LILA RAJIVA: The Mind-Body Politic
Individuals Not Ideologies
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Archive of "Media" Category
The Corporate Media: Suffering From Truth Emergency
We have an elite that has a stranglehold on what gets heard through its grip on professional societies and the major print and TV news. Prizes, media attention, peer approval go to very few media outlets. It’s well- known that only reporters and columnists at a handful of papers get serious attention. That’s a truly dangerous state of affairs and we’re suffering the fall-out from it. What makes it even worse is that news itself is more and more swept aside by trashy, sensation-seeking reporting, which leaves the audience with misinformation or simply a great black hole of ignorance.
Mickey Huff and Peter Phillips analyze the “truth emergency” ravaging the corporate media in the West (and to a lesser degree, everywhere):
“Truth Emergency: Keeping the Facts at Bay
The truth comes as conqueror only because we have lost the art of receiving it as guest.
– Rabindranath TagoreWhat are some of these truths, that not knowing them creates a literal state of emergency for human society? Here are two of many possible examples. A 2008 report from The World Bank admitted that in 2005, over three billion people lived on less than $2.50 a day and about forty-four percent of these people survive on less than $1.25. Complete and total wretchedness can be the only description for the circumstances faced by so many, especially those in urban areas of so-called developing nations. Simple items Americans take for granted like phone calls, nutritious food, vacations, television, dental care, and inoculations are beyond the possible for billions of people.6
In another ignored but related story, Starvation.net logged the increasing impacts of world hunger and starvation. Over 30,000 people a day (eighty-five percent of children under five) die of malnutrition, curable diseases, and starvation. The number of deaths has exceeded three hundred million people over the past forty years. These stories should be alarming headlines, certainly more significant than celebrity tripe and tabloid hype.7
Continuing on the theme of human poverty and its ramifications, farmers around the world grow more than enough food to feed the entire world adequately. Global grain production yielded a record 2.3 billion tons in 2007, up four percent from the year before, yet, billions of people go hungry every day. The website Grain.org describes the core reasons for continuing hunger in a recent article “Making a Killing from Hunger.” It turns out that while farmers grow enough food to feed the world, commodity speculators and huge grain traders like Cargill control the global food prices and distribution. Starvation is profitable for corporations when demands for food push the prices up. Cargill announced that profits for commodity trading for the first quarter of 2008 were eighty-six percent above 2007. World food prices grew twenty-two percent from June 2007 to June 2008 and a significant portion of the increase was propelled by the $175 billion invested in commodity futures that speculate on price instead of seeking to feed the hungry. This results in erratic food price spirals, both up and down, with food insecurity remaining widespread.“
My Comment:
Some of this commentary of course paints speculation with too broad a brush. Futures markets can, and do, provide efficient allocation of resources if they function as they should. The problem is not the futures market but the corruption of the market and the constant meddling in it by the state, which blunts the normal checks that the market would otherwise provide.
And again that goes back to public culture and professional standards that have become debased. The deeper question is how they became debased.
Which, of course, leads us to the government’s manipulation of the interest rate. That is where the problem lies.
But meanwhile, where is the media in all this? Providing the context so people can understand what’s going on?
No. It’s rooting around in John Edward’s trash can……
Did Bethany McLean Even Break The Enron Story?
n “Enronathon,” Seth Mnookin of The Wall Street Journal suggests Bethany McLean wasn’t quite the first person to break the story of Enron…and that she had a good bit of unacknowledged help:
“If journalism were in the Olympics, the Enron story might well be pairs figure skating. Bethany McLean, the young Fortune writer who first wrote about Enron’s shady finances a year ago, has, of course, already been awarded the gold.
And with that have come the requisite endorsements: In the past two months, she was hired as a consultant by NBC News and shared in a $1.4 million deal to co-author a book on the scandal. But another team is also vying for top honors — amid complaints about shoddy judging.
Reporters and editors at the Wall Street Journal believe their work has been unjustly ignored, with some wondering whether Pulitzer rivals like the Washington Post and the New York Times have gone out of their way to praise McLean.
Enron did not collapse under its own weight,” says Jonathan Friedland, the Journal editor who’s been in charge of much of the paper’s Enron coverage. “Without our reporting, I don’t think any of this would have happened.”
In response, McLean’s former editor at Fortune and current Time Inc. editorial director John Huey says, “Bethany was the first journalist in a widely respected national publication to suggest that the emperor at Enron had no clothes.” (Not that her own publication took much note: Fortune had to airbrush out Kenneth Lay from a November SMARTEST PEOPLE WE KNOW cover photo.) Let’s recap: In September 2000, Jonathan Weil wrote a long story for the now-defunct Texas edition of the Journal about odd accounting at various Texas-based energy traders; it included four paragraphs on Enron.
James Chanos, a well-known short-seller who was one of the first to start unloading Enron stock, says he got interested in the company after reading Weil’s piece.
Almost six months later, in March 2001, the then 30-year-old McLean (who Times columnist Maureen Dowd has suggested will be played by Alicia Silverstone in the inevitable movie) wrote her little-noticed 2,400-word story, “Is Enron Overpriced?”
Then, in October, the Journal ran a three-day series by Rebecca Smith and John Emshwiller detailing Enron’s unorthodox partnerships. Their articles are seen by many on Wall Street as ultimately sinking the company. Weil’s partisans think he should get credit for crossing the finish line first (an item, “Credit Due,” ran in “Page Six” recently).
But even Chanos says that “Bethany’s piece was the first one to raise really specific questions.”
Most of the Journal’s brain trust, though, are plugging Smith and Emshwiller, who, of course, wrote their stories in 2001 and are thus eligible for this year’s Pulitzers. “The Fortune story basically said this is a company that nobody understands,” says Journal deputy managing editor Daniel Hertzberg. “It didn’t show what was wrong with the company. It took Becky and John to do that.” That’s the competition.
Now for the judging. In January, Howard Kurtz, the Washington Post’s media writer, highlighted McLean as the first journalist to ask questions about Enron. Ten days later, the Times‘ Felicity Barringer wrote her profile of “the financial reporter everyone loves to lionize.” While McLean was being anointed as a journalistic sex symbol in a story hitherto dominated by a balding Kenneth Lay, folks at the Journal felt they were being robbed:
“People are trying to queer the Pulitzer pitch for the Journal,” says one editor there. That’s sour grapes, counters Kurtz: “In this case, a 31-year-old reporter beat them and the rest of the world by a considerable margin.”
In a bit of circular logic endemic to media reporters, Kurtz adds, “I must have been onto something, since after my piece appeared, she was profiled in the Times, given a contract by NBC, and offered a book deal.” As for McLean, she seems slightly embarrassed by all the attention. “I’ve told people I’ve gotten too much credit,” she says. “I did raise alarm bells, but I didn’t know the half of it.” “Read more: Enronathon http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/media/features/5756/#ixzz0dvvQZvUI
My Comment:
Please note also that the book was co-authored with Peter Elkind, who isn’t attributed in many of the stories.
Not that I’m all that sympathetic to the Wall Street Journal on the Enron story, since they don’t give credit to the alternative press either, and what goes around comes around. (My own experiences of plagiarism from articles and books can be found at the tab, ABOUT - half-way down the page).
If liberal columnists steal without attribution even from liberal bloggers, can you imagine the cone of silence that descends when the victim isn’t liberal? Libertarians and conservatives get stripped clean by the vultures of the “free” (of all ethics) press.
With them, it’s never about public welfare or the good of the nation, even though that’s the standard that they like to foist on other people. Even with the global economy melting down under their noses, they’re jealous of sharing the information that activists, bloggers, and ordinary citizens give out generously for the common good.
(Again, there are honorable exceptions).
In short, they make up credit - just like the Federal Reserve.
Or they steal it - like their banker friends.
Or they collude with each other to “take-down” anyone not part of their game - just like their hedge-fund allies.
And no matter what, they always cover for each other.
Notice how other people’s personal lives are fair game for stalking, extortion, and exposes, but never theirs, as this piece on Maria Bartiromo suggests.
(Ms. McLean figures in that piece too. In fact, a brief google tells us that McLean´s had plagiarism problems and conflicts of interest more than a couple of times).
Item One. Here’s an earlier complaint about Fortune magazine plagiarism. A Fortune writer apparently used material from interviews and articles by an outfit called Annex Research, without attributing or acknowledging it. An email to Fortune got no response, either. The Fortune writer? Bethany McLean…
Item Two: McLean at it again, swiping material from the Orange County Register Weekly
Item Three: Libertarian economist, Bill Anderson, in a piece called “The Most Dishonest ´Journalists´ In the Room,” describes how McLean was having a romantic relationship with the lead prosecutor in the Enron trial, Sean Berkowitz, before the sentencing, while she was covering the trial and getting out the government´s side of the story. Omitted in that story as well was the disturbing fact that the prosecutor had suborned perjury in order to get a full conviction of Jeffrey Skilling.
And that´s besides Item Four….
That fetching stock-manipulation thing she had going with hedge buddies Marc Cohodes and Jim Chanos.
No wonder none of them can get the story right.
And no wonder they still won’t get it straight, not until after activists, or bloggers, or less-known writers at their own outfits or elsewhere do the hard work. Then they’ll slide in to take the credit.
Nice work.
Just as cushy and exploitative as anything on Wall Street, in its way.
Business men and real capitalists do the hard work of producing. Then the faux capitalist money-men and their shills in government rush in to cream the money off and cover themselves with glory via their mouthpieces in the shill media.
No wonder the media doesn’t understand capitalism. No wonder they love the crony capitalist bordello they call home. It’s the only one they know, the poor things.
[Again, they really ARE a minority of journalists, just a powerful minority. There are hundreds of honorable hard-working journalists who write their own stories rather than steal them off the net, whose names never get into headlines, and who wouldn't be caught dead behaving like this].
And don’t miss the other telling details:
Enron’s Ken Lay was a Republican.
Goldman Sachs is a Democrat cash-cow, for the most part.
Jim Chanos, hedge-fund master mind, used to work at Deutsch Bank.
And Bethany McLean was once a Goldman Sachs banker….. (Maybe that explains her kid-glove treatment of Hank at Vanity Fair).….
….And her equally interesting white-washing of Spyro Contogouris, who colluded with hedge funds to attack Prem Watsa’s Fairfax Financial.
Honestly. Rielle Hunter has nothing on any of these gold-diggers.
Climategate: Indian Environment Minister Says IPCC Wrong On Glaciers Melting
There are some interesting developments on the climate-gate frontier.
Apparently, the Himalayan glaciers aren’t melting, after all.
Or at least, not as fast as the IPCC (the Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change , the UN body tasked with climate change) thinks they should. (more…)
Lew Rockwell On The Climatista Totalitarians
Lew Rockwell in The Misesean Vision:
“Let me give another example of the banality of evil. Several decades ago, some crackpots had the idea that mankind’s use of fossil fuels had a warming effect on the weather. Environmentalists were pretty fired up by the notion. So were many politicians. Economists were largely tongue-tied because they had long ago conceded that there are some public goods that the market can’t handle; surely the weather is one of them.
“Enough years go by and what do you have? Politicians from all over the world, every last one of them a huckster of some sort only pretending to represent their nations, gathering in a posh resort in Europe to tax the world and plan its weather down to precise temperatures half a century from now.
“In the entire history of mankind, there has not been a more preposterous spectacle than this!
“I don’t know if it is tragedy or farce that the meeting on global warming came to an end with the politicians racing home to deal with snowstorms and record cold temperatures.”
Doug Valentine On The Impotence Of Progressives
Doug Valentine offers a piece on the futility of much activism.
(Please note: The opinions in this piece are not mine. They are Doug’s. But his point was not to exclude himself or any other writer who claims to be an activist. Its something all of us feel one time or other. I know I do. Frequently. At some level, what writers do is perfectly useless and only a form of self-advancement, if that).
Why Don’t All You People Just Shut Up!
“As my friend Roger says, ‘Never have so many held Washington hangers-on office for so long and talked endlessly to each other for so much money and done so little as the Republic rotted. The utter impotence of the progressive think tanks, lobbies, etc. is a great unwritten story.’
More From The Easter Bunny…
I’ve been curious about the identity of the Easter Bunny, although, strictly speaking, it doesn’t affect the validity of the anti-NSS campaign.
The Bunny has zeal. Bunny-speak is brave, plain-spoken and easy to read:
“The SEC was created to reassure the unwashed masses that it was safe to invest in the markets, after the Great Crash of 1929 proved it was anything but. It was a PR firm for Wall Street, slipped through as an alternative to a regulator who would or could actually do anything to curb the real crookery on Wall Street. At the helm was one of the greatest stock manipulators of all time, Joe Kennedy, who along with Percy Rockefeller and others amassed incredible fortunes running stock pools in the 1920’s.
For those who don’t know what a stock pool is, it’s a hedge fund whose sole purpose is to manipulate stocks, first up, then down, making money in both directions. Which was enormously lucrative for the operators of the pools, and the investors therein - the only losers were always the general investing public, and other participants who weren’t on the inside. I would argue that’s precisely what some of the most lucrative hedge funds of modern times also do - there aren’t a lot of ways to beat the market with 30 or 40% returns, year after year, that don’t involve larceny and criminal behavior, at least in my study of the last century of market history.”
The Bunny doesn’t mince words:
“I concluded a while ago that the rot in the system is pervasive, runs from top to bottom, and is largely unfixable. You have oligarchs, powerful and rich families and corporations, who are having their bought-and-paid-for politicians operate the country for their personal enrichment, at the direct expense of everyone else…..
“My point is that absolute power and wealth enable one to control the safeguards that were put into place to protect populations. By co-opting politicians and capturing regulators, the bad man is allowed to come into the room and do whatever he wants, whenever he likes - and the captured media merely pretends that it can’t hear the cries for help or investigate the countless damaged lives. It’s as bad as Russia under the communists, or perhaps worse.”
The Easter Bunny stays under wraps for a reason I can guess… but maybe not express publicly.
I asked a couple of people in a position to know if it was so-and-so. They denied it stoutly.
I could, of course, go the route of the New York press, which likes to stake out, tap phones, access medical records illegally, go undercover,or violate court orders, or any number of other things.
(If only John Edwards knew how lucky he was to avoid a life as a national figure, official prey for every predator with a pen)
But that particular game doesn’t seem worth either the moral or social candle. And, most often, almost as much can be learned by reading between the lines and studying public evidence as by sleuthing.
But, while sleuthing only requires elbow grease and chutzpah, analysis requires a degree of knowledge, judgment, and intellect that is simply beyond the pay-grade of some journalists, however exalted their professional status. These petty despots have pens and they have power, but they have no clothes, as surely as the emperor they shill for.
A few have figured that out. More will follow suit.
To make the story short, I went and reread a few public records that reference NSS and replayed the stout denials in my mind, recalling as best I could the silences, the gaps, the tone of the answers. I reread The Bunny carefully.
He’s an erudite man, it’s clear. I came to my conclusion about who he was. Right or wrong, time will tell.
