Slumdog Slams Slumdwellers
“It is no secret that Slumdog is meant to reflect life in Dharavi, the vast sprawl of slums at the heart of Mumbai. The film depicts Dharavi as a feral wasteland, with little evidence of order, community or compassion. Other than the children, the no-one is even remotely well-intentioned. Hustlers and petty warlords run amok, and even Jamal’s schoolteacher is inexplicably callous. This is a place of sheer evil and decay.
But nothing is further from the truth. Dharavi teems with dynamism, and is a hub of small-scale industries, whose estimated annual turnover is between US$50 to $100 million. Nor is Dharavi bereft of governing structures and productive social relations. Residents have built strong collaborative networks, often across potentially volatile lines of caste and religion. Many cooperative societies work together with NGOs to provide residents with essential services such as basic healthcare, schooling and waste disposal, often compensating for the formal government’s woeful inadequacy in meeting their needs. Although these under-resourced organizations have touched only the tip of the proverbial iceberg, their efforts must be acknowledged, along with the fact that slum-dwellers, despite their grinding poverty, have lives of value and dignity, and a resourcefulness that stretches far beyond the haphazard, individualistic survival-of-the-fittest sort shown in Slumdog.
In the end, Slumdog presents a profoundly dehumanizing view of the poor, with all its troubling political implications. Since there are no internal resources, and none capable of constructive voice or action, all “solutions” must arrive externally.”
Comment:
This is a short but really perceptive piece that reflects the way I felt about the film, as well as about other works on India’s urban poor, like the book, City of Joy. In addition, City of Joy - which is about Calcultta - seems to imply that it takes a foreigner to get something going among the poor in India.
Despite the strong appeal of both works, and they do have a good deal of charm, they’re ultimately a little patronizing. Slumdog also makes the fundamental mistake of showing poverty as almost inseparable from crime, when simple observation will tell you otherwise.
You’d think, with all the revelations about Wall Street, people would have figured that out.
Propaganda Nation: Iraq War Coverage Still Skewed
“Claims that the mainstream media distorts the violence in Iraq are certainly correct, but not in the way that conservative pundits claim. The American press has systemically ignored, marginalized, or buried deep within their pages casualty reports indicating that hundreds of thousands, perhaps over one million Iraqis died during the occupation. What little reporting has been done on casualties focuses more on American lives. An analysis of the 2003-2005 period finds that the New York Times covered American casualties three times more than Iraqi civilian casualties. When violence against Iraqis has been reported, it typically portrays the victims of violence as the result of the actions of insurgents and militias, rather than also as the result of American bombing. This practice, contrary to conservative punditry claims, allows for the U.S. to be framed in a positive light, as a force fighting against civil war and sectarian violence, rather than one that is destabilizing Iraq through its own bombings (which are estimated to have killed tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands). Furthermore, when the media does report casualties in Iraq (in this case American ones), its reporting is heavily dependent upon the lead of the government itself. According to one study, 75 percent of the stories filed on American casualties in the New York Times from 2003 to 2005 were based exclusively on press releases from the Department of Defense. Statistically, the study showed that, as the DOD increased its press releases on casualties (during months when larger numbers of Americans were killed), the New York Times responded to increased DOD releases by increasing its own reporting on American deaths. During times when the DOD put out fewer releases, the New York Times responded accordingly by reducing its coverage. Coverage of violence, then, is heavily influenced by the government’s own actions and agenda….”
Anthony Di Maggio in Counterpunch
John Bolton Jokes About Nuking Chicago
Here’s John Bolton joking about a possible nuclear hit on Chicago at Think Progress.
Talk about irresponsible and dangerous blather by a man as responsible as any one for the Bush administration isolating itself in the world and increasing international tensions. First, the ‘Obama terrorist’ cover from his pals, then the ’shoot the chimp that wrote the stimulus bill’ joke, now ‘nuke Obama’s town’.
On the other side, Obama and Holder keep up the focus on race in another way.
We don’t need more race talk….and we don’t need any racial slurs or incitement either.
We need someone who can add up the figures and explain how this stimulus bill and the rest of the proposals coming out of the administration do anything but increase the power of the government and the kleptocrats.
Marc Faber Recommends Buying a Farm
“Faber said gold was currently expensive relative to other commodities, and the bearish sentiment that’s driven investors from equities to the precious metal is likely to reverse soon. He had recommended investors buy gold since the start of an eight-year rally that this month saw the metal top $1,000 per ounce as skittish investors sought safe-haven assets.
‘Substantial’ Stock Rally
“I’m a little bit careful about the outlook for gold for the rest of the year,” he said. “A countertrend rally could occur soon where stocks would suddenly rise quite substantially.”
Faber today recommended investors short U.S. Treasuries, as a 27-year bull market likely ended in December, starting the beginning of a long bear market. Faber also recommends selling the Japanese yen, though the nation’s stocks may outperform global equities in the next one or two years because they have been depressed for so long, he said.
The yield on the 10-year U.S. government bond fell to a record low of 2.04 percent on Dec. 18, compared with a peak of 15.8 percent in September 1981. The yen has gained against every other currency in the world, except one, in the last 12 months even as the economy contracted at the fastest pace in 35 years. The Nikkei 225 Stock Average fell to the lowest in 26 years this week.
Head for the Farm
The best bet for investors may be to buy a farm and escape from the cities, as a prolonged recession could lead to war, as the Great Depression did, said the Swiss national, who now lives in Thailand.
“Buy a farm and let your girlfriend work on the farm,” he said, to the applause of investors. “If the global economy doesn’t recover, usually people go to war.”
Comment:
Faber lives in Thailand and is married to a Thai woman. So I daresay his recommendation to buy farm land in Asia (that’s where he usually recommends it) works fine for him. But as someone who lived there for two decades, I’d say a foreigner buying in any country in Asia, except Malaysia (where the language is English and the laws are British) should be on guard. Title law is not clear in most of them and disputes are common. In India, where British legal institutions prevail, the courts are often exploited by scammers who bribe lawyers and policemen to overlook forged documents. Title insurance isn’t usually available either. Caveat emptor.
Obama Tanks the Dow
- The Dow has fallen about 11% since Election Day.
- The Dow’s fall on Obama’s Inauguration Day was the worst Inauguration Day decline in history.
- The Dow fell 384 points on Feb. 10, the day Treasury Secretary Geithner unveiled his financial stability plan.
- The Dow fell 298 points on Feb. 17, the day Obama signed the Stimulus Bill.
- The Dow fell to an 11-year low on Monday, following weekend reports about the government’s potential new plan to bail out Citigroup.
- The Dow fell nearly 200 points intraday Wednesday following Obama’s generally well received speech Tuesday evening. (The index did recover some lost ground, even briefly trading positive in the afternoon, before closing down 80 points as Treasury announced yet more bailout options for banks.)
Comment:
Going further, the Deal Journal gives the President some tips on how to make nice to the market and stop being Obummer.
The budget numbers are out, and they aren’t pretty, projecting a $1.75 million deficit for the year and including a provision to auction off permits to exceed carbon emission caps (frankly, this sounds like the sale of indulgences by popes during the Middle Ages - only now, we’re all so much more enlightened...). This might tank the Dow even more,…
Especially if it also takes a look at GM’s horrible numbers (a $9.6 bn Q4 loss and a decline in its cash position from the previous quarter of $2.2 bn ($16.2 bn to $14 bn). And let’s see what London’s FTSE will do now that Royal Bank of Scotland has announced the biggest annual corporate loss in UK history ($34.2bn/24.1 bn BP)
The Financial-Academic-Media Complex
“Harvard Watch, in case you don’t know, is [was] a group of academics who were formed ostensibly to be the conscience of the ultra secretive Harvard Corporation, whose 7 members have included the likes of Lawrence Summers, Robert Rubin and Dyn Corp.’s Mr. Pug Winokur.
“>The Harvard Corporation administers the ‘not for profit’ [now] 28 billion dollar Harvard Endowment Fund. The largest such pool of capital this side of the Roman Catholic Church. This fund has been intimately linked to such financial fiascos as Bush/Harken Energy and Enron/California energy debacle.”“When the Harvard Watch did their own investigations back in 2003 / 2004, here are a few snippets of what they found. In addition to giving guidance, such as choosing outside money managers, to Harvard’s 21 billion [at the time] dollar Endowment fund, Pug Winokur was the Chairman of Enron’s audit committee.
At the same time one of the Endowment Fund’s biggest outside money managers was Highfields Capital. This is a hedge fund run by John Jacobson – a former member of the seven-man Harvard Corp. He left the Corp. in 1996 with 500 million of Harvard money to start his own financial advisory/absolute return fund.
According to Harvard University 1999 tax returns Highfields topped the pay list of advisories at 30 million in management fees for the year. In fact Highfields did so well making money for Harvard, the Harvard Magazine was crowing about the job they did and they were reportedly awarded additional billions of Harvard money to manage.
Now, I’ll bet none of you will ever guess how Highfields made their astonishing returns for Harvard in 1999? This long/short fund only had 3 equity shorts (put options). Enron just happened to be the biggest – and the Enron short was 47 times the size of the next biggest short.
Of course, no guilt was ever found implicating Mr. Winokur or Highfields – because the SEC was on the job!! Highfields’ 5000 foot grand salami of a homerun simply got chalked up to “pure brilliance”.
Now, for those of you who are not aware; Enron funded research centers at Harvard. This allegedly objective research – incubated at Harvard - was instrumental in legitimizing energy deregulation in California and defending energy industry monoliths against assertions of price manipulation. Nothing stinky here, eh?
Well, apparently something didn’t exactly smell quite right; because it was soon after these facts came to light that Mr. Winokur had sufficiently spread an aroma of his doings about Harvard that his presence was no longer required and he resigned his post to make room for none other than Mr. Robert Rubin. Here’s a snippet of the statement the Harvard Watch published at the time regarding the changing of the guard.
“Winokur’s departure from the Corporation, however, represents only a first step in cutting Harvard’s ties to Enron. There remain multiple Harvard research initiatives funded by and effectively functioning for Enron and its executives. Notable examples include the Harvard Electric Policy Group, the Belfer Center, and the Winokur Public Policy Fund. Moreover, the Harvard Corporation’s remaining members include several Enron insiders. D. Ronald Daniel, for instance, was Jeffrey Skilling’s boss at McKinsey during the 1980s, when Skilling consulted with Enron to design the energy giant’s unsustainable business model. Because of the work of Daniel and Skilling, McKinsey is now a defendant in the largest suit against Enron. Moreover, it is remarkably telling that just as the university prepares to bid farewell to one of the Enron club, it has already announced the entry of another one. Robert Rubin, the Corporation’s latest addition, is a director of Citigroup, Enron’s largest creditor. Rubin attempted to obtain a Federal bailout for Enron as it approached collapse-while its top executives cashed in on Enron’s falling stock and drained the pension funds of thousands of their employees”:
Admittedly, the Enron / Gibson’s Paradox Harvard guffaws occurred before Niall Ferguson’s tenure at Harvard [began in 2004]; but with him being such a sharp economic historian – he probably knew all this stuff anyway….”– Ronald Kirby
Obama Declares Day of Reckoning…
“Bluntly declaring that the “day of reckoning has arrived” after years of financial irresponsibility, President Barack Obama told Americans on Tuesday night that “we will rebuild, we will recover and the United States of America will emerge stronger than before.”
