Category Archives: Amazon blog

Jean Raspail: sage dystopia or severe diplopia?

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At Zobenigo blog, Jean Raspail’s gloriously muddle-headed dystopia about the destruction of a virginal Europe by inchoate brown masses (the yellow peril recycled) gets a keen rebuttal:
“The reasons for the popularity of Le Camp des saints are easy enough to decode. Here’s the novel’s synopsis from the usual place:

The story begins in Bombay, India, where the Dutch government has announced a policy that Indian babies will be adopted and raised in the Netherlands. The policy is reversed when the Dutch consulate is inundated with parents eager to give up their infant children as it would be one less mouth to feed. An Indian “wise man” then rallies the masses to make a mass exodus to live in Europe. Most of the story centers on the French Riviera, where almost no one remains except for the military and a few civilians, including a retired professor who has been watching the huge fleet of run down freighters approaching the French coast. The story alternates between the French reaction to the mass immigration and the attitude of the immigrants. They have no desire to assimilate into French culture but want the plentiful food and water that are in short supply their native India. Near the end of the story the mayor of New York City is made to share Gracie Mansion with three families from Harlem, the Queen of England must agree to have her son marry a Pakistani woman, and only one drunken Soviet soldier stands in the way of thousands of Chinese people as they swarm into Siberia.

In short, it’s the OYPA — the old yellow peril alarm — all over again.THE OYPA seems a weird beast to me since I have spent all my life being bored with the familiar and seeking out out the exotic as its antidote. I welcome Asian immigration on several grounds: first, the wonderfully zany Indians seem a million times more interesting to me than the predictable familiar boring French, whom I have no reason to love anyway; certainly, on average, Pakistani women are prettier than the English; the food they bring is more tasty; etc.

I therefore cannot fit into my head: why would not everyone else feel the same way?

What is more interesting about Jean Raspail’s brain is that it appears to be internally split: while writing his Dantean yellow perilist visions about foreigners flooding (and destroying) good old France, he simultaneously writes other books of scathing criticism of the very same modern France as a rotten perversion of its former self. He is a monarchist to the core and writes movingly about the spark of divinity which resides in the person of the king; his inviolability and irreplacability; the dire consequences of regicide; the lack of proper legitimacy in the person of a merely elected President; lack of authority; lack of respect for authority; etc. This is not merely a political fantasy: Jean Raspail senses that there is something deeply and fundamentally rotten about modern French (and, more generally, European) culture (about which he is probably right) and seeks its causes in the abolition of the monarchy two hundred years ago (I withhold my opinion).

But then he defends that very same rotten France against subversion by foreigners. Why? If France is rotten, then, heck, why not let it sink?

This is known to psychologists as cognitive dissonance.”

Was Pegasus behind the murder of Bill Colby?

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Links added on May 15, 2013

[I think I originally had links, but they seem to have vanished so I’m adding them back.]

Update:

Journalist Christopher Ruddy has also written about the death of Bill Colby while he (Colby) was employed at “Strategic Investment” a newsletter edited at the time by James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg and thus affiliated to Agora Inc.

[Note: the passage “edited…..and thus” was added on May 15, 2013].

Ruddy, an investigative journalist, was originally hired by SI’s James Dale Davidson to investigate the Vince Foster murder death [corrected, May 15, 2013], which Davidson believed was linked to Bill Clinton.

[May 15, 2013 Clarification: Ruddy was funded by right-leaning financier Andrew Mellon Scaife, who later backed NewsMax, the publishing company, of which Ruddy later became the CEO. He was also backed by Joseph Farah, founder of the  conservative Western Journalism Center. But it was Davidson who funded and circulated Ruddy’s influential video of the Foster death, Unanswered: The Death of Vincent Foster.”]

In writing about Colby’s death, Ruddy implies that there is significance in Colby joining SI. He believed SI gained a high profile by carrying the DCI’s name and gave Colby’s name greater recognition. Colby had already annoyed Agency staff by his revelations about past CIA misdeeds. Ruddy seems to imply that Colby’s death had something to do with this.

What Ruddy doesn’t mention is that there is equal evidence that others in government had as much motive to silence Colby as Clinton did, for example, figures like Henry Kissinger and Alexander Haig.

Haig was on the board of News Max, of which Ruddy was at one time is [May 15 – correction] the chief editor and CEO.

Whether Colby’s arrival at SI lent it credibility and thus lent credibility to Davidson’s and Ruddy’s accusations against Clinton, who then had Colby terminated; or whether Colby was killed because of Operation Red Rock, by those who ordered that operation (Nixon, Kissinger, Haig); or whether the reason lies elsewhere,  Colby was evidently murdered, and did not commit suicide, as a son of his, Carl Colby [added, May 15, 2013], now conveniently claims.

Yet another theory is that the Agency itself assassinated Colby to prevent further disclosures about certain illegal CIA operations around the time of Watergate.

Then there is the theory that Colby was taking an interest in the bizarre pedophile ring that John De Camp has written about. (See also this summary of the Franklin investigation). I admit to having a liking for this one.

Finally, some people theorize that Colby’s killing arose from the Aldrich Ames spy case.

Colby, it is claimed,  was himself spying for the Soviets and it was the FBI that disposed of him to spare themselves the embarrassment of a trial.

That would make FBI director Louis Freeh the culprit.

Not being an expert in CIA history, I am hardly qualified to judge the probability of any of these no doubt entertaining tales.

It’s not the villainy that appalls me, really.

Villains one comes across everywhere.

It’s the complete pointlessness of it all. What exactly was accomplished by espionage besides provoking more conflict and retaliation from other countries?

Nothing that couldn’t have been learned by good analysis.

Further comment:

I should state, off the bat, that I am thoroughly unsympathetic to Bill Colby, beyond the sympathy one feels toward anyone who is assassinated.

The man supervised and put through the most horrendous operations (Gladio, Phoenix, MKUltra) all in the name of the government.

He was, at very best, a deluded fool.

Given his position at the top of the intelligence services, he was much more likely to have been fully immersed in evil actions as a high-functioning sociopath, despite his religious leanings.

So, as is usually the case in politics,  both sides (the top brass who likely hunted him down and he himself),  are equally repugnant to normal human beings.

ORIGINAL POST

In “Deep Black Lies” David Guyatt describes the formation of the secretive “Pegasus” group, a cover for a deep intelligence group (Operations Sub Group) emerging out of President’s Reagan’s National Security Defense Directive No. 138 (NDSS-138) in Feb 1986.

The OSG had 3 parts: OSG 1 (anti-narcotics, headed by Ted Shackley); OSG 2 (anti-terrorism, headed by Colonel Oliver North, and, after North’s exposure in Contra-gate, by Richard Secord); OSG 3 (“alignment” – i.e.  assassinations to take care of potential problems, by Richard Secord and then Tatum).

The groups reported to the CIA, the FBI, the NSC, the DoD, MI6, Israeli intelligence, George Bush, and a British peer with expertise in Middle Eastern affairs, Lord Chalfont.

Pegasus was responsible for multiple covert operations, including the Superbills Sting, a deal between Iranian leadership, VP George Bush (a former CIA director), and Panama’s Manuel Noriega. The sting involved depositing $8 billion from the Iranians in drug-lord Pablo Escobar’s bank; then, exchanged half of that sum for twice the number of counterfeit bills from the Iranians (courtesy of a printing press and bank quality paper  gifted to the Shah years earlier).

At the end of some clever machinations, the Iranians were supplied with arms by Colonel Oliver North, the counterfeits were left safely in Escobar’s account, and Bush got a real loan on the back of the counterfeit deposit. That money he laundered through a series of banks, including the Vatican bank, to pay off various covert operations around the world.

That left President Bush finally with $3.8 billion, which went to fund the espionage, surveillance, and research apparatus of the coming New World Order.

Central to the new order would be the global drug trade, which would be in the hands of senior people in 11 different countries. In the US, the names included Bill Casey, Bill Colby, Bush, Kissinger, Haig, Secord, Gregg, North, Clinton, and others.

The most fascinating part of the story for me, however, was Tatum’s interactions with Bill Colby, the former CIA director, turned Agora Inc.  newsletter publisher, who had brought Tatum in as a deep cover agent decades earlier.

Before Tatum’s induction into the agency, Colby was CIA Saigon station chief and was organizing a highly confidential operation at the direction of the White House.

Nixon planned to withdraw from SE Asia, because of the unpopularity of the war domestically.

Afraid that the withdrawal would leave a power vacuum into which the North Vietnamese would rush (those were the days of the “domino” theory), he hoped to strengthen the resolve of local Cambodian forces under Lon Nol, against the N. Vietnamese forces, by staging a false-flag attack on military, air and civil installations in Phnom Penh, leaving behind as decoy the bodies of some North Vietnamese “Sappers.”

They would be brought in there and sacrificed by a super secret agency group, Team Red Rock.

What Red Rock members, including Tatum, were not told, was that they too were to be sacrificed. No word was to ever go back home about such a radioactive operation.

But the Red Rock team managed to spot the treachery in advance and escaped, hoping to get back to the Vietnamese border. It wasn’t to be. Their numbers thinning, they ran into the North Vietnamese and ended up tortured by Chinese and Russian interrogators.

Tatum was one of only two who survived. He was debriefed by Bill Colby, who then inducted him into the CIA, to protect him from what he claimed were powerful enemies in DC, i.e., Nixon, Kissinger and the rest of the top brass, from whom the whole criminal adventure had originated.

For the next ten years, Tatum was stationed all over the country at bases like Fort Bragg (Green Berets) and others, safe under the mentoring of Colby.

Then, when Colby retired, he called Tatum and told him to deactivate, claiming he would be in danger without his old boss to look out for him.

Tatum left and was involved in civilian life for a while, until reactivated on orders from above into the US army and from there to Special Forces aviation, through which he became involved in confidential business in the Grenada invasion.

Tatum was contacted again by Colby in 1983 and assigned a role in flying for Oliver North’s “Enterprise” – the whole-sale shipment of cocaine from Latin America (from the Colombian cartels), in return for gun-running to the Nicaraguan Contras.  The Mena airforce shipments during the Clinton era were part of this. Tatum was apparently ignorant of the actual nature of what he was shuttling back and forth. He claims he was also used by another covert group, Pegasus, at the same time.

But soon he realized the dangers and to safeguard himself started keeping records of his activities. Around the same time, he was given a list of the important figures in the global drug-trade by Barry Seal, a pilot from “Enterprise,” based in Mena airport in Arkansas. Seal later turned DEA informant and was killed, allegedly by the Colombian mafia, as retaliation for exposing it.