I only bring it up to show how looking at the big picture and developing the correct perspective can be as useful and is far more cost-efficient than private-eye sleuthing that reporters think is the one and only credible way to tell a story. Baloney. And morally dangerous baloney. Dirty tricks, even for some intended good you believe in, inevitably corrupt the people who play them, in the same way black ops corrupt intelligence agencies.
Sleuthing is good to add the footnotes and the QED at the bottom of a piece of research and critical analysis. But as a way of curing social cancers - and financial racketeering is more social cancer than legal infraction - it has limited use. By the time you have written your expose to your editor’s satisfaction and done what it takes to avoid libel litigation, the story is old, the crooks have covered their tracks in paper dirt, and a new game is afoot.
Far better to play Sherlock and deduce your conclusions. Leave the investigative reporters to do their thing. You do yours but you do it to appease your own conscience, out of love for what human beings might be (hard to love them as they are, frankly), out of sheer intellectual curiosity (a great part of what drives me), glee at pelting stones at arrogant predators, and…yes…because after life’s fretful fever, we really don’t know what comes next. It might be wise to hedge our bets, as Pascal did.
There may or may not be Judgment Day. But should it roll around, we want to be able to pass muster. Well, at least, we want the She: Who Is Probably Not There to know we tried…
And then of course, we write mainly because it’s fun…
How, my dear Mary, — are you critic-bitten
(For vipers kill, though dead) by some review,
That you condemn these verses I have written,
Because they tell no story, false or true?
What, though no mice are caught by a young kitten,
May it not leap and play as grown cats do,
Till its claws come? Prithee, for this one time,
Content thee with a visionary rhyme.
(Percy B. Shelley, “The Witch of Atlas”)
Sith-Lord Sweep: AG’s Pending Indictments Cover Major Hedgies, Journalists, and Regulators
Corporate finance generalist, investment banker and expert in derivatives, Austin Burrell, sums up last week’s announcement by Attorney-General Eric Holder that there are 5000 pending indictments [sic] arising out of the investigation of fraud in the capital markets:
[Note: the DOJ is involved in some 5000 odd cases of fraud related to the financial industry… (more…)
Obama’s Man In China - Jon Huntsman Jr.
I’ve been thinking that any real change in the US..or anywhere else… will only come from outside politics, from business, or from technology, or from a cultural trend (such as, off-grid living) or from a spiritual movement. But occasionally, I wonder if some politician could actually push things in a new direction, make some kind of real difference.
Recently, some people have been touting a GOP dark horse who´s joined Team Obama. That’s former Utah governor and current Ambassador to China, Jon Huntsman Junior, who even struck some writer at the Washington Post as a potential ‘next big thing.’ (more…)
The Demonic Style: Valentine On Military Historians, Avatars, and the CIA
Insight into why the revisionist media never ‘gets’ it:
“The extent to which this practice existed was revealed in 1975, when William Colby informed a congressional committee that more than 500 CIA officers were operating under cover as corporate executives and that 40 CIA officers were posing as journalists.
“When it comes to the CIA and the press, one hand washes the other. In order to have access to informed officials, reporters frequently suppress or distort stories. In return, officials leak stories to reporters to whom they owe favors.
Pankaj Mishra On The Strength Of Passivity
The old world, with its failures, weaknesses, and poverty, has at least a proper estimation of the limits of human action, says writer Pankaj Mishra in an oped in the New York Times, last August:
“India may have been passive after the Mumbai attacks. But India has not launched wars against either abstract nouns or actual countries that it has no hope of winning or even disengaging from. Another major terrorist assault on our large and chaotic cities is very probable, but it is unlikely to have the sort of effect that 9/11 had on America.
Kingsford Capital And The Captured Media
Mark Mitchell at Deep Capture has some interesting details about the extensive influence of hedge-funds, specifically Kingsford Capital, on the reporting of stories in the financial press:
“Another focus of my investigation at CJR was the appalling bear raid on a collectibles company called Escala. Not only was Escala the victim of massive amounts of illegal naked short selling, but a hedge fund convinced the Spanish government that Escala’s parent company, based in Madrid, was fleecing investors in philatelic collectibles.
Swine-Flu Vaccine Facts That Should Frighten You
One of the best read articles in 2009 on Lew Rockwell was one by Bill Sardi on eighteen reasons you shouldn´t take the swine flu vaccine. Here´s an excerpt, but it´s worth reading the whole piece.
“4. The vaccines will be produced by no less than four different manufacturers, possibly with different additives (called adjuvants) and manufacturing methods. The two flu inoculations may be derived from a multi-dose vial and in a crisis, and in short supply, it will be diluted to provide more doses and then adjuvants must be added to trigger a stronger immune response. Adjuvants are added to vaccines to boost production of antibodies but may trigger autoimmune reactions. Some adjuvants are mercury (thimerosal), aluminum and squalene. Would you permit your children to be injected with lead? Lead is very harmful to the brain. Then why would you sign a consent form for your kids to be injected with mercury, which is even more brain-toxic than lead? Injecting mercury may fry the brains of American kids.
Why We Believe Propaganda
From a piece I wrote in 2005, “America´s Downing Syndrome,” about why the airwar in Iraq was never represented in media coverage:
“And how does the public conscience square with all this? Simple. The civilians who are fair game are not American civilians. The skies that are threatened are not American skies. It may take a village to raise a child, but given enough air power, we now know also that it only takes a child to raze a village. Our children, their villages. And in return for our invulnerability, we make cultural icons out of bomber pilots, turning a blind eye to their ravages abroad. While the grunt that kills and is killed on the scorched ground bears the burden of public backlash against any horrors of war making that might elude censorship, his mates in the clouds are untouchable. Atrocities are always only committed on earth. So a Lieutenant Calley is court-martialed over My Lai and a Charles Graner is imprisoned for Abu Ghraib, but the bombers who wreak havoc on a magnitude far grander not only walk free, but are feted by a society in which for many reasons the air force is substantially white and the officer corps even whiter.
But there’s more. Strategic bombing directed broadly against a country´s will or morale rather than military targets has nearly always been associated with civilian not military control. Pen-pushers in think tanks and journals, couch-crusaders on Wall Street and Main Street are the most hysterical groupies for total war from the skies. (9) Remote from actual bloodletting, they’re still the quickest to tote up grand calculations of its necessity in bringing about their favorite utopia. It was Lyndon Johnson, not the generals, who first ratcheted up the air war against North Vietnam to genocidal proportions.
And because the civilian leadership unlike the military is always indebted to public opinion for its existence, it´s ultimately public approval rather than military need that drives air war against civilians, which is why the corporate media obligingly does its bit to keep that approval going.
Media and government duplicity, widespread intoxication with technological wizardry, a deadly sense of impunity combined with a deadlier sense of omnipotence, cultural myth making, and socio-economic class are the causes of America’s fundamentally diseased relationship with air power and thus with the raw foundation of imperial might. It is the cognitive disease which periodically manifests itself in redundant “smoking-guns” and “exposes” about memos whose sole purpose apparently is to maintain our illusion of ourselves as eternal naifs duped by an endless procession of charlatans in government.
Clearly, it’s not merely war propaganda so much as the public´s receptivity to war propaganda that’s the problem. The addiction to war-as-Grand Theft Auto reveals an insatiable craving in the bowels of the military-industrial leviathan for physical violence. Air war feeds that craving while disarming us with its technical virtuosity and its remote-controlled, surreal impersonality.
Air war works because it displays naked aggression masked as defense, hard core furtively masquerading as family viewing in the American living room. It’s the secret fix that lets us look like good guys but act like bad guys; it’s the other face of the double-eagle, the predator behind the mask of the protector.
Air war is the white noise of a consumer society so narcotized that only violence makes us feel alive. If we no longer see it, hear it, or talk about it in the heart of empire, it’s ultimately only because for more than fifty years now, we’ve never really done without it.”
Wikipedia Scanner and Deletionpedia
This Wired article by John Borland from August 2007 references a handy tool - the wikipedia scanner - for anyone interested in finding out what sorts of edits are being made at wikipedia. The author argues that while most edits, even from interested parties, seem relatively minor and informational, it´s also true that corporations like Diebold (the maker of the Diebold voting machine), Walmart (among many corporations), and the CIA have all been involved in altering information.
“Wikipedia Scanner — the brainchild of Cal Tech computation and neural-systems graduate student Virgil Griffith — offers users a searchable database that ties millions of anonymous Wikipedia edits to organizations where those edits apparently originated, by cross-referencing the edits with data on who owns the associated block of internet IP addresses……
The online encyclopedia allows anyone to make edits, but keeps detailed logs of all these changes. Users who are logged in are tracked only by their username, but anonymous changes leave a public record of their IP address.”
Though it´s nice to see a mainstream publication like Wired, take up this topic, I wonder if it´s only touching the tip of the iceberg.
It´s not the suppression of so-called “conspiracy theory” type articles or their authors that I worry about. It´s the skewing of mainstream topics and the tarring of perfectly respectable publications that are well-sourced and written by well-educated and informed people, and that have broken or explored important stories, often long before and far better than the mainstream media. By removing those sources and sending researchers to so-called mainstream media sources the establishment keeps a tight control of whose voice gets heard, and more importantly, whose voices are annointed with authority. Since many of the alternative voices are those of foreigners, working class or disenfranchised people, immigrants, or political dissidents, this skewing is both censorship as well as a form of cultural imperialism, with a distinct racial, religious, and linguistic bias, i.e. in effect, the skewing tends to promote Anglo-European, state-centric, non-religious or anti-religious, English-language perspectives over others.
If you want to search for articles that have been deleted that you think should be put back on wikipedia, check out deletionpedia. You need to look in the deletionpedia archive, and even then, not all deleted articles end up there.
More Apparent Wiki Whacking On Naked Short Selling
Deep Capture has more on wiki manipulation in its latest post:
“In the past (as you can read about here), we know Weiss spread misinformation relating to stock fraud via Wikipedia on behalf of the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC), the Wall Street firm considered a key enabler of illegal short selling. Exactly who’s sponsoring Weiss these days is unclear; however, as the evidence that follows will demonstrate, his concerted effort to whitewash DTCC’s Wikipedia article makes that company the prime suspect.
Now that his ruse has been uncovered – yet again – the focus becomes one of identifying and repairing the damage done. A brief review of some of the thousands of changes made by Weiss will give you a sense of both the scope of the problem and the nature of his motives. I’m organizing the following tiny sampling of Weiss’s Wikipedia edits by topic, with the content as it originally appeared on the left, with Weiss’s changes on the right. Words added or removed appear in red.”
My Comment
For now, I am just posting this as an interesting development that I haven´t personally verified. Also, I think any notion that the tide has turned on wiki manipulation is overly optimistic. I doubt, for example, that Weiss´ media bosses don´t know what´s happening. That to me is an incredibly naive position to take.
Edward Bernays On Why Conspiracies Work
“In almost every act of our lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons [...] who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world.”
– Edward Bernays
Delingpole On Wiki Manipulation
James Delingpole on Wiki manipulation…
“If you want to know the truth about Climategate, definitely don’t use Wikipedia. “Climatic Research Unit e-mail controversy”, is its preferred, mealy-mouthed euphemism to describe the greatest scientific scandal of the modern age. Not that you’d ever guess it was a scandal from the accompanying article. It reads more like a damage-limitation press release put out by concerned friends and sympathisers of the lying, cheating, data-rigging scientists
Which funnily enough, is pretty much what it is. Even Wikipedia’s own moderators acknowledge that the entry has been hijacked, as this commentary by an “uninvolved editor” makes clear.”
Which is just what we said a while back
You get the scoop here…
Warren Buffett To Promote Paulson Book
Now, we don´t want to read too much into this announcement, but, really, promoting Paulson´s book? What´s Buffett going to say?
I really really like that chapter where Hank had to take over the US government.…you know, after he pushed Bear Stearns and Lehman over with the help of his hedge-fund buddies…and all but nationalized housing.
Or
Gee, Hank´s into that cap-and-trade collectivist boondoggle that just got outed as a total rip-off and a fraud made up by climate change fanatics but hey, give the guy a break, will ya? We´re all capitalists here…..you know, like, state capitalists..wazza big deal?
Or
Yeah, I know. Vanity Fair, that bastion of free markets and free minds, already did its bit for Hank´s place in history when it got down on its knees and..um.. blew…up.. the guy into some kind of I´m-taking-on-the-slings-and-arrows-for-the-greater-good-profile-in-courage long before me, and yeah, Bethany did her bit for Hank too.. but every little effort counts…
I´ve had my doubts about Buffett´s involvement in the bail-out.
This doesn´t make them go away…
Secretive Steve Cohen On Talk Show Discussing Relationship With Ex—
I’d been avoiding mentioning the by-now famous clip of Steve Cohen on a talk show back in 1992, because it seems like a low blow. I mean, hit the guy over the head on insider trading, but don’t worm around in the trash can for dirt on him. Of course, he did put himself on the show…
But, either way, there’s one angle that is relevant.
If you’re billed as the most secretive guy in the hedge world, presumably because you’re a reclusive, crowd-shy financial genius, what does it say that you once got onto a TV show called Cristina of none-too-distinguished caliber to discuss intimate details of your personal life?
Hmm. That’d hardly what I call shrinking violet material.
Here, sans video (because we don’t drag people’s families in the mud on this blog) is the lowdown at New York Magazine:
“Shortly after they were married in 1992, Steve Cohen, the notoriously secretive hedge-fund manager at SAC Capital, and his second wife, Alex, went on the short-lived English-language version of the popular talk show Christina. The episode? “He Acts Like Her Husband!” The subject discussed? Steve’s too-close relationship with his ex-wife, Patricia Cohen, who recently filed a $300 million lawsuit against him.”
Think about that for a moment.
Psychologically, that doesn’t make any sense for a reclusive genius…
But, just suppose, what you have here is not a shy geeky genius (or maybe, I should qualify that - not solely a shy geeky genius) but a guy who was quite at home at a shady broker called Gruntal & Co. in the 1980s - a broker that had ties to the Russian mob and to a whole set of players to whom ‘reclusive’ and ’shy’ are the last words you’d apply. Just suppose what you have here is a guy who was a player in that crowd….making his way any way he could. And just suppose, that past is why he keeps a low profile…
Just suppose.
It’s at least a distinct possibility.
But what’s more like a high probability is that anyone who puts out an article on Steve Cohen like this one or this one by John Carney has lost quite a bit of his credibility on Steven Cohen and on a few things closely related like, say, insider trading…or naked shorting….
Carney’s explanation why Steven Cohen can have done no wrong? A SAC trader told him so. That’s why.
“The trader described the enormous, football field sized trading floor at SAC as “the cleanest in the biz.”
A SAC trader says SAC is 100 percent clean. Because?
Well, that part of it isn’t mentioned in the article, although a lot of other stuff which sure as heck sounds super close to insider trading is.
“When I was there, we put tons of pressure on our brokers to make sure they gave us any information they had fast and first,“
And what was that John Carney was calling Matt Taibbi only a couple of months ago?
Naive?
