Stuart Bramhall links back to my earlier post on Barry Zwicker and the Left Gate-Keepers... who still refuse to talk about 9-11, under an article about the infiltration of the foundation left:
“As Dana Priest’s recent Washington Post expose reveals, the use of private contractors to spy on Americans (in addition to the proliferation of government spy agencies) has gone viral since the 2002 enactment of the Patriot Act. In fact some civil libertarians warn that Americans’ shrinking privacy and personal freedom is rapidly approaching that of communist East Germany under the Stasi (the East German secret police) – where one in sixteen residents were paid to report on their friends on neighbors.
Was There Domestic Spying Before 2002?
Based on 20 years experience as an anti-war and single payer activist in Seattle, I would hazard that that spying on political and community groups didn’t suddenly leap from non-existent to astronomic levels when it was “legalized” in 2002. It has always been my impression that it increased at a fairly steady rate with the rightward drift at all levels of government following Reagan’s election in 1980. I also believe that prior to the enactment of the Patriot Act, much of this domestic “counterinsurgency” activity occurred under the auspices of “left” identified foundations and think-tanks. These are private entities, funded through a combination of CIA monies and right wing philanthropy, that give the appearance of being autonomous – and genuinely progressive and liberal. However it appears that their true function is to restrict the acceptable range of progressive debate and political activity. Barry Zwicker calls them “left gatekeepers (see July 19 and 24 blog)” and Webster Tarpley “counterinsurgency” foundations.
Left Gatekeeping Foundations and the Single Payer Movement
Most of my personal experience with these left gatekeeping foundations occurred as a single payer activist. In Washington State, the single payer movement was started by doctors in 1988, under the auspices of Physicians for a National Health Program. Between 1988 and 1993, when the Seattle chapter was run by and for health professionals, it expanded rapidly, attracted much public and media attention. It was also an important partner in a broader coalition that pressured the governor to appoint a blue ribbon health commission to develop a proposal for state based, publicly financed universal health care.
Then in 1993, when the health provider joined with Washington Gray Panthers to build a broad based coalition, we suddenly hit a roadblock. There were suddenly all kinds of difficulties, which on the surface amounted to a textbook case of Cointelpro infiltration. However unlike Cointelpro, the problems didn’t appear to originate with the FBI or the police, but with local “left” leaning think tanks and foundations. The tactics, however, were classic – with the appearance of quirky outsiders who tampered with our database, seized control of our contact list to launch rumor and character assassination campaigns, split our coalitions by launching parallel, competing organizations (focused on safer lobbying activities and mild reformism), and scared off new members by repeatedly picking fights at our meetings.
A Clear Pattern
In one case we discovered the operative had a history of similar behavior in Seattle’s first Anti-Gulf War Coalition (1991) and the Seattle chapter of Democratic Socialists of America. The pattern in all three cases was the same – getting control of the database and leadership and shutting all three down – including the single payer coalition.
It was only when Washington State joined a regional coalition with single payer activists from Oregon and California – the Pacific Rim Single Payer Summit – that I got some inkling of what was happening. The synchronicity activists from other states described – down to the exact political rhetoric and targeted personal attacks – was uncanny.
It’s safe to assume that specific left gatekeeping foundations involved in suppressing the single payer movement receive generous support from the powerful insurance lobby and Big Pharma – in addition to any CIA and right wing philanthropy. Both the insurance and the pharmaceutical industry stand to lose big under a publicly funded health care system (as the sole purchaser of medication for 300 million Americans, the government would force the drug companies to agree to massive volume discounts – this occurs in all industrialized countries with publicly funded health care).
I write about my personal experience, as a single payer activist, with left gatekeeping foundations in my recent memoir The Most Revolutionary Act: Memoir of an American Refugee.”
Update: Citizen Link blog notes that Kevin Jennings will be given an additional $45 million for his budget in 2011, bringing the money under his management to $410 million.
——————————–
I missed this interesting story at the end of last year, from Gateway Pundit. Strange that child abuse/pedophilia and its promotion is a big story for the press when it’s related to the Catholic church or Republican politicians (and it should be), but a non-story at other times. I wonder why.
Posted by Jim Hoft on Thursday, December 17, 2009, 6:12 AM
(Big Warning on Content)
Thanks to libertarian activist, financial consultant, and author of an early expose of the big banks, “Pirates of Manhattan,”(2007), Barry James Dyke, for pointing out GuideStar.org. This is a website that lets you look up financial records of registered non-profits, a handy way to see what activists and advocates of all stripes are making, what their revenues and expenditures are, and whom they employ. (more…)
I’ve added some updates to “Lila At The Daily Reckoning”, which is meant as a brief refutation of the multiple posts by a pseudonymous poster, mainly on Indymedia, but elsewhere too, that slander me as a “stock fraud” and shill for Agora (wow - that’s really funny)…and thus the British far-right, as well as for Soros-Rothschild (!). I notice someone is also googling a piece I did on my grandfather’s death on Countercurrents, called “For a dignified death.”
Though it might be far-fetched, I wonder if my references in it to grandpa telling us about being a recruiter for the Indian army and having shaken Lord Mountbatten’s hand is being construed as evidence of my “far-right” connection. LOL! (more…)
9-11’s A Lie
(sung to the tune of “Stayin’ Alive” by the Bee Gees from the soundtrack of the motion picture, “Saturday Night Live” )
Well you can tell by the way the buildings fell
There was something wrong, now its time to tell
Spread the word, its nothing new
You gotta educate yourself in “truth”
It’s not alright, it’s not okay
For you to look the other way
We can help you understand
The New York Times effect on man (more…)
From Wired.com:
“Federal officials have arrested an Army intelligence analyst who boasted of giving classified U.S. combat video and hundreds of thousands of classified State Department records to whistleblower site Wikileaks, Wired.com has learned.
SPC Bradley Manning, 22, of Potomac, Maryland, was stationed at Forward Operating Base Hammer, 40 miles east of Baghdad, where he was arrested nearly two weeks ago by the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division. A family member says he’s being held in custody in Kuwait, and has not been formally charged.
Well, well, well. It looks like Patrick Byrne, Judd Bagley, Mark Mitchell and the rest of the estimable team at Deep Capture are having more than some effect.
Not only have the Germans and Austrians banned naked short- selling, Vanity Fair, our least favorite low-class, high-gloss magazine of the DC twitterati, tells us that Steve Cohen is closing up shop as a trader. Sith Lord Cohen doesn’t like the spotlight, it seems. Maybe he remembers all too well what he was up to in the 1980s……even if Reuters wants to keep it buried.
In the July issue of Vanity Fair, legendary hedge-fund billionaire Steve Cohen tells special correspondent Bryan Burrough that he might be ready to walk away from active trading. How big would that be? Well, says Burrough, it’s “a little like saying that God is ready to walk away from Earth.” In this video, Burrough takes the measure of Cohen’s controversial careeer—and offers his theory on why the reclusive banker granted the second in-depth interview of his 30-year career to Vanity Fair.
A message from Ron Paul (May 29) urging you to support The Private Option Health Care Act:
Dear Friend of Liberty,
Unlike the statists in Washington, the freedom movement
understands that our health care is too important to be left to
the whims of politicians and bureaucrats.
CBC News in Canada reports that bankster-associated gold miner Barrick Gold is shutting down critical writing on the Canadian mining industry. (Thanks to Chris Cook).
An excerpt:
“The threat of legal action from mining giant Barrick Gold has forced Vancouver-based Talonbooks to postpone publication of a book about the Canadian mining industry.
Publisher Karl Siegler calls it a clear case of “libel chill” by one of Canada’s largest mining companies.
The book, Imperial Canada Inc.: Legal Haven of Choice for the World’s Mining Industries, was to be published in spring 2010, but in February, the publisher and everyone else involved with the book got a threatening letter from Barrick lawyers.
At times I regret the loss of privacy and the vulnerability to slander that anyone who writes publicly has to face. It seems that no good deed goes unpunished by the mob that sees only upto the horizons of its own vulgar perspective.
Being a thief itself, it sees thieves in honest people. Being a liar itself, it calls what is patently truthful a lie. Motivated solely by venality and malice, it can see no other motivation in people who obviously struggle to hew to their conscience, even when it endangers themselves.
How to escape slander without losing privacy to the envious, the malevolent, the pathological? You cannot. But you can consider your real audience, as Sir Thomas More suggests, in Robert Bolt’s fine play “A Man for All Seasons” (1960). More’s counsel addresses Richard Rich, an academic who despairs that the virtues of a great teacher can never be known beyond a small circle, but it’s advice that applies as well to anyone who has ever suffered from slander directed at them, when their actions were not only not dishonorable, they were more than ordinarily brave and honorable.
“MORE: Why not be a teacher? You’d be a fine teacher.
Perhaps even a great one.
RICH: And if I was, who would know it?
MORE: You, your pupils, your friends, God. Not a bad public, that . . . Oh, and a quiet life.”
Dear Lila,
The US 2011 budget is now in the House Appropriations Committee, and Israel is set to receive another $3 billion in Foreign Military Financing (FMF). In past years, Israel has been given this money with no discussion, no conditions, and no reporting requirements. This tax-payer gift to Israel is traditionally disbursed in one payment at the beginning of the fiscal year, not in periodic increments as is done with other countries receiving aid.
Click here to find your US Representative’s phone number and make a call TODAY, before the money is unconditionally approved once again. (more…)
Morocco Uses Torture To Silence Sahrawi Activists:
“The Saharawi hunger strikers
Six of the Salé-imprisoned ‘Casablanca 7’ began their hunger strikes from 18 March 2010 in protest of their indefinite imprisonment and lack of clear charges. These are Ali Salem Tamek, Brahim Dahane, Yehdih Ettarrouzi, Ahmed Naciri, Saleh Labaihi and Rachid Sghayer.
The hunger strikers issued this statement on 18 March:
‘Our detention has been condemned by governments and parliaments around the world as well as human rights organisations, trade unions and civil society groups. We are being persecuted for exercising our right to express political opinion and engage in legitimate activities to protect the human the rights of our people. In protest at our detention we are today beginning an open hunger strike in order to expedite our claim to a fair trial and our release without condition. We call on democratic forces in the world to support our fight for our release and that of all Saharawi political prisoners held in Moroccan jails.’