Before Clinton’s inauguration, Bush pardoned many of those in his circle who were likely to face prosecution imminently.

“In a very real sense, Chip Tatum’s story has now gone full circle. In March 1996, Tatum wrote to former Director of Central Intelligence, William Colby. Readers will recall that it was Colby who originally recruited Tatum into the CIA in 1971 and set him on his career as a covert intelligence operator. Since that time, Tatum developed a fondness for the super-spook, and Colby, in turn, played the role of mentor. In his letter, Tatum asked Colby to write a foreword for his book, Operation Red Rock, which he had completed just two months earlier. But there was another purpose in writing to the former DCI.

Four years earlier, when Tatum resigned his OSG command, he had volunteered to plead guilty on a felony charge in order to discredit himself. This was part of Tatum’s strategy of survival, as he was aware that one didn’t resign this particular team and remain alive for long. The fact that he had collected a body of evidence (including video and audio tapes and other related documentation) as ‘life insurance’, gave muscle to his negotiation. At that time he had not planned to reveal any of the details that he has now provided. In the event, his offer was taken up and he served a prison sentence of just over one year. That is where matters should have ended.

However, having served his sentence-thus complying with his part of the agreement-both Tatum and his wife, Nancy, were subsequently arrested and charged with another misdemeanour [sic]. Tatum got angry. His letter to Colby stated: “I have always kept my word with you. I told you that I would discredit myself. I don’t need your help to accomplish this. But to charge Nancy with a crime, and expect me to allow this, is beyond my comprehension.” He angrily continued: “I know that North and Rodríguez are the fuel for this, but haven’t you warned them that I wouldn’t sit still for this?” He then added: “I do not blame you for this; I am disappointed that you have allowed the ‘Pond Scum’ to control you!”

There then followed a warning: “The second book that I have already started will contain my movements from 1980 through today. I will not only write about the missions but about the NWO [New World Order] timetable and planned events including a chronology.” Ominously he added: “And I will name names. You must detach yourself from these people!”

Tatum then continued by outlining how he would enter evidence for his forthcoming trial and warning that if disallowed for reasons of classification, then “a Special Prosecutor will be required to investigate the information, and the videotape tells no lies.” He added: “I also had stills and an audio clip of a meeting added to the video. Out of respect for you I have kept your name out to this point, but if you don’t separate yourself from these terrorists I will have no choice but to reveal your involvement also. Either way, the group will be exposed-by the media or by the investigating committee. Either way, they’re out of gas!” Tatum closed the letter by saying: “Mr Colby-you’ve done too much for your country to be disgraced in the manner that these men will be.”

Less than two months later, the former DCI was reported missing. By Monday 6 May 1996, Colby’s body was found. It was later reported that Colby died following a “canoeing” accident on the Wicomico River, Maryland. Tatum and many others (including this writer) doubt this. Throughout his life, Colby had an all-abiding fear of water. It would have been entirely out of character for him to step voluntarily into a boat, let alone a canoe.

Despite this, Colby’s death officially remains an accident. This has come as no special surprise to Tatum, who recently stated to this writer: “I knew the OSG were bulletproof when one of our targets, a 25-year-old, was reported to have died of a heart attack. His name was Al-Jarrah.” That, however, is another story.

POSTSCRIPT

At 3 pm on Friday 4 April 1997-shortly after publication of Part 1 of this article-Chip Tatum was roused from a mid-afternoon snooze and told to report to the warden of his prison. He was informed that he was being released-less than midway through his 27-month sentence-with immediate effect, following an appellate court decision that found his conviction by Judge Adams to be illegal.”

Paul-Lehrman Connection Meaningless, Says Daily Bell (Corrections Added)

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Update: Subsequent to my posting this, the Agora disinfo agent/troll/paid basher Ryals reposts Amberger’s comments to him (rather than Amberger’s blog posts about Agora), simultaneously discrediting and neutralizing Amberger by an unsubstantiated smear (Nazi Stasi), just as he posts any substantial criticism of Agora, ALWAYS with slurs about the critics and always with OLD NEWS about Agora, usually attributing criminal behavior to the critics, for which he gives not a shred of proof.

His response fails to mention the people who really are responsible for Agora’s marketing and selling today – Myles Norin (CEO), Matthew Turner (counsel), Addison Wiggin (chief of Agora Financial, its flagship subsidiary, and also heavily involved in Oxford Group, Michael Masterson (Mark Ford), Byron King, Alexander Greene, Mike Ward, Julia Guth, and many others, whose border-line promotions were all deconstructed by Christoph Amberger. Instead, Ryals tries to discredit Amberger’s whistle-blowing. No question Ryals has some kind of tie to Agora.

To make things clearer, Agora is not solely Bonner’s company but owned by several people, some of whom no doubt have axes to grind with others. Bonner himself might have enemies within the company, for partisan, financial or personal reasons.

Notice how Ryals only focuses on the Republicans in the group, like Bonner, presumably Casey, and Robert Bauman, who specializes in the admirable field of asset protection. Now, unlike the state-worshipping fraud Ryals,  I would love to believe Bob Bauman is a really good asset protector (aka money-launderer), but, alas, if he is not what he seems (and I haven’t seen anything concrete to suggest that), he is much more likely to be an IRS/DOJ honey-pot, if I know how these things work.

That’s what I believe large parts of the  asset-protection racket really is about, when it’s not about espionage and government-related money-laundering.

That might include the over-hyped Simon Black, who also seems to be a part of the LRC-Agora crew and constantly tells people that Singapore is a great place for financial security, when anyone who even researches the matter in a skimpy way will figure out that Singapore is crawling with Mossad and CIA.

NWO resistance indeed.

Anyone boosting simplistic asset protection, or simplistic encryption like Tor (heavens!) is simply pushing people into US govt supervised encryption. But, then, maybe that’s the idea.

ORIGINAL POST

The Daily Bell argues that the Ron Paul-Lewis Lehrman connection is meaningless (links to follow):

“Worse, in our humble opinion, whenever such issues arise these days, the dissemblers come out in force to attack the world’s only apparently honest politician, US Congressman Ron Paul, for working with Lewis Lehrman.

It is true that when Ron Paul and Lewis Lehrman served (with many others) on a US Gold Commission during the Reagan years they wrote a minority report recommending a return to some sort of gold standard.

But Ron Paul certainly didn’t seek Lehrman out to write the report. He wrote it with Lehrman because Lehrman was on the committee. Ron Paul, of course, went on to call for a regime of competing currencies, which is something we’re partial to.”

Comment:

This would be a whole lot more credible if  The Daily Bell itself didn’t call out people on just as tenuous evidence, in much more black and white terms than I have ever done.

It also doesn’t help that the Bell dismisses critics of Paul as dissemblers.

Why?

What’s wrong with criticizing a politician who’s set up as the sole spokesman for libertarian issues?

Why would anti-state capitalists focus on a politician as their spokesman, in the first place?

What sense does that make?

Especially, when just a few days ago, the Bell raised no objection at all, when, in an interview on their site, Gerald Celente claimed Paul was “not a fighter” and had failed because he was not a fighter.

If that is the opinion of Paul’s friends, isn’t it natural that people on the paper-money team or outside the binary altogether (like me) would reach even more devastating conclusions?

I don’t believe most Paul critics are dissembling. I think they are genuinely disappointed and suspicious. I am too.

Three. The Bell loses credibility when it claims Paul is the “only honest politician in the world.”

That’s pure hyperbole.

I’m sure the Daily Bell doesn’t know “all the politicians in the world.” And Paul isn’t perfectly clean. There was rampant nepotism during his campaign. There was the alleged double-billing. There were other mis-steps.

They might all be minor. And the Lehrman connection might be innocuous too, but it’s not the only troubling thing that comes to mind.

Which brings me to my fourth point.

Paul has a long-standing relationship via Murray Rothbard with Agora Inc. and its founder, James Dale Davidson, about which I blogged in July (the first person to pull that little nugget up, I do believe….although, as soon as I say that, I’m sure a dozen quicky sites will pop up with the same information on them).

This is a very troubling connection, in my opinion.

The Agora Inc. network has  ties to Rockefeller-related groups, like the Peterson Institute. I blogged about that in 2009, January.

Now, I myself have once cited research produced by the Peterson.

[It’s in my piece on Krugman, at LRC, and the researcher was Anders Aslund, who was one of the advocates of privatization in the Soviet Union. Aslund was wrong about that,  although not the only one wrong, and certainly not the main one.]

But I post research from all over the place, and that is not an endorsement of the authors’ other works or of the websites carrying the research.

Agora’s ties to the Peterson Institute, however, are a bit more relevant and important than my posting or quoting someone once, casually.

The I.O.U.S.A film (a spin-off from Agora’ “Empire of Debt,” Wiley, 2005) was promoted nationally by the Peterson Institute. Some of the positions Agora supports are consonant with Pete Peterson’s interests, although I do believe most people at Agora are anti-state libertarians, whereas Peterson is no more than a  crony capitalist.

This is what I wrote in my 2009 blog post  about the Peterson connection:

“Assembling this bipartisan group of prominent enablers/theorists of empire over the last twenty years lets IOUSA claim it goes beyond partisanship. In reality it does no such thing. Omitting a context for its arguments, the film actually lends itself to being interpreted in ways quite contradictory to the tenor of the original work. At times it even subverts the book thoroughly.

IOUSA lends itself to a very anti-libertarian, statist moralizing of the debt issue: thus, spendthrift population needs to be forced to save by government. Now that really alarms me. Watch out – forced savings accounts ahead!”

Agora also promotes things like “peak oil,” which I don’t find persuasive, being a long-time believer in the abiotic origin of oil.

These positions are  accompanied by promotions throughout its marketing network from which it stands to gain financially, either directly or indirectly.

That surely calls into question the credibility of the positions of anyone deeply connected to them.

Is Paul connected to them in a serious way?

{Added, August 25: Obviously, Agora has also supported anti-war positions that have not won it popularity, so I should give them credit for that and I do.

But I also recognize that the “anti-war” position has a place in the permissible range of public opinion, as long as on crucial issues and events  antiwar advocates develop laryngitis. This strategy, devised by the intelligence services, ensures that there is “cognitive diversity” among critics of war and the police state that gives the appearance of a “liberal” political culture, while actually permitting them little impact.  It siphons off the energy, time, money, and ambition of perhaps 95% of activists and effectively marginalizes the rest. Zahir Ebrahim has written extensively about this at his depressing but honest website, Project HumanBeingsFirst.]

Besides the tie-in to the establishment via Peterson/Rockefeller and besides the commercial imperative which undermines the sincerity of its positions, there are also Rothschild connections to Agora.