Comment:
Hmm……some of that reckoning talk sounds suspiciously like the language that Nina Totenberg as well as some NY Times writers were using a while back….shortly after NPR cited “Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets”…..shortly after we sent them the book……..
(Coauthor of said opus is the principle writer and creator of the Daily Reckoning....a newsletter very familiar to Beltway and non Beltway critics of empire as well as libertarians of all stripes, left and right….)
Meanwhile, here’s another headline that caught my eye for a different reason:
“Can Obama Save the Planet?” asks Robert Roy Britt at MSN.
Quite a mandate. Not only is the president going to “fix the economy” (as though the economy were some wretched stray in need of neutering), heal racial tensions, win the “war on terror,” - now he’s going to save the planet too. Last time I looked a certain rabbi had that job…
Erk. How do journalists come up with this stuff?
Seniors Taking the Hit for Kleptocrats’ Sins
“Elderly Americans with fixed incomes are increasingly being compelled to make seemingly impossible decisions, Shapiro says, such as choosing between paying their housing bills or their medical costs.
More than 54% of all senior households “do not have sufficient financial resources to meet median projected expenses based on their current financial net worth, projected Social Security and pension incomes,” according to the Brandeis study.
Some seniors are moving in with their children because they can’t pay all the bills. Census reports show multigenerational families are on the rise in part, experts say, because of the housing and larger economic crisis. An estimated 3.6 million parents (not all of them elderly) live with their adult children, according to 2007 census data, up from 2.3 million in 2000, an increase of 57%. In those households, the number of parents 65 and older was up 62%.
Others are turning to reverse mortgages, loans available for seniors 62 and older that allow them to get cash based on the value of their home with no monthly mortgage payments. Such a loan is repaid out of proceeds from the eventual sale of the home or from the borrower’s estate after his or her death…”
More at MSN money.
Social Science - Intellectually Shoddy?
“I have observed that the closer one comes to the study of humans the shoddier the quality of the scientific evidence.”
Biologist Lynn Margulis at Pharyngula
Wittgenstein said much the same thing….
In the study of humans, the arts (poetry, stories, drama, journalism, biography, cultural criticism, history, and philosophy) have much more to say, say it better and say it more memorably than most of the relevant academic disciplines. Margulis is a proponent and co-developer of the modern version of the Gaia hypothesis (now regarded by some as a thesis) which can be said to view the Earth as a single organism. Arthur Conan Doyle, better known for his Sherlock Holmes stories, wrote a short story with that premise, When the World Screamed.
Obviously, its a thesis that environmentalists and communitarians will regard benevolently, and classical individualists at least somewhat suspiciously. But need it be so? After all, one man’s environmentalism is another man’s conservation; one man’s sustainability is another man’s thrift; one man’s cooperative is another man’s citizen republic…
I don’t mean to propose some kind of dishonest compromise between ideologies but just to rethink the confidence with which we assume that our actions cannot find a peaceable “way of going on” even when our ideologies cannot.
Murdoch Apologizes for NY Post Cartoon
“NEW YORK – New York Post Chairman Rupert Murdoch apologized Tuesday for a cartoon that critics said likened a violent chimpanzee shot dead by police to President Barack Obama.
In a statement published in the newspaper, Murdoch said he wanted to “personally apologize to any reader who felt offended, and even insulted.” He said the Post will work to be more sensitive.
Murdoch said the cartoon was intended only to “mock a badly written piece of legislation.”
The cartoon, which was published Wednesday, depicted the body of the bullet-riddled chimp Travis and two police officers. The caption said: “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill.”
Comment:
I didn’t see this until now, and I have to say it seems rather racist, even if the intent were not. Calling George Bush “chimp” is different for the simple reason there’s never been a history of white men being seriously categorized as monkeys, with all the social fall-out attendant. The slur was personal in that case - it had no group overtones. Black men, on the other hand, have had to contend with racial attacks in exactly this vein for more than a century, at the very least. There’s another angle to be considered. There are some people who find it incredibly enraging to have a black man as a president (I’m enraged by Obama too, but only because he’s a shill for the financial industry). Someone just might be incited to violence by inflammatory language and images..
Even if the cartoonist was only thinking of the animal that was shot and even though Obama didn’t write the stimulus bill, any editor with a modicum of sensitivity and knowledge of history, would have spiked it.
Of course, liberals can be just as guilty: these cartoons of Condi Rice seem to go over the line.
And remember the New Yorker cover last year showing Obama in Muslim attire, with Michelle Obama as a Black Panther terrorist and the US flag burning? Editor David Remnick argued that the left-liberal magazine of choice of the literati was obviously satirizing the right’s view of Obama, but pictures are very different from words, especially pictures unqualified by anything else. To even my well-trained artistic and literary eye, the picture was a bit of a shocker, given the context (election year, first African American president).
Why not err on the side of safety? How about shocking us with truthful reports about the financial ties between our pols and pundits and Wall Street? How about shocking us with a close examination of the so-called conspiracy theories (about 9-11, about the FED), that the mainstream media never touch. Maybe that would take a level of bravery, analytical ability, and intellectual honesty that questionable sketches don’t require.
Alan Keyes Denounces Obama As Abomination
Alan Keyes, the conservative who lost to Obama in the 2004 Illinois Senator’s race, is back again with a fiery denunciation of the new President as a “radical communist” and “abomination” who “isn’t even a natural born citizen” and once (presumably when he was young) even supported setting aside babies who escape abortion for killing (?).
Inflammatory stuff….or speaking truth to power…. depending on what you think of Keyes. Obviously, Fox loves him since they’ve been giving him a lot of air time on this, and the video is making a stir.
What is a “natural-born citizen”? It’s a citizen who meets one of the legal criteria to be considered, by right of birth, a US citizen”. It’s not simply where you were born. If you were born on foreign soil, you would still be a natural born citizen if at least one of your parents was a citizen who had lived in America for at least 5 years. Obama Senior was a Kenyan citizen. Obama’s mother was a natural born US citizen, although I’ve seen questions raised about that too.
There are also doubts if the marriage was a valid one under US law. Furthermore, Obama’s mother soon divorced his father and went on to marry another foreign national, with whom she moved to Indonesia.
The L. A. Times has a summary of the birth-certificate controversy, and here’s another at Salon, both of them from a critical point of view. I actually thought the issue had been laid to rest last year, but apparently not. Keyes and other members of the Independent party filed suit on November 13, 2008 (I was out of the country then, so I guess I missed it): Keyes v Bowen, Superior Court, Sacramento, 34-2008-80000096-cu-wm-gds.
Previous suits on this issue have been dismissed because the plaintiffs lacked “standing” - which is the legal requirement that a matter brought to the courts have some specific, concrete effect on the person bringing the suit. You can see why. Otherwise, people would be cluttering up the courts with cases filed on theoretical grounds. Keyes, a former presidential candidate, does have standing, although that might be affected by the fact that the election is now over.
Alan Keyes is a very passionate proponent of the traditional Catholic position on abortion, and from that view point nothing he said was really untoward, although some of his facts are still in question on the birth certificate issue and his “fire and brimstone” delivery will strike many people as either over the top, hilarious, or both. I also do think the word “abomination” was inflammatory and unnecessary. “Abomination” coming from an arch-conservative and statist carries Biblical overtones and will resonate with people who read Revelations (of John of Patmos, at the end of the Gospel) literally. Many of them will think of the “abomination of desolation” and the “false messiah” (Obama is incessantly dubbed a ‘messiah’ both by admirers and detractors) who precedes the Anti-Christ.
On second thoughts, though, I’m not sure critics have a right to question the language on this tape, since it was the Obama camp itself that went out of its way to play up the ‘messiah’ angle. They probably figured that if religious rhetoric worked for Bush, why not lure away some of Bush’s religious following by cloaking their establishment front man, Obama, in dressed-up “preacher talk.”
A lot of Obama’s rhetoric is simply PR, as my post “Wake Up and Smell the PR” (over the weekend), alleges, and so what can I say? Live by PR, die by PR……
And, what if Keyes prevails? Then we get President Biden:
20th Amendment, Clause 3:“3. If, at the time fixed for the beginning of the term of the President, the President elect shall have died, the Vice President elect shall become President. If a President shall not have been chosen before the time fixed for the beginning of his term, or if the President elect shall have failed to qualify, then the Vice President elect shall act as President until a President shall have qualified; and the Congress may by law provide for the case wherein neither a President elect nor a Vice President elect shall have qualified, declaring who shall then act as President, or the manner in which one who is to act shall be selected, and such person shall act accordingly until a President or Vice President shall have qualified.”
Here’s more on Obama’s birth certificate and some of the facts surrounding his Kenyan father’s citizenship (Kenya was part of the British empire at the time). Obama Jr.’s Kenyan citizenship would have expired in 1982, in the absence of any renunciation of US citizenship on his part. More from the same website on some of the groups behind the promotion of the citizenship issue. I’m not sure that the website actually gives any evidence that’s incontrovertible, though, beyond a replication of a photocopy of the birth certificate (?).
Most of the debunking seems to be of the order - ‘he says it’s a dirty tactic, so it’s not true’.…or, ‘look who’s behind the issue.’
He says, she says is not evidence. Its doesn’t go to the substance of the charges.
Other thoughts:
1. Wouldn’t a birth certificate be a minimum requirement for a candidate and wouldn’t intelligence have checked that out long before anyone was even under serious consideration for presidency? It would be incredible if it weren’t so, given that even rather lowly jobs these days require quite a bit of a background check.
2. Why is the certificate number blacked out?
3. Are the type and seal authentic?
4. What about the categorization of the
childfather as African?5. Why not just release the original and put an end to the issue?
More:
*Philip Berg (no relation to Nicholas Berg who was beheaded in Iraq), a 9-11 truther (not sure which of the many 9-11 groups that is), is one of the people who’d earlier filed suit. Berg also filed a RICO suit against Bush et. al. over 9-11.