Another 19 hunger strikers are in Tiznit prison and their hungerstrikes started from 20 March. These are Moustapha Abd-Dayem, Hreish Hassan, Mohamed Berkaoui, Bachir Isamïli, Mohamed Taghioullah Fekallah, Brahim Khalil Meghimiah, Khalihenna Abouhassan, Moulay Ali Bouamoud, Fadli Binhau, Mahmud Aboughassem, Sheiahu Hamza, Fathi Sid Ahmed, Daihani Abdallah, Mohamed Salami, Sawakh Djamal, Mahdjub Ailal, Hassan Mohamed Lehassen, Nourdinne Taher, Lehmam Salama.
And there are a further 3 hunger strikers in Boulmharez prison in Marrakech (El Waaban Said, Brahim Bariaz, Ali Salem Ablag), 3 in Layouune prison4 (Bachri Bentaleb, Ameidan Chej and Mohamed Berkan), 2 in Taroudant prison (Louali Amaidan and Jalad Hasan), 2 in Kenitra prison (Laaseiri Salec and Amaidan Saleh) and 1 in Bensliman prison (Hasan Abdelahi).5
Detailed medical information from the hunger strike monitoring groups draw attention to the dangerous symptoms the prisoners are experiencing at this stage of 29 days. These are listed variously among the prisoners as loss of consciousness, fatigue, migraines, asthma, acute cardiac and intestinal pain, asthma, vomiting and diarrhoea. Blood pressure and sugar levels are reported as decreasing alarmingly, with growing kidney, liver and gallbladder complications.6
The Saharawi Lawyers Association has also reported cases of neglect by Moroccan prison administrations, lack of proper medical assistance from prison clinics and staff, and Saharawi prisoner Hassan Abdullah in Bin Sliman is said to have been severely beaten by Moroccan prisoners at the incitement of prison staff.”
More here at Free Sahara.
From Lew Rockwell exciting news from Brazil…and also from Sweden:
“The young Brazilian financial and ideological entrepreneur, Helio Beltrão, has done something great for the Austro-libertarian movement and the cause of liberty, for his country and the whole world: establish the Instituto Ludwig von Mises Brasil, and make it flourish. The website is already significant, and this month, MisesBrasil sponsored the first Austrian Economics conference in the country’s history.
his is an all day extravaganza, starting at 8:30 am, with opening remarks from seminar host, Jayant Bhandari, and featuring:
9 to 11am: Character & a Free Society” by Lawrence W. Reed, President, Foundation for Economic Education, USA. As a journalist, Lawrence visited 69 countries; spent time with Contra rebels in Nicaragua; lived with Mozambique rebel forces; travelled with freedom activists in Poland
11 to 11:15am: Coffee
11:15 to 1:15pm: “Defending the Undefendable” by Walter Block, Harold E. Wirth Eminent Scholar Chair in Economics and Professor of Economics at Loyola University New Orleans and Senior Fellow with the Ludwig von Mises Institute,
1:15 to 2:15pm: Lunch
“How Capitalism Tames The Vices,” Lila Rajiva, author of “The Language of Empire,” (MR Press, 2005) and “Mobs, Messiahs and Markets,” (with W R Bonner, Wiley, 2007).
(Lila: My invitation was withdrawn by the seminar hosts from fear that Canadian authorities/other seminar participants might object to opinions I’ve expressed on Israel-Palestine on my blog (I don’t believe they would have). My apologies to any readers who signed up anticipating my speaking there, but now you’ll get more time with Walter Block, Paul Geddes, and Larry Reed. Have fun!)
4 to 4:15pm: Coffee
4:15 to 4:45pm: Closing remarks by Paul Geddes, Vice-President, West Coast Libertarian Foundation, Canada
Event Rooms 1300-1500, Segal Graduate School of Business 500 Granville Street
Vancouver, BC, Canada V6C 1W6
Cost, $80, $40 for students. (Includes lunch.)
TUNE IN TO THE WEB’S MOST POPULAR POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: LEW ROCKWELL
Saturday, April 10th, 2010 at 1PM CT
** LEW ROCKWELL ** - An Exclusive Interview and Wide Ranging Conversation. Lew is the Founder and Chairman of the Ludwig von Mises Institute (www.mises.org) and Editor of LewRockwell.com - two websites having among the highest Internet Traffic in the entire world. We will the Disastrous Effects of Government Intervention on Jobs, Businesses and How to Quickly Cure Unemployment.
LEW, THE THINKER-ACTIVIST
Lew was, in the 1960’s, an editor for the books of Ludwig von Mises and he was Ron Paul’s Chief of Staff in the 1970’s.
We will talk about The Future of Liberty in America and The Practical Steps Each Person Can Take To End the Spread of Tyranny. We are very honored to have Lew on our show and know that everyone will find him an extraordinary teacher from whom to learn.
Hosted by Michael McKay along with Special Commentator, Ms. Zoe Russell.
David Lindorff lays out the grounds for impeaching President Obama:
Let’s start with the war in Afghanistan, which Obama has taken full ownership of with an escalation that will bring the number of US troops in that country (not counting mercenaries hired by the Pentagon and CIA) to 100,000 by this August.
The president has authorized the use of Predator drone aircraft for a program of bombing conducted against Pakistan which has illegally expanded the Afghan War into another country without any authorization from Congress. These pilotless drones are known to kill far more innocent bystanders than enemy targets, making them fundamentally illegal on principle as weapons. Furthermore, this wave of attacks in Pakistan is a war of aggression against another nation if the word “war” is to have any meaning at all, and as such it is illegal under the UN Charter. Indeed initiating a war of aggression against a country which does not pose an immediate threat to the invader is described in the Charter and in the Nuremberg Tribunal Charter as the gravest of all war crimes.
The president, as commander in chief, has also, in collusion with Attorney Eric Holder, blocked any prosecution of those who authorized and perpetrated torture against captives in the War in Iraq, the War in Afghanistan, and the so-called War on Terror–notably Federal Appeals Court Judge Jay Baybee, and Berkeley Law Professor John Yoo, who as Justice Department attorneys authored the legal briefs justifying torture– and has in fact continued to permit the application of torture against captives. All of this is in clear violation of the Geneva Conventions, which as a signed set of treaties, are part of the law of the United States. Under those treaties, failure on the part of those up the chain of command to halt or to punish those who commit torture are themselves guilty of the crime of torture.
As commander in chief, President Obama has also overseen a strategy in Afghanistan of expanded attacks on civilians in Afghanistan. As in Iraq under the Bush administration, this current phase of the war in Afghanistan is seeing more civilians killed than enemy combatants, because of the widespread use of weapons like helicopter gunships, aerial bombardment, fragmentation bombs, etc., as well as a tactic of night raids on housing compounds where insurgents are suspected of hiding–raids that frequently lead to the deaths of many women and children and innocent men. It is significant that even the recent execution-style slaying of nine students, aged 11-18, by US-led forces, has not led to an investigation or prosecution of a individual. Rather, the incident is being covered up and ignored, with the clear acquiescence of the White House and the leadership at the Pentagon.
It is also widely believed that under the command of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who is known to have directed a large-scale death-squad operation in Iraq before moving to his current position, a similar death-squad campaign of assassination is being conducted now in Afghanistan--a campaign that like the notorious Phoenix Program in the 1960s in Vietnam, is almost certainly resulting in the deaths of many innocent Afghans.
Domestically, the president has continued to allow the policy of detention without trial of hundreds of captives in Guantanamo Bay and other prisons, including Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan, and his director of national security has even stated that it is the policy of this administration that American citizens deemed by the administration to be enemy combatants or terrorists may be targeted for summary execution. Such officially sanctioned state murder is a blatant violation of the Constitution’s insistence that every American has a right to a presumption of innocence and to a trial by a jury of his or her peers.
The president has also continued and in some ways even expanded the Bush/Cheney administration’s program of warrantless spying by the National Security Agency on the electronic communications of millions of Americans. A part of that program, the monitoring of communications of a now defunct Islamic charity, was just declared illegal by a federal judge in a case that was brought against the Bush/Cheney administration, but which continued to be defended by the current administration. There has not been a decision as yet by the Obama administration about whether to appeal that decision. While the case in question does not represent a crime by the Obama administration, it is clear that it only represents the very tip of the huge iceberg of domestic spying, and the administration’s vigorous efforts to shut down this case or to win it are clear evidence that the NSA is continuing to do the same thing on a vast scale. In fact, the only reason this case even got to trial is because of a government error that resulted in a memo describing the monitoring being mailed inadvertently to the victims of the spying.
While we’re at it, I would also suggest that there is ample evidence to call for the impeachment of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who appears, as head of the New York Federal Reserve, to have colluded in an effort to cover up a massive fraud at Lehman Brothers, and who has subsequently as Treasurer, participated in unprecedented giveaways of taxpayer funds to several of the country’s largest banking institutions.
The above enumeration of criminal and Constitutional transgressions makes it clear that this president, like his predecessor, has, almost since his first day in office, continued down a road of criminal and unconstitutional behavior that threatens the survival of Constitutional government in the United States.
Let me state it simply: President Barack Obama, as well as Attorney General Eric Holder, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and Treasury Secretary Geithner, should be impeached for war crimes and high crimes against the Constitution.”
A message from Ron Paul and the Campaign for Liberty:
“This is getting to be like a bad movie. You know the ones where the villain, dead and buried more times than you can count, somehow mysteriously reappears in a place you don’t expect him? Well, here comes… a new fight over a biometric national ID card — and if you don’t have the card, you can’t work.
Right now, freedom-stealing statists Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY), banding together with other statists from both parties, are scheming to sneak a massive power grab into a new “immigration reform” bill.
This bill is a statist’s dream — “amnesty” for illegal immigrants and a biometric ID card for virtually everyone else.