First, Rothschild interests are now directly connected to Rockefeller interests, by a recent merger (which I’ve blogged a couple of times).

Second, there are also direct connections between the Rothschilds and Agora.

I wasn’t sure about some of those, a couple of years ago.

In fact, I thought the allegation that Agora was a Rothschild front was only innuendo concocted at Executive Intelligence Review by ex-Larouchite, Bill Engdahl, who often doesn’t cite his sources and has once picked up leads from me without acknowledgement, likely because I come from the right

That’s why, even though I was disillusioned with Ron Paul by then, I didn’t place much stock in the Engdahl charge, especially when it was picked up on Jennifer Lake’s blog (see this blog post of March 10 2010) and then embellished with a lot of strange errors.  I felt the whole thing had to be some kind of disinformation. I certainly didn’t make any connection to Paul.  I thought it was a ploy to muddy more concrete legal issues. One can’t be prosecuted for being a Rothschild front, after all, but one can discredit one’s detractors by posing as one, since the whole Rothschild conspiracy is beyond the pale for mainstream analysts and writers. In fact, Lake’s silly comments, which I was forced to address because they libeled me, actually damaged the very thing she –  with typical arrogance – thought she was assisting – the public interest. In short, she forced me to state things that tipped off the very people she claimed I was covering for.

That’s why I even thought Agora itself was encouraging the story, a view shared by at least one other credible journalist. For the same reason, I suspect that Tony Ryals, the cyberbully behind all the negative postings about me, isn’t half as insane as he pretends to be. In fact, I think he has indirect ties to Agora himself, since he never mentions the people there who have actual legal responsibility there, like CEO Myles Norin, or their attorney, Matt Turner, or Agora Financial chief, Addison Wiggin, or some of their star traders, like Alan Knuckman.

[Sept 6 – this morning, I checked to find that Ryals’ posts referencing these comments of mine and thus referencing these individuals had been deleted or “disappeared.” Of course, just to make me a liar,  they might pop back. But it’s interesting that it’s impossible to stop Ryals’s libels, when it’s someone like me (or others, who aren’t in charge at Agora or whose crimes, if they committed any, are beyond the statute of limitations, but it’s easy enough to get him to remove comments about the people still there.]

Funnier still, Ryals never mentions a former senior employee, Christoph Amberger, whose blog about the company’s shenanigans (cons would be a better word from what I read) was shut down in 2011. Reportedly, this was after he was paid to keep his silence, that is, hold to a non-disclosure agreement under threat of litigation. All traces of his blog about the company’s marketing deceptions (GreenLaserReviews) were wiped off the net in a matter of days.

Instead of mentioning all this, Ryals, who even corresponded with Amberger (who smacked him down for the troll he is) waffles on about Davidson, who is safely beyond reach of prosecution, and, in any case, seems to have more than paid for any sins by his investigations into the Clinton mafia and his insights into the manipulation of the stock markets; Bonner, who probably has no legal liability, as he’s not an officer of the company, and is too wealthy, too cautious, too smart, and too well-connected to get into trouble anyway; and Stansberry, who is already damaged goods and unlikely to get hurt any worse by innuendo.

But leaving aside intriguing theories about the cyber-underworld in which Ryals and his rants reside, I’m still not sure what the Rothschild connections to Agora really amount to.  The best I can say is I’m much more willing to believe some people there profit from them.

Why did it take me so long to get to that point?

Because it’s only recently (over the last year) that I’ve had the time to dig around and find any kind of credible accounting of how the Rothschild family might be the financial juggernaut they are said to be on conspiracy sites.

[I got there by adding material posted at Project Humanbeingsfirst  to my own research into BCCI (via Engdahl, Skolnik, DeepBlackLies, Yamaguchi.com, Forbes.com, LBMA website and other material.]

Now that I’ve come to think the whole “Rothschild” conspiracy  is something more than fiction, I’ve also begun to look at Ron Paul with a more critical eye.

So that’s where I come from on that.

Now, for my own credibility on the subject, given that I too have a connection to Agora.

This is what I have to say.

Except for the attacks following my pieces on Assange (by an attention-seeking Assange groupie, Tom Usher at RealLiberalChristian) and a legal threat at DailyBell by another fanboy and blatant troll, calling himself Al Kyder, and a couple of other things), one hundred percent of  the negative posts about me on the net stem from this one supposedly crazy person, who seems to have an indirect connection to Agora.

And all the rest of the monitoring/hacking I’ve experienced stem from my fall-out with Agora too.

What was the monitoring/hacking about? Simple.

In 2008, I gave whatever information I had  about certain sensitive issues to responsible journalists and investigators.

There you have it. That’s why their campaign against me didn’t end with the resolution of my IP issues with the company.  In fact,  it’s the reason why the IP issue keeps festering.

Who likes to be joined at the hip to someone who’s outed them? Who likes to know that someone knows what they are capable of?

That is why they are so bent on isolating me, stirring up third parties against me, and minimizing my influence in every way possible.

Since then, I’ve been warned by good people to “leave it alone” or possibly become even more of a target.  And that’s what I’ve tried to do, but it’s not because I’m interested in covering up anything for anyone.

It’s because I see no reason to second-guess the integrity, good faith, and sound judgment of what I’ve been told but take it as solid advice from people who know better than me. And  it’s because I believe more evil than good will come from ignoring that advice.

Especially as there’s another layer of complexity to this story.

Agora Inc. was also the last business association of former CIA director, William Colby, who  seemingly committed suicide some twenty years ago.

I say seemingly, because the suicide theory has been peddled only recently, and only by one of Colby’s sons. No one else believes it and there’s not much evidence for it.

Thus far, the official story has been  that it was an accident.

That sounds just as unlikely to me, as I blogged earlier.

Note: Ryals not only filched the Davidson-Chomsky-Rothbard connection from my blog (posted on July 20), as well as the information about Rees-Mogg’s and Colby’s Le Cercle and Pilgrim connections (which I got by discovering and researching the ISGP.EU site in detail),** he failed to link the post and then tried to pretend that I was covering up something about the Colby killing, when I’d  blogged about it as a murder, long ago, in 2010, and before that, in 2009. In fact, I’d been researching Mockingbird, MKUltra, mind-control, and sex-trauma as early as 2004, for my first book, where I have a couple of chapters on the material.

In 2005 I wrote a piece about former CIA director Stansfield Turner and Operation Gladio. It was around then that I also first heard about about Colby.

The fact that I ended up in the company where Colby once worked is one of those strange coincidences that “intention” pulls out of the universe.

And, far from covering up any of this, I’ve blogged repeatedly about it.

For instance, here’s my comment on an interview of Rees-Mogg there:

Posted by Lila Rajiva on 06/05/10 11:59 AM

Sorry. Colby was Cercle and apparently also Opus Dei …

Posted by Lila Rajiva on 06/05/10 11:55 AM

Rees-Mogg is reportedly a member of Le Cercle and the Pilgrim’s Society, as well as the exclusive Roxburghe club – supposedly a very influential part of the Anglo-American establishment. He was backed by speculator and corporate raider, James Goldsmith, relative and close associate of the Rothschilds.

Allegations are made on the left that Rees-Mogg is closely associated with Richard Mellon Scaife. Rees-Mogg is also closely tied to James Davidson, Bill Bonner, and Agora, through the Strategic Investment newsletter and other publications.

Through SI, he’s also linked to William Colby, ex CIA chief, also a Pilgrim Society member, if I’m not mistaken.

By link, I just mean there exists a relationship. It’s by no means clear how that actually plays out, if at all.

Colby was murdered (?) early 1990s. My best guess is it was related to the opening of CIA files with the Church Committee (much earlier)….and inter departmental fighting that resulted; there’s also a connection to a White House- related paedophilia scandal in Nebraska that got hushed up in a hurry. Some have linked that scandal to CIA mind-control operations but I haven’t seen anything conclusive about it. “

It always seemed plausible to me that Colby’s death was a political assassination, given his involvement in Operation Phoenix and Project Mockingbird, his testimony at the Church Committee hearings, his interest in the Nebraska pedophile ring, and his work for the intelligence-affiliated Nugan Hand bank (which had ties to BCCI).

I learned about Le Cercle and the Pilgrim’s Circle from ISGP.eu, and passed that onto the Bell, as well.

I posted the link to ISGP.eu at the Bell below a July 8, 2010 article

Posted by Lila Rajiva on 07/09/10 12:28 PM
Sorry. Two careless mistakes.

@John Treichler (not Treicher, as posted before).

The site is the Institute for the Study of Globalization and Covert Politics (ISGP.eu not ISGPU, as I wrote in a hurry). Written from a very left-wing perspective. Meticulously compiled.

[Note: ISGP eu was up when I posted the link, but googling for it today, I find that the domain is for sale and I find a post at Cryptogon, dating back to January of the same year (2010), saying that the site had disappeared, but that the writer at Cryptogon had saved the information from the google cache in the form of a zip file. However the link he had posted didn’t open to the ISGP.eu file at all. He claimed he had given it to Wikileaks for safe-keeping. I later found it at wikispooks.]

So, that’s my explanation of why the Bell’s dismissal of the Lehrman link isn’t quite enough; why there are other reasons to worry about Paul, such as his connections to Agora; why I was slow to start looking at Paul critically; what Agora’s ties to the Rothschilds might be; and what my connection to the whole business amounts to.

There’s one other thing. The Bell is also a part of the same Agora network to which Paul seems to have ties.

You won’t hear that from them, though.  It’s one of those little omissions that are troubling,  like the repositioning and revisionism that goes on on the site, at times.

For instance, in the same piece on the Lehrman tie, Wile writes that he knew Assange was disinformation right away.

Not so. He got that from me (see these comments below a piece at Infowars.com

as well as these comments below another piece there.

I was perhaps the only rightist anti-neocon to criticize Assange.

Other debunkers were Wayne Madsen (the first on the case) and Bill Engdahl, both on the left.

Neither of those two, by the way, assembled nearly as comprehensive a critique of Wikileaks as I did.

And I know that research had an impact, because  the Guardian ran a piece derived from it shortly after (picking up on the John Shipton lead) and an Australian academic wrote a paper repositioning the cypherpunk association (deconstructed in my pieces) into a narrative more favorable to their man.

Wile relied on that research, as well as material on Gordon Duff’s site, in changing his opinion. Then he exaggerated and ended up with a kind of parody of my criticism of Assange.

This he tends to do, which allows an opening to people like Fed regulator, William Black, whom Wile once made the mistake of criticizing. Black reacted with a petty and surprisingly  personal attack, but, when you distort people’s positions, you have to expect vehement reactions.