Wiki Whacking: Green Doctor Of Wikipedia
“Lawrence Solomon at the National Post writes about a topic that WUWT readers have known about for a long time: How Wikipedia’s green doctor rewrote 5,428 climate articles.
We’ve known for some time that Wikipedia can’t be trusted to provide unbiased climate information. Solomon starts off by talking about Climategate emails.The emails also describe how the band plotted to rewrite history as well as science, particularly by eliminating the Medieval Warm Period, a 400 year period that began around 1000 AD.
The Climategate Emails reveal something else, too: the enlistment of the most widely read source of information in the world — Wikipedia — in the wholesale rewriting of this history.
He then focuses on RealClimate.org co-founder William Connolley, who has “touched” 5,428 Wikipedia articles with his unique brand of RC centric editing:
All told, Connolley created or rewrote 5,428 unique Wikipedia articles. His control over Wikipedia was greater still, however, through the role he obtained at Wikipedia as a website administrator, which allowed him to act with virtual impunity. When Connolley didn’t like the subject of a certain article, he removed it — more than 500 articles of various descriptions disappeared at his hand. When he disapproved of the arguments that others were making, he often had them barred — over 2,000 Wikipedia contributors who ran afoul of him found themselves blocked from making further contributions. Acolytes whose writing conformed to Connolley’s global warming views, in contrast, were rewarded with Wikipedia’s blessings. In these ways, Connolley turned Wikipedia into the missionary wing of the global warming movement.
The Medieval Warm Period disappeared, as did criticism of the global warming orthodoxy. With the release of the Climategate Emails, the disappearing trick has been exposed. The glorious Medieval Warm Period will remain in the history books, perhaps with an asterisk to describe how a band of zealots once tried to make it disappear.”
My Comment:
As you know, wiki engineering is one of my recurring obsessions, having had to go through 3 rounds of wikipedia fighting to stay on it, and having nearly had some associates’ wiki pages wiped out because of their connection to me.
And what was I guilty of? Of nothing more dreadful than respectful, fairly carefully modulated writing on such hoary topics as Zionism, media corruption, racism, racialist ideology, banking, and the Federal Reserve. Never have I advocated anything that could remotely be called racist, foul, biased, or misogynist. I have simply been factual and rather indifferent to political codes or the particular form of brainwashing prevalent in the US - which is, if we don’t know about it, it ain’t worth knowing.
Whenever I suggested that wiki was manipulated, I was told I was being conspiratorial, that I was imagining things…and that that isn’t the way the world works.
But now…wiki-whacking has been exposed for all to see. If it’s this bad on climate-gate, think about all the other topics that have been skewed.
But that’s all going to change soon….little by little. Now that the whistle has been blown on these kapos, their come uppance is round the corner.
See this piece, that reports on the canning of errant wiki administrator, climatista Connolley.
“Scientific” Academies Need A Taste Of RICO Too
Alan Caruba , a conservative writer and reviewer:
“Consider a letter dated October 21, 2009 and signed by the presidents of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Geophysical Union, the American Meteorological Society, the American Society of Plant Biologists, the Association of Ecosystem Research Center, the American Chemical Society, the American Institute of Biological Sciences, the American Society of Agronomy, the American Statistical Association,
And the Botanical Society of America, the Crop Science Society of America, the Natural Science Collections Alliance, the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics, the Soil Science Society of America, the Ecological Society of America, the Organization of Biological Field Stations, the Society of Systematic Biologists, and the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research.
Together, they asserted that “Observations throughout the world make it clear that climate change is occurring, and rigorous scientific research demonstrates that the greenhouse gases emitted by human activities are the primary driver.” It went on to repeat all the usual scary scenarios of rising sea levels, urban heat weaves, wildfires, and other climate-related events.
In a footnote, the letter to U.S. Senators said, “The conclusions in this paragraph reflect the scientific consensus represented by, for example, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the U.S. Global Change Research Program.”
We now know that the “science” being cited by these two entities was, at least in the case of the IPCC, totally rigged, but the presidents of these alleged science-based organizations took it on face value despite ample scientific evidence it was false. The revelations of emails exchanged between the perpetrators of the hoax have demonstrated the deceptions…….
In light of this, who can trust these organizations? And who can trust the “science” produced by NASA and other U.S. agencies that have benefited from billions in grants directed at so-called climate, i.e. global warming research?”
Sad SAC: Reuters Spikes Hedge Story On Complaints From Steve Cohen
Via Finalternatives:
“Reuters opted against running a story about alleged insider-trading on the part of SAC Capital Advisors founder Steven Cohen after Cohen himself complained about the news agency’s coverage, a journalism blog reports.
Cohen repeatedly called Devin Wenig, CEO of Thompson Reuters Markets Division and the second-in-command at Reuters parent Thomson Reuters, according to Talking Biz News. The hedge fund boss reportedly complained that the story, which the University of North Carolina blog reports would have been an “incremental” advance in the story of alleged insider-trading more than 20 years ago, was part of a pattern of persecution on the part of Reuters.
Wenig forwarded Cohen’s complaints to Reuters editor-in-chief David Schlesinger, who in turn referred the story to editors. Those editors debated the story, written by Matthew Goldstein, before deciding to kill it after three days.
“We make decisions on whether or not to run stories purely on journalistic grounds,” a Reuters spokesman told Talking Biz News.
Goldstein was the first reporter to cite the unsealed court documents that include explosive allegations against SAC and former SAC portfolio manager Ping Jiang. Cohen’s ex-wife, Patricia, last week sued him for $300 million, accusing him of insider-trading, perjury and hiding assets from her and from the authorities.”
My Comment
Looks like more confirmation of the Deep Capture thesis - that major newspapers are bending over backwards…and forwards….for the big hedge funds.
I notice that Hedge World has picked this story up….as well it should, it’s a big one… and very kindly links this blog, as well as the ever-alert zerohedge - the only MSM-touted blog I truly dig, mainly because I dig the characters on it.
Earlier, I blogged that Steven Cohen was also having problems with a militant ex-missus, who has gone public with allegations that he perjured himself, hid money from the government (here we are on Stevie’s side), and did other sorts of naughty things, like insider trading, that reclusive billionaires really shouldn’t do, not if they want to stay either reclusive or billionaires.
We have much more sympathy for Mr. Cohen, of course, than we do for the self-important twits and petty tyrants who fly their bylines at major newspapers with little respect for the body politic. At least, we understand simple greed. But the weedy vanity of the pen-pushing mob needs to be exposed for what it is.
Now comes Mr. Goldstein, who clearly suffers from the delusion that his job is to break important stories, no matter how exalted the net worth of the subjects. That didn’t sit well with his boss, and now the dirty laundry is out in the open.
Meanwhile, as if irate Sith ladies and spiked stories weren’t enough, there’s also a forced oral sex- cross-dressing- cum- sexual-harassment suit coming back from the past to haunt Sad SAC.
Who knew you could have so much fun without getting naked (shorted)?
Ilana Mercer On Subverting Natural Law
“Oblivious to the cameras – or perhaps for them – Amanda Knox, 22, and Raffaele Sollecito, 25, exchanged a slow, sensual kiss in full view of world media. Not far from where the two kissed lay the body of Meredith Kercher, the English girl with whom Knox had shared student accommodation in Perugia, Italy. Her throat slit, Meredith had expired in slow agony.”
I´m sure that opening, from a piece by the always incisive Ilana Mercer, got your attention.
Mercer writes here about an American “media mafia” baying in full-throated support of the murderous Amanda, as an innocent abroad, caught in the toils of Italy´s provincial justice system.
Now, we can always be counted on to get interested in anything at which media mobs bay…and this case proves to be interesting on other counts as well.
For one thing, I have a long-standing interest, nourished by the late William Roughhead, in true crime….but this go round, it´s not the murder itself that strikes me, but this passage in Mercer´s piece:
“In American (positive) law, procedural violations can get evidence of guilt – a bloodied knife or a smoking gun – barred from being presented at trial. More often than not, such procedural defaults are used to suppress immutable physical facts, thus serving to subvert the spirit of the (natural) law and justice.”
Mercer, I suppose, means that sometimes technical details of “how” trip up the more important objective of the law..which, she says, is to do justice. I´m tempted to quote Oliver Wendell Holmes to her (that it´s not the business of the law to do justice..however one construes that), but I´ll pass….
Instead, I´ll ask another question:
By distinguishing between procedural niceties of law and the ends of justice they ought to serve, isn´t Ms Mercer making a rather good argument for the use of extra-legal methods in conducting war….
And wouldn´t that allow for some tactics I am sure she´d condemn ,if they were taken up by one of her most frequent targets, Islamic terrorists?
Rick Ackerman On the Deflationary Argument
“Our grasp of deflation’s logic began with the 1976 book, The Coming Deflation, by the late C.V. Myers, and continued with Davidson and Rees-Mogg’s The Great Reckoning. Although Myers’ work was obviously premature, the concepts it emphasized are timeless, particularly this one: “Ultimately, every penny of very debt must be paid – if not by the borrower, than by the lender.” This is the crux of the inflation vs. deflation debate, and because of the way Myers framed it, we’ve never had any doubt that the U.S. would eventually experience a catastrophic deflation. We were early in thinking the financial system would topple as a result of the allegedly “mild” recession of 1990-91 and its S&L crisis. In retrospect, it’s clear that we lacked the imagination to see that the huge amounts of Third World debt that threatened the global economy at the time were relative chump change compared to the galactic sums that Bush, Obama and the Federal Reserve have put into play in the last three years in hopes of saving the system.”
My Comment
I posted this to support my reiterated position that the recession cannot possibly be corrected as simply as advocates of the stimulus programs like to argue. It´s been in the making for more than a quarter of a century. Can a few months change everything so fast? I could be mistaken, but I don´t think so,…
I also posted the Ackerman piece to counter the establishment media spin that Nouriel Roubini was so much “ahead” of others in predicting the recession.
I call Roubini an establishment figure because of several things, including the fact that he does business with Larry Summers. Here is Roubini warning about housing in 2006...
He himself said the earliest he predicted the housing crash was in July and August 2006.
But by then, even a layman, like yours truly had already done that, and done it earlier - July 2005
And I was, at least in part, drawing on my reading of Mises. org, Lew Rockwell, and The Daily Reckoning, when I wrote the piece…which is where they spotted me on the web, and offered me a gig.
(As I said, I´m always walking into synchronicities in my life..)
Compare that with what other experts were saying in 2005, which is, there´s no housing bubble. That´s Ritholtz, by the way, who writes the excellent blog, The Big Picture (At least, Ritholtz also did say that housing was extended).
But then, in that same piece, Ritholtz also predicted that 2008 would be a good time to reenter the housing market. Oops. [Dec 12. On second thoughts, maybe oops isn´t really warranted. Housing may not have bottomed out everywhere, but I´ll bet you could have picked up good bargains in a few places in 2008]
That shows that you can have very good number-crunching skills, but then miss some of the…..dare I say it?…big picture.…because the big picture has nothing to do with number-crunching but with perspective
And that takes a knowledge of history…. and not simply economic history either. It takes a broader knowledge of the world than professional money-managers usually have.
Meanwhile, compared to Austro-libertarians (see those cited above in Ackerman´s post), Roubini was some twenty-five years late in his analysis.
Yet the media studiously ignores Austrian theory and Austrian theorists (Mark Thornton, for example, called the housing bubble exactly on time and called gold $1200 back in 2005) and stamps approval on people who were either late or wrong…and turns to them for solutions.
Why is all that important? Because it shows the intellectual dishonesty that is at the heart of the corruption of the system. Fraud and force go together, and for political and financial fraud to succeed, they need intellectual and academic fraud to cover their sins… and prep the soil.
Deep lack of trust of anyone who adheres to a rival political theory (or to a rival political party)…. and the arrogance of power…lead the establishment media to rewrite history…. and this intellectual dishonesty is the rag behind which the emperor (the state) hides his moral nudity.
Five-Minute Guide To Propaganda On The Web
I´m noticing some hilarious (to me) propaganda efforts on the web. Unfortunately, newbie media watchers are liable to be misled quite easily by them.
Here, I offer a quick and handy guide to spotting a propaganda effort, especially one emanating from Wall Street.
1. Predominance of name-calling. Does the writer offer arguments or name-calling? A few ripe names here and there are one thing. But if a piece is entirely devoid of reasoning and simply includes a list of epithets, such as, freak, weird, bizarre, crazy, loon, circus, tin-foil hat..it´s propaganda.
2. False Equivalence. Your man is caught committing an axe murder to which he ´fesses up on tape. He´s also an embezzler, a pathological liar, and kicks his dog. Their guy is an upstanding citizen on all counts, successful, philanthropic, intellectual, but he likes to party .. and got into a couple of fights once. No equivalence.
Trying to make false equivalences is the hall-mark of propaganda. A kid´s theft of a five dollar trinket is not the same offense as the monumental thieving that got us into this financial crisis. Anyone who makes these kinds of equivalences isn´t smart enough or honest enough to be trusted.
3. Talking points. When you hear the same set phrases tripping off the lips of everyone - then it´s propaganda. This doesn´t mean that a catchy phrase can´t be repeated quite innocuously. I´m also not talking about people who stay on message and keep repeating some thing to get it through to the public. I am talking about spinning things by choosing certain phrases. I´m talking about guilt by association. Say, you don´t have reason or evidence on your side. What do you do? You take a picture of Ted Bundy (or Hitler, or any one else), and then try to associate your enemy with that person.
4. Same old, same old. Watch out for the same faces showing up all over again. Propaganda is usually spun by a few favorites and any sidekicks and newbies whom they can con into joining their team. When you´re worried about someone´s honesty, try google. Go back and read the stuff they wrote. See when they wrote it. Do they have a consistent philosophy (changing your mind on a subject is a different thing). Do they have understandable positions..and a coherent intellectual frame work?
5. Separate the name-calling from the facts. Because some supposedly authoritative figure calls something a conspiracy, lies, or anything else doesn´t make it so. We´ve just seen from climate-gate how biased the peer review process is. Well, wiki is manipulated too. And some blogs, including this one, can show you hard evidence that publishing and the media are pretty much manipulated as well.
6. Look at the person´s record. There are a lot of late-comers to the scene claiming credit for things they didn´t discover, happen upon, or explain first. Revisionist history is all over the place. Look to see if the person credits sources - including opponents, enemies, people on the opposite side of the political spectrum, and obscure sources. That´s the hall mark of intellectual honesty. If they aren´t intellectually honest, they´re unlikely to be honest in other ways. If they repeatedly misattribute and twist history (remember, partial truths are the worst lies), watch out.
7. Look at the level of emotion and reason. Emotion..even passion..is good. But emotion without the ability to retract, qualify, substantiate, source, question, analyze, synthesize, and accurately assess, is pointless, dangerous and a possible sign of propaganda, or, at least, sound and fury minus substance. How polite is the person if contradicted? Do they answer criticism? (I´m talking about legitimate criticism, not flaming or obstructionism).