That’s right. Instead of controlling the border and enforcing the rule of law, these statists want to control you.
That’s why it’s vital you sign the petitions to your Senators IMMEDIATELY. http://www.chooseliberty.org/NationalId3.aspx?pid=3
You see, a National ID scheme — complete with biometric tracking technology — is embedded in the new “Comprehensive Immigration Reform Bill” being pushed by Senators Graham and Schumer, as well as other Big Government members from both parties.
And if passed, the “Comprehensive Immigration Reform Bill” would require a new National ID card that would:
*** Include biometric identification information, such as fingerprints, retinal scans or scans of veins on the back of hands. Depending on the technology used, the ID card could easily
be used as a tracking device;
*** Be required for all U.S. workers regardless of place of birth, and make it illegal for anyone to hold a job in the United States who doesn’t obtain the ID card;
*** Require all employers to purchase an “ID scanner” to verify the ID cards with the federal government. Every time any citizen applies for a job, the government would know -- and you can bet it’s only a matter of time until “ID scans” will be required to
make even routine purchases, as well.
Of course, the most dangerous part of the bill is the biometric tracking technology which would allow federal bureaucrats to track our every move.
Allowing our government to have this much “prying power” in our lives will ultimately result in the TOTAL loss of freedom.
This is exactly the type of battle that often decides whether a country remains free, or continues down a slide toward tyranny.
Government goon squads with all our personal information — information they do not need and constitutionally should not have — is a recipe for disaster for our nation.
You see, once “well-meaning” government bureaucrats know exactly how we live our lives, it won’t be long until they try to run them.
In fact, it will only be a matter of time until they spend their workdays making sure you and I don’t go anywhere we “shouldn’t,” buy anything we “shouldn’t,” read anything we “shouldn’t,” eat
anything we “shouldn’t” or smoke anything we “shouldn’t.”
You see, this fight isn’t really about immigration. Whatever you think of that fight, it’s simply being used as cover.
If there is good news in this fight, thanks to the help of grassroots citizens like you, it’s that we’ve been able to render the Big Government politicians’ REAL ID nearly toothless in more than two dozen states.
Now, the statists are growing nervous. They know Americans are FED UP with their mad rush to take over our health care system, expand Federal Reserve power and regulate and control every aspect of our lives.
We’re FED UP with trillion dollar deficits. We’re SICK AND TIRED of radical schemes like Cap and Tax.
We’re done with their out of control spending on foreign affairs and nation building all over the globe.
They also see that our anger is producing results. Many of their schemes are failing.
Rallies are growing in strength. Candidates are rising up in state after state to say “Enough!”
So the statists are trying a bipartisan “backdoor” scheme to impose more control on American citizens.
They’re hoping that after months of Big Media mouthpieces decrying the “poisonous and partisan politics” in Washington, the American people will jump for joy at the sight of a Democrat from
liberal New York and a Republican from conservative South Carolina “working together to solve our immigration mess.”
Well, you and I know better. After all, liberty activists can hardly find two Senators with
bigger vendettas against the liberty movement than Senator Chuck Schumer and Senator Lindsey Graham. Senator Graham himself has very publicly denounced the limited government R3VOLUTION launched by Dr. Ron Paul. He’s stated that we’re not welcome in HIS party. And now, he’s proving why the one who should not be welcome in any party that values freedom is LINDSEY GRAHAM.
That’s why it’s up to you and me to FIGHT back.
Unfortunately, the only way to DEFEAT a new National ID card is to contact Americans from coast-to-coast and explain EXACTLY what’s at stake.
They’re not going to get the real story from the media. It’s up to you and me to reach them.
Already, I’ve prepared email blasts, blog posts and other internet activities to alert liberty-loving Americans to the National ID scheme included in the new “Comprehensive Immigration
Reform Bill.”
But that’s not all. Campaign for Liberty staff tells me if I pull out all the stops, there’s an additional twelve million folks I can reach through our mail and phone programs. And finally, if I can raise the resources, I’d also like to run hard-hitting newspaper, radio and TV ads in New York and South
Carolina, explaining to the citizens of those states exactly what Senators Schumer and Graham are up to.
With all the battles we’ve faced over the past several months to save AUDIT THE FED and stop ObamaCare, I simply don’t have the resources to do everything. So please sign the petition and chip in with a quick contribution of $5, $10 or even $25 IMMEDIATELY!
http://www.chooseliberty.org/NationalId3.aspx?pid=3
You see, this isn’t a fight we can afford to lose. Passage of the National ID card would virtually guarantee the last vestiges of freedom we enjoy as Americans would be seriously
jeopardized.
And if you and I don’t defeat it, who will? There is already a strong, “bipartisan coalition” developing,
and the American people barely know what’s going on.
So I have to ask you — in addition to your signed petition — can I count on you to help out with a $5 or more donation?
http://www.chooseliberty.org/NationalId3.aspx?pid=3
Sincerely,
John F. Tate
President
P.S. Embedded in Senators Lindsey Graham’s and Chuck Schumer’s “Comprehensive Immigration Reform Bill” is the groundwork for a National ID card — complete with biometric tracking technology
– for everyone with a job in America. If passed, it would require every American to obtain the card to
work legally in the U.S. — and you can bet it will only be a matter of time until they’re required even for simple purchases.
So please sign the petition and help out with a quick contribution of $5, $10, $25 or whatever you can afford right away.
http://paracom.paramountcommunication.com/ct/4099816:6090536223:m:3:187725201:99DF108C4BE0121D524C70E176DF1CFF
Bill Murphy, chairman of The Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee (GATA) reports that on March 23,2010, GATA director, Adrian Douglas, was contacted by a London metals trader, Andrew Maguire, who had been told directly by JP Morgan traders how they manipulate the precious metals (PM) markets on non farm payroll data release, COMEX contracts rollover, and similar recurring occasions, to make money.
Maguire had previously contacted the enforcement division of the CFTC (Commodity Futures Trading Commission) to report this. On February 3, 2010, he gave a two-day advance warning of PM manipulation on the release of the non-farm payroll data on February 5 that took place as predicted.
Read more at GATA.
You don’t have to be a fan of Jesse Ventura to ask why Huffington Post, a liberal outlet, would be so illiberal as to prevent someone from even questioning the government’s version of what happened on 9-11.
Ventura didn’t say he subscribed to any “conspiracy theory” or alternative explanation. He didn’t claim he knew what happened.
He just questioned the government. That was enough to shut him down. And shut him down not in a conservative, pro-censorship venue, but on a leading “liberal” site. An online site, at that.
What does that say about “liberalism” today?
A Barron´s interview with Bearing Asset Management´s Kevin Duffy and Bill Laggner, via Lew Rockwell:
“Do you see the S&P 500 retesting its lows of this year?
Duffy: It’s difficult to know. It depends on how much money gets printed. In real terms, can we get cut in half from here? We think so. S&P earnings are distorted because of accounting changes for banks and brokers; if banks were marked to market, S&P earnings next year could fall to $45 a share. Bullish sentiment is rivaling the 2007 top, and volatility has fallen dramatically. We like the VXX, an exchange-traded note that’s based on S&P 500 short-term volatility as measured by the VIX index. It’s down 67% this year, and fits into the whole idea that complacency is very high.
From the website of the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee, the leading activist against gold price manipulation in the market:
“GATA today brought suit against the U.S. Federal Reserve Board, seeking a court order for disclosure of the central bank’s records of its surreptitious market intervention to suppress the monetary metal’s price.”
For some of my warnings of gold price manipulation, see the following:
“Was the IMF Involved in Gold Price Manipulation?” Dissident Voice, June, 2006
“Hanky-Panky at the Counting House,” Dissident Voice, June 6, 2006
A piece of Orwellian obfuscation by one Tom Sykes at Daily Kos *(see note at the bottom of this post) goes into the file, rip-roaring propaganda:
“I want to be clear on something up front. I think hedge-funds are a menace and should be outlawed. I think Goldman Sachs is a criminal conspiracy and its whole leadership should be indicted.
There are plenty of commentators, like Paul Krugman in the New York Times today and Matt Taibbi in his article in Rolling Stone, that have done great reporting on Goldman and on hedge funds.
But what we’re seeing is how a really odious character named Patrick Byrne is trying to hijack this issue…”
My Comment:
Byrne hijacked Taibbi? The liberals busted Goldman Sachs and naked short-selling and the hedge funds?
Aren’t Goldman Sachs and the hedge-funds the money men who funded the whole left-establishment..and wasn’t it people on the right libertarian side who busted them, and in fact called the whole financial crisis?
The libs were on the case only in 2008 when everyone was on the case and you’d have to have been blind not to notice.
This kind of revisionism makes me question the impetus behind the Rip Van Winkle awakening of the MSM on the financial crisis.
Either it shows that the MSM can’t see what’s going on in front of its collective nose, which argues that its working hypotheses are wrong (the kinder interpretation), or it shows rank dishonesty (the truer interpretation, likely).
I’d go with the first interpretation, only the hatchet job the press keeps doing on anyone from the other side of the political spectrum suggests that the second interpretation is the right one.
As I’ve repeated ad nauseum, Taibbi seems to have lifted my Goldman Sachs piece of 2006 (Money Week) as well as a bunch of other articles written in 2007-2008 (see ABOUT) . You can read it on the net and then go back and see what Taibbi wrote, only about three years after I did. (He probably pinched stuff from at least one other person as well). You will also see that I wrote more than half-a-dozen articles on Goldman after that in 2006 and 2007 (check this site). In 2008, everyone began writing about Goldman. I figure someone at Rolling Stone got worried that the population was beginning to wake up to which side really had the goods, and decided to co-opt the issue before their intellectual ineptness was too evident.
Otherwise, I’m hard pressed to explain why they don’t think they need to source and attribute correctly. They can’t all be such intellectual charlatans? Right?
As for naked short selling, Byrne has been waging that campaign since 2005.…and some others on the right, even before him. Even people who don’t think there’s an NSS hedge-fund-media conspiracy involved have long ago conceded that NSS is a problem (see this Motley Fool piece from 2005), and that it’s difficult to figure out what’s really going on, because the DTC/SEC, for example, won’t/can’t release the figures needed to assess the situation.