Wile’s subtle perception management has even caught the attention of many contributors to the Bell, including pro-Paulian goldbugs like Bionic Mosquito and Leonardo Pisano, as well as paper-money anti-Paulians like FauxCapitalist and Memehunter.

Why does he do it? Most likely as a way for the site to stay viable on the net, while conspiracy mongering, or perhaps, as a way to manage the reactions of readers and associates. Nothing wrong with that, but, still, it’s unsettling and tends to make people suspicious.

It’s why I stopped posting on their forum, despite my gratitude to them. for providing a useful and unusual venue for discussions.

I also do respect Wile’s courage in tackling material people usually avoid for fear of losing their credibility.

So the Bell does get a lot of props from me for bravery and unique content, yes, but I also see them as compromised by their financial ties. The same goes for some other libertarian sites I still read.

Other pluses: Wile is almost always polite and he is not as Eurocentric in his thinking as some others.

I should add that I’m not one of those who think he’s running a limited hang-out himself.  Or, at least, he is doing it less than most.

Some final thoughts:

First, about Colby and Agora.

Colby had so many enemies that it would be hard to narrow down who murdered him, if he was murdered, without a lot more evidence being uncovered. But no one in officialdom or intelligence is likely to want to do that. And only a fool or a martyr would venture into that territory alone.

About the Agora connection (and, through them, to Paul):

Colby’s name appeared on Agora’s long-running Strategic Investments newsletter, with which the Rothschild-related Rees Mogg is/was affiliated, along with long-time anti-tax advocate, electronic counterfeiting (anti-Naked Short Selling) critic, and Forbes/Scaife protege, James Dale Davidson.

Davidson, Rothbard, and Chomsky all worked together in the 1970s, in antiwar activism, which by itself means little or nothing. Many ideological foes make common cause on single issues.

But, it was not “by itself,” as the evidence shows.

At least one of Paul’s writers (the guy who wrote the race realist pamphlets) is directly tied to Agora.

Paul himself has been incessantly promoted by Agora, until very recently, when affiliates and associates began promoting a few anti-Paul libertarians, like Wendy McElroy, N. Stephen Kinsella, and even Stephan Molyneux, who appeared briefly on the Doug Casey website, and then was pushed out.

It was also from Agora Inc. that I first heard of Ron Paul.

Casey, like Jeff Berwick and what looks like a majority of the hard-money community, is himself closely tied to the Agora network by business affiliation.

So also, as I said earlier,  the Daily Bell, with its multiple banking and gold community associations.

These ties may or may not mean anything nefarious, but they would certainly limit what the Bell, or any other libertarian writer in this circle, would be willing or able to say publicly.

Which means I really can’t trust someone in that circle to be too forthcoming about Paul, since they all share business networks.

That is simply common-sense.

Even I have had a hard time writing about Agora’s network, even though all I did was write and do some research there, and the only person I really worked with was Bill Bonner.

To put it as simply as possible for all the trolls who still can’t read my actual words, let alone between my words:

It is difficult to write critically about people with whom you have had personal and professional relationships; who have accessed your personal and business records (illegally).

It is even more difficult when their employees work and live close to where you work and live and they are native-born, while you are an immigrant.

It becomes impossible when the political and economic context is a multi-front global military and economic war, in which your motherland is also involved, and not always as an ally; when the legal and media environment of your adopted country is totalitarian; when your family lives abroad and you are self-employed and modestly well-off, while they have tens of millions of dollars behind them, are connected to intelligence and financial elites, have thousands, if not millions, of subscribers and friends to whom they can outsource their efforts, and when they are marketing, financial, and political players on a global scale.

If that is true of me, how much more is it true of the hard-money community, which is completely encompassed by the Agora network?

I don’t expect any of them to pipe up with anything but support for Ron Paul. They will alienate their business associates, otherwise.

I hope that explains why I don’t think the Bell’s dismissal of the Lehrman tie is sufficient by itself.

I say this as someone who took a long time to open their eyes about Paul.

Which person likes to think they’ve been had? Or, that establishment critics mightn’t be entirely off-base in their criticism of Paul?

As far back as 2008, I heard some mutterings from loyal fans of Paul but said nothing, hoping it was all minor or a mistake.

I even took the part of the LRC crowd against the WSJ in a lengthy blog post.

[As far as that WSJ incident goes, I still stand by the piece ]

In 2010 I spoke up about my dissatisfaction with Paul’s positions at the Daily Bell forum.

I didn’t want to, because I knew Paul supporters would get annoyed by it, but credibility is very important to anyone writing about politics. It should be more important than pleasing the team.

Then, a few people who’ve wanted to discredit me for supporting libertarian positions(albeit nuanced and rather more conservative ones than that of the anarcho-caps), or for criticizing Assange (albeit in a most circumspect and balanced way than his other detractors), or for deconstructing Ron Paul and his libertarian promoters (albeit factually and with respect), have tried to claim that I’m covering up for this or that person.

The truth is exactly the opposite. I’ve been libeled, monitored, and undermined covertly, almost continuously since 2007.  I’ve also been plagiarized repeatedly and marginalized.

I don’t really believe the government was behind any of that, except maybe at a very low level, in so far as some petty operatives might have been employed by my enemies to do the dirty work.

So, there is no cover up on my part. Or paranoia.  What I say is not a lie. It’s not propaganda. It’s not a smear or anything but the most truth it is possible, helpful, and advisable for anyone in my position to speak.

For the umpteenth time, I’m not RAW, nor CIA, nor Jihadi, nor Hindu fascist. I’m just a writer, with a lot of interests, an eclectic background, and too much curiosity and impetuosity for her own good.

It was a meaningful synchronicity that I got involved in the whole business. I don’t say that to promote myself,  create a mystery, or confuse the situation. I say it because that is really how it happened.

There are mysteries of “intention,” “attraction,” and the cycles of time.  And they have nothing to do with “dissembling”, “disinformation,” or “RAW”.

The innuendos by Jennifer Lake, Tony Ryals, and Tom Usher are simply smears, even if they are understandable smears.

There really are more things in earth and heaven, Horatio…

Gore Vidal Dead: Clever Satirist, Deluded Moralist

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Gore Vidal died.

He said some accurate things about American foreign policy [which I admired], wrote some famous books I’ve never read [well, actually I did read “Myra Breckinridge” and disliked it] and was a clever fellow altogether, at least, all the clever people say so. 

But, hmm…I don’t really have anything to say except, let’s see…

I really don’t give a fuck. Look, am I going to sit and weep every time a young

hooker decrepit old pansy man dies?  feels as though she’s been taken advantage of ?

[That was Gore Vidal defending his good friend Roman Polansky, guilty of forced sodomizing and rape of a 13 year-old girl, after feeding her drugs.]

[Further note. The derogatory term (pansy) is intended to be satirical.  I have no animus against gays or gay rights, in fact, I fully support them.]

But, since the entire blogosphere is singing Vidal’s praises, without any reference whatsoever to his many negative traits, including venomous attacks on people ranging from Truman Capote to Charlton Heston,  I decided to break my usual rule of not saying anything negative on someone’s death and point out how mean a man he was in some ways, personally.

There was, for instance, his trick of embarrassing heterosexual males by implying homosexuality, the most famous instance of which was his encounter with Charlton Heston, who was not amused.]

And more here about the venom behind the urbanity:

About Truman Capote:

“Vidal made no secret that he detested the author of Breakfast at Tiffany’s and In Cold Blood, saying once: “Capote I truly loathed. The way you might loathe an animal. A filthy animal that has found its way into the house.”

When asked ‘What was Capote doing that you didn’t like?” Vidal shouted: “Lying! The one thing I hate most on this earth. Which is why I do not have a friendly time with journalists.” He called Capote’s death “a good career move” and added “Every generation gets the Tiny Tim it deserves.”

Stephen Moss in The Guardian has a good piece about a man who wrote brilliant essays and over-rated novels, and  carried his perceptive and prescient anti-imperial criticism into pointless America-bashing that finally undercut his own criticism.

“Does age bring wisdom?” a questioner from the floor asked Gore Vidal? There was a short pause. “No, it brings senility.” Cue a wave of applause from the vast audience that had come to touch the hem of the man Adam Boulton, who had the tricky task of interviewing Vidal, called “the greatest essayist since Montaigne”.

That’s a big claim, but not necessarily wide of the mark: Vidal’s essays on politics and literature are magnificent and will live long after the weighty novels he is keener for us to read and remember are gathering dust.

The wind-lashed encounter with Boulton was a ramble – an old man (Vidal, not Boulton) peering into the nooks and crannies of a fascinating life – but, happily, it was punctuated by some memorable one-liners. Asked who his successor as the great contrarian would be, he said: “I’m not holding the door open.” Lifting his walking stick and brandishing it like a mitre, he intoned: “I’m still the bishop of Rome.”

His advice to young people – “Grow up.” Questioned about his famous line that “when a friend succeeds, a little part of me dies”, he insisted it had been a joke – the books of quotations may have to be rewritten. The Republicans he called “a mindset rather than a party – a group of like-minded people compelled by greed and with a capacity for character assassination.” Asked by Boulton if Bobby Kennedy (who Vidal heartily disliked) would have made a better president than George W Bush, he replied: “You would make a better president than Bush!” Could an intellectual ever be elected president? “Well,” said Vidal, “accidents happen.”

[LR: Being anti-Bush or anti-Republican, is, after all very popular in intellectual circles, so it is hardly evidence of great courage to attack either of them from the safety of Europe.]

The one-liners, if you could catch them above the howling wind, kept coming: Vidal’s mind, which has a deeply ironic and subversive bent, is sharp, even if at 82 the body is frail. But are one-liners enough? There is substance in Vidal’s worldview – the Jeffersonian belief in the autonomy of the states, the fear of centralised power, the opposition to US entanglements abroad (he even said US involvement in the second world war was undertaken for selfish reasons) – but these days it gets hopelessly lost. He has become a turn.

His ceaseless negativity is also wearing. Perhaps that is the prerogative of the old, but the attack on the US is so unremitting that he undermines his own assault. “America is a country where no one can be phoney enough” – it sounds good, but is it true? It seems phoney to me. This is the country, after all, he has chosen to return to after his long sojourn in Italy.

Vidal has things of value to tell us – that the US administration has used 9/11 to tear up supposedly inviolable personal freedoms, that America cannot be both republic and empire, that all US politics is based on money, property, business. It was a telling moment when Boulton mentioned the picture in Vanity Fair that linked Vidal, Kurt Vonnegut and Norman Mailer, three octogenarians pitching against America’s misguided, self-interested interventions in the Middle East. That got a large and deserved burst of applause.