*The eligibility issues was previously raised for Mitt Romney’s father George, who ran for president in 1968. The ruling was that he was eligible since his parents were US citizens, even though he (George Romney) was born in Mexico where they were missionaries. In 1964 another challenge was defeated when it was decided that Barry Goldwater, who was born in Arizona before it was a state, was eligible.
The Monopoly of Money and the Money of Monopolies
The Fed’s monopoly of money has meant not only monopoly (i.e “play” money that lacks fixed value, in contrast to gold), but also actual monopolies in every industry across the board. The reason is that bigger organizations can and do borrow more, paying back only in “cheapened” money. That lets them outlast their smaller competitors and lets them grow bigger and bigger….
The Fed’s monopoly of money also makes possible the rise of “pirate” states which can shift the tax inherent in rapidly cheapening money onto others:
1) internally, onto the backs of its savers
2) externally, onto the backs of other countries which have to use the monopoly currency. (e.g. emerging markets have to use the US$).
Here’s an excellent comment on that:
“Anyway, the appalling truth, which explains what’s happened in our own era, is that when Roosevelt managed to make the dollar the world’s currency, and the Federal Reserve began to be able to tax the rest of the world simply by expanding the money supply, what happened is that the whole American economy quietly started to shift from production-and-taxation mode, into “pirate” mode, “without anyone noticing!”
The global consequences have been enormous. It’s enabled American power (and the amount of military spending possible) to expand enormously, beyond what was sensible in the long term. It’s made foreign war seem cost-free to the American public, which in turn has caused a whole string of foreign lobbyists to try to buy American support and intervention in every corner of the world. It’s also made the American economic and political system very unstable in the long term, I suspect, because it’s now “addicted” to getting things cheap. Pirate economies (unlike the old boring taxation ones) tend to collapse, when they can no longer expand, or at least can no longer tap the outside world any more. It’s also gutted American industry and production, because once you could pay for things in paper dollars, it became cheaper to outsource everything possible and buy things from the third world. It’s had a very oligarchic effect on government and big business, since their access to easy credit enabled big organisations to buy up smaller ones on an unprecedented scale; and, finally, it’s been very corrupting, to get something for nothing in this way, for so long. It’s the true background reason for the predicament you’re in today.
And as I said, it’s created a world were “everything” is rigged against traditional conservatism. Currencies that are purely creations of government not only give unprecedented power “to” governments to interfere in all of our lives, but their inherently inflationary nature has created a world that rewards borrowers at the expense of savers. That is historically unprecedented, and an extraordinary thing to build a civilisation on. Should one be surprised that the culture associated with this civilisation should be one of personal self-indulgence, rather than one of self-restraint? That is the world that Roosevelt (and, later, Nixon) gave us…”
Comment by ‘Alexander’ on Rod Dreher’s Crunchy Con
Citigroup Targeted for Government Take-Over
“Today’s Wall Street Journal, New York Times and Financial Times all cite “sources” saying the US government is about to take a stake worth up to 40% of Citigroup, the Western world’s very largest financial group….”
Comment:
Well, we did predict that was likely only a few short posts ago: Media Hints at Bank Nationalization
Propaganda Nation: Obama As Marketer-in-Chief
Every so often, plain-speaking slips through…. even on the pages of the New York Times. Here’s a quote on the Geithner plan:
“As a whole then, the plan takes important steps in the right direction, but it is unclear in critical aspects. We do not know whether this is because the Treasury cannot afford to be too clear, or whether it is because the Treasury still has little idea about what to do. The coming days will tell.
Finally, the plan will need public and political support to be credible. This means that bankers and existing investors should not be seen as benefiting at the expense of the taxpayer, and that all the government investment should start paying off in the not-too-distant future. While the Treasury has resisted the urge to ceremonially sacrifice the bankers, this makes it even more imperative that President Obama’s political skills be used to sell the plan.”
Diamond, Kashyap and Rajan on the Geithner Plan, Freakonomics blog, NY Times, February 12, 2009
(The emphasis at the end of the excerpt is mine. The blog on which this post appeared is run by Steven D. Levitt, co-author of the best-selling, Freakonomics; the economists who are guest posting are University of Chicago Professors, Douglas Diamond and Anil Kashyap, and IMF economist, Raghuram Rajan)
Gold Double Top?
“When gold hit $1000 for the first time ever on Friday March 14th 2008, silver hit a high of $20.88 but now it can only muster about $14.50 when gold breached $1000 again. Why the dismal performance? The answer is because silver is a more recession sensitive metal compared to gold and decrease in industrial demand is acting as a dampener on the silver price. As said before, when the unemployment figures peak then and only then does silver become a multi-year buy. What is going on just now is a trader’s market.”
Mind-Body: Chaos Versus Order
“Chaos always defeats order because it is better organized,” Terry Pratchett, via Butler Shaffer.
Joel Stein - Media Monopoly
“I have never been so upset by a poll in my life. Only 22% of Americans now believe “the movie and television industries are pretty much run by Jews,” down from nearly 50% in 1964. The Anti-Defamation League, which released the poll results last month, sees in these numbers a victory against stereotyping. Actually, it just shows how dumb America has gotten. Jews totally run Hollywood.
How deeply Jewish is Hollywood? When the studio chiefs took out a full-page ad in the Los Angeles Times a few weeks ago to demand that the Screen Actors Guild settle its contract, the open letter was signed by: News Corp. President Peter Chernin (Jewish), Paramount Pictures Chairman Brad Grey (Jewish), Walt Disney Co. Chief Executive Robert Iger (Jewish), Sony Pictures Chairman Michael Lynton (surprise, Dutch Jew), Warner Bros. Chairman Barry Meyer (Jewish), CBS Corp. Chief Executive Leslie Moonves (so Jewish his great uncle was the first prime minister of Israel), MGM Chairman Harry Sloan (Jewish) and NBC Universal Chief Executive Jeff Zucker (mega-Jewish). If either of the Weinstein brothers had signed, this group would have not only the power to shut down all film production but to form a minyan with enough Fiji water on hand to fill a mikvah.
The person they were yelling at in that ad was SAG President Alan Rosenberg (take a guess). The scathing rebuttal to the ad was written by entertainment super-agent Ari Emanuel (Jew with Israeli parents) on the Huffington Post, which is owned by Arianna Huffington (not Jewish and has never worked in Hollywood.)
The Jews are so dominant, I had to scour the trades to come up with six Gentiles in high positions at entertainment companies. When I called them to talk about their incredible advancement, five of them refused to talk to me, apparently out of fear of insulting Jews. The sixth, AMC President Charlie Collier, turned out to be Jewish.
As a proud Jew, I want America to know about our accomplishment. Yes, we control Hollywood. Without us, you’d be flipping between “The 700 Club” and “Davey and Goliath” on TV all day.
So I’ve taken it upon myself to re-convince America that Jews run Hollywood by launching a public relations campaign, because that’s what we do best. I’m weighing several slogans, including: “Hollywood: More Jewish than ever!”; “Hollywood: From the people who brought you the Bible”; and “Hollywood: If you enjoy TV and movies, then you probably like Jews after all.”
I called ADL Chairman Abe Foxman, who was in Santiago, Chile, where, he told me to my dismay, he was not hunting Nazis. He dismissed my whole proposition, saying that the number of people who think Jews run Hollywood is still too high. The ADL poll, he pointed out, showed that 59% of Americans think Hollywood execs “do not share the religious and moral values of most Americans,” and 43% think the entertainment industry is waging an organized campaign to “weaken the influence of religious values in this country.”
That’s a sinister canard, Foxman said. “It means they think Jews meet at Canter’s Deli on Friday mornings to decide what’s best for the Jews.” Foxman’s argument made me rethink: I have to eat at Canter’s more often.
“That’s a very dangerous phrase, ‘Jews control Hollywood.’ What is true is that there are a lot of Jews in Hollywood,” he said. Instead of “control,” Foxman would prefer people say that many executives in the industry “happen to be Jewish,” as in “all eight major film studios are run by men who happen to be Jewish.”
But Foxman said he is proud of the accomplishments of American Jews. “I think Jews are disproportionately represented in the creative industry. They’re disproportionate as lawyers and probably medicine here as well,” he said. He argues that this does not mean that Jews make pro-Jewish movies any more than they do pro-Jewish surgery. Though other countries, I’ve noticed, aren’t so big on circumcision.
I appreciate Foxman’s concerns. And maybe my life spent in a New Jersey-New York/Bay Area-L.A. pro-Semitic cocoon has left me naive. But I don’t care if Americans think we’re running the news media, Hollywood, Wall Street or the government. I just care that we get to keep running them.”
– Joel Stein in the Los Angeles Times
Comment:
Joel Stein manages to do more for race relations in this clever-and-wise, self-deprecatory put-down of the strident Abe Foxman (of the Anti-Defamation League), a racial shake-down artist if ever there was once, than any number of pronouncements from the President or Attorney General.
A little humor, a little self-deprecation goes much further than righteous wrath in these things….
Meanwhile, showing how out of hand race/religion talk can get, here’s Juan Cole’s Informed Consent on a brouhaha over what some Palestinians and Israelis think is a secular/Jewish attack on Christianity,apparently in retaliation (preemptive?) for holocaust denial.
Propaganda Nation: Revival Time Is Here Again
Revival time is here again.
I can smell it. The nation’s preachers are out in full force. First, there was President Obama telling us we needed to have a great race healing. Now, Attorney-General Eric Holder comes out to tell us we’re still segregated. We work together, but then we live and play by ourselves in segregated groups. We’re all cowards when it comes to race, says Holder.
Holder might have had a point and so might Obama had they spoken at any other time…and in any other way. But frankly the only segregation that really matters now is the segregation of the political class and its clients from the rest of us. It doesn’t matter which neighborhood you live in, black, white, brown or parti-colored – they all spell b-r-o-k-e the same way.
Barack Obama is a likeable guy. Not for one minute do I believe that he’s doing anything but the best he can. He’s sincere.
That may just be the trouble. It seems to be the delusion of societies to think they lack precisely what they have too much of. C. S. Lewis said as much. Cultures awash with hedonism believe themselves puritanically repressed; societies long lost to any orthodoxy fear religious dogma; and now with race at the center of talk shows and college seminars, of gym etiquette and prison protocol, we’re told that more race-talk is what we need.
Is it?
Do we really need to spend more time spewing what we think of each other like inbred cousins on a Jerry Springer show? Jerry used to be my vacuum time, so I actually know how those things ended – in a scrum of tattoos and ripped shirts, fake hair and flying cusses.
If that’s togetherness, a bit of segregation might be more civil.
And a bit of proportion might be more sensible.