8. Beware of accusations whose significance you can´t assess. Do you know enough about business, accounting, law, and history to judge which mistake is serious and which isn´t? If you don´t, consult people who do. Don´t consult one person. Talk to several experts and get a feel for the issue.
9. Beware of innuendo that lacks relevance. Having a drunk-driving violation doesn´t disqualify you from discussing subsidies for the auto industry. Someone´s hairstyle, body type, love life, and hobbies are irrelevant. Anyone who harps on the personal stuff doesn´t have a case….unless the personal stuff is inextricable from their public professions. Even so, be wary of it.
10. Get to know the history of the players and the issues. Often, the same set of opponents go at each other over years. Don´t show up in year 10 and hope to figure out what´s going on.
11. Research the subject yourself, reading both sides (and any other side, as well). Talk to professionals and experts, but also talk to people on the outside. Sometimes, as with Wall Street, professionals can´t see something because they´re steeped in the ideology of their job.
12. Ethnic and religious solidarity, professional ideology, provincialism, racism, gender bias, nationalism, imperialism…it´s taboo to check for these. I do. When the advocates of a position all look a like, I ask myelf why. It´s not automatic that they´re therefore biased, but it could well be that they all see things the same way because they have in common the same life experience. Someone might use lofty arguments, but the real reason he picks on Greenspan, and not someone else, is because Greenspan is Jewish. And conversely, a Jewish person might pick on someone because he´s Catholic, and not for the reason he professes in public. This might be unconscious. Or it could be quite self-conscious but hidden under disingenous professions of transparence.
No one, especially not people in power, should be believed to be “above” this sort of bias. Major print, TV and online media are part of that power.
13. Money.
This, of course, should be number one on the list. Is the person being paid to say what they´re saying. If so, how much, by whom, and with what degree of disclosure. If they´re upfront, it might not be a problem. After all university professors are paid..but not all of them take positions in politics that have anything to do with their universities´positions. Also, there are many dishonest shills, friends, networks, and fellow travelers, who don´t get paid but still churn out reliable propaganda or PR on behalf of their favorite cause or person. I don´t mean that one should discount the testimony of friendly networks. Not at all. But if a groupie or fellow traveler can´t show evidence and reasoning for their support, then their statement is no more than a testimonial.
Ultimately, all this boils down to one thing. Skip the emotion and invective, and look for the evidence and logic. And don´t be intimidated by celebrity, “authoritative” sources, the popularity of a position or anything else.
Example: A journalist attacks naked short-selling. The industry defends itself by saying short selling is a good thing. Duh.
No one´s objecting to short selling..so why the strawman? Maybe because an attack on short selling would be easier to knock down than one on naked short selling?
Example: Critics of anthropogenic global warming are often criticized for attacking global warming, or climate change. But AGW is not any of these things. And critics aren´t usually denying the existence of anthropogenic global warming. What they´re objecting to is the claim that AGW is large enough to be a problem and the idea that, if so, there´s something human beings could do about it in the way of policies and economic interventions. That´s an entirely different kettle of fish. But climatistas won´t ever spell that out..
Hedge-Fund Pays Naked Shorting Critic Byrne $5 Million
Copper River Partners (formerly Rocker Partners), the short-selling hedge-fund of David Rocker and Marc Cohodes, and associated entities have settled a case brought against them in 2005 by Patrick Byrne, CEO of embattled internet retailer Overstock, according to The Register.
Note: The suit doesn´t charge naked shorting, but defamation and illegal collusion with research analysts.
Copper River worked with a research firm, Gradient Analytics, that employed well-known financial journalist Herb Greenberg, one of the central figures in the story of the “capture” (corruption) of Wall Street journalists by speculators. Hedge funds stand accused of engaging in illegal collusion with journalists to drive down stock-prices of companies.
Last year, Gradient settled for a figure between $1.5-$2 million and issued an apology. Now comes this further vindication.
Despite the relatively trivial amount won in the Rocker case, $5 million, it´s noteworthy that the settlement does all the things victory in an actual court trial does, without the risk of losing on a technicality.
It also underscores something I´ve been suggesting for a while.
That public interest blogging and journalism alone isn´t enough.
It´s necessary to actually sue or inflict damage of some kind to score victories in these things.
Unfortunately, that´s usually not worth doing for people who aren´t wealthy. Vicariously, however, we “little people” can at least relish the spectacle of the behemoths of finance getting it in the rump.
And this case could prove to be a model for similar lawsuits by other embattled companies.
Still to come is Overstock´s suit against 12 prime broker-dealers (including Goldman Sachs), which will go to trial in late 2010. The suit charges an illegal stock market manipulation scheme.
Also in the works, the SEC, which dropped its investigation of Gradient in 2007, has now turned its sights on Byrne. Given Byrne´s charge of regulatory and media capture, there are some who see this as retaliatory.
Climate-Gate: Summary
I found this excellent summary posted by a contributor to the New York Times blog of the evidence of manipulation of data in the outed emails:
• Phil Jones writes to University of Hull to try to stop sceptic Sonia Boehmer Christiansen using her Hull affiliation. Graham F Haughton of Hull University says its easier to push greenery there now SB-C has retired.(1256765544)
• Michael Mann discusses how to destroy a journal that has published sceptic papers.(1047388489)
• Tim Osborn discusses how data are truncated to stop an apparent cooling trend showing up in the results (0939154709).
Analysis of impact here. Wow!
• Phil Jones describes the death of sceptic, John Daly, as “cheering news“.
• Phil Jones encourages colleagues to delete information subject to FoI request.(1212063122)• Phil Jones says he has use Mann’s “Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series “…to hide the decline”. Real Climate says “hiding” was an unfortunate turn of phrase.(0942777075)
• Letter to The Times from climate scientists was drafted with the help of Greenpeace.(0872202064)
• Mann thinks he will contact BBC’s Richard Black to find out why another BBC journalist was allowed to publish a vaguely sceptical article.(1255352257)
• Kevin Trenberth says they can’t account for the lack of recent warming and that it is a travesty that they can’t.(1255352257)
• Tom Wigley says that Lindzen and Choi’s paper is crap.(1257532857)
• Tom Wigley says that von Storch is partly to blame for sceptic papers getting published at Climate Research. Says he encourages the publication of crap science. Says they should tell publisher that the journal is being used for misinformation. Says that whether this is true or not doesn’t matter. Says they need to get editorial board to resign. Says they need to get rid of von Storch too. (1051190249)
• Ben Santer says (presumably jokingly!) he’s “tempted, very tempted, to beat the crap” out of sceptic Pat Michaels. (1255100876)
• Mann tells Jones that it would be nice to ‘”contain” the putative Medieval Warm Period’. (1054736277)
• Tom Wigley tells Jones that the land warming since 1980 has been twice the ocean warming and that this might be used by sceptics as evidence for urban heat islands.(1257546975)
• Tom Wigley say that Keith Briffa has got himself into a mess over the Yamal chronology (although also says it’s insignificant. Wonders how Briffa explains McIntyre’s sensitivity test on Yamal and how he explains the use of a less-well replicated chronology over a better one. Wonders if he can. Says data withholding issue is hot potato, since many “good” scientists condemn it.(1254756944)• Briffa is funding Russian dendro Shiyatov, who asks him to send money to personal bank account so as to avoid tax, thereby retaining money for research.(0826209667)
• Kevin Trenberth says climatologists are nowhere near knowing where the energy goes or what the effect of clouds is. Says nowhere balancing the energy budget. Geoengineering is not possible.(1255523796)• Mann discusses tactics for screening and delaying postings at Real Climate.(1139521913)
• Tom Wigley discusses how to deal with the advent of FoI law in UK. Jones says use IPR argument to hold onto code. Says data is covered by agreements with outsiders and that CRU will be “hiding behind them”.(1106338806)
• Overpeck has no recollection of saying that he wanted to “get rid of the Medieval Warm Period”. Thinks he may have been quoted out of context.(1206628118)
• Mann launches RealClimate to the scientific community.(1102687002)
• Santer complaining about FoI requests from McIntyre. Says he expects support of Lawrence Livermore Lab management. Jones says that once support staff at CRU realised the kind of people the scientists were dealing with they became very supportive. Says the VC [vice chancellor] knows what is going on (in one case).(1228330629)
• Rob Wilson concerned about upsetting Mann in a manuscript. Says he needs to word things diplomatically.(1140554230)
• Briffa says he is sick to death of Mann claiming his reconstruction is tropical because it has a few poorly temp sensitive tropical proxies. Says he should regress these against something else like the “increasing trend of self-opinionated verbiage” he produces. Ed Cook agrees with problems.(1024334440)
• Overpeck tells Team to write emails as if they would be made public. Discussion of what to do with McIntyre finding an error in Kaufman paper. Kaufman’s admits error and wants to correct. Appears interested in Climate Audit findings.(1252164302)
• Jones calls Pielke Snr a prat.(1233249393)
• Santer says he will no longer publish in Royal Met Soc journals if they enforce intermediate data being made available. Jones has complained to head of Royal Met Soc about new editor of Weather [why?data?] and has threatened to resign from RMS.(1237496573)
Finished in next post …
November 21st, 2009
11:29 am
Continued from previous:• Reaction to McIntyre’s 2005 paper in GRL. Mann has challenged GRL editor-in-chief over the publication. Mann is concerned about the connections of the paper’s editor James Saiers with U Virginia [does he mean Pat Michaels?]. Tom Wigley says that if Saiers is a sceptic they should go through official GRL channels to get him ousted. (1106322460)
[Note to readers - Saiers was subsequently ousted]• Later on Mann refers to the leak at GRL being plugged.(1132094873)
• Jones says he’s found a way around releasing AR4 review comments to David Holland.(1210367056)
• Wigley says Keenan’s fraud accusation against Wang is correct. (1188557698)
• Jones calls for Wahl and Ammann to try to change the received date on their alleged refutation of McIntyre [presumably so it can get into AR4](1189722851)
• Mann tells Jones that he is on board and that they are working towards a common goal.(0926010576)
• Mann sends calibration residuals for MBH99 to Osborn. Says they are pretty red, and that they shouldn’t be passed on to others, this being the kind of dirty laundry they don’t want in the hands of those who might distort it.(1059664704)
• Prior to AR3 Briffa talks of pressure to produce a tidy picture of “apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data”. [This appears to be the politics leading the science] Briffa says it was just as warm a thousand years ago.(0938018124)
• Jones says that UK climate organisations are coordinating themselves to resist FoI. They got advice from the Information Commissioner [!](1219239172)
• Mann tells Revkin that McIntyre is not to be trusted.(1254259645)
• Revkin quotes von Storch as saying it is time to toss the Hockey Stick . This back in 2004.(1096382684)
• Funkhouser says he’s pulled every trick up his sleeve to milk his Kyrgistan series. Doesn’t think it’s productive to juggle the chronology statistics any more than he has.(0843161829)
• Wigley discusses fixing an issue with sea surface temperatures in the context of making the results look both warmer but still plausible. (1254108338)
• Jones says he and Kevin will keep some papers out of the next IPCC report.(1089318616)• Tom Wigley tells Mann that a figure Schmidt put together to refute Monckton is deceptive and that the match it shows of instrumental to model predictions is a fluke. Says there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model output by authors and IPCC.(1255553034)
• Grant Foster putting together a critical comment on a sceptic paper. Asks for help for names of possible reviewers. Jones replies with a list of people, telling Foster they know what to say about the paper and the comment without any prompting.(1249503274)
• David Parker discussing the possibility of changing the reference period for global temperature index. Thinks this shouldn’t be done because it confuses people and because it will make things look less warm.(1105019698)
• Briffa discusses an sceptic article review with Ed Cook. Says that confidentially he needs to put together a case to reject it (1054756929)
• Ben Santer, referring to McIntyre says he hopes Mr “I’m not entirely there in the head” will not be at the AGU.(1233249393)
• Jones tells Mann that he is sending station data. Says that if McIntyre requests it under FoI he will delete it rather than hand it over. Says he will hide behind data protection laws. Says Rutherford screwed up big time by creating an FTP directory for Osborn. Says Wigley worried he will have to release his model code. Also discuss AR4 draft. Mann says paleoclimate chapter will be contentious but that the author team has the right personalities to deal with sceptics.(1107454306
Checking Back On Old Posts
Delving into the archives is a lot of fun. It´s uncanny, how things turned out…
Check this post from October 9, 2008:
(Mind you, I hadn´t come across Deep Capture at that point. I started reading it in the spring of this year. I think I came across a link to it on Doug Boggs´blog - The Banterer)Do Statistics Back Claims of Complete Credit Freeze?
“Many commentators claim, however, that virtually no transactions are occurring in this market. These claims are completely false. For the week that ended October 1, which is the most recent week currently reported, total commercial paper outstanding amounted to $1,607 billion. Yes, this amount was down from the $1,702 billion reported for the previous week, but is a 5.6 percent drop a good reason to panic? If we go back to March 2008, when nobody was talking excitedly about the commercial market’s “freezing up,” we find that the total amount outstanding, on average, was $1,822 billion, or only 13 percent more than last week. In March, the market was working fine; now it’s “locked up.” This sort of hyperbole, with which we are being bombarded hourly around the clock, is totally without a basis in the facts…..”
Robert Higgs, suggesting that some people are fomenting panic. He asks why.
Comment:
The answer lies in asking yourself:
Who has benefited so far? How? What do they want to happen?
Paulson Plan Premeditated?Here’s Bill Engdahl tying up the loose ends of my piece on Paulson on how Paulson’s plan benefits the three new super banks, Goldman, JPMorgan Chase, and Citi and how they would be used to dominate global, especially European, banking.
Interbank Wars - Latest
The latest in Citi’s fight with Wells Fargo is that Citi has terminated negotiations and is planning to pursue breach of contract against Wells, so Wells is going ahead with its deal. Citi has Goldman Sachs connections: Rubin, Clinton’s Treasury Secretary and a former Goldman chief is a director. Meanwhile, with regard to Bear’s demise, here is a piece arguing that JPMorgan was involved in gold price manipulation under cover of their bail out of Bear this spring. JPMorgan chief Jamie Dimon sits on the Board of the NY Federal Reserve and as such was privy to the NY Fed’s actions re Bear Stearns.
Media Trix
Bill O’Reilly, not usually my favorite person, has been pretty good on standing up to the bail-out. This evening, he had a clip from an NBC skit on the sale of subprime mortgages to Wachovia by a couple, the Sandlers. It mocks Barney Frank’s role in eliminating oversight of Fannie and Freddie. Apparently the video was edited to remove the reference to Frank. The Sandlers had a long list of progressive groups they donated to (including Move On.org).
O’Reilly’s tack seems to be that the positions of those groups is undermined by the funding. That part is far-fetched, but it is time someone pointed out that not everyone affected by the decline in housing prices is an innocent. Many people made fortunes during the boom and are making more money from the bust.
Update - Market Moves Or CyberWars?Another amazing day. I walked out of the house for 2 hours to buy a laptop for traveling, since my old one had mysteriously lost its internet connectivity. When I came back, the market was closing with a sell off, down 7% (679 points).