Where were the voices of the younger generation was the implication? Is the art of engagement dying? Ironically, Christopher Hitchens, seen by some as a possible heir to the waspish Vidal, has engaged – but on the side of so-called liberal interventionism. Hitchens was in the audience and asked a loaded question – was it true Vidal had said the Bush administration knew 9/11 was coming? Vidal shot back that he’d never said such a thing, and that in any case Bush – his questioner’s hero – was too incompetent to have carried out so strategically devastating an attack.

[LR: Notice that Hitchens and Vidal reinforce the propaganda frame-work, by denying any validity whatsoever to the view that the government itself might have been complicit. How is this different from the Michael Moore brand of Democrat anti-establishmentarian critique?]

Vidal avoided that trap, but the uncommitted observer was still left wanting a more coherent picture of what should replace Bush. Even old guys – and it is poignant that Vidal is now the last of that Vanity Fair trio alive – have to do more than mock the vanities of the world. And beyond welcoming an Obama presidency as a sign that the US might be growing up,

[LR: Again, how deep really is criticism of this kind? ]

Vidal has little positive to say. Bush is an idiot, McCain a dimwit – not even a war hero, because “all he ever did was crash his plane; he didn’t even try to escape”; even Roosevelt wanted only to become “emperor of the west”. Sorry, but I don’t buy that latter point: there is a point where glib contrarianism becomes hollow and self-defeating; the enemy of thought.

Did he have any words of wisdom to offer at the dusk of a long life, asked a youthful member of the audience? Vidal had none, which seemed rather sad. It doesn’t suggest senility – the mind is strong, the wit undiminished – but it does suggest that irony can only take you so far.”

Obama Birth Certificate A Forgery, Says Sheriff Arpaio

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Update (July 20): The Daily Bell has an interesting theory that this whole controversy might be engineered to rescue Obama in public perception. Their reasoning is that Sheriff Arpaio is himself a polarising figure guilty of many controversial practices and making him the center piece of the storm over the certificate (which broke in 2008) might be an clever way to diffuse the scandal. Additional proof for this theory is that the forgery itself is so clumsy that people have been speculating it was intended as a trap.

Well, well, well. Lookee here (chuckle, and h/t EPJ)…

Turns out Barack Obama’s birth certificate is definitely forged.

“I have to respect the science of document examination and the evidence there points to the forgery pictured above.  There are also serious signs that the forger of the Obama birth certificate released by the White House did not understand codes and numbers associated with the document.  Analysis of the numbers and code revealed that the document is not genuine.  The evidence is more than compelling.

The biggest error came as a result of the age of the document forger.  He or she was obviously too young to be aware of correct terms used to classify what we today call African-Americans. The creator of the phony document listed Obama’s race as African.  That is a huge red flag because that term was not applied as a race title until well into the 1980’s.  That term and the moniker, Black would have been considered politically incorrect and racist back when Obama was born.  The proper term throughout history until the late 1970’s was Negro. The government did not change this until well into the 1980s.

“Additionally the United States government standardized the acceptable terms for all identification documents.  Eventually Negro became an apparent derogatory term that sensitive politically correct Americans abandoned in the 1980’s.

This so-called birth certificate document was the product of a criminal conspiracy.  It needs to be investigated by Congress and the State of Hawaii.   The problem here is politics prevents the orderly administration of justice.  Democratic politicians have total control and are breaking the law by obstructing justice. “

Comment:

President Obama’s release of a long form birth certificate in April 2011 didn’t assuage his critics. They insisted it was forged.

The persistence of such doubts, die-hard Obama defenders in the media replied, was yet another yahoo conspiracy by bitter clingers.

Here are some reminders of what the mainstream said (courtesy of wikipedia):

Michael Tomasky called it racial paranoia “Birthers and the persistence of racial paranoia” The Guardian (London) April 27, 2011

[A guy called Tomasky would never express racial paranoia, I suppose]

Dan Vergano said it was racial prejudice, “Study: racial prejudice plays role in Obama citizenship views”. USA Today, May 1, 2011

[USA Today would never, never cater to racial prejudice.}

The New York Times said it was an embarrassment, “A Certificate of Embarrassment”. The New York Times. April 27, 2011.

[The NY Times is never embarrassed by the baldfaced banditry in its own backyard]

Fareed Zakaria said it was coded racism, “Fareed Zakaria on Donald Trump and coded racism”. Global Public Square (CNN), April 22, 2011.

[Zakaria apparently doesn’t mind racism when it involves dropping bombs on strangers in the Middle East]

Real estate mogul Donald Trump’s taste in wives  is much better than his taste in wedding-cake mansions…..or in bankster bail-outs, but he scored a bulls-eye on this one.

The fudge with “African” instead of “Negro” was discussed a long while back.

So what’s the news in the recent claim?

Apparently, a 95 year old retired state worker was able to point out numerical codes that hadn’t been filled in, while the boxes for race and employment had.

I’m not sure what to make of it yet, but I already know what to make of how it’s being spun.

I googled Obama birth certificate, and right after a couple of sites with the hot news at the top, where you’d expect it to be,  were sites that dismissed the birth certificate controversy as “birther” conspiracy.

They were in  third or fourth place when I saw them, which would seem to be pretty high when the news that’s breaking is that big.

Usually new stuff buries the old stuff and sends it way back past the fourth or fifth page in an Internet search…at least for the first day after a big story.

But not here.

Then I hunted for images to put up on my blog so people could see what the Sheriff’s team means about the fudge about “African.”

Well, when I searched google and then looked on the left-hand side of the search results for what comes up under IMAGES, the very first image on the left was the certificate.  But instead of getting a bunch of different sites where the image was posted, google kept redirecting me instantly to Snopes.  The redirection was blatant.

So why would google heart snopes?

Snopes, according to its ABOUT page, was founded in 1995 by Barbara and David Mikkelson of Los Angeles, to explore urban legends and such. Naturally, it just became the web’s leading “touchstone” for rumor research. Naturally, they got a couple of “Webbies” and “Best of the Web” awards and have been invited onto all the major networks.

So naturally, no one in their right mind would take them at face value.

And so it is.

Read anti-Zionist activist Maidh O’Cathail’s piece at Dissident Voice, exposing its pro-Israeli bias in covering 9-11 research.

See also the conservative blog called Huffington Riposte which considers Snopes a left-liberal propaganda outlet.

On the other hand, here are some Kossacks (from Daily Kos) claiming it pushes right-wing views.

My diagnosis of something that sounds left to the right and right to the left and reeks of big bucks?

You guessed it. George Soros.

First US State Recognizes Jury Nullification

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The freedom-loving people of New Hampshire have quietly hit one out of the ball-park for the cause of true justice. At LRC blog, Will Grigg reports on jury nullification in New Hampshire. In a dark sky, this is one bright, shining star.
“Posted by William Grigg on July 6, 2012 10:10 AM

When New Hampshire Governor John Lynch signed HB 146 into law on June 18, the Granite State became the first in the nation to enact a measure explicitly recognizing and protecting the indispensable right of jury nullification.

New Hampshire’s jury nullification law reads, in relevant part: “In all criminal proceedings the court shall permit the defense to inform the jury of its right to judge the facts and the application of the law in relation to the facts in controversy.”

There is nothing novel about the principle and practice of jury nullification, which dictates that citizen juries have the right and authority to rule both on the facts of a case, and the validity of a given law. This is widely recognized in judicial precedents in both American history and in Anglo-Saxon common law dating back to the Magna Carta (or earlier). At the time of the American founding it was well and widely understood that the power of citizen juries — both grand and petit — was plenary, and that their chief function was to force the government to prove its case against a defendant — and the validity of the law in question.

In contemporary America, however, trial by jury has been all but abolished in practice. Reviewing recent Supreme Court rulings, legal commentator Adam Liptak of the New York Times observes that in its just-completed term, the High Court “has turned its attention away from criminal trials, which are vanishingly rare, and toward the real world of criminal justice, in which plea bargains are the norm and harsh sentences commonplace.” (Emphasis added.)

The fact that the right to a trial by a jury of one’s peers, which is supposedly sacrosanct, has become all but extinct illustrates the extent to which the U.S. “justice” system has become Sovietized.

After the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, the jury system — which had been established under Czar Alexander II in 1864 — was abolished and replaced with “People’s Courts” composed of a judge and a panel of two to six Party-appointed “assessors” who heard all of the evidence and decided all questions of both fact and law. The assessors “became known as `nodders’ for simply nodding in agreement with the judge,” wrote federal Judge John C. Coughenour in an article published by the Seattle University Law Review. “People’s assessors virtually always agreed with judges; acquittals were virtually nonexistent…. [U]nlike our adversarial system, the Soviet inquisitorial criminal justice system neither prioritized nor emphasized the rights of individual defendants, but instead paid homage to the interests of the state.”

One very telling measure of the Regime’s fear of citizen juries — especially those informed of their right to nullify unjust laws — is found in the efforts expended by prosecutors to prevent cases from going to trial.

In his 1998 book (co-written with Lawrence M. Stratton) The Tyranny of Good Intentions, Dr. Paul Craig Roberts points out that “the vast majority of felony cases are settled with a plea bargain….” Many, perhaps most, “felonies” today involve no offenses against persons or property, no criminal intent, and are usually a product of an opportunistic prosecutor’s malicious creativity in confecting a criminal offense.

It is common for prosecutors to multiply charges as a way of terrorizing an innocent defendant into accepting a plea. Very rarely do we see a defendant with the means to defend himself in such circumstances. For the average citizen who finds himself targeted by an ambitious prosecutor, a plea bargain usually seems like the only relatively palatable alternative to the expense of a trial and the possibility of a long time in prison. At the bargaining table, “I’m all in” for the prosecutor means that, should he lose, he would sacrifice a little prestige, with the taxpayers absorbing all of the expenses; the defendant stands to lose everything and faces the prospect of utter ruin.

This is why so many innocent people are willing to deal. For the State, the most attractive feature of such arrangements is the fact that it keeps such cases away from juries. And we’re left with a “justice” apparatus that functions, in the words of legal scholar John Langbein, like “the ancient system of judicial torture,” which relied on self-incrimination through duress, rather than conviction on the basis of sound evidence.”

Rajat Gupta Verdict: Insider-Trading & IP Theft By The Govt

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“Anyone can benefit from insider information but not anyone can afford a supercomputer. They may both provide – with fair certainty – a market advantage but only one advantage will be prosecuted.”

–    Anthony Wile, The Daily Bell

Rajat Gupta Trial: The Other Goldman Insider Ring…

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Just wonder what would happen if Gary Naftalis, lawyer for Rajat Gupta, the former Goldman manager on trial for alleged insider-trading, asked Lloyd Blankfein if he’d ever shared confidential Goldman information himself….you know, with one of his swanky neighbors in New York, say, Daniel Seth Loeb (Mr. Pink of feminine hygiene fame), who manages billions for hedge-fund, Third Point LLC..