(Now, why would anyone think conspiracy when there’s stone-walling going on…)
Matt Taibbi basically borrowed Byrne’s argument. And having taken the argument, the establishment is now trying to discredit the person who made it first (see Ritholtz here and here, even before the Facebook brouhaha).
It’s not irrelevant that in coming to his conclusions, Ritholtz cites only the very same journalists whose credibility is shot by the evidence of their collusion with hedge-funds. That is certainly a bizarre way to report on a topic.
Mind you, this should not be taken to be an endorsement on my part of Byrne’s business practices or accounting, about which I know only what I have read. And that of course has mostly been written by his critics and critics of the NSS thesis, like Dow Jones reporter, Carol Remond.
But Remond, despite her reputation as a respected reporter on penny-stock scams, is seriously compromised in her reporting on this issue because of alleged collusion with hedge funds.
I say alleged, to be on the safe side, but to my eyes the evidence is convincing.
On the other hand, Overstock has repeated accounting problems that its foes argue are the real reason for its NSS campaign.
How serious these problems are is hard to say.
Of the two accountants who routinely denounce Byrne’s business practices in multiple postings that take up a remarkably (and suggestively) disproportionate space on their blogs, one, Sam Antar, has been convicted of one of the most extensive cases of embezzlement in recent history. Antar also claims the mantle of reformed felon without any evidence that restitution of the embezzled funds took place. He escaped prosecution only by turning in his own family. This is not a confidence-builder. Actually, there’s some evidence of further wrong-doing involving one Barry Minkow that’s also posted on the Deep Capture blog. Antar and Mankiw are practicing greenmail, according to this piece.
(Its author uses the term loosely. Greenmail, in recent US financial history, is what Michael Milken is infamous for - a type of corporate raid. And Milken is one of the central villains in the Deep Capture story of the corruption of Wall Street. Since I researched this period for a book I was planning to write on Goldman Sachs, I’m conversant enough with the subject to say with some confidence that Byrne is on the right track on this).
The other accountant who criticizes Byrne, Tracy Coenan, seems to be another ally of Antar and equally over- concerned with the accounting problems of Overstock, to the neglect of other companies.
Yet these are the only two accounting experts I see cited by Weiss.
Could there be other things wrong with Overstock?
Perhaps.
I have no way of knowing. But what I do know doesn’t so far make me think the problems are related in any way to the thesis of Deep Capture. The accounting errors don’t seem especially egregious, compared to the rest of what is going on in the market that the reform movement that Byrne spearheads is trying to tackle.
So is Deep Capture’s work discredited because of Byrne’s alleged and real problems?
No.
Overstock could very well be mismanaged and Byrne could be guilty of accounting shenanigans. That has nothing whatsoever to do with the extensive, indeed, mind-boggling, ties between supposedly neutral financial reporters and the hedge-funds that Deep Capture report on. The evidence the site has collected is shocking and undercuts any defense of the neutrality of the reporters in question (Bethany McLean, Remond, Weiss, Herb Greenberg, Roddy Boyd, etc).
To return to the media manipulation story.
After Taibbi put the two stories on Rolling Stone, Goldman and Penson came out and shot them down.
Taibbi, strangely, for a supposed target of Goldman and for all his righteous indignation over NSS, vanishes on the latter subject (NSS) and retracts parts of the former.
So what happens?
The entire Goldman argument gets reduced to “Goldman corrupted the regulators,” which works very well if you want more government and more regulators (and we are not fundamentalists on either subject). The good part of that from the point of view of the MSM is that that lets them displace the outrage on one or two figures (Rubin, for example), while using GS as a whipping-boy to funnel off popular rage from any effective overhaul/criminal prosecution, as well as to deflect it from the evidence of conspiratorial criminal activity.
(Yes, there are conspiracies, Virginia, and often the ones protesting loudly that they don’t exist are part of them…unwittingly or not).
Take this piece at Business Insider by Ritholtz, which sets up the boundaries of establishment discourse, with Taibbi and Gasparino at either end. What it does is to come down roughly “midway” between the two in a way that conveniently does nothing to change the centrist liberal establishment discourse.
(At least, that’s my take).
Now, Taibbi comes from a well-established media background, with a father who was an NBC TV man.
It’s hard to believe he doesn’t know the ethics and etiquette of sourcing. In fact, it’s downright impossible.
We’d have to conclude that
1. He was tasked with co-opting the stories for political or national security reasons.
2. Or lacks journalistic integrity, a deficiency fairly rampant these days….
3. Or wants to protect the left-liberal establishment on the issue….
4. Or some combination of the above.
Note:
*Tom Sykes is apparently a sock-puppet created by Gary Weiss, the former Forbes and Business Week reporter, at least, according to the considerable evidence amassed at Deep Capture.
Note: I have sent several mob/corruption-related articles to the Deep Capture team and consider myself a supporter of their research, which I’ve tried to link and forward to others, as well as to more generally publicize. I don’t think that prevents me from assessing the merits of their claims objectively. I don’t, for example, condone any social engineering attacks on social media sites like facebook, no matter what the legal status of such attacks is. Frankly, the work Deep Capture is doing on market/media corruption is too important for its members to get into such unworthy activities. Nor do I think bringing in personalities, family members, or even private networks of journalists is particularly important or even necessary. The point is not whether a journalist talks to or is friendly with another journalist….or even hedge-fund. The point is whether their work is significantly biased by the friendship and whether they disclose the friendship and attempt to correct for it. I appreciate a number of left and liberal writers, even when I disagree with them, because I find them intellectually honest and reasonably objective (complete objectivity being impossible as well as unnecessary). That’s not a very high standard to demand now, is it?
Jewish Appeal to Support the Goldstone Report
The primary author of the recently released UN Report on Gaza, the internationally respected jurist Richard Goldstone, has been attacked by establishment voices within the Jewish community. When those within a community try to “excommunicate” and dishonor a truth-teller, it is our obligation and responsibility to speak out vehemently on their behalf and on behalf of the truth they bring.
By all accounts, Judge Goldstone, who has a deep connection to Israel, approached his task with no pre-conceptions about what he and his team would find as they investigated the circumstances and aftermath of the Israeli attack on Gaza. Goldstone is a former South African constitutional law court judge who also served as a prosecutor of the Yugoslav and Rwandan war crimes tribunals. His credentials for this task are impeccable.
For following where the truth led him and releasing a report detailing human rights abuses and violations of international law by Israel, as well as Hamas, Judge Goldstone should be applauded for his honesty and integrity. Instead, he and the report have been viciously and relentlessly attacked by many within the Jewish community.
When it comes to Israel, hard-core censorship and intimidation by those claiming to speak in the name of the Jewish people have been the order of the day. Our saying, “Three Jews–four opinions,” reflects the traditional Jewish encouragement to argue and debate. But the reality, sadly, is that diverse opinions are welcome–except when it comes to Israel.
We must hold the Israeli government and the Jewish establishment accountable for attempting to vilify a truth-teller and for suppressing the truth about Israeli government crimes against the Palestinian people. We call upon each and every one of us to speak out at every opportunity–at our community centers and synagogues, in our homes, in the street, wherever we go.
We must demand that the truth be heard and that those claiming to speak in our name stop manipulating truths that have been well-documented for years, long before the Goldstone report. We are also appalled by the Obama Administration’s reaction to the report. We call for a fair and impartial investigation of the report’s allegations by non-military institutions in Israel. Failing that, we call for an investigation by the International Criminal Court (ICC).
Let us begin the New Year in the pursuit of justice.
Sincerely,
Here is my comment policy:
If you persistently repeat an aggressive argument in multiple comments without further evidence or logic, I will consider it flaming and delete it. If you indulge in ad hominem or obvious racial/religious/sexual/cultural bigotry, I will delete or edit your comment.
Hmm..some flying fur:
Matt Yglesias has a blog post called “School for Rich Kids Isn’t Charity” to which Karen de Coster administers several unkindest cuts.
The gist of Yglesias’ argument is that private school tuition money should be taxed because it’s money that really ought to be going to public schools, if those varmint parents only knew their duty to the state.
Well, first, as Ms. de Coster points out, those private school parents (and everyone else) are already paying for public schools through property taxes. So what Yglesias is asking for is a punitive second tax, for the sin of opting out (with your own money) of the free goodies the state wants you to have to make you yet another dependent. A dependent who will then be a reliable vote for expansion of the state.
Ms. de Coster is a CPA who’s probably (?) never taught in a school, private or public. I have.
[Note: this seems to have come off as a brush-off. It's not meant to be. Just explaining why I think I have something to add, from anecdotal experience, to a theoretical debate].
So let me toss my two cents in.
From my experience (and it’s not extensive), public schools have problems but they’re not caused by lack of money primarily For my part, I made better money teaching in a public school for troubled inner-city children than I ever did teaching in private schools. There was grant money coming to the school. Whether it was usefully spent or not I don’t know. Everyone worked, but the students came from such difficult backgrounds (routine gun fights in their neighborhood, missing parents, pervasive drug addiction, an AIDS patient in one case, malnourishment, street life with its attractions and traps, it was an uphill and probably futile task. The school folded up in three months when the funds suddenly vanished.
Private school wasn’t always much richer but it was different. One of my first jobs teaching in the US was teaching music at a private boy’s school. It was supposedly part-time but I got into the classroom at 6:30 and left only at 3:00, with my time entirely taken up by classes and prep. I was paid $4000 a semester for that. (Fortunately it was only one of three jobs I held at the time). It was probably the hardest work I ever did. There were between 20-35 rather rambunctious boys between the ages of five and 14 who didn’t take kindly to choral instruction, music theory, or my accent. One asked me with disdain why I didn’t look like Vanna White, his heroine (he was nine). Another was so disruptive I had him stand in the corner, where he created more disruption by announcing sotto voce that the art teacher was being undressed by the geography teacher, and he could see it through a hole in the wall. (There was no hole in the wall. Like Saki’s heroine, he was a specialist in romance at short notice).