It began in the morning when
Paulson announced that insurance companies were in for trouble. That set off the selling in the bank and insurance stocks, including regional bank funds.The whole thing was compounded by the fact that today was the day the ban on short-selling around 1000 financial and finance related stocks was lifted, so short-sellers were pouncing.
[Companies on the SEC's list slid 18 percent on average during the ban, compared with 24 percent drop for all financial companies in the Standard & Poor's 500 Index].
Then, General Motors had a bad day: Standard &Poor threatened to downgrade it (as well as Ford) to junk. GM shares got beaten down under $5; Ford was down over 20% too.
You had to wonder at the timing.
1) It’s the Jewish holiday, Yom Kippur, today. Recall that the selling began the evening of Rosh Hashanah. Remember that old saw - sell Rosh Hashanah, buy Yom Kippur? Markets are weaker at the time…
2) The declines came on the one-year anniversary of the closing highs of the Dow and the S&P. The Dow has lost 5,585 points, or 39.4 percent, since closing at 14,164.53 on Oct. 9, 2007. It’s the worst run for the Dow since the nearly two-year bear market that ended in December 1974 when the Dow lost 45 percent.
3) The decline is 7 years from 9/11
Anyway, when I got back the damage had been done.
[I ended up buying my computer at a shop that sold refurbished electronics in a rather shady side of town. A cop car was pulling away just as I walked in. But having just been a spectator to one of the biggest bank heists in history, I suddenly found the grungy looking characters hanging around rather harmless].
James Altucher, a trader, has this to say at The Street:
“The single biggest reason the stock market has fallen in the past five days is hedge fund liquidations. Of the top 20 hedge funds in the world, something like 18 are down 20% or more this year. They are getting redemptions, they are liquidating, they are selling stocks with reckless abandon to raise cash. Our job as good investors is to give them liquidity and take their bargain-basement merchandise off of their hands. Let’s get their selling over with so we can make money.”
Well, that’s evident. There was big selling, especially at the end, the kind from sell signals going off in program trading.
Morton Kondracke on FOX News in the evening was telling us sagely that it’s not a liquidity issue, it’s a confidence issue, and (get this) the answer is to create a global central bank. Right. The solution to a confidence problem is to give the markets to the confidence-men.
A note on cyberwarfare might be apposite hear [sic]. I dig it up from an old article I wrote that references Laurent Murawiec’s now notorious power-point presentation in 2002 advocating seizing Saudi oil fields. Murawiec is connected to Donald Rumsfeld’s Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) which makes InfoWars central to the battle ground.
“In all these cases, IW involves creating phantom cyber-images, which can include phantasms of nonexistent trains, airplanes, stock market orders, and bank transfers; false impressions of the enemy’s troop strength and one’s own, of supplies and movements, of fake attacks and all-too-real defenses; and phantom images of the enemy’s leaders doing evil things on screen because one has video-morphed images of them doing them so.
“Information warfare is not about machines or even electrons. It is about people’s minds, society’s functions, and armies’ strategies. Cyberspace endows us — and our enemies — with new and extraordinary means with which to achieve our respective aims. “We have only begun to cyber-fight….”
More at “Tom Tancredo Takes Out Mecca: The Cyber Wars Playing Near You”
Brown Calls Climate-Skeptics Flat-Earthers; IPCC Calls Hackers Sophisticated
Gordon Brown, Britain´s PM and former Chancellor of the Exchequer, takes to peevish name-calling over the growing response to Climate-gate:
“The Prime Minister launched an outspoken attack on climate-change sceptics amid growing signs of public doubts about the scientific and political consensus on the environment.”
– Telegraph, December 6
Apparently, it´s unwashed climate-bloggers who are anti-scientific, not the agitprop team masquerading as independent scientists that got outed at East Anglia for such trivial matters as manipulating professional journals, doctoring research, defying freedom of information requests, and conspiring to destroy vital records that correctly belong to the public.
No, no, that wouldn´t be unscientific says Brown.
The real villains of the story are the people who conclude from this revealing tableau that the science of global warming may need to go a bit further before it underpins a global taxation regime likely running to billions, if not trillions.
“With only days to go before Copenhagen we mustn’t be distracted by the behind-the-times, anti-science, flat-earth climate sceptics. We know the science. We know what we must do.”
In short, act first, think later.
Obviously, Brown is also taking a leaf out of the book of whoever it was who said, strength lies not in defence but in attack…..
At least, Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) disagreed and said the matter could not be swept under the carpet; it would be investigated.
Meanwhile, some speculation here on something that at first bothered me — whether this hack, which first showed up on Russian servers, is connected to Russian crime or even to the Russian government. The emails, posted over a 15 year period ending November 12, were sent on October 12 to the BBC, which didn´t respond. Then, realclimate (a pro AGW site) was hacked and the data uploaded there. But the site was quickly shut down by the owners. Then, a link was posted via a Saudi computer on The Air Vent, a climate skeptic blog, with a link to a computer in Tomcity in Tomsky, Siberia.
“The server is used mainly by Tomsk State University, one of the leading academic institutions in Russia, and other scientific institutes, according to the Mail on Sunday.”
The vice chairman of the IPCC thinks the hack shows evidence of being sophisticate and wellfunded.
But frankly, so what if the hackers were Russian? Climate science is international and cap and trade is international. If there were repeated freedom of information requests that the researchers blocked, then it´s vital for the data to be in the public domain.
So, the speculation is interesting, but essentially irrelevant….and at this stage, suspiciously misleading.
The hackers have the last word on this:
“We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps. We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code, and documents. Hopefully it will give some insight into the science and the people behind it.”
Or as someone said: NO TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION.
If we have a global government (and we have), then everyone all over the world has a right to the information behind that government´s policies.
Climate Chief Jones Steps Down
The Winnipeg Free Press notes that chief climate book-cooker Phil Jones has announced he´s stepping down. It then comes out swinging in defense of the true scientific spirit, let the carbon footprints fall where they may:
“Many skeptics have had their doubts about the climate data championed by the IPCC and the CRU, but one of them, Steve McIntyre, a retired mathematician and policy analyst, decided to do something about it. McIntyre has been indefatigable in his efforts to get the raw data and computer codes from the climate science community so he could check whether or not their work was straight.
But the climate scientists at CRU and elsewhere have denied McIntyre’s information requests for years. Phil Jones, the head of the climate-change body at CRU, even emailed he’d destroy the data rather than let McIntyre have it. Jones has announced he is stepping down from his post….
… a tribe of incestuous climate scientists may have actively conspired to undermine the peer-review process.
The climate-change industry, along with people like Al Gore, has slammed skeptics for not publishing in the peer-reviewed literature. What the Climategate documents reveal is that this small group of scientists, who often peer-review each other’s work as well as skeptical articles, have discussed ways of keeping findings they don’t like out of the peer-reviewed literature as well as the IPCC reports, even if it required trying to oust editors, boycott certain journals, or to reclassifying a prestigious journal that publishes skeptical articles as a fringe journal unworthy of consideration. They also discuss their specific intention to exclude contrary findings from the IPCC reports, even if they have to redefine what the peer-reviewed literature is!
Science is vitally important for the operation of a highly technological society, and that science must be open, transparent and must adhere to the scientific method. The institution of science has no place in it for hiding data, hiding data-processing, shaping data to conform to pre-existing beliefs, undermining the peer-review process, cherry-picking reports in order to slant political IPCC reports or slandering critics by comparing them with flat-Earthers, moon-landing conspiracy theorists or holocaust deniers. Let the Climategate hearings begin.”
My Comment:
I hope this will make the lay public much more skeptical of the much touted academic process called “peer review.” Peer review, in the hands of corrupt and unscrupulous “scientists,” turns out to be nothing much more than a PR gimmick to enhance the authority of certain points of view.
Of course, anyone who´s spent any time at all in academia already knows this. Graduate students quickly find out that dissertations are written not because of any intrinsic scholarly merit in the project, but because professor x can get grant y, which will let student z graduate and perhaps get a foot into the tenure system at university abc, where professor x´s old buddy j needs someone else to support his agenda. And so on. The process, because it involves grubbing for money more than following the inherent worthiness of a project, naturally promotes the most political and street-smart operatives rather than the most scientifically gifted or creative researchers.
When academic work is driven by government funding, the end product is not science but propaganda for government programs. What a shock.
Climategate: Freakonomics Author Says Climate Models Driven By Funding
“Freakonomics” co-author, Stephen J. Dubner weighs in on Climate-gate in The New York Times:
“The current generation of climate-prediction models are, as Lowell Wood puts it, “enormously crude.” … “The climate models are crude in space and they’re crude in time,” he continues. “So there’s an enormous amount of natural phenomena they can’t model. They can’t do even giant storms like hurricanes.”
There are several reasons for this, [Nathan] Myhrvold explains. Today’s models use a grid of cells to map the earth, and those grids are too large to allow for the modeling of actual weather. Smaller and more accurate grids would require better modeling software, which would require more computing power. “We’re trying to predict climate change 20 to 30 years from now,” he says, “but it will take us almost the same amount of time for the computer industry to give us fast enough computers to do the job.”
That said, most current climate models tend to produce similar predictions. This might lead one to reasonably conclude that climate scientists have a pretty good handle on the future.
Not so, says Wood.
“Everybody turns their knobs” — that is, adjusts the control parameters and coefficients of their models — “so they aren’t the outlier, because the outlying model is going to have difficulty getting funded.” In other words, the economic reality of research funding, rather than a disinterested and uncoordinated scientific consensus, leads the models to approximately match one another. It isn’t that current climate models should be ignored, Wood says — but, when considering the fate of the planet, one should properly appreciate their limited nature.”
Dubner´s piece reads Climate-gate as a kind of Rorscharch test for pundits. If you´re pro AGW, then all this is a tempest in a tea-cup (Paul Krugman). If you´re anti AGW, (James Delingpole), then it´s the greatest scientific scandal of the century.
“All those e-mails — people have never seen what academic discussion looks like. There’s not a single smoking gun in there. There’s nothing in there. And the travesty is that people are not able to explain why the fact that 1988 was a very warm year doesn’t actually mean that global warming has stopped. I mean, that’s loose wording. Right? Everything is about — we’re really in the same situation as if there was one extremely warm day in April. And then people are saying, well, you see, May is cooler than April, there’s no trend here. And that’s what — the travesty is how hard it has been to explain…”
“If you own any shares in alternative energy companies I should start dumping them NOW.”
Well, I think of myself as a critic, but I don´t see the scandal right now as definitively one or the other — either game, set and match…..or a fizzle. It´s obviously a well-timed and massive hit to AGW, but I can think of worse things done in the name of science….from experiments in mind-control on unsuspecting patients… to Lysenko…..
As for its impact on AGW, I´m afraid the spin-machine will quickly rewrite the significance of some of the language used by the rogue scientists.
Still, at the end of the day, it all helps to erode people´s trust in expert authority..and that is always a good thing.
The Devious Web (Correction)…
I notice that Gary Weiss commented on Patrick Byrne’ post on this blog, describing the post as a sample of obsessive behavior about naked short selling.
I have nothing to say to that, except that people who’ve had to battle a number of foes can sometimes become what’s called hypervigilant. I’ve certainly had the experience.
But that’s not my point here. I bring up the post only because Weiss writes like someone who’d never come across me before, duly (and snarkily) noting the “obscurity” of this blog. Well and good. No offense taken. We like our obscurity…it keeps us meek. And we’re told the meek will inherit the earth…or at least, what’s left of it after our oligarchs finish raping it.
However, I bring this up not to air any wound to my amour propre but because Judd Bagley the main reporter at award-winning business blog Deep Capture has accused Weiss of using sock puppets on wiki, and has posted screen shots to prove it. [It's not germane to this tale that too uses sock-puppets].
One of Weiss’s alleged sock-puppets on wiki, says , goes by the name, MantanMoreland (other names used there and elsewhere include Samiharris - at wiki - and Tom Sykes - at Daily Kos and other places).
Now, it so happens that when I was trying to get rid of my web-stalker, Tony R, I ran into someone called Mantanmoreland on the message boards that he haunted. Was this Weiss? Or was it someone else? You judge.
Correction: I have crossed out the section below where I have incorrectly identified Tony R as someone by the name of Villasenor, whose postings/m.o. seemed similar to me on many counts. He has denied it (see comment section). My post resumes after the crossed out section.
Interestingly, Ry__s also claims he is not Ry__s.[However, V doesn't deny that - like R__s he uses multiple aliases, some very similar, frequents the same message boards, and attacks similar things].Fair enough. I’ve added a correction. It makes no difference to my claim about R__ls or about Mantanmoreland, only it leaves me still in the dark who this person Ry__ls is.
Since the suit lists multiple aliases for him and some of these aliases resemble the multiple aliases that R___ls uses, their targets are similar, and their venues and forums often identical, it is an understandable error, if it’s one.
In any case, I will use R__ls name and strike through V’s, to avoid giving offense/slandering the wrong person….although it’s clear that neither of these two mind slandering other people.I’ve no axe to grind in the matter.
To recap: Vis a one-time stock-dealer who was fined by the NASD. He’s also a small-time racketeer (http://mindbodypolitic.com/2009/09/27/blogger-credibility/e http://listsearches.rootsweb.com/th/read/ARIZONA/2005-06/1118951523) and a former groupie of securities fraudster, Amr Elgindy and his Anthony Pacific site. (http://siliconinvestor.advfn.com/readmsg.aspx?msgid=22945870). In whatever time is left over from that, he’s given to web stalking and harassing, for instance, of a (http://siliconinvestor.advfn.com/readmsg.aspx?msgid=15095618mber)Just to be clear, I am agnostic about the merits of any of his claims about, who might be doing something illegal, for all I know. I mention this just to show that has a history of this sort of thing.
[With no cause at all, Tony R has also libeled Georgetown University professor, James Angel, because of a financial film he made that that didn’t conform to his ideas (as far as I recall the subject).
Anyway, I approached a number of of sites (such as, Indymedia, KYCNews, and the SEC complaints board) to have them remove Tony R’s libels and to find out how to make him desist. It turned out he was in Guatemala, so it would be hard for me to do anything legally about him. I was also told he was likely to just switch aliases and ratchet up the harassment, if I went after him. In fact, whenever I mentioned his most common alias name, Tony R, he would show up like lightning on this board and spam me (that’s why I’m not using his complete name).
Now here’s the interesting part. While I was trying to find out more about Ry__s, I came across an irate exchange between him (under one of his many aliases http://www.chillingeffects.org/uncat/notice.cgi?NoticeID=1748) and someone called Mantanmoreland. Note: it was on a message-board (not on wiki).
I wrote to Mantanmoreland (it was in February 2008), asking if he knew anything more about Tony R. and we went back and forth about it for some two weeks, exchanging around two dozen emails, most of which I still have. Those emails went under my name. In them I explained that I’d become the unwitting target of this Tony R, solely because I’d been hired to write a book with the president of a company that Tony R. was fixated about.