Loeb, allegedly part of the network of sometime Sith Lord, Michael Milken (also of insider-trading fame),  is what’s called an activist hedge-fund, which is a nice way of saying he actively influences the price of the stocks he shorts/buys (all for the greater good, of course, but fortunately it coincides precisely with Mr. Loeb’s good too, which is so nice, especially when your hedge-fund is down).

Of course, one guy’s activism is another guy’s market manipulation, but I came not to quibble.

Daniel…Danny to his friends…is also good at digging up… er…doing research on the companies he shorts and employing public message-boards to intimidate company officers with information both relevant to their duties and relevant only to the purpose of intimidation (see also, harassment) .

He employs for that purpose the very interesting corporate intelligence firm of Julius Kroll, which every 9-11 researcher knows…

Kroll has ties (would you call those insider ties?) with Maurice (Hank) Greenberg through its purchase in 2004 by Marsh & McLennan, an insurance brokerage firm owned until 2005 by Jeffrey Greenberg, Hank’s son. Greenberg has been chief of C.V. Starr (CIA-linked), of Starr International, and until 2005 of AIG (also CIA-linked)…..

but I digress…

Where was I? Oh yes. Insider trading.

I just wondered about it in my little ole way, because digging (just like Kroll!)  through my archives, I ran into this note about how…sort of like biorhythms or crime-waves following the phases of the moon… there were a string of exits, literal and figurative, among some of these Goldman- Third-Point-activist-outsider-insider-letter-writing types at certain opportune moments. To wit.

“Goldman’s chief hedge-fund manager, Pierre-Henri Flamand (chief of GS Principal Strategies), retired in February after 15 years at Goldman. Flamand was with Principal Strategies from 2002 -2007, and then turned it into a hedge-fund in 2008, is starting his own fund. He’s being replaced by another manager from GSPS. Goldman has been accused of conniving with select hedge-funds to conduct bear raids on banks and governments.

Meanwhile, Adam Sackett, co-chief of trading at Third Point Capital, died on March 11, March 10, Wednesday night, apparently from a sudden bacterial infection. Third Point is one of the hedge-funds accused of colluding with David Einhorn’s Greenlight and SAC’s Steven Cohen in manipulative activities. Sackett had previously worked at Jim Chanos’ hedge-fund Kynikos (suspected by some to be part of that group), according to this death notice in the New York Times.

Note: Bankruptcy examiner Anton Valukas’ report on the demise of Lehman came out on March 11, 2010, the day after Sackett died.

Our condolences to the family.

In a letter to investors, posted at scribd, Daniel Loeb, Sackett’s co-chief at Third Point, called him “brilliant, kind, and funny, ” says the WSJ.

Last year, Third Point lost three senior officers, its chief operating officer, Brian Wilson, chief risk officer, Devin Dellaire, and head of investor relations, Tom Kratky.”

Tut. The last thing you want at activist hedge-funds is inactive  officers. But there — happens to the best of us.

And Loeb  is among the bestest of the best, we hear. So good that he gets to be neighbors with big shots from Citigroup and Goldman “we don’t do insider trading” Sachs at 15 Central Park West.

That’s this swanky place in New York:

15 central park west residents

And, dang, if  that isn’t a nice picture of Lloyd Bankst – I mean, Blankfein. Guess if you have to do God’s work, you might as well do it in a duplex worth $26 mill, huh?

[I have to say me..being a wog schwartze ‘n all…I couldn’t quite get the hang of what could’ve possibly cost $26 big ones in the place…but as they say, if you got it, flaunt it..]

And here’s Sandy Weill (former chief of Citigroup) flaunting his digs – worth $46 mill – at 15 Central Former Citigroup CEO Sandy Weill bought a full-floor penthouse in the front section of 15 CPW. He paid $43.7 million for the place in 2007, then a record price per-square-foot.

Park West.  (Love the smile, Sandy).  And then there’s Daniel Ochs (hedge-fund manager) and …but I digress, again.

Danny (to his foes, Senor Pinche_Wey – look that up) Loeb paid nearly as much as Sandy for his 8 bedroom apartment (45 million in 2008). He  wants to sell it for 100 million this year.

Nice.

But what I was really getting at, in my clumsy way, is could Mr. Gary Naftalis please inquire if Mr.Lloyd  Blankfein, in his neighborly walks from his apartment ($26 million) to the lobby and back, and up the elevator, and down, and in the door, and out..and waiting to catch a cab, or go to a restaurant, ever run into Mr. Loeb?

And if he did, did he chat? And if he chatted, as I hear he did, did he ever say anything about Goldman? And if he did, did he ever…just accidentally…let on about something that was confidential? I mean, I know how Mr. Blankfein is so big on confidentiality and how careful they are with even the appearance of wrong-doing at Goldman Sachs.

So careful, that their senior executives have begun jumping ship on the front pages of the international press.

Here’s how one of its clients, Marvell Technology Group, saw Goldman’s impeccable culture:

“Dr. Sutardja and Ms. Dai founded Marvell Technology Group, a worldwide semiconductor company in 1995. Goldman Sachs managed the IPO for Marvell and put the two executives into its Private Wealth Management Group. It is alleged that once the two executives’ personal wealth was under the financial management of Goldman Sachs, the firm abused the two executives’ trust, manipulated their relationship, and ultimately defrauded them of several hundreds of millions of dollars.”

And if Mr. Blankfein, like Brer Rabbit, jes’ lay low ‘n didn’t say nuffin’, how should we understand a passage like this one:

“Multiple media stories (such as this one in “Investment News”) have speculated that Goldman Sachs actually designed these CDOs in such a way that they would be certain to implode, delivering large profits to Goldman and preferred hedge fund clients. Those CDO could not have been created without Einhorn and his allies inside New Century delivering the mortgages that went into them. And there is no doubt that Goldman Sachs delivered the knock-out punch that put New Century out of business, ensuring that the CDOs would, in fact, implode. This constellation of facts may be coincidental, of course. Or not. This essay lays them out, and leaves it to the reader to decide.

New Century’s problems began in December 2005, when board member Richard Zona drafted a letter in which he threatened to resign if senior executives did not agree to sell a greater percentage of the mortgage loans on its books to various banks, such as Goldman Sachs. In his letter, Zona explicitly stated that he was making this demand in league with David Einhorn and Dan Loeb.

Unfortunately, according to the bankruptcy report, New Century’s executives never saw that letter. Zona stashed the draft letter on his computer and instead submitted a letter making a similar demand, but omitting all mention of Einhorn and Loeb. In all likelihood, Zona changed his letter because he knew that New Century’s executives had good reason to doubt whether Einhorn and Loeb, who had recently reported large shareholdings in New Century, were acting in the company’s best interests.

As Deep Capture has thoroughly documented, Einhorn and Loeb are part of a network of hedge fund managers and criminals who use a variety of dubious tactics to destroy, seize, and/or loot public companies for profit. It is not unusual for money managers in this network to appear as long investors in the companies they are attacking, and sometimes they seek to obtain a seat on a target company’s board in order to be better placed to run the company into the ground for their own private profit.

Essentially everyone  in this network – including Einhorn and Loeb — are connected in important ways to Michael Milken, the infamous criminal who specialized in loading companies with debt, looting them, and then profiting still more from their inevitable bankruptcies.”

Most of all, could Mr. Gary Naftalis find out why US Attorney Preet Bharara hasn’t charged David (no relation to Danny, we hope) Loeb, who was also leaking confidential Goldman information to Galleon?

“The logs showed calls from Loeb’s phones to numbers associated with Rajaratnam and Galleon trader Adam Smith on dates when Gupta is alleged to have tipped Rajaratnam, bolstering a defense claim that it was Loeb or others who leaked data.

Loeb, whose job kept him in regular contact with hedge funds, hasn’t been accused of wrongdoing, and Frankel didn’t present other evidence that he was the source of Rajaratnam’s information.”

And why  didn’t he charge Henry King, the technology analyst, another Goldman leaker, and how did he overlook the mysterious “Mr. X,” a third Goldman leaker... and why was it he zeroed in only on the luckless Mr. Gupta?

By the time it caught the attention of the Feds, Goldman – if we’re to believe the charges – had sprung more leaks than the Titanic…

Which leads to some interesting speculations.

Marvell Technology, we can safely assume, falls under the tech sector.  That would be the sector in which Henry King, the leaker, worked.  Marvell, with its Singapore offices, would also probably be of interest to David Loeb, head of Asia Equity sales, the other known leaker.

The one with all those ties to hedge-funds.

Would those hedge-funds include Daniel Loeb’s well-known Third Point? Especially, since, on looking up Mr. Loeb’s holdings, we find he has over 40% in technology including holdings in Marvell and in Apple.

Dan Loeb’s Third Point Offshore fund returned 3.7% during the first 5 months of 2012. Here are his top 10 holdings at the end of March:
Company Ticker Value ($000s) Activity
YAHOO INC YHOO 1,073,016 26%
DELPHI AUTOMOTIVE PLC DLPH 417,990 New
SARA LEE CORP SLE 221,221 32%
APPLE INC AAPL 217,037 New
UNITED TECHNOLOGIES CORP UTX 182,468 New
GOOGLE INC GOOG 179,547 New
MARVELL TECHNOLOGY GROUP LTD MRVL 145,503 -8%
MEDCO HEALTH SOLUTIONS INC MHS 140,600 New
FAMILY DOLLAR STORES INC FDO 136,052 New
CAPITAL ONE FINANCIAL CORP COF 119,841 New

It looks like he lost on Marvell, at least the shares he bought this year, but we don’t know what was bought in 2008…or sold…and what with all the long-short, up-down, outsider-insider, black-white, pump-dump, on-shore/off-shore, high-tech low-class complexities of hedge-funds, inquiring minds would like to know….

[June 20. I checked Einhorn and I see that he bought Marvell Technology in 20011 in the 3rd Q
“David Einhorn initially invested in Marvell Tech Group, a semiconductor company, in the third quarter of 2011. He bought 16,640,000 shares at an average price of $14. Then, he added more shares in the next two quarters and owned a total of 18,372,247 at March 31, 2012, making the holding 5.2% of his portfolio and his fifth-largest holding.

Marvell temporarily went above Einhorn’s highest average purchase price of $15.63 in the first quarter, but dropped to open Tuesday at $11.98 per share”

—

Back to Marvell. The co-founders claim that Goldman forced them to sell their holdings in  companies at a loss, through margin rules, and then turned around and bought those shares for its own holdings and those of its related hedge-funds.