He was all of five, had a tow head and a face like a cherub, but it didn’t stop him from calling everyone a “d*** face” whenever he had a chance. I finally had to talk to his mother, who received my complaints frostily. Angel-face had already told her that naughty teacher has used the word “wimp” to his preciousness (I’d jokingly told him not to be a wimp but to come up and join the rest of the band)…. which had left him too shaken, poor darling, to continue.
As for “d*** face,” she was sure he would never use such language, she said, in a tone that let me know she was sure I would…..
What I’m saying is that private school can be as tough and underpaid as any public school. And there can be just as uncooperative parents and difficult children.
Money isn’t the main problem with public schools. The problem in the inner cities is the environment in which the school and the children are forced to function; the administrators who have no conception of what’s needed; and a culture that doesn’t support learning.
My high school in India was half-built and lacked running water in one of the labs. I remember sitting on sand in one class. We had no xerox machines, no computers, no type-writers or calculators in the class. There was a broken-down piano (an enormous luxury in India), old books sent to us from America for the library. We loved them for the glossy pictures, lively text and smooth pages. Our own Indian text-books were printed smudgily on cheap paper, rarely had pictures, and tended to be litanies of facts. It was in those old discarded text books that I first read about Robert Fulton and the steam ship and the duel between Burr and Hamilton. It didn’t make a difference that I read it leaning against an old pile of bricks, doodling in the sand, while a nineteen-year old, in a green sari and a huge rose in her bun, sang out the endless details of the Tree-tee of Ver-sigh-liz, while the boys tried to catch her eye.
It didn’t make a difference to our education because there was a culture of learning. The students came from households that were often struggling to pay the bills, for whom uniforms and books and lunch boxes on small middle-class Indian salaries was an enormous sacrifice. But those households placed an extremely high value on learning and accomplishment. They were largely professional or academic families. If a teacher scolded or punished us, our parents took the teacher’s side (for the most part). We didn’t have television to distract us. We had structured time to study at home. We had standards demanded from us. We had people who had a firm grasp, if not of their subject, of the role they had to play in the class room.
Matt Yglesias often has interesting things to say. But on this one, Ms. de Coster is right. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Money isn’t the central problem in public schools. I doubt that it’s even really a major problem.
“It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people’s minds”
– Samuel Adams
A new piece with some travel tips at Lew Rockwell.
Here’s the opening:
“A while ago I wrote an article suggesting that for some libertarians it might be time to run.
I still think it is. But I also think your journey abroad should be reasoned and carefully planned, or it could leave you worse off, not better. Run smart, not stupid.
To help you do that, here are some things I’ve learned from years of going back and forth across the world. I’ve grouped them under four headings that express fundamental elements of a libertarian stance in the world.
Connectivity (the free market is all about communicating and persuading)
Security (libertarians should take the initiative in defending themselves)
Simplicity (less always makes for more independence)
Flexibility (don’t resist change; it’s the essence of the free market)
Jeff Knaebel tore up his US passport out of hatred for the state and became a stateless person wandering through the villages in India. In case you’re thinking he must be some kind of hippy, Knaebel is a former CEO of a company and an engineer trained at Cornell University.
“The one actual, real and direct action that I could take was to break the paper chains that were holding me as a slave to the Empire. I tore up my U.S. passport at the Gandhi Samadhi, Rajghat, New Delhi. Rather than arrest me, the Indian police told me that I was free to roam anywhere in India, and to call them for help if I ran into any trouble.
The great Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote, “Man is moral choice.” This is what I have been calling the Law of Moral Causation. By unilateral renunciation of my citizenship, I chose to assert my responsibility by denying that the U.S. government could act in my name and on my behalf.
Here is the quotation of a freedom fighter in Mexico which seems equally relevant to the India of today:
“Why is it necessary to kill and to die so that you should listen to Ramona, seated here beside me, tell you that Indian women want to live, want to study, want hospitals, want medicines, want schools, want food, want respect, want justice, want dignity? ~ Insurgente Marcos to President of Mexico Salinas after the cease fire in Chiapas, San Cristobal de las Casas, February 1994 (Our Word Is Our Weapon, Seven Stories Press).
I plan to continue to present to the State and to humanity the question of whether we are ready to permit a peace-loving man to exist and to move about freely, without tracking tags and permission-to-exist documents. Or have we been so thoroughly conditioned that everyone except third world villagers and tribal people is destined to live in the big surveillance sheep pens constructed by states all over the world.
Hat-tip to Lew Rockwell for running the article on his site.
My Comment
Bravo for the gesture. But as an Indian by birth I must say I wouldn’t advise any expat Indian to try this. The Indian police will treat you very differently from a vellakara (this is Tamil for ‘white man’ ). A friend of mine, a graduate of one of the Indian Institutes of Technology, spent the year after his graduation roaming India, minus “English language privilege” - i.e. he pretended he didn’t speak it. He said he saw a side of India he hadn’t experienced until then.
Besides, the cynic in me wants to know - did Knaebel dispose of his assets before this gesture….or after? And if so, how? I’m sorry if my questions seem derisive. They’re meant respectfully.
I feel the same way about some…some... elements in the “patriot” movement.
Did civil liberties and the police state work them up so much when George Bush was in power? Is it civil liberties or the thought of an African-American president that incenses some people?
I’d say in a few cases it’s the latter….
From Jewish Voices for Peace:
“Upset about the inclusion of a film about Rachel Corrie at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, Koret–one of California’s largest Jewish foundations–issued a statement calling movie sponsors Jewish Voice for Peace and the American Friends Service Committee (yes, pacifist Quakers) “virulently anti-Israel, anti-Semitic groups.”
We need your support to counteract these lies.
Jewish Voice for Peace is an organization that includes Israelis, Jewish educators, rabbis, Holocaust survivors and their children and grandchildren. We’ve written extensively about the issue of anti-Semitism, and our members are an essential part of a burgeoning Jewish cultural and spiritual renaissance……. What changed? Why now?
And how is the backlash here linked to the backlash against pro-democracy activists in Israel?
We think it’s because now, the world’s attention is on settlements, and for the first time in recent memory, a US administration is creating pressure on Israel. That means that this is a historic opportunity and that we need your financial support to take full advantage of this moment….”Please go to the Jewish Voices for Peace website.
to help.
Some wiki criteria for notability:
1. The person has received a notable award or honor, or has been often nominated for them.
YES - The Getabstract business book award is a major and influential international business award and the Frankfurt fair is considered one of the top book fairs in the world.
2. The person has made a widely recognized contribution that is part of the enduring historical record in his or her specific field.[7]
YES - I am a contributor to the Routlege Key Concepts Series, on the subject “Torture,” - that is, my contribution the subject is considered worthy of entry in a very influential series that defines subject areas for college students. Language of Empire is cited over several disciplines…
I made early and important contributions in the alternative press to the two most important stories in the last ten years in American politics - torture and the financial scandal.
3.. The person has created, or played a major role in co-creating, a significant or well-known work, or collective body of work, that has been the subject of an independent book or feature-length film, or of multiple independent periodical articles or reviews.
YES - MOBS, MESSIAHS, AND MARKETS has been the subject of many independent reviews and citations. So has THE LANGUAGE OF EMPIRE
4. The person has been interviewed by major media or press
YES - in several papers.
Of course, it’s not upto me how these criteria are interpreted…
FINALLY - Very relevant - the context. Last week, I wrote controversial blog posts on the Wall Street-media mafias and social media attacks, and I also criticized my co-author’s company for a two year history of mis-attribution. I believe this nomination is a result of that attribution fight.
Last week, I also went on to say a few more things, naming some extremely powerful people and revealing that I had email records to document what I was saying. Thereafter, the deletion nomination appeared [delete removed, August 7]
The first and second nominations for deletion also appeared in a political context.
Added (August 7): It’s also the case that on the wiki entry, I was able to list my articles and where they were first published. Bonner has been publishing my articles (in the book) under his sole name.
Take away my wiki and they can wipe out my contribution more easily so reviewers can’t see who wrote what so easily. They can still see it on my blog but they can attack my blog/twitter or prevent others linking it too…which they have done.
Update: A google search and a reply from Agora tells me that both my ex and Casey are mistaken and got the line from an old movie. It is something in the public domain. It’s not an old Czech saying, as I first thought, but an old Vietnamese saying.
This is hilarious. It also makes me feel a lot better.
***
Still, it does nothing to assuage me after so many problems of attribution.
A reader raises the question: Can anyone really own a one-liner?
My reply:
Yes. On several grounds.
First: Ethics
You certainly should attribute things correctly, to the best of your knowledge.…
And you should correct an attribution if you find out you’re wrong. We teach this in every first year language class in the country and kids are failed when they plagiarize.
Second. Damage to the reader and the other author.
In this case, the line is a SPECIFIC MEMORABLE LINE, NOT A PHRASE.
A line of this kind is much more than a random phrase - it’s a one-liner that fixes quite complex ideas into a memorable creation - the definition of what can be copyrighted.
Oscar Wilde, for example, was very famous for pinching other people’s one-liners, even though he was perfectly capable of making themselves up on his own. There’s a famous incident in which Wilde hears a friend’s funny remark and says, “I wish I’d said that..” and the friend, from whom Wilde had taken a number of such lines, responds wearily, “You will, Oscar, you will.”
Suppose I go to a village and perform Shakespeare, passing it off as my own work - of course, I have done something wrong. No one in his right mind would say otherwise.
Or, if I passed off some clever line of Johnny Carson’s as my own? I gain a reputation for wit I couldn’t sustain on my own, and MORE importantly, if it’s not Carson but some unknown comedian, I make it impossible for the original creator to use that line as his own - thus stealing his own creation from him….or making him look like a liar if he insists it’s his own.
I don’t know how anyone could argue that this isn’t fraud. It is. It’s a violation of truth -
And it’s also a fraud committed on the reader or audience. It’s not libertarian at all.
Third -
There are several shades of meaning to the notion of ownership that libertarians confuse. This confusion is exactly why I find a lot of libertarian theory bunkum.