Here’s my question. Deep Capture says unequivocally that Mantanmoreland is Gary Weiss. Weiss denies it equally flatly. Now, I exchanged dozens of emails only a year ago with Mantanmoreland about a situation that he could hardly forget, since he had his gripe with Tony R too. But Weiss’ recent blog post seems to indicate that he has no idea who I am.
That leaves only one possibility. Either Weiss or Bagley is in error (to put it as mildly as possible)…
Which is it? And what would that mean? And does that have anything to do with the recent (thwarted) attempt to delete my wiki page?
Added: As a matter of fact, by assessing the various reactions to this post (who posted, where and on what forums), I clarified the answer to the above question to my satisfaction…
Rewriting of History Underway
Taibbi on the tea-parties, being sloppy with his facts again, all in the name of rhetoric:
“It’s amazing, literally amazing to me, that it wasn’t until Obama pushed through a package containing a massive public works package and significant homeowner aid that conservatives took to the streets. In other words, it wasn’t until taxes turned into construction jobs and mortgage relief that working and middle-class Americans decided to protest. I didn’t see anyone on the street when we forked over billions of dollars to help JP Morgan Chase buy Bear Stearns. And I didn’t see anyone on the street when Hank Paulson forked over $45 more billion to help Bank of America buy Merrill Lynch, a company run at the time by one of the world’s biggest assholes, John Thain. Moreover I didn’t see any street protests when the government agreed to soak up hundreds of billions in “troubled assets” from Citigroup, a company that just months later would lend out a jet furnished with pillows upholstered with Hermes scarves to former chief Sandy Weill so that he could vacation in Mexico over Christmas.”
My Comment:
Er, Matt. It was the Dems who rolled over for the bail-outs. It was the Republicans, the Southern Republicans, who stymied it first time round…until they had their arms twisted.
Before you got your consciousness raised on the subject several years late, it was right libertarians who were objecting most strongly to the financializing of the economy…..
The Penson video post wasn’t as big a deal as it was made out to be, to my mind. But this post and his debate on 9-11 with David Griffin (at Alternet) do betray some ignorance…
Update:
Louis Proyect has a review of “Dime’s Worth of Difference” (Cockburn and St. Clair) that has a precis that will disabuse anyone inclined to believe the Democrats are more people-friendly than the Republicans…
Taibbi’s Penson Video..(Correction)
Correction:
(10/12/09, Monday)I should have said “allegedly faked” video. I stand corrected. No weasel words, Mr. Byrne (see Byrne’s comment below).
I often post stories on which I have no comment or opinion one way or other, because I haven’t followed them, but think readers might like to. In my last several posts, in fact, I defended Deepcapture’s, Taibbi’s, and Zerohedge’s work, in spite of occasional alleged or real errors.
But the reason I linked to Wenzel’s blog is because Wenzel’s post is pretty funnily written, and I don’t follow Taibbi, except occasionally. I didn’t like his attacks on David Griffin, where he exposed himself as somewhat ignorant. Taibbi also doesn’t attribute people (apparently others have that complaint too). But arrogance and ignorance in one area don’t equate to being incorrect in another.
I’ll add a separate post with the rather long back and forth between Taibbi and his various critics and defenders. I went by Penson’s dismissal of the video, but I’ve since noted that Penson has some history that is troubling and tends to makes its dismissal less credible.
So what else might be construed as “weasel-worded” in my recent blogging?
Perhaps my rather neutral approach to the Byrne vs. Weiss feud, still going strong. Well, I’m neutral about it - who stalked whom, etc. etc. - because I don’t know the ins and outs of it. I had my own experience of being harassed, and can barely keep up with the details of that, let alone someone else’s stalking experience.
I also don’t know which of the two abuses of the market - “stock pumping and money laundering” (criticized by the Wall Street “captured” media) or “naked-shorting” (criticized by Byrne, Davidson “ “Bob O’Brien,” and many others, including Taibbi) - is the more momentous.
As a libertarian, I think naked-shorting is, but that’s only my opinion. Which is why I’ve been neutral. My sense is both abuses are real and extensive.
Likewise, I really don’t know enough about what the SEC’s investigation of Overstock is about. Could it be punitive?
Quite likely, given all we know about the SEC. But does that mean everything else the SEC does is incorrect? Unlikely.
Does that mean what Byrne wrote about “naked short selling” is incorrect? No.
Final point. I tend not to like shrill personal attacks.
That’s a deferral to civility and complexity, not weasel-wordedness.
ORIGINAL POST:
On Matt Taibbi getting suckered by a “faked” (quotes added for now) naked shorting video:
“Carney is a sharp guy, and he has Taibbi nailed on this one, but, I repeat, naked short selling, like a lot of Wall Street, is a very complex game. Carney in some of his other posts suggests there is nothing wrong with naked short-selling, he is off on that one. Some of it can be justified as simple market maker operations, but some of it is major league abuse by very clever insiders, which is the point Taibbi is taking, but doesn’t have the knowledge to back up properly.
Anyway, once you sit down an analyze the entire naked short selling thing, you realize that the bad naked short selling would go away if the SEC would stop issuing regulations that protect the bad guys. Basic common sense and commercial law would put an end to the bad naked short selling, real fast.
Bad naked short selling exists because there is a power source to manipulate, in this case the SEC, and the bad guys are running circles around the SEC.
What you want to understand naked short sales for yourself? Well pull up a chair, give yourself five hours and read this. It’s a great first step.
But, I tell you, it will be much more fun watching Taibbi attempt to pull the bayonet out of his brain.”
More by Robert Wenzel, at Economic Policy Journal.
UK Military Protocol for Security & Counter-Intel Ops
An important document on how the British state deals with what it perceives as security threats:
“This significant, previously unpublished document (classified “RESTRICTED”, 2389 pages), is the UK military protocol for all security and counter-intelligence operations.
The document includes instructions on dealing with leaks, investigative journalists, Parliamentarians, foreign agents, terrorists & criminals, sexual entrapments in Russia and China, diplomatic pouches, allies, classified documents & codewords, compromising radio and audio emissions, computer hackers—and many other related issues.
The document, known in the services as the “JSP 440″ (”Joint Services Protocol 440″), was referenced by the RAF Digby investigation team as the protocol justification for the monitoring of Wikileaks, as mentioned in “UK Ministry of Defence continually monitors WikiLeaks: eight reports into classified UK leaks, 29 Sep 2009.”Read more at Wikileaks on UK protocols for dealing with security threats of all kinds, from investigative journalists looking for disclosure of official documents to Chinese officials seeking “influence” (there’s an extensive section describing Chinese intelligence gathering).
Letterman Targeted in Extortion Plot By CBS News Employee
Update: Favourite Letterman-blackmail quote so far is by Stephanie Gutman, at The Telegraph, UK:
“But this follows on the heels of the Travolta family extortion affair, so it points out one of the pitfalls of fame and wealth, that one is continually surrounded with a mosquito cloud of predators trying to draw blood. And even the creepiest, snarkiest, fake-sincere liberal talk show host gets my sympathy for having to live with that.”
“Three weeks ago, Letterman said, he got in his car early in the morning and found a package with a letter saying, “I know that you do some terrible, terrible things and that I can prove that you do some terrible things.” He acknowledged the letter contained proof.
He said it was terrifying “because there’s something insidious about (it). Is he standing down there? Is he hiding under the car? Am I going to get a tap on the shoulder?”
Letterman said he called his lawyer to set up a meeting with the man, who threatened to write a screenplay and a book about Letterman unless he was given money. There were two subsequent meetings, with the man given a phony $2 million check at the last one. Letterman joked it was like the giant ceremonial check given to winners of golf tournaments.”
He told the audience that he had to testify before a grand jury on Thursday.
“I was worried for myself, I was worried for my family,” he said. “I felt menaced by this, and I had to tell them all of the creepy things that I had done.”
He said “the creepy stuff was that I have had sex with women who work for me on this show. My response to that is yes, I have. Would it be embarrassing if it were made public? Yes, it would, especially for the women.”My Comment:
What an irony (but not an oddity) that the comedian who was making vulgar jokes about Sarah Palin’s minor daughter - presumably, to prove how trashy the Palins are - has a history himself.
Letterman admitted to numbers of affairs with co-workers, while revealing a black-mail plot from another CBS news employee, whose name hasn’t been confirmed yet. It’s interesting that this critic of the Palins* - who’ve been married for years and who had children within their marriage - married his long-term girlfriend only in March this year, though he had a child with her in 2003.
This is not a judgment about Letterman’s lifestyle. That’s his business. It’s a judgment about his good sense and his psychological motivations. You’d think the man would zip up about anyone else’s family or sexual history.
File this away as another instance of the corruption of the media. In recent posts, I’ve talked about sexual blackmail as one way in which public figures are ruined or hounded out of office. We’ve had the example of Eliot Spitzer, most famously.
The other point to note is that the perpetrator is a newsman (and not just any newsman - an Emmy award winning CBS producer and crime reporter for “48 hours.” Although this has nothing to do with the “deep capture” of the media in the financial story, it does add to the evidence that the media really is the problem, at every level. When reporters are so intent on making their names that they’re prepared to “out” public (or even less than public) figures over personal matters that are irrelevant to any public interest, why should we be surprised that one of them takes a more direct route and uses the information to make money from his target directly?
*Note: As I’ve said before, I’m not a fan of Sarah Palin’s but dislike the way she was treated.
Matt Taibbi Shills for Neocons?
Well, what a surprise. Not.
Taibbi is a very funny writer and if this excerpt at Alternet is any indication, his new book bashing the 9-11 movement is a great read.
But, if the excerpt is any indication, it’s also a superficial read.
Until the moment I saw this piece, I was undecided about Taibbi. I’ve noted in earlier posts that he seemed to jump far too eagerly on the pair that cooked up the derivative deals that got AIG in a mess I noted that that emphasis steered the focus away from Hank Greenberg, AIG’s corrupt boss. It was the first thing that made me wonder about Taibbi.
[Added on 9/24 10:16 AM: Greenberg is central to the 9-11 story. AIG has a long history that goes back to US corporate and political espionage in China and the CIA's involvement in that. Much of the American housing, medicare, medicaid, and financial industry has been corrupted by nothing more than elaborate versions of old fashioned insurance hustles. No wonder the company at the center of the whole financial crisis is an insurance giant]
The next red flag was the rapid way in which he shot to the head of the Goldman Sachs bashing (almost a decade after any half-awake journalist in New York should have been alert) and only after GS’s name was pretty much mud, no thanks to the New York media. It smacked of damage control and gate-keeping.
The 9-11 movement bashing seems to confirm it. Read through the Alternet piece and you’ll see it’s a mass of non-sequitors, assumptions, strawmen, and red herrings. He uses his writing talents to divert and mislead. He’s the latest in a series of popular names jumping onto the 9-11-bashing bandwagon, even from the libertarian side. I’m naming no names, but you know who they are.
Here’s one single thing any of them have to explain. Why were they all so late in coming to the Goldman story? Why is it that the people who got it right about Goldman, the financial crisis, torture, and everything else…are also those who do NOT accept the official story?
Doesn’t that imply that the world view that’s been most accurate and prescient over the last several years is the worldview that doubts the 9-11 story? The skeptics simply have a powerful and credible hypothesis that makes far better sense of things than the 9-11 fundamentalists.
TAIBBI:
“The 9/11 Truth movement is really distinguished by a kind of defiant unfamiliarity with the actual character of America’s ruling class. In 9/11 lore the people who staff the White House, the security agencies, the Pentagon and groups like PNAC and the Council of Foreign Relations are imagined to be a monolithic, united class of dastardly, swashbuckling risk-takers with permanent hard-ons for Bourne Supremacy-style “false flag” and “black bag” operations, instead of the mundanely greedy, risk-averse, backstabbing, lawn-tending, half-clever suburban golfers they are in real life. It completely misunderstands the nature of American government — fails to see that the old maxim about “the business of America is business” is absolutely true, that the federal government in this country is really just a lo-rent time-share property seasonally occupied by this or that clan of financial interests, each of which takes its 4-year turn at the helm tinkering with the tax laws and regulatory code and the rates at the Fed in the way it thinks will best keep the money train rolling.The people who really run America don’t send the likes of George Bush and Dick Cheney to the White House to cook up boat-rocking, maniacal world-domination plans and commit massive criminal conspiracies on live national television; they send them there to repeal PUCHA and dole out funds for the F-22 and pass energy bills with $14 billion tax breaks and slash fuel efficiency standards and do all the other shit that never makes the papers but keeps Wall Street and the country’s corporate boardrooms happy. You don’t elect politicians to commit crimes; you elect politicians to make your crimes legal.”
And here’s a face-off between Taibbi and theologian David Griffin on 9-11. It’s not pretty. Taibbit comes off as ignorant, belligerent and vulgar, which is unfortunate because he’s a talented writer and has some good instincts. But he’s no match in intellect or the ability to argue for David Griffin, whom I know from his academic writing on process theology.
I’m a strong supporter of 9-11 “truthers” but don’t write on the subject myself for several reasons -
*Keeping track of the story is hard enough; keeping track of the various splinter 9-11 groups is impossible.
*Without absolute mastery of the details, you’re liable to get waylaid by bogus information on the web.
*There are enough people working on the story without my jumping in.But I admit, I’m sorely tempted at times like this…
Sandinista General: Kleptocrats ‘R Us - So What?
“Ortega defends the Sandinista Front’s rise to economic power, which started during the 1980s and has accelerated in recent years. Since President Daniel Ortega returned to power, opponents have criticized him and his party for essentially privatizing Venezuelan aid, which last year totaled $457 million, according to the Central Bank.
The Sandinista government has created a series of privately managed companies under the auspicious of the Venezuela-bankrolled Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas (ALBA). Those companies, which represent more than $530 million in energy contracts, tourism holdings, and cattle farms, are linked to the presidential couple and managed by the family and Sandinista party treasurer, Francisco López…….
Ortega said one can be a self-identified leftist and still be rich….”
More here at The Nica Times.
In other words Nicaragua’s dear “leaders” are in bed with every rich speculator/developer from abroad. And aid to the country is being siphoned off by them. Great news for the foreign speculators/flippers in the country, making their capital gains and throwing chump change to the kiddies to feed their conscience.
Bad news for ordinary folks who make their living working and producing for the predator class.
Ah, but the new rich are kind too. A few bones are being tossed to the underclasses to buy respectability. The usual formula of crony capitalism - predation + charity.
I steal whatever I can get away with. Then I go to mass and toss your dying children some old toys. I get to be richer than everyone…and better too. I cheat, lie, defraud, and stomp on a thousand faceless individuals to get what I have. Then I toss some tiny part back to some one else and absolve myself.
It’s the Jeffrey Levitt model of absolution. More than twenty years ago, Tony Korneiser wrote a piece in The Washington Post on the man who “stole Baltimore.”
Back then, Kornheiser presciently put his finger on the moral and social attitudes that would metastasize in twenty years to give us the bank that “stole America.”