One instance, was in the case of tech stock, NVIDIA:

Citing clear conflict of interest, the FINRA Claim alleges no one from Goldman ever disclosed to Claimants that Goldman was increasing its holdings in NVIDIA shares, while simultaneously forcing Claimants to sell their NVIDIA shares at a loss. Indeed, according to the FINRA Claim, no one from Goldman ever disclosed to Claimants that it was trading in NVIDIA at all or that it provided investment banking services to NVIDIA.

Another was in the case of their own company, Marvell. Their lawsuit against Goldman, though, doesn’t show any evidence of Goldman or hedge-fund purchasing Marvell.

If it did,  to a layman’s eyes, the scheme would seem as bad as a pump-and-dump operation.

Pump-and-dump operations often go hand-in-glove with naked short-selling, even though bashers and pumpers like to face-off on the message-boards with ripe invective.

And now we know that there’s been  naked-short-selling at Goldman Sachs since documentary evidence emerged accidentally in Overstock’s lawsuit with Goldman Sachs.

That  brings us back to the alleged insider trading ring Goldman had going with Third Point and its associates.

Which, again to our layman’s eyes, seems just as bad…if not a good deal worse..than the shenanigans of “Big Raj”‘s Galleon Group.

Besides, Big Raj is not on trial here. He’s already in the slammer. The trial is about Rajat Gupta, whose main mistake in this case seems to have been picking Big Raj for a friend….at least, for the time they were friends.

Which wasn’t long, by the account of Berkshire Hathaway’s No. 2 man, Mr. Ajit Jain.

Raj had gypped Rajat by 2008 says Mr. Jain.

Which means that if you’re looking for insider-rings with high-up connections to Goldman, Gupta might not be the highest up connection. Or, at least, not the only one.

I mean, it seems like if Mr. Bharara, another proud New Yorker, really wanted to know what was going on at Goldman, it would have been a lot less work to just stop by for a neighborly chat at  15 Central Park West….

Or has he?

The Problem With The Rajat Gupta Insider Trading Case

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Update:

New charges have been added to the indictment, including alleged tips on March 12, 2007 (Goldman Sachs) and Jan 29 (Proctor & Gamble) that led to Galleon trading.

ORIGINAL POST:

You gotta hand it to the government. They know how to do theater.  Except it’s theater of the absurd.

While mafia outfits with…er…skeletons in their closet sail on unscathed; managers – especially brown ones –  who might have talked out of turn are facing the firing squad.

Walter Pavlo in Forbes:

“The government does have a case, but what they do not have is Gupta on tape, or anyone naming Gupta on tape, as being a source of insider information.  The way to sway a jury, beyond the evidence, is to portray the person sitting on trial as either a devil or saint; a devil guilty, a saint innocent.  According the NY Times, during one discussion outside of the presence of the jury on the first day of trial, Naftalis was warned by Judge Jed Rakoff to not get into too much detail about Gupta’s record of philanthropy (saint).  This, Naftalis argued, would go to discredit “greed” as being a factor in the alleged crime. I think it is a fair point.

Rajat Gupta is a good person who came from humble beginnings and rose to be someone who was well respected in the business community.  He should get a fair trial and I believe that will happen. However, the government’s mosaic of Gupta as a source of inside information is countered by a defense of a man of intelligence, character, and integrity. Those fine characteristics of a person should not go away with an indictment alone, they must be tried in court.  I think Gupta has a good chance, but if Raj shows up, all bets are off.”

I started out being unsympathetic to Rajat Gupta, when the government first brought charges against him last year. At the time, I thought he would be one of many top business leaders who would be charged, and that Lloyd Blankfein, Geithner, and others higher up the food chain and more culpable for the financial crisis, would follow.  Now that I’ve seen that Gupta is going to be served up as the main course for the public to devour, I’ve become a bit suspicious of the bona fides of the prosecution.

Insider-trading, whatever you think of it, is a very tangential part of the financial crisis, except in so far as it was partly the means by which some of the major firms were naked-shorted.

Goldman Sachs, as we’ve seen, is central to that story.

But the Gupta trial casts Goldman as a victim and GS chief Lloyd Blankfein is actually testifying against him. That’s the man whose confab with Timothy Geithner, NY Fed Reserve chairman, in the same month that Gupta is supposed to have tipped of Galleon’s Raj Rajaratnam (September 2008), constituted a scandal several orders of magnitude greater than the alleged shenanigans of Gupta.

Blankfein, surely more culpable, than Gupta or Rajaratnam, is getting good PR, from this trial, as he did from the Rajaratnam trial last year.

So what’s really going on here?

I don’t want to get into the larger picture in this post, except to say it’s all part of a strategy of rescuing Goldman from any serious damage and of redirecting energy away from the most dominant members of the financial world to the relatively new upstarts – the Indians.

In “Breaking India,” Rajiv Malhotra, a former tech entrepreneur turned author, has written eloquently about the dual strategy pursued by the US government in building up India (through the business schools and management networks), while simultaneously breaking it down (India-bashing from leftist journalists, activists, and academics, including the incitement of Dalit activism against India itself as a symbol of Brahmin supremacism).

In a sense, the dual strategy has ended with the Gupta trial and now the object seems to be solely to break the country. The media portrays it with increasing negativity, directing popular anger toward South Asian financial networks, to the exclusion of others,  and, specifically, away from the Anglo-Jewish elites who actually caused the financial crisis.

The new comers might have profited from it illicitly but in no way were they the prime movers of the global heist.

With that quick sketch of the general context, here are the particulars that I find striking for a criminal case pursued with so much fanfare and media attention:

1. There is no “smoking-gun,” whatsoever. That’s right. Zip. Nada. There is not one tape in the over 2000 (TWO THOUSAND) tapes held by the prosecution that either shows Gupta passing on a  tip to Rajaratnam or names Gupta as someone who tipped off RR.

Think about it. It’s pretty incredible. The government was secretly investigating Rajaratnam’s network as far back as 2007, with FBI wire taps over a period of at least 11 months between March and December 2008.

And not one of those conversations, intimate, unsuspecting conversations, actually contains a concrete tip or refers to Gupta as a tipster. There is actually only one Gupta conversation with Rajaratnam in the whole file – on July 29, 2008.

It’s based on this and other circumstantial evidence that the government rests its case that Gupta was passing on confidential board information to Galleon between March 2007 and January 2009, charging him with five counts of securities violations and one count of conspiracy, potentially opening him up to 105 years in prison and $25 million in fines.

I know if someone had taped me for over a year,  there would be a lot of things I’d find it hard to explain. Not because I’m up to anything wrong. Not at all. But simply because I blurt out my feelings in private. It’s the way I am. Sometimes, those are just passing feelings and quite meaningless to anyone who knows me.  I once told my family I wanted to raise a tiger cub in the garden; I’ve called friends names I’d rather forget; I’ve made forceful political statement that I wouldn’t think of venting on my blog. I say things that aren’t even accurate, just because it’s a casual conversation and I’m not thinking, or because I’m thinking of something else or…or…any of a dozen reasons.

And guess what, I’m not sorry I do. I have a right to.  Expressing your views, whether momentary feelings or long standing opinions, is what you do with your friends in your home.

It’s called privacy. If you can’t be free to vent feelings or express opinions, however unpleasant they might sound to a third party (third parties shouldn’t be listening, should they?), what the heck is privacy for?

But drawing conclusions from the haphazard, half-spoken chitchat of people’s private conversations is another things. Private chat is difficult to interpret, unless you get explicit repeated statements that are black and white. Everything else is open to interpretation.

2. There is no evidence that Gupta profited from the information he’s alleged to have passed on. This again is a big gaping hole in the government’s case. The essence of illegal insider-trading is that the wrong-doer materially benefited and that he passed on the tip with that benefit in his mind.

It’s a “mental state” crime, which also makes it hard to prove.

No profit, and bingo, half the case has crumbled.

Now, given that, why would Rajat Gupta turn down a civil trial, where the maximum he faced would have been fines and bans from sitting on corporate boards, and go in for a criminal trial, where he could go to jail? There’s only one reason. An administrative hearing has a lower standard of proof and a judge who can make up his mind as he wishes. A criminal trial gets a jury and demands “beyond a reasonable doubt” as the standard.  But it’s also riskier. Juries can go one way or other.

Here’s my point. The only defendant who would take that kind of risk would be a defendant who thought he was innocent.

So what’s the government doing without these two major elements of a successful insider trading case?

It’s trying to build a circumstantial case, putting together a kind of “mosaic” of the evidence, as someone has noted. It’s calling witnesses to show that while Gupta might not have literally profited from his tips, he indirectly profited, because he was invested with Galleon and he intended to do even more business with it in the future. The tips were credit toward that future return.

The prosecutions’ second line of argument is to suggest that Gupta and Rajaratnam were such close friends, that Gupta had to have passed on tips, because that’s what buddies do.

But, here’s another thing. The government (SEC) didn’t let Gupta see settlement documents with cooperating witnesses against him.

That means the defense doesn’t get to learn the terms on which the government struck deals with cooperating witnesses against Gupta.

That’s pretty significant.

Fortunately, the judge did force the FBI  to review documents (notes) from the SEC’s civil investigation, which overlapped the FBI criminal case (Brady material), and it did force them to show the defendant exculpatory evidence in them.

Thirdly, the government is trying to piece together the timing of the calls to show that it must have been Gupta who put through the call just before closing on Sept 23, 2008, to tell Rajaratnam that Warren Buffet was going to invest in Goldman Sachs. That tip is the piece de resistance of the trial, because Rajaratnam turned around and managed to squeeze a trade through before closing that netted around $800,000.

The Buffet investment information was, of course, confidential, as Lloyd Blankfein testified, as was the information about a Goldman Sachs audit committee meeting, whose results are alleged to have been passed onto Rajaratnam (March 2008).

What Blankfein didn’t testify and someone should have asked was if Blankfein and everyone else in the firm had actually kept the information confidential, as they expected Gupta to. Blankfein does remark that there was a lot of speculation going on about the audit committee findings.

Does that mean there were loose lips all over the place?

Because if there were, then the case against Gupta founders again.

Because then, how do we know who it was that tipped off Raj Rajaratnam?

The answer is, we don’t.

And, in fact, so far the defense has found at least two (and possibly three) other people at Goldman, lower down in the food chain, who were passing on tips to Galleon’s chief. One of those, David Loeb, head of Goldman Sachs’ Asia Equity Sales In New York, made two dozen calls to Galleon, some of them on the same day Gupta is alleged to have tipped the hedge fund off.  Besides Loeb, an analyst Henry King, as well as a Mr. X , have also been mentioned as tipsters. King, a high profile tech analyst known for his spot-on calls, is alleged to have been leaking information from Taiwanese manufacturers to US investors.