Actually, you DON’T own intellectual property in the same way you own your shoes…you own it in a MUCH STRONGER way..which is precisely what copyright law recognizes. The relationship is much more intrinsic. That is why your intellectual property is not sold in the same way as your ordinary work product. You have to consciously give it up.
You also own a dog in a different way from the way you own your shoes, don’t you?
And a woman “owns” her womb or her fetus in another way. This is an area of immense confusion, and libertarian theory is often clueless about it..
Fourthly, your ownership rights are stronger when you have agreed on and have actually discussed that particular line and whether your coauthor could appropriate it or not. That is certainly both personally and professionally incorrect.
By the way, I’m not claiming I created that one-line.
I think it was coined by my ex-husband… or, possibly, one of his friends. The two of them use it all the time in their circle. It might even be a folk phrase, for all I know. I am double-checking it right now, by contacting the friend, who lives in Czechoslovakia.
I happened to quote it to Mr. Bonner and he liked it and asked if he could use it. I said no, not without attribution. He agreed. This was before the book came out.
Now, suddenly two years down the road, his business partner and close friend uses it….after a whole two years of attribution problems and promotional issues. Recently, I’ve just ignored them because I believe this endless runaround is intended to make me look foolish for objecting.
As a single incident, it doesnt matter. But as only the latest example of a whole bunch, it certainly does bother me - not least, because it’s an appalling waste of time.
I notice that plagiarism is now absolutely pandemic on the net. Even well-known historians seem to be plagiarizing (Doris Goodwin, for one).
But that’s no proof of the innocence of the action.
It’s proof of the corruption of our intellectual life.
Whatever it costs, it behooves me to object, and keep objecting, when someone does something that’s the moral equivalent of pilfering..
I thought the two links below needed to be visible, so I am reposting them from a comment from Non Entity for you to check out:
ObscuredTruth.com
FreeTalkLive.com
And of course, check out the Free State project in New Hampshire.
A young German here in Buenos Aires alerted me to an unfolding story I’d not heard of - the decline in the bee population in the US and UK, attributed by some to the genetic modification of crops, by others to the use of pesticides. Other experts blame cell-phones. Or stress from migration.
At Natural Choices, one writer, Ladd Smith, describes the crisis:
“A topic of real concern to gardeners across the country is the recent major decline in the honeybee population. Referred to as “colony collapse disorder (CCD),” it was first reported in the U.S. in October 2006 and spread rapidly, with beekeepers reporting losses of between 50 percent to 90 percent of bees. While the exact causes are not known, there are a variety of theories, including pesticide use, migratory stress and the bees’ immune system failure.”
The article offers the following suggestions:
1. Plant a bee garden (this takes a wide variety of plants and shade)
2. Create an insectary (don’t use chemicals pesticides that kill insects)
3. Add Orchard Mason bees (non-aggressive)
Agribusiness titan Monsanto is the goliath every activist would like to slay:
Its patented Round Up brand of herbicide is ubiquitous in farmland world over, but new research suggests the product poses a danger to human health. [Note: an earlier version of this post dropped the word herbicide by accident so it read as though soy contained the chemical. I corrected it but the google cache still shows the old version in the header. Apologies. I often think I've corrected something and saved it and find that the save didn't actually take place...]
From Marie Trigona at America’s Program
“A study released by an Argentine scientist earlier this year reports that glyphosate, patented by Monsanto under the name “Round Up,” causes birth defects when applied in doses much lower than what is commonly used in soy fields.
The study was directed by a leading embryologist, Dr. Andres Carrasco, a professor and researcher at the University of Buenos Aires. In his office in the nation’s top medical school, Dr. Carrasco shows me the results of the study, pulling out photos of birth defects in the embryos of frog amphibians exposed to glyphosate. The frog embryos grown in petri dishes in the photos looked like something from a futuristic horror film, creatures with visible defects—one eye the size of the head, spinal cord deformations, and kidneys that are not fully developed.
“We injected the amphibian embryo cells with glyphosate diluted to a concentration 1,500 times than what is used commercially and we allowed the amphibians to grow in strictly controlled conditions.” Dr. Carrasco reports that the embryos survived from a fertilized egg state until the tadpole stage, but developed obvious defects which would compromise their ability to live in their normal habitats.
Pointing to the color photos spread on his desk, Dr. Carrasco says, “On the side where the contaminated cell was injected you can see defects in the eye and defects in the cartilage.”
For the past 15 months, Dr. Carrasco’s research team documented embryos’ reactions to glyphosate. Embryological study is based on the premise that all vertebrate animals share a common design during the development stages. This accepted scientific premise means that the study indicates human embryonic cells exposed to glyphosate, even in low doses, would also suffer from defects.
“When a field is fumigated by an airplane, it’s difficult to measure how much glysophate remains in the body,” says Dr. Carrasco. “When you inject the embryonic cell with glysophate, you know exactly how much glysophate you are putting into the cell and you have a strict control.”
Glyphosate is the top selling herbicide in the world and is widely used on soy crops in Argentina.
Monoculture soy is grown on more than 42 million acres of fields across Argentina and sprayed with more than 44 million gallons of glyphosate annually. It is part of a technological package sold by Monsanto that includes Round Up Ready seeds GM to tolerate the herbicide glyphosate. This allows growers to fumigate directly onto the GM soy seed, killing nearby weeds without killing the crop. In the winter, crops are sprayed to kill off weeds and seeds are then planted without having to plow the soil, a process commonly referred to as “no-till farming.” Nearly, 95% of the 47 million tons of soy grown in Argentina in 2007 was genetically modified, adopting the Round Up ready technology marketed by Monsanto.
The study on the top-selling agrochemical has alarmed policymakers, so much so that Dr. Carrasco has received anonymous threats and industry leaders demanded access to his laboratory immediately following the study’s release. Industry leader Monsanto wouldn’t talk to the Americas Program for this story, but in a press release on its website, the company says that “glyphosate is safe.”
My Comment:
There - the cat’s out of the bag. Now you know why I’m down here. South America has the last remaining land masses suitable for agriculture, the greatest biodiversity, the richest vegetation, the richest fauna….
No wonder one of the most predatory and rapacious corporations in the world is also here…
How walkable is your neigborhood? You can check it out here at Walkscore.com
Via Bob Sharpe´s blog, ¨Toward A Simple Life.”
OK. A new one. Shortly after my blog posts on antisemitism, the gunman, and racist language, I get an email in my inbox saying I’m subscribed to Pak Alert.
I didn’t pay any mind and didn’t click on it, thinking it was spam. Then I googled Pak Alert, which seems to be a news group. Glancing through it, I see it has the Protocols of the Elders of Zion listed….and some antisemitic language that I didn’t bother to read through since it was clear what it was.
I deleted the mail, thinking it was spam.
But then I got to thinking about how I got the mail. So I went and and checked and sure enough, someone had subscribed me to the group. That’s abuse, and I reported it twice to Google.
Wondering if someone wanted to create an embarrassing record to “prove” I was anti-Semitic, since I’d subscribed to the group.
Now, how did that happen? Did they get my password or can you just add an email without permission? No idea. I don’t frequent chat groups.
Tomorrow, I’m going through and making note of some of the things that have happened since I started writing for the web. It runs the gamut from name-calling to hacking, spamming, stalking, provocation, libel, threats, delinking articles, plagiarism, copyright infringement, personal harassment, forgery, invasion of privacy, sending out private email to public groups…….
Not complaining, merely observing the follies of my fellow men.
And wondering if they’re worth it.
“If all a country needed to do to achieve manufacturing supremacy and economic dominance was devalue their currency then Georgia and Bosnia would be considered paragons of economic prosperity.”
– Michael Pento, via 321 gold.
Aha. The folly of naivete. Mr. Pento’s mistake is to think that manufacturing supremacy is what our oligarchs have in mind for the US. He must be kidding.
The goal is to destroy US economic independence (let alone dominance) and subjugate it to an international cabal centering around….guess who…the oligarchs.
In the news on Friday, May 22:
“Martin Bell, former BBC war correspondent and current UNICEF UK Ambassador for Humanitarian Emergencies, recently concluded a three-day trip to the north-east zone of Somali to report on the situation of children and women affected by conflict, drought, displacement and other hardships – and to shed light on UNICEF’s efforts to provide them with crucial services.
In Bossaso, one of the country’s busiest ports, Mr. Bell visited settlements for displaced people and saw firsthand the dire conditions in which they live. Displaced populations form a group of chronically vulnerable people here, lacking even the most basic social services and livelihood opportunities.
Bossaso hosts 27 camps where 40,000 people have sought refuge from other parts of the country. Over 1 million people in Somalia are internally displaced, mainly due to the conflict and insecurities in the central and southern regions..”
More at Relief Web.
Doctors Without Borders/Medicins Sans Frontieres reports that more than 270,000 have fled to Northern Kenya, to camps operated by the UN High Commission for Refugees, where rations have been cut by 30% and malnutrition runs at over 22%, well above the emergency threshold. That’s driving many of the refugees back to the war-zone.
My Comment
This was sent to me by a young Somali friend, who urges everyone to help in any way they can.
Now, my focus in this blog is on mass thinking, but the organization of crowds (through state propaganda, coercion, and surveillance) has as its other face, the dis-organization of crowds in times of crisis, often state-produced crisis, such as at New Orleans during Katrina, or here. Among people on the move in large groups, refugees are probably the largest group.
What is amazing to me about crowds of refugees is that they move peacefully, giving the lie to fear-mongering imagery of masses of people overwhelming civilization. That’s the sort of imagery usually conjured up by authoritarians when discussing mass migration or mass movement of any kind.
In the news today, AP reports:
“Multifamily construction plunged 46.1 percent to an annual rate of 90,000 units after a 23 percent fall in March. Permits for multifamily construction dropped 19.9 percent to 121,000 units. Analysts said apartment construction is being hurt by a glut of condominiums on the market and by tightening credit conditions for commercial real estate.”
My Comment
Oh, my. This made my day. Condo flippers and developers are in big trouble.