We can call it segregation today, but I wonder what people segregated a century ago would think about that. Students clustered in groups of their own choosing are not terrified men and women fleeing dogs and police batons.
Actually, you don’t need to go back a century. You can find the same thing today in prisons, at non-violent demonstrations, wherever people are rounded up and snatched out of their houses. The victims are black, brown and white. And they’re not where they are because we don’t talk enough about race in this country. They’re there because we don’t talk enough about the state.
That’s from my latest piece at Lew Rockwell.
Climate Czars’ Ultimatum: Clean Energy Or World War
“Jose Endundo, environment minister of Congo, said he recently visited huge Lake Victoria in nearby Uganda, at 80,000 square kilometers (31,000 square miles) a vital source for the Nile River, and learned the lake level had dropped 3 meters (10 feet) in the past six years — a loss blamed in part on warmer temperatures and diminishing rains.
In the face of such threats, “the rich countries have to give us a helping hand,” the African minister said.
But it was Stern, former chief World Bank economist, who on Saturday laid out a case to his stranded companions in sobering PowerPoint detail.
If the world’s nations act responsibly, Stern said, they will achieve “zero-carbon” electricity production and zero-carbon road transport by 2050 — by replacing coal power plants with wind, solar or other energy sources that emit no carbon dioxide, and fossil fuel-burning vehicles with cars running on electric or other “clean” energy.
Then warming could be contained to a 2-degree-Celsius (3.4-degree-Fahrenheit) rise this century, he said.
But if negotiators falter, if emissions reductions are not made soon and deep, the severe climate shifts and sea-level rises projected by scientists would be “disastrous.”
It would “transform where people can live,” Stern said. “People would move on a massive scale. Hundreds of millions, probably billions of people would have to move if you talk about 4-, 5-, 6-degree increases” — 7 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit. And that would mean extended global conflict, “because there’s no way the world can handle that kind of population move in the time period in which it would take place.”
Melting ice, rising seas, dwindling lakes and war — the stranded ministers had a lot to consider. But many worried, too, that the current global economic crisis will keep governments from transforming carbon-dependent economies just now. For them, Stern offered a vision of working today on energy-efficient economies that would be more “sustainable” in the future.
“The unemployed builders of Europe should be insulating all the houses of Europe,” he said.”
Bernie’s Web: Madoff Bought No Securities
Latest reports indicate that no stocks were actually purchased for customers:
“We have no evidence to indicate securities were purchased for customer accounts,” said Irving Picard, the court-appointed trustee overseeing the liquidation of Madoff’s assets.
At a meeting for investors, Picard detailed the history of the case and how claims will be processed. He said his office has received 2,350 claims so far and they expect the number of claims to double.”
Each of these claimants can now be covered for losses up to $500,000. For 5000 (conservative estimate) claims, that means there could be as much as $2.5 billion in pay-outs.
Propaganda Nation: Media Hints at Bank Nationalization
A fine observation on how to predict the future:
“We play close attention to air time given to so-called “Experts” and the way the media spins the information. If you know that our mainstream media is simply a licensed PR firm for the US government, you can get vital information which you can use in trading. Always ask yourself - What opinion are they trying to insert? What are they selling? What’s the underlying agenda?
The government uses the media to float policy before the public so it can digest it. By the time the government takes the action, most people not only anticipate it but are even asking for it.
In the past two weeks there have been countless debates, op-ed’s, and even opinion polls regarding bank nationalization. The popular opinion among the establishments “Experts” is that nationalizing the banks may be the only way. Even Alan Greenspan, a LIBERTARIAN, recently said that it would be a good idea. It’s coming folks! It’s what the establishment wants. (Sidenote: They may not actually use the word nationalization, even if thats exactly what they do)
Below is the long term view of BAC and C. These stocks have made multi decade lows. Other stock charts which looked similar to these were Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman, Bear Stearns….”
Thanks to Charting Stocks.
Recall that Nouriel Rubini (whom I consider the “designated doom and gloomer” - has come out suggesting a failure of a government (sovereign bank) in the offing and that recently Goldman Sachs called gold $1000 (and it’s come to pass in the last 24 hours)….we can be doubly certain of a big bank failure to come.
Currency Wars: Dollar Versus Franc
“For several months there has been a tendency by Jim Sinclair and others to dismiss the US dollar rally as technical short covering. Now there is a tendency to dismiss the fall of the Swiss franc as dirty tricks among large hedge funds. These are interpretations that trivialize the reality that is unfolding. What we are witnessing is financial warfare, and the USA Empire has several distinct advantages over every other player: 1) The US dollar is the world reserve currency 2) US debts are denominated in US dollars 3) The US Fed and US Treasury act as one and are part of the USA Empire 5) The US Empire has a lot of experience manipulating markets and the SEC, SPIC, rating agencies and NYMEX/COMEX are members 6) Don’t forget about the US military.
Back to the war:
Over the last several years
Jim Willie notes that Putin struts into Davos and the Chinese delegation follows suit. He notes that
Clearly the USA Empire does not want there to be any viable fiat currency alternative to the US dollar (or gold). There will be no escape, save one, and that will be gold.
Just look at the gold holdings for various central banks [Russell]. What this tells me is that the US dollar will benefit more than any other currency if gold explodes. My contention is that the USA Empire will take away the German gold if they can, and the rest of the Swiss gold a well. Read this article for more details: [Bressler].
The only way out of the unfolding mess is to devalue the dollar against gold, probably by a factor of 10 or more, and then breathe confidence back into the system by linking the dollar to gold. I don’t believe that an alliance of other countries can pull this off with the USA Empire fighting to dominate the next world order.”
Financial Follies: The New KKK
“Calling the $12 trillion giveaway to bankers a “subprime crisis” makes it appear that bleeding-heart liberals got Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into trouble by insisting that these public-private institutions make irresponsible loans to the poor. The party line is, “Blame the victim.” But we know this is false. The bulk of bad loans are concentrated in the largest banks. It was Countrywide and other banksters that led the irresponsible lending and brought heavy-handed pressure on Fannie Mae. Most of the nation’s smaller, local banks didn’t make such reckless loans. The big mortgage shops didn’t care about loan quality, because they were run by salesmen. The Treasury is paying off the gamblers and billionaires by supporting the value of bank loans, investments and derivative gambles, leaving the Treasury in debt….”
Michael Hudson on the new KKK - Korporatist-Krisismongering-Kleptocrats
Gold: Who’s Got It; Who Hasn’t
The US has 8,135 tonnes….64.4% of reserves
Germany — 3,412… …64.4% of reserves
IMF — 3,217… … …(1)
France — 2,508… … …58.7%
Italy — 2,451… … …61.9%
Switzerland — 1,040… …23.8%
Japan — 765.2… …1.9% …(a potential gold-buyer)
China — 600.0… …0.9% …(should be a big buyer)
Russia — 495. 9… …2.2% …(is a buyer)
Taiwan — 422.2… …3.6% …(should be a buyer)
India — 357.7… …3.0% …(should be a buyer)
UK — 310.3… … …14.5% …(sold most of its gold at the low price)
Saudi Arabia — 143.0… …11.4% (should buy gold)
South Africa — 124.4… …9.0%
Australia — 79.8… … …6.3%From Richard Russell, The Dow Theory Letters.
So there you have it. Among countries, Italy, France, Germany, and the US have the most gold. Switzerland has a third of what they have.
The UK, South Africa, Australia, and Saudi Arabia are next with about 1/5th - 1/10th as much.
Russia and Japan have only a small percent in gold.
China and India have even less.
What do most Asians have?
Debt (treasuries and dollars) from the US.
Neo-colonialism anyone?
Rule of the Kleptocrats: Senior US Officials Involved In Iraqi Looting
“In what could turn out to be the greatest fraud in US history, American authorities have started to investigate the alleged role of senior military officers in the misuse of $125bn (£88bn) in a US -directed effort to reconstruct Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein. The exact sum missing may never be clear, but a report by the US Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) suggests it may exceed $50bn, making it an even bigger theft than Bernard Madoff’s notorious Ponzi scheme.
In one case, auditors working for SIGIR discovered that $57.8m was sent in “pallet upon pallet of hundred-dollar bills” to the US comptroller for south-central Iraq, Robert J Stein Jr, who had himself photographed standing with the mound of money. He is among the few US officials who were in Iraq to be convicted of fraud and money-laundering.
Despite the vast sums expended on rebuilding by the US since 2003, there have been no cranes visible on the Baghdad skyline except those at work building a new US embassy and others rusting beside a half-built giant mosque that Saddam was constructing when he was overthrown. One of the few visible signs of government work on Baghdad’s infrastructure is a tireless attention to planting palm trees and flowers in the centre strip between main roads. Those are then dug up and replanted a few months later.
Iraqi leaders are convinced that the theft or waste of huge sums of US and Iraqi government money could have happened only if senior US officials were themselves involved in the corruption. In 2004-05, the entire Iraq military procurement budget of $1.3bn was siphoned off from the Iraqi Defence Ministry in return for 28-year-old Soviet helicopters too obsolete to fly and armoured cars easily penetrated by rifle bullets. Iraqi officials were blamed for the theft, but US military officials were largely in control of the Defence Ministry at the time and must have been either highly negligent or participants in the fraud….”
Patrick Cockburn in The Independent.
Comment:
Maybe now some liberal interventionists will wake up and smell the Ponzi….
Lew Rockwell On The Siamese Twins In DC
“National socialism and international socialism are in close competition… It’s a hard truth for Americans to face, that neither team in Washington is going to guard what we love the most. That is something we are going to have to face. Liberty is for the citizens to guard themselves.”
Time Magazine Hits The Kleptocrats….And Misses
If you ever wanted to see propaganda in action, check Time magazine’s list of the 25 people responsible for the financial collapse upon us:
“Twenty Five People To Blame For the Financial Crisis.”
Comment:
Where to begin?
For starters: I’m not a fan of “Top 40s” listings except for the Top Forties, i.e., for popular trends, celeb fashion faux, Red Book girlie advice and such like. At ostensibly news-heavy publications (then again, perhaps that’s rather an ambitious term for a coffee-table glossy like Time) you’d expect at least a pretense at deep thinking. Apparently not….
Second: Why 25? There’s so much blame to go around that you either make a list of hundreds (how about the Misfortune Five Hundred?) or whittle it down to the Big Ten…
Third: We expected Bob Rubin to be given a free pass, since the media has always had a peculiar love affair with this slippery guy, and we expected the knee-jerk over-emphasis on Republicans, but George Bush is more responsible than Alan Greenspan (Fed Chairman under Clinton and Bush) ??
Whatever you think about Bush, there’s one thing quite clear - the man was not an intellectual powerhouse…nor was he a shrewd tactician.