Then there’s Anil Kumar, a colleague at McKinsey, who turned informant for the government, in the Rajaratnam case. Kumar testified that Rajaratnam often played off his sources against each other so they would be work harder to get a pat on the head from “Big Raj.” One of the tipsters Rajaratnam played off against Anil Kumar was the “insanely hot” blonde tipster, Danielle Chiesi, whose antics eventually sank the good ship Galleon.

So now we know that Rajaratnam has a profile of manipulating  people and that he could ‘have been trying to get Anil Kumar to do more for him (remember, in the call with Gupta he complains that Anil Kumar isn’t earning the million dollars a year he was giving him). One way to do that would be to hint that he was getting information from someone else, even if that someone else was simply chatting with him and wasn’t actually tipping him.  There’s another angle.  If Anil Kumar could wear a wire and rat out Rajaratnam,  what are the chances he wouldn’t agree to anything else the Feds wanted from him? Maybe he cut a deal to point the finger at someone higher up.  Gary Naftalis, Gupta’s lawyer seems to be thinking along those lines, in demanding to see the SEC’s deals with cooperating witnesses.  Anyway, Kumar is no pillar of integrity and his accusations should be taken for what they’re worth.

What’s also strange….passing strange….is that David Loeb, whom the government caught on tape passing on tips about Intel, Apple, and Hewlett Packard to RR,  has not been charged at all.

Yet, Loeb called Galleon traders twice on September 23, 2008, including once  at  3:07 pm. That’s the same day prosecutors are trying to pin the Buffett tip on Gupta.

I wonder when the other call was; reports don’t specify.

Loeb also made four calls to Galleon’s Adam Smith on October 23, 2008, the same day that prosecutors say Gupta told Rajaratnam that Goldman Sachs would lose almost two dollars a share.

That’s pretty damning. And it’s on tape.  But Loeb hasn’t been fingered.

Instead, the government has gone straight for the jugular of Rajat Gupta.

You have to wonder why.

Globalists Subverting Liberal Arts Discourse In India

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Rajiv Malhotra discusses why Hinduism, despite being a religion of around a billion people, has never been understood or defended in the same way as Christianity and Islam. He calls on Hindus to understand and reproduce today the ancient tradition of purva-paksha (Sanskrit for ‘the first objection to any assertion in a debate’), that is, understanding the ideology or belief-system of another culture on its own terms.

While Christianity has produced an enormous range of texts to explain its world-view and to defend it and “place” it among other religions and traditions, modern and ancient, Hinduism has failed to do so, subscribing to a quietistic belief that possession of knowledge or truth within oneself is sufficient.

Thus, among all religions, Christianity, in all its variants, has produced the greatest quantity of discourse, and the most widely dispersed, allowing it to colonize intellectual discourse across the board.

This is true, even while it’s true that orthodox Christianity is under attack from secularists. Many Christians indeed feel themselves singled out for attack, among all religions.

However, that feeling is misleading. The real problem is that secularism (an outgrowth of liberal Christianity itself) is creating the friction.

It is not that other religions are attacking Christianity so much as that secularism, while still attached to its parent religion, Christianity, is colonizing the intellectual spaces of other cultures. Secularism uses the symbols and beliefs of Western Christianity as a target, although the real social ills under attack (consumer culture, racial or gender oppression etc.) belong to the societal structure of post-Christian Europe.

The globalist agenda, which involves the export of cultural Marxism to other cultures, draws the people in those cultures away from producing an effective discourse of their own real indigenous traditions. Instead, it seduces them to take up the globalist cultural Marxist discourse because of the opportunities for advancement that discourse offers through the international network attached to it.

Thus, a young Indian in school will be told that India has no “liberal arts” or “libertarian” tradition. He must get it all from the West. And when he does, thanks to foundation funding, it comes wearing the friendly face of “universal human rights”, “democracy”, “women’s rights’ or “gay rights”, under which lies a dominant secular discourse that in turn disguises an imperial and colonial agenda.

The colonialism is not the old-style colonialism of occupying land and taking over homes, although that too can be found in one of the cockpits of the globalist project, Israel.

The other cockpits in Europe and in America content themselves with propagating ideology that permits the colonization and domination of other people’s homelands through transnational state-capitalism, but they also try to protect they own homelands from reciprocal movement, by restricting and demonizing third-world immigration. They want freedom for their businesses, to put it bluntly, but no freedom for other human beings. That not only preserves the power of the Western establishment, but enhances it.

The new colonialism is cultural colonization. The subversion and destruction of civlizations, not simply Islam, but any civilization in the path of the globalist agenda.

In that sense, the Hindu civilization in India and orthodox forms of Christianity or non-European Christian communities, are also under attack.

The only difference is that the Christians have an enormous tradition, a dominant media and academic presence, and considerable wealth behind them.

So far, argues Malhotra, Hindus have not had anything similar. They build temples and endow charities, but they have not spent the same time or money defending and exposing to the public their own intellectual and cultural heritage. It might be time for them to do so aggressively.

Amazon Blog: The Funny-Money-Hunny [sic]

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The German translation of “Mobs, Messiahs and Markets,” Der Massensyndrom, is out. And my co-author gave an interview to accompany the release.

We have a slight difference of opinion on this. I think the over-supply of paper money in the system over the past decades isn’t entirely Greenspan’s doing. It isn’t possible for one man to exert that kind of influence on the economy. What about the oceans of paper that poured in from millions of ordinary people in Asia who chose to stash their savings in the dollar rather than in a gunny sack… or in their own woozy currencies?

Too bad the dollar turned out to be as bad a bet as any of the others…

How the times they have a-changed.

Back then, we turned down thrifty, frumpy Hard-Work-And-Savings at the door (no callouses, dirty nails and sweat stains, please) and waltzed in on the arm of the Funny-Money-Hunny [sic] — a lady of questionable virtue and unquestioned charm….

But now?

We turn to the papers for insights and we find this:
Former Bear Stearns Hedge Fund Managers Indicted.

I guess they call that hedge-hunting.

Tut…And these guys were gods only yesterday.

How soon they forget….

All it took was for gas prices to double…..and the mob got out the noose and the gallows…
Back then, the working stiffs….got, well, stiffed.
Back then, all over the world, the good times rolled and the high-rollers made good;

But now it’s goodbye to the good times.
The nobs are being nabbed.
And the only thing rolling on Wall Street are the heads…..

(No trade mark infringement intended against Maria Bartiromo, TV’s original “Money Honey” – hence my alternative spelling..

Amazon Blog: Do-Gooding Do-Do

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“Those who now speak of decoupling used to talk of globalisation. This is oxymoronic, you can believe in one or the other but not both,” says analyst James Montier.

Montier thinks that the world is bound to go the way of the American economy – down. If you pumped for globalisation and global growth when the going was good, he says, you can’t now argue for decoupling. You can’t now say that the global economy doesn’t depend on what happens here. That would be cognitive dissonance.

Here, I’ll take the part of cognitive dissonance. It’s what makes the world go round.

Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets is chock-full of it.

Critics have called that a terrible thing…..or terrific, depending on where they stand,
But if our detractors rested their case against us only on this, they’d have a non-starter on their hands. Anyone who’s sniffed a grand theory up close knows better.

Why?

Because the real world is a jungle and logic cuts only a very narrow track in it; we’d be foolish to mistake our little wayward path for the woolly thickets our machete didn’t get to.

There is no logical structure that doesn’t rest on a blind spot….there is no sense that does not have a foundation that is nonsense. (That’s from a piece I did on Tom Friedman).

In fact, a bystander watching the way we mangle language could be pardoned for thinking it our original sin. He’d see that we’re fooled not just by our theories, but by words themselves. Their sense and their nonsense.

“Mobs” is a book about words.

On my part, it started from my critical work on language; from studying propaganda and from my popular writing on the subject .

In “Do Gooding Do-Do” and “Developmentally Disabled,“ two pieces used in the book (incorrectly attributed in several places), I took a look at some common words used about economics … and got into trouble with progressive and conservative friends.

What did I say that was so bad?

I said that “free market” language is used a lot to support what’s essentially managed trade. And that “social uplift” language is used the same way.

But how can you not take a position, asked the critics, a la Montier. Isn’t globalisation

A Very Good Thing? Or A Very Bad Thing?

Is it?

Perhaps it’s neither…or both….
Perhaps it’s sometimes one thing..sometimes another.
Perhaps it’s just too complicated for slogans. Sometimes government regulations are the lesser evil. And sometimes the greater. Perhaps you can talk about globalisation….and also talk about decoupling. Perhaps, on most things with any complexity the best response is not the one the mob wants to hear – Yes or No.

The best response is – It Depends.

Amazon Blog: Government of PR flacks, by PR flacks, for PR flacks

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Where you get your words from doesn’t matter. That was the verdict of pundits and newsmen last week on the charges of plagiarism flung back and forth between the candidates.

Maybe.

But. in a time when words are increasingly going astray, a man or woman who makes his living with them can’t afford to fool around. He’d better stick with the ones he picks. And they’d better be his.

Four years ago, the country went to war for words later proved false. Word provided by politicians, pundits and newsmen… who should have known better. Who had a duty to their words – to keep them honest, unadulterated, and organic.

Because we swallow what they tell us.
We live or die by their words.

When words don’t anchor themselves in reality, then they’re only slogans…memes. The stuff of PR. We are dying by PR in this country.

It’s a major theme of Mobs, Messiahs and Markets.
The slogans that drive the mob crazy and pollute the conversation in our country.

If the point of words is to get what you want, then you can pitch them anyway you want. That’s the bottom -line.

But bottom-line thinking isn’t really what a conversation among citizens is about.
That’s what corporations do.

If our country is a business – even a not-for-profit business – run to achieve a social goal, however noble, or meet a production quota, however magnificent, then it doesn’t really matter whether anyone plagiarizes. It doesn’t matter how words are treated. It only matters that they do what we want them to do and take us where we want to go.

But if your country is not a corporation but an association of individuals, then words have to mean something more than slogans to move your listeners this way or that. They have to be more than tools to get your way.
You have to treat them with respect, like the people who speak them With care.

Like fine cutlery at a dinner. You don’t bend them or break them and you don’t pinch them, even from friends.

Real words are an exploration of the changing truths of the heart. They express what we are. They take us to places we did not know existed and let us become what we never dreamed to be.

They make up a conversation between individuals.
Not a script crafted by PR flacks.