Overlook the opening of this article, with that plaintive reference to a ” modest rebound in single-family home construction in April” that “raised hopes.”
Hopes should not be raised. That’s pretty clear by now. Not unless you’re being paid to pump houses for some rash developer who ran out of buyers for his pet eye-sore. We can think of a number of things that should be raised - black flags, eyebrows, interest rates…..but not hopes.
I’ve been checking condo prices all over the world and it’s the same news. From Panama to Kuala Lumpur, from Miami to Baltimore. Commercial developers are in trouble.
If that doesn’t warm the cockles of your heart and put a smile on your face, I don’t know what will. These wretched companies drove up housing by 100-300% (and more) in some cities and literally chased people on small or fixed incomes out of places they’d been living for years.
And don’t tell me they added any real value.
In New York. construction in one building was so shoddy, the Buildings Department had to intervene. I personally inspected a condo where, when the owner kicked the wall, her foot went right through. Many of them were aesthetic monstrosities that ruined the skyline, polluted the air, and destroyed the architectural beauty of the places where they metastasized.
Now there’s a glut and the developers are losing their shirts.
Miami’s condo king, Jorge Perez, is sitting on top of a market with the biggest glut in the country. Since 2003, nearly 23000 condos were added to downtown Miami, and 33% of them remain unsold. The financial hurricane hit just when Perez, the “tropical Trump,” had opened his newest project, Icon Brickell, a boutique hotel combined with over 1,640 luxury apartments and squeezed into three towers. Only 18 units have sold so far. Perez (once estimated to have a net worth of $1.3 billion) is in big money trouble. His company, Related Group, lost $1 billion in 2008 and ran up debt of $2 billion, $700 million from Icon Brickell alone.
It just doesn’t get better than that….
A posting on facebook tells me that there is such a thing as “Beat Up a White Kid Day,” apparently a kind of May-day ritual.
I was astounded and first thought it must be some kind of prank, but there it is on wiki:
“However he [Judge Russo] concluded that “based on the evidence I’ve heard, May Day is reality and the evidence was overwhelming that this was an attack based on May Day and that the victim was chosen because she was white.” In drawing such a conclusion, Judge Russo suggested that white students in Cleveland’s integrated public schools have reason to fear assaults by minorities in so-called May Day attacks every May 1.”
Lila:
The judge in question was Cuyahoga juvenile court judge Russo, who was ruling on the beating up of Melissa King, a 13 year old student at Wilbur Wright Middle School in Cleveland, Ohio, on May 1, 2003, by a group of black and hispanic children. Although the immediate cause in this case was a personal vendetta, almost everyone in the case, seems to have acknowledged the reality of “Beat Up a White Kid Day.”
Since there’s been so much talk about white supremacists and their links to tax protesters and militia groups, I thought it was only right to show that such ideologies don’t rise in a vacuum. There’s plenty of hate anger to go around. [Lila: hate is misused as a word so I changed it to anger] And here’s one instance.
What was the reaction?
In Cleveland, the original story brought a flood of more than 100 letters to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, in which readers wrote that in fact this had been a May-day ritual for many years in desegregated communities and that many of them had been afraid of going to school on that day.
I’ll be retuning to this blog post to add any links to interesting aspects of the media coverage of this (or lack of it).
(And yes, I know I have two other posts I have to return to to update…bear with me).
OK. Remember Jena in Louisiana ? In 2006 a white student, Justin Barker, was attacked by six black students, setting off a case that had the whole country in a ruckus.
In this Alternet piece, a black commentator looks at Jena and sees excessive fear of young black males that leads to their being sentenced much more stiffly than whites for comp[arable crimes.
On one site. black readers' comments show that the central fact of the Jena case for them was the hanging of nooses.
That was seen by many of the whites in Jena as a prank.
For the whites the physical beating far outweighed the symbolic threat of the nooses (equivalent to cross-burning).
Here's a Counterpunch article on it that plays up that angle. But there are some interesting slants in the piece which grate on me a bit. Picking apart the language of Jena residents (who refer to "coloreds" and "our blacks") is a bit silly. Small town people without requirements to be PC in their language are going to express themselves in ways that are not as 'sensitive' as less insular society demands. This probably means nothing. And what was the need to emphasize that there was only one black person on the 9 member school board and only one black man in the 10 member parish government? Jena had a little less than 3000 people at the time. The African-American population is around 3500. That means the Af-Am percentage was at the time a bit over 10%. That means the racial make-up of the board seems quite fair, even if you subscribe to such numerical tests. [Correction: I have to go back and look at the hispanic population and find out how much of a difference to my calculations adding it would make].
But I digress. While I can find any number of articles on the Jena 6, most of them focusing on southern racism and noose hanging, I can find hardly any on Beat Up a White Kid Day. And on forums I’ve seen, the attitude is that there can be no race hatred among minorities because racism is related to power structure.
With Barack Obama now president, that leaves us with several possible positions.
One. Blacks now are part of the power-structure and can be as racist as whites.
Two. Blacks really aren’t part of the power-structure, and Obama is just a figure-head.
[In that case we need to ask who really is in power].
Three. There are many kinds of power. Opinion-making is also power.
Media Coverage:
On the Jena story, digging through links, I got an American Journalism Review piece which covers the media coverage (always the most interesting part of an American news story). The piece shows that the national media actually didn’t touch the story until 5 months later, when black bloggers and activists like Alan Sharpton had made a furor over it, and then they almost uncritically accepted the version put out by an activist called Alan Bean. The AJR piece questions Bean’s portrayal of the story, raising several points that also struck me.
Here’s a quote from AJR:
“Out of 57 stories:
Only eight stories allude to Mychal Bell’s prior criminal record….
Ten stories use the phrase “all white” to describe the jury that found Mychal Bell guilty of aggravated second-degree battery and conspiracy to commit aggravated second-degree battery. None explains why the jury was all white…..
Multiple stories describe the tree the nooses were found on as a “white tree”…… No stories question if the description is correct, and none asks students about the tree. Only the L.A. Times does not describe the tree as “white.”
Descriptions of white student Justin Barker’s medical condition vary from paper to paper and from story to story.…….. [Lila: here's a link to what is seems to be an injured Justin Barker. From the looks of it, the beating doesn't seem too bad. ]
The Washington Post, the L.A. Times and the Chicago Tribune never, in months of coverage, mention Barker’s medical bills. [Lila: the medical bills seem to be equivalent to the cost of an ambulance, ER, stitches and a bit more - roughly $12,000; again, more like injuries in a school brawl)..........
All four papers link the events in Jena multiple times, without ever explaining why they're linked............
Thirty stories quote civil rights activists, organizations or advocates. Eight stories quote Jesse Jackson; twelve quote Al Sharpton; others quote the ACLU, the Southern Poverty Law Center and the NAACP. Six quote Alan Bean of Friends of Justice five of them in the Chicago Tribune.........
..... In a piece titled "How One Man Fired Up Jena 6 Case," [Jason] Whitlock wrote that the media blindly accepted Bean’s story, to the detriment of the truth. Why? Because it was easy, he says.”
Lila: To put this in perspective, consider another race-hate crime in the last two years:
The Megan Williams torture case: in which a twenty-year old black woman was held captive for several days, sexually abused, forced to eat faeces, and stabbed by six whites, according to this AP report.
One of the defendants in this case got 10-25 years for second-degree sexual assault and another got three consecutive sentences, one for 10 years for violation of civil rights and the others for 2-10 years for assault.
Put this against what Mychal Bell, the 16 year old defendant at Jena, was initially charged with. He was charged as an adult with attempted second-degree murder (Lila: surely excessive). Later, this was reduced to aggravated second-degree battery.
At his initial conviction Bell faced up to 22 years in prison. On retrial, this was reduced to simple battery and finally he served 18 months altogether.
Lila (May 6):
Well, I don’t agree with the comment that “blacks are not part of the power structure” unless you want to say the president of the USA , the AG and a number of other positions are completely devoid of power. In which case, whites haven’t been all that powerful either. I think the third position is the correct one. There are many kinds of power: there’s money power, there’s political power, there’s public opinion, there’s academic opinion, there’s moral force, there’s biological power….
We tend to focus on money power/political power to make claims about the power or lack thereof of minorities. And largely, I think that’s correct - when you’re talking about structures of law, administration and institutions where those kinds of power hold sway. But there are other realms, as I’ve indicated.
My point is our discussion of race is abysmally simple-minded. We think in slogans and in memes. And that gets echoed in real life. Ultimately, this kind of mass thinking drives real life victimization, especially in troubled times. Exactly how it does this needs to be explored.
But this post is long enough now, and I’ll leave it at that.
PS (May 6): The context that is ignored in all this is inter-racial crime, crime that is not characterized as hate-crime officially, but is felt among whites as racially motivated. But since a post on this would be lengthy and involved I’ll address it separately.
For a tax-protest to be credible, the protester has to show evidence of good-faith.
Here are some points to consider:
If you want to engage in counter-economics, then you should know its activities are criminal and will be so regarded. Don’t expect sympathy from the rest of the public which does pay its taxes.
Notice that the media has made a distinction between the tax-resistance of the Vietnam war era and contemporary tax resisters - emphasizing the “white supremecist” elements and scams in the latter (and doubtless there are many).
Expect most people to believe (and, unfortunately, in some cases they will be right about it) that you are just another free-loader on the system.
Check out this factsheet to see how the government views tax protesters like Irwin Schiff.
And here’s a sympathetic view of Irwin Schiff from Libertarian Republican.
My view? I don’t know Schiff’s case in detail but I’m not persuaded by his methods, though sympathetic to his aims.
My suggestion, if you really don’t want to be subject to Uncle Sam, leave the country. Drop citizenship.
A large mass of people renouncing US citizenship is the smartest, least problematic way to defund the US government.
Rep Ron Paul, Daniel Hannan, Lew Rockwell, Jason Sorens, R.J. Harris, Cody Willard & Shelly Roche, Free State Project, Secession, Nationalization FREEDOM WATCH 2PM EST TODAY (Wed., Apr. 29th)! http://www.foxnews.com/strategyroom
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In the news:
The IMF says the G-20 fiscal stimulus will reach its 2% target.