“Today’s businessmen seem to have hung a sign that says: We Will Lie, Cheat and Steal Unless You Stop Us. They renounce their responsibility to behave ethically, and dare the government regulators to seal off the border.
The sin isn’t cheating, but getting caught. If Jeffrey hadn’t been caught, he and Karol might still be the toasts of Baltimore. They wouldn’t be seen as gluttons, but as eccentrics and damned entitled to be so.
A few years ago Jeffrey hired a public relations firm to retool his image. The trick, and Jeffrey understood it, was philanthropy. Rockefeller, Ford, du Pont, Morgan — they all gave some away. That’s how they bought respectability. Now their great-grandsons are running for president. Instead of being known as a slumlord, which he was before he got into banking, Jeffrey would be known as a philanthropist. Through Jeffrey’s and Karol’s good charitable deeds, the Levitt name would stand for kindness and compassion. What Jeffrey neglected to tell the public relations firm was that it wasn’t his own money he was giving away. “
To “slum-lord,” add con man, gangster, penny-stock pumper, bid-rigger, racketeer, briber, stock fraudster, blackmailer, thief, extortionist, pimp, charlatan - which is what the word financier really stands for today.
Kind of takes away the glamor…
Ground Hog Ben: Fed Declares Depression Over…
I expanded an earlier post into a diatribe:
That’s it folks. Wrap it up. This here recession…er.. correction…er.. depress…oh, whatever..is over. Time to put away your pens and papers, boys and girls.
Professor Bernanke says there’s going to be no test. You hear that? Or maybe, there’ll be one little teeny-weeny take-home. Better yet, you just get to write in and ask for whatever grade you want.
Billy Gross, Bobby Rubin, and Jamie Dimon, you boys get A’s, as usual.
(The rest of you clods better learn to to suck up if you want A’s).
Everyone else gets B’s….
No one fails. Ain’t life great?
Whew. That depression stuff was so, well, depressing. Glad it’s over.
There. That wasn’t so bad, after all, was it, seeing as how it was supposed to be the worst one in half-a-century and the sky was falling and we were all going to live in the Ozarks or Patagonia on canned peas and raw mackerel until we got raptured up… and really all that happened was some green paper got printed and we had to listen to a lot of speeches about schools an’ stuff in Barackistani (not as weird a lingo as Bushlish, but just as daft) and then, bingo, everything’s back to normal again.
Yessir. The economy is healthy. Grade A, certified organic, flu-vaccinated healthy. A bit weak. But wholesome. Except for jobs, that is. No jobs.
What kind of recovery is that, you ask?
What kind? It’s the new deadbeat, can’t-get-a job, rocketing-inflation, trashed-currency, can’t-sell-my-house, can’t-make-my-payments, bankrupt-mafia-government, kazillions-in-debt, trade-warring-with-China recovery - that’s what it is. Glad you asked.
It’s kind of a new thing. No one’s really tried it so far, but they’re doing it in Europe, we hear. And maybe a bit of it in Asia. But it’s back here in the US of A that we’ve got the whole thing down. Right here in Washington. And from now until the economy gets really going, we’ll be getting the full Bernanke on it - at least, that’s the buzz.
Yep. Professor Ben’s all but promised us he’s going to be inflating grades all around this time.
No F’s. No D’s. Heck, no C’s. It’s A’s and B’s all the way. That’s the way they do it in Princeton. It’s a self-esteem thing.
Like that pep talk back on March 16, when Ben first spotted those green shoots. Now it’s September15 (exactly six months later), and Ben says the recession is over.
He says it’s all in the numbers from the National Bureau of Economic Research. The numbers say the recession ended this summer or fall. Man, the things they can predict these days.
Ole Ground Hog Ben. Puts his head out and the sun comes up. Amazing. Who knew you could even keep score of an economy?
Kind of like a lacrosse game at Princeton. Swat. Swat. Swat Take that, Harvard.
Of course, being a Princeton professor and religious and a pretty nice guy from all we’ve heard, Ben couldn’t bring himself to tell an outright whopper. He let the truth out dribble-drabble at the end.
Something about “impaired credit”…. and “head winds”…. and “digging out from personal debt”…. and “ongoing adjustments”….. and “unwinding massive stimulus efforts”…. and “risking igniting inflation”…. and “lingering high unemployment”…. and “sluggish outlook”…. and “higher gas prices” and…. “consumer reluctance”…. and “widespread job insecurity”…. and “significantly impaired credit”…. and “less lending”…. and “higher costs”…. and “deep freeze in credit”…. and “fearing defaults.”
But they put that way down in the report, after paragraph 5 (”Bernanke: Recession is Over,” Kansas City Star, Sept 15, 2009).
Before that, they just had him muttering something about the economy “underperforming”. ‘ Yeah, underperforming. Like the old geezer just needs a shot of Viagra.
But don’t let any of that bad stuff worry your little head, ’cause you know, the numbers say we’re okay. The numbers say the recession…er correction..er depress…oh, whatever…is over.
And numbers don’t lie, you know.
Like August retail sales. That went up by 2.7% over July. (I know, I know, cash-for-clunkers, high gas prices, blah blah blah. Gimme a break. It was still up wasn’t it?)
And the ISM numbers are good too.
August PMI (Purchasing Manufacturers Index) came in at at 52.9, 4 percent points higher than July.
(A number over 50 indicates an expanding economy. Below 50 is a contracting economy. This is the first time since June 2007 that the number’s been over 50).
Oh you don’t say!
And New Orders came in at the highest reading since December 2004. You know what that means. Businesses are stocking up. GDP is on it’s way up.
Woo-hoo. Ride that gravy train.Ka-ching! Bada boom!
Hold just a moment though.
What’s this Non-Manufacturing Index stuff here?
Oh, you mean those bozos in medicine and law and teaching and real estate and construction and finance and retail?
Yeah, consumers. You know, guys who consume stuff. That stuff the manufacturing guys are producing. Seems like they still aren’t doing so good. So who’s going to buy all the stuff?
Not consumers. They’re cutting back.
You don’t know? That’s what comes of being a grade-inflated B student.
I bet Bob Rubin knows. And Jamie Dimon. And Bill Gross. And Warren Buffett.
And all their hedge-fund managing, private-equity-directing, leveraged-buying-out, sovereign-wealthy speculator buddies lining up to start the casino all over again.
They know whose money they’re using to do it too.
Hey, Professor Bernanke. Can we see you outside class? We have some questions….Note:
The indicators that are looking positive (ISM number, retails sales, the price of copper) are all numbers that could reflect no more than
1. The business cycle restocking of inventories 2. Cash for clunkers 3. The beginning of the school year 4. State purchases/investments being made by China in an effort to get rid of dollars
Bernanke Declares Depression Over…
That’s it folks. Wrap it up. This here recession…correction…depress…oh whatever..is over. Time to go home. Put away your pens and paper, boys and girls.
Professor Bernanke says there’s going to be no test. Or there’s going to be just a take-home. Or better yet, you just get to write in and ask for whatever grade you want. Bob Rubin and Jamie Dimon get A’s, of course. The rest of you get good B’s…. No one fails. Ain’t life great?
Whew. That depression stuff was so, well, depressing. Glad it’s over.
Wasn’t so bad, after all, seeing as how it was the worse one in half-a-century and the sky was falling and we were all going to live in the Ozarks on canned peas and mackerel until we got raptured up… and really all that happened was some green paper got printed and we had a to listen to a lot of speeches in Barackistani (not quite as strange sounding a dialect as Bushlish but just as daft…) and then, bingo, everything’s back to normal again.
Yessir. The economy is healthy.
Except for jobs. No jobs.
What kind of recovery is that, you ask? It’s the new jobless, rocketing-inflation, trashed-currency, falling-house-price, bankrupt-government, kazillions-in-debt, trade-warring-with-China recovery - that’s what it is.
Glad you asked. Now you know…
Old Ground Hog Ben.Here’s the news clip:
“Gold futures climbed back above the $1,000-an-ounce mark on Tuesday, after upbeat U.S. economic reports and as Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said the recession is likely over.
However, he and other Fed officials reiterated views that unemployment will remain high and economy stay weak well into next year, fueling expectations that the central bank will continue to provide ample liquidity. ”
More at Market Watch.
Stalinist “Libertarian” Fan Mail
The morning mail can always be guaranteed to bring something out of the fever swamps. This one calls itself libertarian. But it shows every sign of a Stalinist disposition, down to the puerile and quasi-racist invective. I’ll parse it after I’ve had breakfast. Just a small sample of the abuse you get for pouring yourself near full time into enlightening people and supporting unpopular positions…when they are unpopular. This one doesn’t even write me a mail under his own name. And so far, his contribution to libertarianism seems to be confined to writing apoplectic email. Hmmm. I am usually less annoyed by such things. I really should go and get some coffee…
“It seems that your beloved barefoot snowbilly from Wasilla has not quite made it through “The Language of Empire” http://www.antiwar.com/blog/2009/09/07/from-the-people-and-sarah-palin-who-brought-us-the-iraq-war/ Do you still defend this vile, statist thug? Will I STILL see more stupid LRC posts in the near future? I have a question. If I asked you to choose a position on the the Socialist-Corporatist TARP Program (I call it the TARD program, for obvious reasons), would your position be closest to… A) “This whole situation is a perfect demonstration of why “doing nothing” and letting failing companies fail would have been much better than sinking valuable money and resources into them.” or B) “inaction is not an option we have got to shore up our economy… ultimately what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the healthcare reform that is needed to help shore up our economy um helping the… oh - its gotta be all about job creation too - shoring up our economy and putting it back on the right track. So healthcare reform and reducing taxes and reigning in spending has got to accompany tax reductions and tax relief for Americans and trade we’ve got to see trade as opportunity not as competitive um scary thing but one in five jobs being created in the trade sector today we we’ve got to look at that as more opportunity - all those things under the umbrella of job creation - this bailout is a part of that.” I will give you a hint. The first statement was made by a principled Libertarian, and the second statement was made by an idiot. What if that idiot also “managed a 6 percent increase in part of the state’s budget, as well as being responsible for a windfall tax on oil companies—much like that proposed by Democrats” and gave their state “some of the highest resource taxes in the world”? Do you still defend this vile, statist thug?”
My Comment:
First. Nowhere have I written that I support Sarah Palin’s positions. I’ve clearly stated “I am no fan of hers”. I thought she was unqualified…besides having some criticisms of her personal choices that may or may not be relevant to her candidacy as Vice-President. As a long-time (since 1991) antiwar activist, I obviously don’t support her pro-war position. But let’s see, exactly who were the choices? McCain, Biden, Obama…yes , wow, a bunch of peaceniks, all. I supported only one person this time around - that’s Ron Paul. In 2004, I supported any third party candidate, including Nader. Not because of lack of principle, or because I agree with all of Nader’s positions, but on the principle of support for any one opposed to the status quo. I stand by those positions.
I was opposed to the war in Yugoslavia, when many people thought it was a good war. I opposed the First Gulf War and the Second, as well as the sanctions, when hardly anyone talked about them (in 1995). I’ve signed petitions/letters in support of people as different in their politics as Norman Finkelstein and Ward Churchill, on one hand, and Hans Hoppe on the other. I’ve written in support of Jerry Falwell when he was attacked personally. I also defended Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Sonia Gandhi when they were attacked personally. And, I defended Sarah Palin. No candidate for public office (or anyone else) for that matter, deserves to be trashed personally in such a racial, sexual, and classist way.
Demonizing them as though they were each a mini-Attila the Hun is an exercise in silliness. These politicians are run-of-the-mill people, no worse nor better than those around them. I will bet “principled libertarian” above would never dream of criticizing the people pushing the war on terror - the neo-conservative cabal running the government. Oh no. That would never happen.
And I’ll bet he wouldn’t call them the translation of “Wasilly snowbilly” that would apply to neo-conservatives.
I wrote about Goldman Sachs - more than two years ago - “Why It’s Time to Sell Goldman.”And I’ve written dozens of pieces and posts about them since. A piece I wrote last year was the first to tie Goldman to AIG (”Putting Lipstick on an AIG”). And I took TARP apart almost as soon as it came out.
But I guess, actually reading what people wrote would be asking too much from the underworld of internet forums.
Sorry to be so dour. But reading this sort of thing, I wonder why anyone should bother. Why inform people about the malignant lot at the top? The people at the bottom seem pretty malignant too…
On my darker days, I wonder if they don’t deserve each other…
White Hats Telling White Lies
My piece on Team Obama’s propaganda effort on behalf of its economic interventions,
“Green Shoots and White Lies,” is up at Lew Rockwell this morning.I’m posting the part that sums up a few of the biggest whoppers the administration is pushing to get those old animal spirits juiced up again. Will the PR work? Well, no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the public. Tell a lie big enough and tell it often enough and people will buy it.
White Hats Telling White Lies:
Fudge One:
Goldman Sachs had a great quarter, making a profit of $3.5 billion and the government made $1.4 billion on its investment in Goldman Sachs. The government also got a 15% return on its investment in the eight biggest banks.
Truth:
Goldman had a great quarter only because it moved its reporting calendar to cut out December 2008, when it had a loss. And the government only made a profit on the TARP money it gave to Goldman because
* It funneled more money via the bailout of insurance giant AIG to AIGs counterparties, including Goldman (which took in $13 billion of the AIG money).
* Warren Buffett made a pre-TARP financial investment in Goldman.
* Goldman got the benefit of exceptionally low interest rates from the government at the expense of savers and to the benefit of borrowers.
* Goldman was issued FDIC-guaranteed bonds.Without that extra welfare thrown at it, Goldman would actually be broke, not showing a profit. Ditto for the other banks.
Fudge Two:
The labor market is getting better because jobs are growing. The unemployment rate fell from 9.5% in June to 9.4% in July.Truth:
That number only shows a slowing in the growth of unemployment. And even that small improvement has been offset by other aspects of the labor market that are worsening quite sharply:
* The duration of unemployment is increasing
* Temporary jobs are declining.
* The percentage of the eligible population receiving unemployment insurance has increased (0.1 percentage point to 4.7%. by September).
* The four-week moving average of initial claims has moved to its highest level in a month.Even when jobs have been added, they’ve been created by government spending and they’ve been in areas like education, health, and government. In the purely private economy, in manufacturing, construction and retail, job losses have been huge. (“Brown manure not green shoots,” Nouriel Roubini, Forbes, July 9, 2009.)
Note: Recent improvement in the ISM (Institute of Supply Management) Index that signals expansion of production (and thus hiring) also needs to be discounted against the huge price inflation an increasingly pressured dollar will entail. That’s beside the effects of a hike in the Federal Funds rate that’s bound to follow a dollar-crashing scenario.
Note: The ISM is a leading indicator of executive expectations for future productions, orders, inventories, hiring, and deliveries.
Fudge Three:
Increases in real personal income in April and May will increase consumer spending.
Truth:
The increases were caused by tax-rebates and unemployment benefits kicking in, and most of it was saved, not spent (80 cents on the dollars). There was a temporary lift in consumer spending, but it petered out quickly. And as unemployment rises, benefits decline, and credit tightens in the future, consumption will decline even further
Fudge Four:
The bank stress tests came out better than expected.