Do you really think he was anything more than a mouthpiece…..and probably a fairly sincere mouthpiece…when it came to economic and financial issues?
Now, before I venture any further analysis, I want some honest reader response here. Since I am being brave and taking the personal and financial hits that go with public bloggery, you dear readers, must do your part as good citizens and raise your hands (and voices) in public. Tell me what you think this list means and how and why it was cooked up.
And here I give you an original rajivanation:
Not with silence and stealth are republics defended - but so they are lost
Police State Chronicles: Another Win For The Un-Free Web?
The latest on the BlockShopper -Jones Day trademark infringement case:
Last April, startup real estate news site BlockShopper ran the headline “New Jones Day Lawyer Spends $760K on Sheffield” with a link to the bio for the lawyer in question—Jacob Tiedt—from the Web site of his law firm, Jones Day. In July, it ran a similar item about a home purchase by Dan Malone Jr., another Jones Day lawyer, with the link to his Jones Day bio.
BlockShopper was following standard operating procedure by linking to publicly available Web sites. But Jones Day got mad. The law firm (a big one, at 2,300 lawyers) has never publicly said why it sued; maybe the powers that be there thought the posts compromised their lawyers’ privacy. Housing records are public documents, but the Web turns public into accessible, and the firm presumably wasn’t thrilled about having its attorneys’ home purchases broadcast. Jones Day demanded that BlockShopper remove the items. When BlockShopper refused, the firm sued the 15-staff startup for trademark infringement. Jones Day’s legal theory was that BlockShopper’s link would trick readers into thinking that Jones Day was affiliated with the real estate site.This may seem far-fetched, but the judge in the case didn’t think so, and that led to a settlement this week that will require BlockShopper to change the way it creates links. And that’s not a good signal to send about the Web, where linking has been an unrestricted currency available to all….”
More at Slate, by Wendy Davis.
Comment:
I’ve had mixed thoughts about this.
Bill Cara Predicts Massive Rebellion
Canadian trader/pundit/activist and all around good citizen, Bill Cara, isn’t one given to apocalyptic statements, but here he is sounding the fire alarm and predicting a massive rush for the exits on Barack Obama’s watch:
February 13, 2009 by Bill Cara
[5:25am ET] I believe that Humungous Bank and Broker (HB&B) is purposefully and systematically destroying the stock-broking, insurance-broking and mortgage-broking industries and that nothing good will come of this process. Because the principle of independent research, objective analysis and free choice is being increasingly denied us, the public is becoming a bank chattel. At some point, there will be a massive rebellion. I believe this event will occur on President Obama’s watch.
At the end of the day, the President and HB&B will see they have gone down the wrong road. That will become obvious when depositors cause runs on the banks, withdrawing their paper money to exchange it in the streets for gold and silver.
The bankers’ scam of precious metals futures that fail to deliver anything but fiat money and their phony derivatives-based precious metals exchange traded funds (ETFs) like GLD and SLV will crash at some point as investors increasingly put their faith in physical money, not in the credit system or the US Dollar.
I implore President Obama to reject the advice he is getting from bankers, and to listen to the anti-bank lobby before the people take matters, like money, into their own hands.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_run
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebellion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exchange-traded_fund
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/fiatmoney.aspAnd this from Ned Schmidt, of the Value View Gold Report:
”The era of monetary madness and “saw dust” economic policies on the part of governments that we have so long feared appears to have arrived. Again, it seems the Gold Bugs have the intellectual high ground.
Rarely do we look to politicians for honest statements. Perhaps for that reason, recent words of a Chinese official were so refreshing. The following from the Financial Times on Thursday says it all,
“Luo Ping, a director-general at the China Banking Regulatory Commission, said after a speech in
“‘Except for US Treasuries, what can you hold?’ he asked. ‘Gold? You don’t hold Japanese government bonds or
“‘We hate you guys [
From Byron King: Own gold. How much? For now, the more, the better. Own coins, if you can get ’em. Own bullion, if you can get it. Own shares in good miners with reserves in the ground while you can buy ’em. Just get some gold.”
Mark Hulbert: When sentiment is this strong, gold usually goes down.
Full Disclosure: I have no financial connection what so ever to any of the newsletters or investment gurus I’m quoting here or any where else on this site. I pick the material solely on how useful it seems to me. Doug Casey (whom I quoted in an earlier post) is an associate or partner(?) of Bill Bonner of Agora Inc., with whom I wrote my last book, but beyond the book and my PT work for Agora on Bonner’s columns/the book during November 2005 - October 2007, I have no financial dealings with either of them or their employees, affiliates, or partners.
Are You A Real Libertarian Or A Corporate Libertarian?
“In fact, progressives very often get the story quite wrong in characterizing issues as “government versus market.” Certainly the current financial crisis provides an obvious example of such confusion. No one was really pushing for “deregulation” in the sense of getting the government completely out of the market.
The financial industry’s agenda was to get one-sided deregulation. They wanted to preserve the government security blanket of “too big to fail,” while removing prudential controls that limited their ability to take on risk. In effect, what the financial industry wanted (and got) was government insurance that they didn’t have to pay for. This surely is not the libertarian agenda; this is the agenda of a politically powerful industry (with allies in both major parties) that will get everything it can out of Washington.
In short, I would like to see more of the anti-corporate side of the libertarian agenda. There may be many areas in which libertarians and progressives take opposing positions, but there are many areas in which we should have common ground. I am not interested in keeping the scorecard. I just want to see libertarians be as aggressive in confronting the interventions that support corporate power as they were in confronting Social Security.”
Excellent piece on corporate libertarianism by Dean Baker at Cato.
Obviously, I think the general thrust of libertarianism is more right than that of socialism, but it’s sadly true that libertarians are usually blind to the anti-individualism and corruption of businesses but alert to the same thing in the state.
Hampshire College’s Brave Anti-Occupation Students
“In the last 3 years I have several times declared hopefully that young people are going to lead us; and I have been premature. I did it at Columbia University in an article for New York Magazine in ‘07, I did it at Brandeis University in The American Conservative that year too. On both occasions I was blown away by the diversity of the progressive student movement on campus: that identity politics meant nothing to these kids; Jews intermingled with Muslims and Asians in a cohesive manner, and no one gave a s**t.Well now I am saying the same thing about the Hampshire divestment and betting that I will be right. This is a shot that will be heard ’round the nation. It is no wonder that Dershowitz called the students in a threatening manner as soon as they had taken the action: Dershowitz and I recognize the huge symbolic meaning of this stroke. For years divestment had been stopped dead by then-President Lawrence Summers’s attack on it at Harvard, saying it was “antisemitic in effect if not intent,” or words similar, which caused rightthinking gentile faculty to steer away from the issue like a plague. Then it was stopped among the Protestant churches by endless legal wrangling, again with the threat of being labelled antisemitic hanging over their heads.
Those Protestant churches tabled and couldn’t adopt simple measures that limited the divestment to companies doing business in the Occupation! The evil occupation, with its crazy settlers and pogroms–and that’s all the Hampshire initiative applies to, the companies that helped to kill Rachel Corrie! So let us be clear, This is a huge moral stroke. And who is responsible: not Protestant churches or Middle East Studies professors, but an organization of committed students, many of them Jews, who will not be intimidated by anyone, their own administration or Alan Dershowitz. Bless them and honor them!
A few other observations must be made. According to one of those students, in this comment on Indypendent, when Hampshire College first divested from Apartheid South Africa years ago, “the Administration did what it could to distance itself from the situation then, too, with then-President Adele Simmons calling it a ‘big non-issue.’” And today when you visit Hampshire, they brag on that hammer blow! And this will happen again. We and Hampshire will look back on the bravery and independence of Hampshire students as we look back on the bravery of the Wilmot Proviso, or of Harriet Beecher Stowe, or of Congressman Abraham Lincoln when he introduced anti-slavery legislation in Congress in 1848– in these hammer blows of free and unafraid people, others were summoned to the great task at hand!
Again: Dershowitz knows this as well as I do. He is a great advocate. He knows he must stop this now, and blacken the Hampshire initiative, so that no signal goes out to others that It is OK to do this thing. But Dershowitz is too late. The students hung up on him and laughed. Generational forces are at work. He is 70 years old and is advocating for the evil settlement program that even the American government knows is a disaster, that even Gary Ackerman, the Israel Lobby’s main man in the House, or one of them, has lately condemned as settler “pogroms” (language first employed by me, then later by Jeffrey Goldberg).
Dershowitz employed a traditional Jewish intimidation tactic, calling the Jews and reminding them of their loyalty to the Jewish family. But it didn’t work. These were Hannah-Arendt-Baruch-Spinoza Jews who feel loyalty first to the human family…”
From PhilipWeiss.org.
Comment:
Surely Jewish people aren’t the only ones who employ the “intimidation tactic of reminding people of their group loyalties”? Seems like I hear some of that from Indian friends whenever I write anything that “makes India/Indians look bad” to the West. It’s a natural concern and normally, I wouldn’t leap to the conclusion that there was “intimidation” involved at all, but knowing Dershowitz’s extremely abrasive ad hominem style of argument, there probably was in this case.
Jay Leno Plugs Barry Dyke’s “Pirates of Manhattan”
“Leno is referring to the fact that Barry Dyke predicted a major collapse of the U.S. financial system in June 2007 way before everyone else when “The Pirates of Manhattan” was first published.
Hampton, NH (PRWEB) February 5, 2009 — The Tonight Show host Jay Leno recently stated that author “Barry Dyke called it!”. Leno is referring to the fact that Barry Dyke predicted a major collapse of the U.S. financial system in June 2007 way before everyone else when “The Pirates of Manhattan” was first published….”
Comment:
Way to go, Barry! Good friend, Barry Dyke (how’s that for name-dropping?) proves that “doing it my way” works. Barry self-published and made his book a best-seller all on his own - sans major reviewers or promoters. I’m glad to be one of those who recognized how important Barry’s work was - especially on Goldman Sachs, where he beat me to the punch getting a book out. (My own writing on GS in “Mobs” got cut out for many reasons). Knowing what a hard slog it’s been for him, I couldn’t be happier to see it. The major media is finally picking up on the people who really were telling it like it is. Barry’s book was 10 years in the writing and he struggled on with it despite major personal setbacks that he describes in his introduction - everything from bankruptcy to divorce to surgery…
Check the book out at the Pirates of Manhattan website.
Police-State Chronicles: Your Medical Records At Their Finger-Tips
“The bill’s health rules will affect “every individual in the United States” (445, 454, 479). Your medical treatments will be tracked electronically by a federal system. Having electronic medical records at your fingertips, easily transferred to a hospital, is beneficial. It will help avoid duplicate tests and errors.