Bloomberg reports on the figures spent so far:
“The G-20 countries will spend $820 billion on stimulus measures in 2009, up from a March estimate of $780 billion, and will spend $660 billion in 2010, the fund estimated.
The IMF also revised its forecast for budget deficits in G- 20 countries as a result of fiscal expansion. Today’s report calculates that budget deficits in the G-20 this year will increase by 5.5 percentage points of gross domestic product relative to 2007 and 5.4 percent in 2010. In March, the fund forecast a 4.7 percentage-point rise this year and a 5.1 percentage-point jump next year.
Strauss-Kahn said yesterday that governments should start to discuss “exit strategies” from the emergency spending once the crisis passes.
The fund’s estimate for financial-sector support also increased today to 32.1 percent of GDP, up more than 3 percentage points from the March estimate….”
My Comment (check back for more):
Domininique Strauss-Kahn, a member of the Socialist party and a former finance and economy minister in Lionel Jospin’s “Plural Left” government became the new managing director of the International Monetary Fund on September 2007, replacing Spain’s Rodrigo de Rato.
Interesting things to note about Strauss-Kahn:
Reconciliation
Siegfried Sassoon, November 1918
“When you are standing at your hero’s grave,
Or near some homeless village where he died,
Remember, through your heart’s rekindling pride,
The German soldiers who were loyal and brave.
Men fought like brutes; and hideous things were done;
And you have nourished hatred harsh and blind.
But in that Golgotha perhaps you’ll find
The mothers of the men who killed your son.”
Thanks to Sunni Maravillosa for posting this great piece, The Bartleby Project, by John Gatto.
“The Bartleby Project
By the end of WWII, schooling had replaced education in the US, and shortly afterwards, standardized testing became the steel band holding the entire enterprise together. Test scores rather than accomplishment became the mark of excellence as early as 1960, and step by step the public was brought, through various forms of coercion including journalism, to believe that marks on a piece of paper were a fair and accurate proxy for human quality. As Alexander Solzhenitzyn, the Nobel Prize winning Russian author, said, in a Pravda article on September 18, 1988, entitled “How to Revitalize Russia:”
No road for the people [to recover from Communism] will ever be open unless the government completely gives up control over us or any aspect of our lives. It has led the country into an abyss and it does not know the way out.
Break the grip of official testing on students, parents and teachers, and we will have taken the logical first step in revitalizing education. But nobody should believe this step can be taken politically—too much money and power is involved to allow the necessary legislative action; the dynamics of our society tend toward the creation of public opinion, not any response to it. There is only one major exception to that rule: Taking to the streets. In the past half-century the US has witnessed successful citizen action many times: In the overthrow of the Jim Crow laws and attitudes; in the violent conclusion to the military action in Vietnam; in the dismissal of a sitting American president from office. In each of these instances the people led, and the government reluctantly followed. So it will be with standardized testing. The key to its elimination is buried inside a maddening short story published in 1853 by Herman Melville: “Bartleby the Scrivener.”
I first encountered “Bartleby” as a senior at Uniontown High School, where I was unable to understand what it might possibly signify. As a freshman at Cornell I read it again, surrounded by friendly associates doing the same. None of us could figure out what the story meant to communicate, not even the class instructor.
Bartleby is a human photocopy machine in the days before electro-mechanical duplication, a low-paid, low-status position in law offices and businesses. One day, without warning or explanation, Bartleby begins to exercise free will—he decides which orders he will obey and which he will not. If not, he replies, “I would prefer not to.” To an order to participate in a team-proofreading of a copy he’s just made, he announces without dramatics, “I would prefer not to.” To an order to pop around the corner to pick up mail at the post office, the same: “I would prefer not to.” He offers no emotion, no enlargement on any refusal; he prefers not to explain himself. Otherwise, he works hard at copying.
That is, until one day he prefers not to do that, either. Ever again. Bartleby is done with copying. But not done with the office which employed him to copy! You see, without the boss’ knowledge, he lives in the office, sleeping in it after others go home. He has no income sufficient for lodging. When asked to leave that office, and given what amounts to a generous severance pay for that age, he prefers not to leave—and not to take the severance. Eventually, Bartleby is taken to jail, where he prefers not to eat. In time, he sickens from starvation, and is buried in a pauper’s grave.
The simple exercise of free will, without any hysterics, denunciations, or bombast, throws consternation into social machinery—free will contradicts the management principle. Refusing to allow yourself to be regarded as a “human resource” is more revolutionary than any revolution on record. After years of struggling with Bartleby, he finally taught me how to break the chains of German Method schooling. It took a half-century for me to understand the awesome instrument each of us has through free will to defeat Germanic schooling, and to destroy the adhesive which holds it together—standardized testing…..”
by John Gatto
My Comment
I once wrote the libretto for a one-act opera about Bartleby composed by a friend of mine at Catholic University. Unlike John Gatto, I always related to Bartleby and understood it because my first education was in India.
Education in the liberal arts was terribly rote-like in India in the 1980s. Long lists of figures to memorize. Map boundaries that had to be drawn from recollection. Senseless lists of obscure kings and their completely fungible achievements. Venkatappa I built 40 highways, 500 hospitals and 35 colleges. Krishnayya III built 35 roads, 502 colleges, 25 temples. Chandravarma XX conquered the Marathas or Rajputs or whoever in 807 AD…etc., etc. Not much in the way of ideas. The whole thing was like a long catalog. Lists of the building materials (limestone, gypsum, white marble) used for various famous mosques, monuments, temples - none of which I’d ever seen, since traveling in India was difficult and expensive for middle-class families. Nehru’s Five-Year Plans, every dam and hydel project, with the exact monetary figure for each one.
We’d copy the whole thing onto a large piece of brown wrapping paper and then memorize it in sections until we could reel it off without a flaw. Some of the girls took a few - shall we say - chemical stimulants to pull off this feat. The week after our exams, we would all be flat on our backs with exhaustion, fifteen pounds lighter, and hardly any more enlightened than before our labors. The next term, we’d go back to “bunking” class (playing truant) for the first few weeks to make up for this torture.
There was also a lot of long-hand copying of notes, because photocopy machines were nonexistent in our college and books were precious when you were living in a hostel. I copied scores of T. S. Eliot poems into a long notebook. In another I copied essays about Jane Austen. We took notes copiously in the classroom, although our lecturers were often less informed about things than we were. When things got boring, the more practical girls took to crocheting long scarves or eating lunch surreptitiously.
The whole thing was calculated to destroy any intelligence or interest in the subjects we were studying. It was a long, medieval exercise in mental gymnastics.
Amazingly, many of us ended up no worse intellectually than people who had had the finest undergraduate training.
But it was in spite of what we went through, not because.
Boo-hoo. Poor AIG employees are suffering unfairly from the public outrage over executive bonuses.
Look, we know these guys aren’t the culprits. The bad guys are too powerful (Hank Greenberg & Co.) or have skipped town.
So, yes, we know that the letter writer isn’t the problem. BUT….
He and his colleagues ARE senior people who worked at AIG while rampant fraud/crime was prevalent at other divisions. Did any of them say anything or do anything about it? AIG was involved in repeated infractions of the laws, over decades - a lot of which had already been exposed to the public eye or was being prosecuted. These guys didn’t know? Give me a break. And sez who the other divisions did nothing shady? How much do we really know?
Even if they themselves didn’t do a thing wrong, in light of their company’s centrality to the whole financial crisis, they should have had enough decency to have refused their bonuses. Where’s their public spirit?
Yes, the whole bonus fracas is a distraction and purely symbolic. But symbols are important. And people are understandably outraged.
Instead, we get this rather narcissistic letter in the Times that tells a single personal story.
Dear me, senior managers at a major financial firm work 12-14 hours, do they?
So do a lot of people who don’t get that kind of compensation.
Tough. There’s a serious problem and everyone has to contribute what they can, especially the people directly involved in the crisis.
Notice how the NY Times has been playing the bonus story.
Read this story by Allen Salkin
He says AIG rage isn’t healthy - chill it, you yokels. Interesting. I checked through Mr. Salkin’s archives to find out if he’d ever commented about politics so directly. But no. The only time since 2000 Salkin ever had anything to say about politics was recently - to try to douse rage over AIG and to defend their executive salaries (you need 500k to live in New York, he says here).
Thousands of people in the financial industry were killed in the 9-11 attacks. President Bush went on a rampage in Iraq that killed thousands of US servicemen and women and mutilated tens of thousands of them, in addition to killing over a million Iraqi civilians and reducing the country to near rubble in many areas. It was, arguably, a genocide. Since the 1990s, the financial industry in New York has created huge bubbles of fraud and crime that have destroyed the life savings, income, credit, and productivity of millions of people and firms all over the globe and has set off what looks like a global depression that could last for years. Did Allen Salkin at any time tell any of the frenzied speculators, corrupt regulators, and slavering real estate salesmen who pushed all this on the public to take a yoga class and chill? Did he tell them that lying, cheating, swindling, cosmic looting and mass murder are “not healthy”? No, I don’t recall he did.
Had New York journalists been doing their duty ( a central discipline necessary for practitioners of yoga) in the past two decades, I doubt the world would be in this mess.
Selective high-mindedness isn’t reason speaking. It’s servility to power masquerading as spirituality. Don’t fall for it.
The outrage over the bonuses was a distraction, yes, but it symbolized for struggling working class and middle-income people what’s wrong in the let-them-eat-cake world of the financial elites. To treat their outrage (which was also carefully orchestrated by the administration, by the way) as simply populist feeling gone mad is strangely and suspiciously selective.
Full disclosure: Salkin called me for comments for his piece. I said roughly what I said above. He didn’t use those comments.
PS: Nice to see Karl Denninger thinks along the same lines.
I have no idea who Denninger is but his take on things is almost identical with mine (dollar contrarian, psyop-savvy).
PPS: I note that Matt Taibbi wrote a post on this same letter and posted it on Alternet the day of this blog post.
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