The bank stress tests led Ben Bernanke to conclude that nearly all of the banks had enough capital to absorb higher losses should the economy worsen, and that the Treasury stood ready to provide more.
(AFP, “Hope is alive for green shoots,” May 11, 2009)
Truth:
The bank stress tests used an unemployment figure of 10.3% (the most adverse case). But unemployment is likely to be 11% and above by next year. If you take into account discouraged and partially employed workers, some economists suggest the figure is more likely to be 16%.
Another point. The stress tests overlooked all the other ways in which the government was paying for the banks, through FDIC guarantees and cheaper loans, for instance.Fudge Five:
The housing market is improving.
In July, the Pending Home Sales Index was up 3.2%. Another improvement was in the value of U.S. homes. In the second quarter that number fell year-on-year (the 10th consecutive quarterly decline), but it fell by a smaller amount than in the previous quarter, for the first time since 2007.
Truth:
The improvement in home sales has been mostly in the lower end of the market and it largely reflects foreclosure sales and government credit, not real improvement in the market.
The slowdown in price decline has been offset by negatives in other areas:
* 23% of all homeowners owe more on their mortgages than their houses are worth.
* 22% of all home sales nationwide in June were foreclosure resales.
* 29.2 percent of all homes sold in June were sold for less than the owners originally paid.(Portfolio.com August 11, 2009)
Loan problems aren’t confined to subprime. Prime mortgages are going underwater too.
Meanwhile, the market also has to deal with the decline in commercial real estate, which is undergoing one of the greatest contractions in retail in decades. Rents, even in the best urban shopping districts, have been declining.
(Colliers International Spring 2009 Retail Report, May 14, 2009).
Beyond commercial real estate, there are also all the other plagues about to visit us, when personal loans, auto loans, and student loans tighten over the coming years.
Bottom line?
There is no real basis for sustained optimism about the economy yet.California Assemblyman Duvall’s Hot Mic Loses Him His Job (Updated)
Update:
Following up on whether there’ll be a focus on lobbyist-lawmaker corruption and what favors (if any) were exchanged between Duvall and the lobbyists he’s purported to have sex with, it seems that, fortunately, progressive groups are indeed trying to force a broader investigation of the subject.
Meanwhile, one of the two married lobbyists who are allegedly the subject of Duvall’s graphic boasts, Heidi De John Barsuglia, denies the affair (which means little at this point), and Sempra Energy, the giant utility company that employs her, has issued the usual public statement about how seriously it takes such charges. TPMMuckraker has the go-to round-up of the situation, no seamy detail left unmentioned.
Duvall voted several times against renewable energy measures (that Sempra also opposes), but since that’s a broadly-supported GOP position, it’s unclear that there was a quid-pro-quo in any of it.
My Comment:
I don’t cover sex scandals here unless they raise some sort of ideological point or tie in to the issue of blackmail and media/political control. But coming so soon after the salacious Vanity Fair piece on Palin, I wanted to post this one, which has at its center a California assemblyman and strong “family values” defender ‘outed’ by a mic he didn’t realize was on.
I’d really like to see if the media will treat a male conservative law-maker caught bragging publicly about his adulterous affairs with two lobbyists as viciously as they treated a female conservative governor who hasn’t been caught doing anything at all (she’s been accused not very successfully of some less than major ethical infractions).
Duvall will get a lot of flak for being
a. a hypocrite (which, as I’ve noted before, he may not necessarily be)
b. an idiot (which he clearly is)
c. crude/odious (check)
d. deceitful (check)But I doubt if anyone will post photoshopped pictures that defame him, the way Sarah Palin was defamed.
Why won’t they? Something to do with the strange misogyny that conservative women with children and pro-life views elicit from liberal women. I’ve noticed it before….
The female of the species is [sometimes] more vicious than the male…especially to other females.
Let’s see how the media treats the actual news in this story - Duvall’s unprofessional relationship with lobbyists and what political favors he might have done them - or whether it gets side-tracked by the even-for-politics-exceptionally-racy details and the usual diatribes about hypocrisy.
How Green Are Our Shoots!
I’m working on a new piece on the propaganda effort on the economy coming out of Team Obama. Here’s a part:
“How green are our shoots!
Thus say both Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner.
And the public believes them. How come?It all began in March. In the first televised interview by any sitting Fed chairman in 20 years (CBS 60 Minutes), Bernanke used the term, “green shoots” for the first time. He pointed out that the Dow Jones index had recovered from 12 year lows in 2008 and the banking system had stabilized. No more big banks would fail, he predicted (AFP, March 15, 2009).
Two months later, His Timness echoed Big Ben. Geithner cited reduced spreads on corporate and muni bonds, the reduction in costs in credit protection at the big banks, and smaller risk premiums in the interbank market. He too said the economy was recovering. (Tim Geithner, Statement before the Senate Banking Committee, May 20, 2009)
In June, World Bank President Robert Zoellick joined the ’shooters.’ Zoellick is a former US trade representative notorious for forcing US government subsidies and trade policies inimical to small farmers onto emerging markets. Zoellick noted “signs of global recovery,” but cautioned that they might be killed off if protectionism were adopted (Reuters, June 8, 2009)
Translation: foreigners had better not object to US government-managed trade policies…or the global recovery will fold.Put out….or look out.
Zoellick added his own revealing metaphor to the shooter lexicon: “Right now there is a low-grade fever; it isn’t full influenza, but we need to keep a close watch…”.[my emphasis]
[Oddly, Zoellick's own employees at the World Bank contradicted their boss's assessment in a report only a couple of weeks later (See "World Bank Global Economic Outlook" below]
In May billionaire hedge-fund manager George Soros was seeing green. And in July , chief wonk of the Obama economic team Lawrence Summers detected greenery in remarks to the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
Green shoots were now being sighted by everyone:
*In July the International Monetary Fund published its World Economic Outlook update
The Fund revised expected global growth in 2010 upward to 2.5%. The main source of the improvement, it claimed, was a brightening outlook for Asia.*Simon Johnson, IMF economist–turned-Peterson-Institute-spokesman-turned green-shooting-star even went on PBS to announce, “we are turning some sort of corner.” (August 20, 2009)
*Surveys of economists and business leaders in the summer showed that, in contrast to only a few months earlier, slightly more than half thought that the economy had bottomed.”
There’s a lot more I’m working on. Hope to have it on Lew Rockwell tomorrow, although I’d like to see it on some left-anarchist sites too. What began as a bit of trivia hunting (I was trying to figure out when the “green shoots” meme started) ended up throwing some interesting light on politics, the media, and the economy….
Zionist Inquisitors and the Media Narrative
“No media outlet mentioned that in 2003 Zionist media mogul Haim Saban acquired control of ProSiebenSat.1, Germany’s second largest broadcaster.
While wielding a major opinion-shaping media outlet during Merkel’s ascendancy as Germany’s first female chancellor, Saban described himself as an “Israeli-American” and “a one-issue guy and my issue is Israel.” Steve Rattner, Saban’s financial adviser, explained the motive for his media acquisition: “He thinks Germany is critical to Israel.” Rattner re-emerged as president Barack Obama’s auto industry “car czar” before resigning in mid-July due to a pension fund scandal…..
..In June 2006, a Saban-led group acquired Univision, the largest Spanish-language broadcaster in the U.S. With Latinos the fastest-growing voting bloc in the U.S., Univision is critical to Israel’s ability to sustain its control of U.S. foreign policy. Univision is the fifth largest television network in the U.S., reaching 98% of Spanish-speaking households through 62 television stations, 90 affiliate stations and more than 2,000 cable affiliates. [See “How the Israel lobby took control of U.S. foreign policy.”]….
. In addition to emerging as a reliable EU advocate for Israeli policies, Merkel threatened to arrest Williamson for Holocaust denial on a EU-wide warrant. A search of her phone records would doubtless uncover a discussion with a key supporter, Haim Saban.
Zionists and the lawmakers they groom are well positioned to advance a modern-day Inquisition—as when Bishop Williamson simultaneously faced arrest in Europe and expulsion from Argentina, the site of a seminary he directed and home to the largest Jewish population in Latin America.”
Read more about the framing of media narratives by Jeff Gates at Intifada-Palestine.com
The Hundred Who Made the Economy Collapse
Vanity Fair’s piece on the hundred who made the economic crisis manages to include blackberries and VIP rooms, Ralph Nader, George Bush and Bill Clinton, Woodrow Wilson, Republicans Hank Paulson and Hank Greenberg…
But it omits Robert Rubin….and Larry Summers…and Tim Geithner….and any of the numbers of hedge funds that were shorting companies for years….and it forgets AIG….and Barney Frank..[Correction: It does include AIG and Barney Frank, a great improvement] and even good old Eliot Spitzer, who should have done much more, for all that sound and fury about going after crooks…
What a tendentious list.
More anti-Christian Bile at Vanity Fair
I was trying to get a grip on the mentality that produced the Sarah Palin smear job (I carry no water for Palin and think she was a poor choice for veep, but…)
..and I came across this gem, “Blame America (and Jesus), for Jaycee Dugard kidnapping,” from the September edition of Vanity Fair. It implies that belief in the divinity of Jesus is somehow linked up with some kind of kinky sexuality. I kid you not…
[ Just try substituting a few other religious figures for that.
How about "Blame India (and Krishna) for sex-trafficking in Mumbai slums"? How do you think that sounds?
Or "Blame Saudi Arabia (and Muhammed) for terrorism? (Sorry, we already have that going around)
Ok. Here's a anothr one. What about "Blame Israel (and Moses) for torture in military prisons."
Has a ring to it....
[Note to religious fundamentalists - the above is satire meant to deride Vanity Fair's bigotry - no offense is meant to Jesus, Mohammed, Moses, Krishna, Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, or Judaism. Offense is meant to Vanity Fair, however, mainly for terminal idiocy and obvious bigotry].
Here’s the piece:
“It’s an American Gothic thing—or, by any other name, a white trash thing. On the fringe of communities across the country there is a mutant culture: trashy, marginal, uneducated, unhealthy, and nutty. People cluck about it, and are fairly careful to avoid it, but are, too, remarkably laissez-faire towards it. This is partly because white trash means…white. And partly because, in America, a white man’s home is his castle (no matter how much debris is in the yard), and you just don’t ask too many questions (and because so many homes in America look like the homes of sex offenders).
And partly because of Jesus.
If Phillip Garrido ranted about there being no God, if he passed out atheist tracts, instead of bizarre-o Jesus-saves stuff, he would likely have been carted off years ago. But Jesus saves you not just from your sins but from public opprobrium. It may not make you any less weird in people’s eyes, but it makes you part of a protected class of weirdos. Jesus is an acceptable refuge for the sex offender. God knows, Jesus may even incite the sex offender.
No matter. If you believe hotly enough in Jesus, you’re a good American—at least for all the other weird Christians with piles of crap in their backyards, which is a considerable demographic.”More here, by Michael Wolff.
Vanity UnFair’s “Me and Mrs Palin” Is a Bit of Odious Fluff (Updated)
Vanity Fair has a piece on Sarah Palin through the eyes of her daughter Bristol’s boyfriend, Levi Johnston. The title itself is slimy, implying that there are cougar-like revelations to be had..
[Please note also the cover with its title, "Keeping up with the Johnston," the positioning of Levi's hand on his stomach and Sarah's photoshopped face over his hand].
O la la - Mrs. Palin is a glass-eating, baby-making monster because, get this, in her family of five with two working parents, the kids do the cooking and the older kids look after the younger kids. Sheesh. Hang the woman.
You can hear the VF staff tinkle - These conservatives are such hypocwites! (Thanks to whichever lefty writer I saw use that little howl of derision). Don’t they know real “family values” means parents should slave for kids so the kids never learn to take care of themselves?
Yep. We get it. “Family values” means helpless, dependent kids, so teachers and counselors can have harder jobs and state social workers can take over their guardianship and create yet another disenfranchised group in need of governmental protection.
And on another point, who invented the hideous word “kids” for teenagers? There was a time not to long ago when girls of 15 and 16 were married and mothers and boys of that age were working like responsible adults.
Dear Vanity UNFair, the piece said more about you than about the Palins, or the wretched adolescent who’s learned how to father kids out of wed-lock and trash the grandparents of the kid all while still just a precious little “kid.”
What a role-model for a young man. Or maybe he’s just another establishment media hack in training….
Note: Shows you how much the media actually cares about children..or anyone in need of consideration. Nice job to have the father of an out-of-wedlock baby (no moral judgment here, merely a recognition that it’s a baby deserving of a little adult sensitivity to its needs) trash the grandparents with whom dad lived not so long ago.
Smacks of those stories of communist spies or Hitler youth turning children against their parents.
Note:
Here’s a good take by Bill Kristol on an earlier Vanity Fair trash piece on Palin. Not that I see eye to eye with Kristol on foreign policy…or much else… but Kristol, unlike the author of the earlier piece, Todd Purdum, is smart.
Note:
Purdum (husband of Clinton press secretary Dee-dee Myers), was called a “scum-bag” by Bill Clinton….who probably knows whereof he speaks..
Further Note:
Check this fawning piece on Henry Paulson, at Vanity Fair. Funny how Todd Purdum, who finds it so easy to pick on a woman’s child-bearing and rearing decisions, her clothes and social class, has nothing except flattery for Paulson:
“It was February 2008, and Henry M. Paulson Jr., a prince of Wall Street turned secretary of the Treasury, was reflecting on his biggest achievement to date: a $168 billion economic-stimulus package that had passed Congress four days earlier after swift, bipartisan prog ress through both houses. In light of all the later twists and turns that the global financial system and the national economy took, this measure would come to seem quaint and fainthearted. But at the time, it was a very big deal indeed, and Paulson felt justifiably proud. The stimulus had been his baby. Paulson had persuaded George W. Bush, whose relations with both parties in Congress were by then close to toxic, to articulate only the broadest principles, and not to present a detailed plan. Paulson himself, in endless night and weekend negotiations with congressional leaders, had delivered the final package.”
Notice the reference to Paulson’s “delivery” of the treacherous bail-out of America’s fattest cats.
Anne Applebaum on Ted Kennedy
Robert Bork’s America,” Kennedy declared, “is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the government, and the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens.”
That image – the women in the back alleys, the doors shutting on the citizens’ fingers – was powerful enough to prevent Bork from winning Senate approval. It is thus not unfair to say that the vitriol that has surrounded Supreme Court nominations ever since is one of Kennedy’s legacies, too….”
— Anne Applebaum in The Telegraph.
My Comment
Ms. Applebaum nails it. The “borking” of not just Supreme Court nominations but of political figures in general goes back to this sad episode in media history.
The Kennedys are American royalty, like the Bushes. So on an occasion like this, it’s probably not appropriate for an outsider to say more. Anyway, I was glad to see that conservatives, even rather shrill ones like Michelle Malkin, have been restrained enough and allowed Ted Kennedy’s family a few days of solemnity and sympathy, before discussing his political or personal flaws.
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