But the bill goes further. One new bureaucracy, the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, will monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is doing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost effective. The goal is to reduce costs and “guide” your doctor’s decisions (442, 446). These provisions in the stimulus bill are virtually identical to what Daschle prescribed in his 2008 book, “Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis.” According to Daschle, doctors have to give up autonomy and “learn to operate less like solo practitioners.”
Betsey McCaughey at Bloomberg.com
Sunny Maravillosa has a commentary on this that sums up my own feeling: why do we have to give up control of our bodies and health to the allopathic cartel and the healthocrats (thanks for those neat labels, Sunni)?
Ivan Ilich the Austrian philosopher and priest made a similar point in Medical Nemesis (also known as Limits to Medicine), first published in 1975. llich argued that the medicalization of even normal processes in life had led to a vast amount of iatrogenic (doctor/drug/hospital induced) sickness in modern industrial societies. His criticism of medicine was part of his more extensive attack against the way society institutionalizes activities that people can better do for themselves.
He also attacked formal education and called for networks of peer learning. Today, that sounds uncannily like the world-wide web…
Global Games: Bio-tech Hype Makes Money For Agribusinesses
From the Center for Food Safety, a press release:
GENETICALLY MODIFIED CROPS FEED BIOTECH GIANTS, NOT THE POOR
Contacts: Bill Freese, Center for Food Safety, 202-547-9359 (North America); Nnimmo Bassey, Friends of the Earth Nigeria, +234 80 37 27 43 95 (Africa); Helen Holder, Friends of the Earth Europe Brussels: +32 474 857 638 (Europe)Biotech Companies Exploit Food Crisis by Raising GM Seed and Pesticide Prices, Record Profits Projected Biotech Propaganda Distracts Attention from Real Solutions for Small Farmers
Washington D.C., February 11, 2009 - A new report released today by the Center for Food Safety and Friends of the Earth International warned that genetically modified (GM) crops are benefiting biotech food giants instead of the worldís hungry population, which is projected to increase to 1.2 billion by the year 2025 due to the global food crisis.
The report explains how biotech firms like Monsanto are exploiting the dramatic rise in world grain prices that are responsible for the global food crisis by sharply increasing the prices of GM seeds and chemicals they sell to farmers, even as hundreds of millions go hungry.
The findings of the report support a comprehensive United Nationsí assessment of world agriculture ñ the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) - which in 2008 concluded that GM crops have little potential to alleviate poverty and hunger in the world. IAASTD experts recommended instead low-cost, low-input agroecological farming methods.
“GM crops are all about feeding the biotech giants, not the worldís poor,” said Nnimmo Bassey, executive director of Friends of the Earth Nigeria and chair of Friends of the Earth International.
“GM seeds and the pesticides used with them are much too expensive for Africaís small farmers. Those who promote this technology in developing countries are completely out of touch with reality,” he added.
“U.S. farmers are facing dramatic increases in the price of GM seeds and the chemicals used with them,” said Bill Freese, science policy analyst at the US-based Center for Food Safety and co-author of the report. “Farmers in any developing country that welcomes Monsanto and other biotech companies can expect the same fate - sharply rising seed and pesticide costs, and a radical decline in the availability of conventional seeds,” he added.
GM seeds cost from two to over four times as much as conventional, non-GM seeds, and the price disparity is increasing. From 80% to over 90% of the soybean, corn and cotton seeds planted in the U.S. are GM varieties. Thanks to GM trait fee increases, average U.S. seed prices for these crops have risen by over 50% in just the past two to three years.
Exploitation of the food crisis has been extremely profitable for Monsanto, by far the dominant player in GM seeds. Goldman Sachs recently projected that Monsanto’s net income (after taxes) would triple from $984 million to $2.96 billion from 2007 to 2010.
The exorbitant cost of GM seeds is not the only problem. The vast majority of GM crops are not grown by or destined for the world’s poor, but instead are soybeans and corn used to feed animals, generate biofuels, or produce highly processed food products consumed mostly in rich countries.
The report documents that nearly 90% of the global area planted GM crops in 2008 was found in just 6 countries with highly industrialized, export-oriented agricultural sectors in North and South America, with the U.S., Argentina and Brazil responsible for 80% of GM crops. The United States alone produced 50% of the world’s GM crops in 2008.
Despite more than a decade of hype, the biotechnology industry has not introduced a single GM crop with increased yield, enhanced nutrition, drought-tolerance or salt-tolerance. In fact, the biotechnology industry’s own figures show that 85% of all GM crop acreage worldwide in 2008 was planted with herbicide-tolerant crops. Herbicide-tolerant GM crops - chiefly Monsanto’s Roundup Ready varieties used with Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide - have increased overall use of chemical weed killers. Roundup prices in the U.S. have more than doubled in the past two years.
Meanwhile, biotech propaganda has obscured the huge potential of low-cost agroecological and organic techniques to increase food production and alleviate hunger in developing countries. The report mentions several such projects, such as push-pull maize farming, practiced by 10,000 farmers in east Africa. The enormously successful push-pull system controls weed and insect pests without chemicals, increases maize production, and raises the income of smallholder farmers….”
More at the Center for Food Safety
Rights Or Entitlement?
”I feel entitled to be treated fairly. I feel entitled to respect. I feel entitled to warmth and maybe even love. How childish is that? I mean . . . really! Is a lizard entitled to fairness? A lion? …….Where is it written in the rules of the universe that we humans are special and can step on bugs and eat hamburgers, yet expect to be magically spared these indignities where our own precious lives are concerned?…”
Non Entity at Strike the Root.
Comment:
I sympathize with anyone impatient with the language of rights today. It often seems as if practically anything can become a right, if voiced with enough exuberance.
But we shouldn’t forget that there’s a reason for this development. “Rights talk,” as scholar Mary Ann Glendon called it, didn’t develop in response to ‘nature,’ as NonEntity implies here. It grew up as a response to corporate power. And that’s a creation of the state and the law…
Correction: Glendon herself argues that this “rights” language comes out of the centrality of property rights to rights language in the US tradition - which makes the individual rights-holder more important than the “public good,” as envisaged in the rights language in Europe, which stems from Rousseau,
I think she blames it on John Locke - a move I don’t quite agree with… (more to come)…
An American Medley
Over at Independent Indian, my friend and Hayek protege Suby Roy tries to sum up US history in a hit parade:
When Johnny Comes Marching Home, Summertime, and I Got You, Babe make his list.
Personally, I think there’s one song there that sums up everything: It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue
“The highway is for gamblers, better use your sense.
Take what you have gathered from coincidence.
The empty-handed painter from your streets
Is drawing crazy patterns on your sheets.
The sky, too, is folding under you
And it’s all over now, Baby Blue….”If that doesn’t sum up our season of madness in the markets, I don’t know what does. With just a little tinkering, it makes perfect sense today:
“The empty handed banker from Wall Street
Is drawing crazy patterns on your balance sheets
Tarp 2 is folding under you….
etc. etc.
You get the picture.
Advice From A Speculator
From Doug Casey:
“It’s too early to buy real estate right now, although a fixed-rate mortgage could go a long way toward offsetting bad timing. It would let you make your money on the depreciation of the mortgage, as opposed to the appreciation of the asset. Still, I wouldn’t touch housing with a 10-foot pole – there’s been immense overbuilding, immense inventory. And people forget: a house isn’t an investment, it’s a consumer good. It’s like a toothbrush, suit of clothes, or a car; it just lasts a little bit longer. An investment – say, a factory – can create new wealth. Houses are strictly expense items. Forget about buying the things for the unpaid mortgage; before this is over, you’ll buy them for back taxes. But then you’ll have to figure out how to pay the utilities and maintenance. The housing bear market has a long way to run.
The U.S. Dollar and the Day of Reckoning
It’s very hard to predict the timing on these things. The financial markets and the economy itself are going up and down like an elevator with a lunatic at the controls. My feeling is that the fate of the dollar is sealed. People forget that there are 6 or 8 trillion dollars – who knows how many – outside of the United States, and they’re hot potatoes. Foreigners are going to recognize that the dollar is an unbacked smiley-face token of a bankrupt government. My advice is to get out of dollars. In fact, take advantage of the ultra-low interest rates; borrow as many dollars as you can long-term and at a fixed rate and put the money into something tangible, because the dollar is going to reach its intrinsic value.The Recession
This isn’t a recession, it’s a depression. A depression is a period when most people’s standard of living falls significantly. It can also be defined as a time when distortions and misallocations of capital are liquidated, as well as a time when the business cycle climaxes. We don’t have time here, unfortunately, to explore all that in detail. But this is the real thing. And it’s going to drag on much longer than most people think. It will be called the Greater Depression, and it’s likely the most serious thing to happen to the country since its founding. And not just from an economic point of view, but political, sociological, and military.For a number of reasons, wars usually occur in tough economic times. Governments always like to find foreigners to blame for their problems, and that includes other countries blaming the U.S. In the end, I wouldn’t be surprised to see violence, tax revolt, or even parts of the country trying to secede. I don’t think I can adequately emphasize how serious this thing is likely to get. Nothing is certain, but it seems to me the odds are very, very high for an absolutely world-class disaster.
Gold’s Performance in 2008
The big surprise to me is how low gold is right now. It’s well known that even if we use the government’s statistics, gold would have to reach $2,500 an ounce to match its 1980 high. I don’t necessarily buy the theories that the government and some bullion banks are suppressing the price of gold. Of course, with everything else going on, the last thing the powers-that-be want is a stampede into gold. That would be the equivalent of shooting a gun in a crowded theatre; it could set off a real panic. But at the same time, I don’t see how they can effectively suppress the price. Either way, the good news is that gold is about the cheapest thing out there. Remember, it’s the only financial asset that’s not simultaneously someone else’s liability. So I would take advantage of today’s price and buy more gold. I know I’m doing just that.Gold Volatility
Gold will remain volatile but trend upward. I don’t pay attention to daily fluctuations, which can be caused by any number of trivial things. Gold is going to the moon in the next couple of years.Gold Stocks
Last year, it seemed to me that we were still climbing the Wall of Worry and that the next stage would be the Mania. But what I failed to read was the public’s indirect involvement through the $2 trillion in hedge funds. On top of that, while the prices of gold stocks weren’t that high, the number of shares out and the number of companies were increasing dramatically. Finally, the costs of mining and exploration rose immensely, which limited their profitability.The good news is that relative to the price of gold, gold stocks are at their cheapest level in history. I still have my gold stocks and the fact is, I’m buying more. I’m not selling, because I think we’re starting another bull market. And this one is going to be much steeper and much quicker than the last one. I’m not a perma-bull on any asset class, but in this case I’m forced to go into the gold stocks. They’re the cheapest asset class out there, and the one with the highest potential….”
So says Doug Casey, well-known international speculator.
Comment:
My two cents on this is:
1. Real estate is not yet a good buy in, say, Marbella, where an international speculator like Casey is likely to be waiting for luxury property to come down.
But that doesn’t translate into you, joe-no-speculator, passing on a bargain in the exact place you want right here in the US.
Make sure the house is a solid building (prefer brick and stone to wood, for example), has no structural defects, is priced well within your means, has something unique to qualify it as attractive even in a glut of housing units (no McMansions, no cookie- cutter condos no bleak developments).
The house could be historic, have lovely architectural details, be on water (lake or bay or ocean front), be in a very busy or affluent section of town, or be placed where you know for sure new infrastructure or transport is coming in) - or, better yet, it could be all of the above.
If it has a rental unit attached, a convertible garage, or can be divided into two units, all the better - you can get someone else to pay the mortgage or earn an extra income.
Whittle down the price as much as you can (yes, that means taking advantage of the other fellow’s bad luck ).
Pay cash and you’ll get it even lower…
Do you have to be a millionaire? Not by any means. If you hold any kind of job beyond minimum wage, know how to save, can put down about 10,000 bucks - you can buy now.
Just make sure that rentals are holding up well where you buy….or that you can find Section Eight tenants for it.
2. I agree with Casey that gold is underperforming. I don’t know why. But it means something. And what it could mean is a correction. (Update: I mean a correction in the short term. Long term, we are in a bull market in gold).
3. On the forex front, the dollar may be going down long term, but anything can happen in the short term. To my novice eye, the dollar’s shown a lot of strength, bouncing back quickly from any dip below 80 on the weighted index and now sitting up at around 86. I’d look for a longer downturn only after 90.
***
Publishing Perils: McGraw Hill Hearts S&P
As soon as I invent a new category - publishing perils - I get stuff leaping out all over the place for it.
Here’s a particularly lovely one, from Eddy Elfenbein:
“Yesterday, Jesse Eisinger reported that McGraw Hill dropped Barry Ritholtz’s book, Bailout Nation. Barry said that it’s due to his harsh treatment of the ratings agencies (Standard & Poor’s is owned by McGraw Hill).
McGraw Hill says that it’s dropping the book due to editorial conflicts. This strikes me as an exceedingly lame excuse. Jesse quotes Barry, “All the conversations I had with them, they made apparent this was all about S&P’s role as sister company.”
Read the rest of this post at “Crossing Wall Street.”
(Barry Ritholz is the writer of the popular macroeconomic blog, “The Big Picture.”
And here’s the original post at The Big Picture.
Gold Up But Dollar Up Too
“THE SPOT PRICE of physical gold bullion touched an 8-session high early in London on Wednesday, turning lower from $927.50 an ounce as world stock markets slipped following Wall Street’s shock 5% slump overnight.
Treasury-bond prices rose despite a record $21 billion auction of new 10-year notes due today, while crude oil slipped below $38 per barrel.
The Bank of England said in its latest quarterly Inflation Report that the
Business confidence across the 16-nation Eurozone worsened for the 18-month running in Dec. according to the Ifo Institute in Munich, falling to the survey’s lowest reading since it began in 1993.
“We have to be cautious on gold short term,” says Phil Smith in his latest technical chart analysis for Reuters India.
“The near term signals are still bullish but are looking like they may turn. Overall still a bullish chart, but with near-term downside risk.”
Comment:
GSax has been saying gold will be up above $1000 in 3 months. Considering that it’s around 900 plus and that over spring it often moves up, they didn’t need Nostradamus to come up with that. Not when they have their guys stashed in every corner of government.
Some people might still think a 15% upside is a good deal. But I think buying on the dips is a better idea. I’m still of the school of thought that the price may have to go way back…maybe even below 700…. before it resumes the next bull leg.
But that’s just my no-account opinion.
MindBody: The Yoga Of Inaction
The Yoga of Inaction
i
I write in praise of non-doing, in a country full of doers and deeds doing.
Winter’s the best time to practice my yoga of inaction, America
Come, twist yourself into a lotus and hum the sacred mantra, zzzzz.
At least, you will be doing no harm.
ii
Out there in Washington, the doers are armed and dangerous with verbs of mass action:
They tell us they will
lower…
raise…
save…
fix…
create…
fight….
bail-out….
pump up…
shut-down…
flood…
redeem…
destroy…..
And they won’t even rest on the seventh day.
iii
In the grammar of our nation, the mood is imperative,
the voice active.
The tense is future.
(And our future is tense).
The American in me cheers.
Wrongs will be righted, the good fight will be fought.
The Indian in me sighs and longs for the passive.
He remembers the past.
iv
Rights can go wrong and good fights go bad, warns the devious old fakir in the corner.
Eli’s Comin’, hisses the 60’s child, shaking her long hair out of her eyes.
It’s Barack, I say, not Eli.
It’s all the same, she says.
The cards say….a broken heart…
v
Reality’s a rope trick.
You think you see a snake, it’s only an old rope.
Just long enough
and fat enough
to swing fools on the end of it.
vi
This is a time for hibernating, for dreaming vegetative dreams in the dark.
We’ve had too many revolutions, too many slogans
Time now for cryptic words, opaque silences.
For darkness and recession.
The cycle must fall.
Lila Rajiva
Copyright February, 2009
More Madoff: Bernie’s Web Of Deceit (Updated Feb 12, 2009)
I keep wanting to look up every other money laundering scheme I can think of (like BCCI), because that’s what the Madoff case reminds me of.
First there’s the unbelievable extent of the fraud - all over the US and Europe as well as Asia.
Here is a chart showing the range of groups hit.
Here’s another, also from muckety.
And this is the Wall Street Journal’s list of Madoff clients.
Then there is its brazenness - it seems to have burgeoned right under the noses of regulators. In fact, the regulators seem to have been complicit in it, as this report by David Sirota seems to indicate: the SEC was stone-walling questions about their role at the Financial Services Committee Hearing last week (they invoked executive privilege).
Meanwhile, it turns out that Madoff’s wife withdrew $15 .5 million from a brokerage in Boston related to the main scheme, 10 million of it on the day he ‘fessed up.
On Monday, Madoff agreed not to contest fraud charges in the civil suit brought against him by the SEC (there’s also a criminal suit) and prosecutors have agreed to a 30 day extension of the deadline for indictment (to March 13), raising the possibility that Madoff could escape a jury trial through a plea bargain.
Force X And The Roads Leading To 9-11
The more I read, the more I feel that it’s a big mistake to skirt 9-11 research on the grounds that its a whole area to itself and distracts from ongoing issues (Madoff, the bail-out, etc).
Of course, I’ve never bought the notion of some people on the left that talking “conspiracy” discredits or calls into question a journalist. On the contrary.
First, to accept the evidence of conspiratorial politics is not to become a full-fledged “conspiracist.” It isn’t a step from 9-11 theory-making into believing in shape-shifting lizards.
(Although that’s what clever media manipulators would have you believe…and it’s what masses of readers are brainwashed into believing).
Second, anyone who fails to see that there’s rather clear evidence of the work of conspiratorial groups (what was Madoff’s scheme except a conspiracy?) is either brainwashed or part of government propaganda.
Today, reading and rereading the material surrounding 9-11, US drug trafficking, BCCI, money-laundering and the Nasdaq, I’m more than ever sure that it’s a mistake to skirt 9-11, as I’ve been doing so far.
Here’s what Peter Dale Scott, a leading researcher on things related, has to say:
“My personal suggestion to 9/11 researchers is that they focus on the connections of the meta-group’s firm Far West, Ltd. – in particular those which lead to Khashoggi, Berezovskii, Halliburton and Dick Cheney, and Diligence, Joe Allbaugh, and Neil Bush….”
And:
“Once the local power of drug armies was enough in itself to neutralize the imposition of state authority. But today there are increasing signs that those at the highest level of the drug traffic will plot with the leaders of major states to ensure, or even to stage, violence that serves the power of the state and the industry alike.
Thanks to extensive research in Russia, we now have initial evidence of a second and even more significant proposition: There exists on the global level a drug meta-group, able to manipulate the resources of the drug traffic for its own political and business ends, without being at risk for actual trafficking. These ends include the creation of designed violence to serve the purposes of cabals in political power – most conspicuously in the case of the Yeltsin “family” in the Kremlin, but allegedly, according to Russian sources, also for those currently in power in the United States.
One piece of evidence for this consists in a meeting which took place in July 1999 in southern France near Nice, at the villa in Beaulieu of Adnan Khashoggi, once called “the richest man in the world.” Those at the meeting included a member of the Yeltsin cabal in the Kremlin and four representatives from the meta-group, with passports from Venezuela, Turkey, United Arab Emirates and Germany. Between them they allegedly enjoyed excellent relations with:
1) Ayman al-Zawahiri, the acknowledged mastermind of 9/11 and senior mentor to Osama bin Laden.
2) Soviet military intelligence.
3) the FARC, the Colombian revolutionary group that has become increasingly involved in the drug traffic.
4) the Kosovo Liberation Army, a similarly involved group.
5) (according to a well-informed Russian source) the CIA.
The third important proposition is that a meta-group of this scale does not just help government agencies make history. I hope to show that it, and its predecessors, are powerful enough to help make history themselves. However they do not do so overtly, but as a hidden Force X whose presence is not normally acknowledged in the polite discourse of academic political scientists. On the contrary, as we shall see, references to it are usually suppressed….”
More here in “The Global Drug Meta-Group: Drugs, Managed Violence, and the Russian 9-11,” Lobster Magazine. 10/29/05
Activism: The Boston Tea Party
[Note: The Boston Tea Party's 2008-2010 program consists of the Campaign For Liberty's four points, endorsed by US Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) and presidential candidates Chuck Baldwin (Constitution Party), Cynthia McKinney (Green Party), Ralph Nader (Independent), Bob Barr (Libertarian Party) and Charles Jay, the Boston Tea Party's 2008 presidential nominee.]
1. Foreign Policy: The Iraq War must end as quickly as possible with removal of all our soldiers from the region. We must initiate the return of our soldiers from around the world, including Korea, Japan, Europe and the entire Middle East. We must cease the war propaganda, threats of a blockade and plans for attacks on Iran, nor should we re-ignite the cold war with Russia over Georgia. We must be willing to talk to all countries and offer friendship and trade and travel to all who are willing. We must take off the table the threat of a nuclear first strike against all nations.
2. Privacy: We must protect the privacy and civil liberties of all persons under US jurisdiction. We must repeal or radically change the Patriot Act, the Military Commissions Act, and the FISA legislation. We must reject the notion and practice of torture, elimination of habeas corpus, secret tribunals, and secret prisons. We must deny immunity for corporations that spy willingly on the people for the benefit of the government. We must reject the unitary presidency, the illegal use of signing statements and excessive use of executive orders.
3. The National Debt: We believe that there should be no increase in the national debt. The burden of debt placed on the next generation is unjust and already threatening our economy and the value of our dollar. We must pay our bills as we go along and not unfairly place this burden on a future generation.
4. The Federal Reserve: We seek a thorough investigation, evaluation and audit of the Federal Reserve System and its cozy relationships with the banking, corporate, and other financial institutions. The arbitrary power to create money and credit out of thin air behind closed doors for the benefit of commercial interests must be ended. There should be no taxpayer bailouts of corporations and no corporate subsidies. Corporations should be aggressively prosecuted for their crimes and frauds.
More at The Boston Tea Party
Publishing Perils: Send In The Clowns
In an earlier post, I mentioned the perils of being an independent reporter. With no big-name organization to back you up or fight your battles for you, falling afoul of powerful people, even without intending to, can lead you into a professional - and personal quagmire. Here’s the story of one of the most chilling vendettas against an independent journalist too curious for her own good:
“The life of a freelance writer can inspire paranoia even at the best of times. Story assignments inexplicably fall through, editors change
their minds. But the surreal campaign of dirty tricks endlessly played on Jan Pottker by Ringling Bros. chief Ken Feld and his minions would
be enough to persuade even the most stoic freelancer that their career path was being plotted by Franz Kafka.The excruciating details of Pottker’s travails are annotated in almost 10,000 pages of pretrial complaints, motions, affidavits and
depositions filed in the bowels of Superior Court for the District of Columbia. The evidence gathered so far evokes other unfortunate
milestones in the annals of corporate espionage, going back to General Motors’ infamous campaign against the young activist Ralph Nader 40
years ago through the mysterious death of Karen Silkwood on an dark Oklahoma highway in 1974.Pottker’s personal tormentor was an obscure, innocuous-looking,36-year-old freelance writer and sometime publisher with uncommonly
close ties to high-ranking former officials of the CIA. His name was Robert Eringer….”More at “Send In the Clowns,” Jeff Stein, Salon, August 31, 2001
Comment:
I have ambiguous feelings about this. On the one hand, I empathize with Pottker, obviously. On the other hand, reporters also have to draw a line - which they don’t any more - between investigative work essential to a story that has public value (i.e., there has to be a “public interest” element strong enough to justify the disclosures) and “dishing the dirt” about people who have lots of money or are famous but whose activities really have no strong bearing on public policy or the citizenry. That is, reporters have to be able to tell the difference between acting like a responsible Fourth Estate and simply being a nasty purveyor of other people’s dirty laundry. After all, if the private lives of everyone in the public eye is fair game, why shouldn’t the private lives of journalists be, as well? And where’s the end to that?
Here’s an example: Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky, in so far as it was conducted on the White House premises and might have made him vulnerable to blackmail, was within bounds (although the manner in which it was covered showed pretty bad judgment and taste, in my opinion). However, retailing gossip about Ms. Clinton or Chelsea strike me as being off-limits. Pottker’s case makes the cut, but I have to wonder why she needed to have brought in the family’s sexual secrets into it.
Everyone needs a portion of their souls left to themselves, even criminals..
In my opinion, one of the reasons journalists get tempted by this stuff is their inability to make “big picture” sense of the stories they cover. Rather than connect the dots economically, or historically, or culturally, or intellectually, so much easier to splash on the prurient detail, with the comforting assurance that nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the public…..
Mark Twain On Newspapers
“If you don’t read the newspaper, you are uninformed; if you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed.” - Mark Twain
Madoff Agrees to Partial Settlement with SEC
“Bernard Madoff and the Securities and Exchange Commission have agreed to a partial settlement of civil suit accusing Madoff of defrauding investors.
According to an SEC press release, Madoff consented to a partial judgment without admitting or denying the civil charges against him. Although the amount in civil penalties that Madoff would have to pay has not yet been determined, the judgment states that the allegations against him have been established and cannot be contested at a later point….”
- report by Laurie Bennett, Feb. 9, 2009
More at Muckety.com
Global Games: GM Crops Post Severe Risks In Poorer Countries
Countering the misleading spin put out by agribusinesses, an interview with a leading activist against genetically modified food:
“Q: What are the health risks posed by genetically engineered (GE) foods?
A: GMOs are linked to toxic and allergic reactions in people, the deaths of thousands of sick, sterile livestock, and damage to virtually every organ studied in lab animals. Soy allergies skyrocketed by 50 per cent in the UK soon after GM soy was introduced. A human subject showed a skin prick allergic-type reaction to GM soy, but not to natural soy.
In the 1980s, a contaminated brand of food supplement called L-tryptophan killed about 100 Americans and caused sickness and disability in another 5,000 to 10,000 people. The source of contaminants was almost certainly the genetic engineering process used in its production. The disease took years to find and was almost overlooked. It was only identified because the symptoms were unique, acute, and fast-acting. If all three characteristics were not in place, the deadly supplement might never have been identified or removed.
If GM foods on the market are causing common diseases or if their effects appear only after long-term exposure, we may not be able to identify the source of the problem for decades, if at all.
Q: Has there been a perceptible impact of GE crops on India’s farming community?
A: Hundreds or thousands of Indian farm workers who pick Bt cotton by hand are developing allergic-type reactions. The cotton is engineered with a gene from a soil bacterium called Bt (bacillus thuringiensis), which produces a natural insecticide. The reason it is in our crops is that the industry and government say the Bt toxin is completely safe for humans. In its natural state, it’s used in organic agriculture and forestry. They, therefore, claim that Bt toxin has a history of safe use, and doesn’t even interact with mammals; that it’s destroyed in the digestive tract.
But this assumption ignores the evidence. About 500 people in the US and Canada developed allergic-type reactions when they were sprayed with natural Bt discharged from airplanes. When they fed natural Bt to mice, the mice developed a powerful immune response and damaged intestines. But the Bt engineered into crops is thousands of times more concentrated than the natural form and is designed to be more toxic.
When I reviewed the symptoms from the Indian cotton workers, they turned out to be the same symptoms that were described by the 500 people in North America who were sprayed with Bt. The Indian Bt cotton farmers allow sheep to graze on the cotton plants after harvest. According to several shepherds, within five to seven days, one out of every four sheep dies. Thousands of sheep have died in the Andhra Pradesh region, and more will be added to those numbers the next year. There are also widespread reports of disease and death among buffalo, who either grazed on the Bt cotton plants or consumed Bt cottonseed or oil cakes.
When I visited Andhra Pradesh, I spoke to a group of women and asked if any of them experienced any reaction to BT cotton crop. After some hesitation, two women stood up and one of them revealed that she suffered from itching. I was also told that women cotton workers are embarrassed to discuss the details of their symptoms, so they don’t come forward.
Q. A chapter in your book says that the risks posed by GE crops/GM foods are greater for women and children.
A: Pregnant women should most definitely avoid GMOs. A Russian study found that more than half of the babies from mother rats fed GM soy died within three weeks, compared to only a 10 per cent death rate for babies whose mothers ate non-GM soy. The offspring from the GM group were also smaller and could not conceive.
Q. In your opinion, does India really require GM foods?
A: The US spends three to five billion dollars per year to subsidise the GM crops that no one else wants. They are trying to force other countries to take GMOs to solve their own problems. The US department of Agriculture confirms that GMOs do not increase yields or farmer income, and in many cases reduce both.
In developing countries, GM crops are clearly disadvantageous. A study by the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) concluded that GMOs are not appropriate, and that industrial farming practices in general force small farmers and landless peasants off the land. Analysis of Bt cotton in India consistently reveals that it provides far less income compared to farmers growing organic or NPM (non-pesticidal management) cotton. But these more appropriate and healthy systems don’t have corporate champions to promote them.
Q. What would be the best strategy to regulate the introduction of GM food?
A: The best regulation would be to demand a ban of current GM crops and all outdoor field trials. Then India can invest in proper independent studies, which I am sure will confirm our conclusions that the current generation of GM crops is unsafe for humans, animals, and the environment.From an interview with Professor Jeffrey Smith, author of “Seeds of Deception.”
Here is a link to a piece I did a while back for Counterpunch, on the scientific evidence about the risks of genetic modification: “Of Mice, Men and GM Peas.”
And here is a piece on the impact of globalization on local communities in India, “The Globalized Village” (the piece was edited atrociously).
In “Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets” (Bonner & Rajiva, 2007), I have this to say:
“Leading Columbia U. economist, Dr. Jagdish Bhagwati, thinks the agreements on safety in agricultural trade contained in what’s called the Uruguay round of the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) must be grounded in scientific evidence. In his book, In Defense of Globalization,
he gives the example of the European Union initiative to ban the sale of hormone fed beef. Since the EU couldn’t muster enough scientific proof for the ban, the World Trade Organization was bound to find the EU in violation of WTO rules.
Dr. Bhagwati objects to the EU’s moratorium on the sale of Genetically Modified seeds and foods for the same reason. There simply isn’t enough scientific evidence to warrant it, he claims. The anti-globalization crew, on the other hand, thinks that scientific proof is not essential. They think the principle of precaution should be enough, while Dr. Bhagwati sides with “respectable scientists,” who consider the ban fear-mongering.1
One can only be pleased to be on the opposite side of respectable science. One vastly prefers disrespectful, unrespectable science - the kind of science that blows wind up the skirts of pompous blowhards. Respectable scientists are consensus mongers, organization men……only with higher IQs. The tools with which they arrive at proofs sufficient to pass peer review are so fine we fear we can hardly see them. And, like the mills of god, they grind exceeding slow. It might take them 20 years to definitely prove that genetically modified beef plays Chinese checkers with your immune system. When the worst case scenario is as awful as an international plague, then the reasonable position actually becomes the most unreasonable. The unexpected, low risk event may be just what should occupy center stage in people’s consciousness.
This doesn’t mean one is in favor of government regulation of food. We are neither prescribing policy nor proscribing it…. we are merely grumbling that we liked the old genetically unmodified world better. We have no desire to eat strawberries armed against frostbite with herring genes or cauliflower with an IQ higher than ours.
We would like the state to stop telling us what to do…whether it is in airports, in our schools, or in our bedrooms…but we dig in our heels equally at efforts by global corporations to improve our water or our vittles at the expense of our health and with subsidies from our tax dollars…..”
“Playing the Global Trade Game,” Endervidualism, February 2007, copyright Lila Rajiva (reused in the book).
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