LILA RAJIVA: The Mind-Body Politic
Individuals Not Ideologies
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CIA Funds Both Sides Of War, Uses NY Times For Psyops (Yawn)
David DeGraw at Alternet.org describes how US intelligence ishas been behind both sides of the war on terror and how the media aids the war effort with calculated psyops like the recent “finding” of mineral deposits in Afghanistan that was trumpeted in the New York Times. (more…)
Daily Bell: Elites Conspire Over Afghan Mineral Wealth
The Daily Bell on the Afghan mineral discovery:
Here is what the Anglo-American brain-trust may have in mind:
1. It will invite countries into the region to “exploit” minerals, operating through the Afghan government. (And has already invited China.) Each country, once involved, will be expected to provide its own security.
Gordon Brown Grilled Over US/Euro-led Global Government, March 2009
UK PM Gordon Brown, addressing the European Parliament, Strasbourg, March 24, 2009
I’ve tried to jot down some of the most important points. The responses are from various interlocutors from the floor. (more…)
Pre 9-11 Put Options Records Destroyed by CBOE
From Bob Wenzel at EconomicPolicyJournal.com:
Explosive new information has broken with regard to destruction of pre-9-11 options trading records.
Just prior to 9-11, someone (or group of people) bought large amounts of put options on various airline stocks. Put options gain in value when a stock goes down. The airline stocks went down after 9-11.
Afghanistan Has Trillion Dollar Deposits Of Iron, Copper, and Lithium
So now we know the real reason for the Afghan war.. I wonder how long the Pentagon has had this information? BBC reports on June 14, 2010:
“Afghanistan may have more than a trillion dollars worth of untapped mineral deposits, a spokesman for the ministry of mines has suggested. The statement came after reports in the New York Times of the work of a team of Pentagon officials and US geologists. They discovered large quantities of iron and copper as well as valuable deposits of lithium. However, questions are being asked about the timing of the release of the latest information.
Experts Trumpet ISI-Taliban Link As Excuse For US “Counter-Measures”
Shock. Pakistani intelligence (the ISI) might be involved with the Taliban.
When the obvious is stated with all the fanfare of a papal decree from such organs of the ruling class as the London School of Economics and our own JFK School of Government (Harvard), can military action be far behind? File this along with my previous post, Mad Dog alerts.
The Associated Press reports (June 13, 2010):
“Pakistan’s main spy agency continues to arm and train the Taliban and is even represented on the group’s leadership council despite U.S. pressure to sever ties and billions in aid to combat the militants, said a research report released Sunday.
The Free Bees Sing “9-11’s A Lie”
9-11’s A Lie
(sung to the tune of “Stayin’ Alive” by the Bee Gees from the soundtrack of the motion picture, “Saturday Night Live” )
Well you can tell by the way the buildings fell
There was something wrong, now its time to tell
Spread the word, its nothing new
You gotta educate yourself in “truth”
It’s not alright, it’s not okay
For you to look the other way
We can help you understand
The New York Times effect on man (more…)Israel: Future Turkish Defense Of Aid Ships Will Be Act Of War
“Israeli Army commander and top Likud member Uzi Dayan today warned on Israeli Army Radio that Israel would consider any attempt by the Turkish military to protect future aid ships from attack an “act of war.” With Israeli protesters already condemning Erdogan, is war on the table?
Army Intelligence Analyst Arrested in Wikileaks “Helicopter Attack” Video Probe
From Wired.com:
“Federal officials have arrested an Army intelligence analyst who boasted of giving classified U.S. combat video and hundreds of thousands of classified State Department records to whistleblower site Wikileaks, Wired.com has learned.
SPC Bradley Manning, 22, of Potomac, Maryland, was stationed at Forward Operating Base Hammer, 40 miles east of Baghdad, where he was arrested nearly two weeks ago by the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division. A family member says he’s being held in custody in Kuwait, and has not been formally charged.
Ex-CIA Station Chief Admits Drugging & Molesting Algerian Woman
And all in the name of “intelligence” the tax-payer has to support this huge bureaucracy of underemployed, over-sexed meddlers..
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A former CIA station chief in Algeria pleaded guilty on Monday to sex abuse stemming from a 2008 incident in Algiers and to cocaine use, the U.S. Justice Department said.
Ron Paul: Governments Never Want Peace
“Meanwhile, it is rumored by the Financial Times, AFP and others that Greece may spend more than it saves from austerity measures on arms deals with Germany, France and the US as a potential condition of receiving bailout funds.
If true, it is certainly not unprecedented for the global military industrial complex to benefit from deals made by their friends in the central banking community. After all, war is the health of the state. The last thing big government proponents want is for peace to break out in the world.”
Welfare Kings: The Case Of Charles Schwab
From Brad Blog (”Food Incorporated”):
“When they were first introduced during the early days of the New Deal, farm subsidies were intended to stabilize prices in order to offset the extraordinary low prices brought on by over-production and by the Great Depression; to keep farmers on their farms and in their homes.
Today, it would be fair to say that farm subsidies, like Wall Street bailouts, flow to those who need them the least.
In Thieves in High Places, Jim Hightower provides the classic example — billionaire stockbroker Charles R. Schwab; the proud owner of Casa de Patos, “1,500 acres of picturesque wetlands in Northern California.” Schwab grows rice on the land, not for harvesting purposes but because the rice attracts ducks. Schwab is one of those rich folks who likes to invite friends and clients to go duck hunting. (Careful you don’t invite Dick Cheney, Mr. Schwab.)
So Schwab has no intent to harvest the rice, but that doesn’t prevent this man with an estimated $4.7 billion net worth from collecting $500,000/year in federal farm subsidies because he does not market the rice.
Hightower laments, “Sadly, it’s legal, and it’s a fine upstanding example of what George [W. Bush] and his base like to call ‘entrepreneurship.’”
China Defies US And Sells Gasoline To Iran
The Sino-US trade wars are heating up. On Friday, the US announced that it would impose stiff duties on Chinese-made oil country tubular goods, which are steel pipes used in the oil industry.
“According to US data, the OCTG trade case is the largest in US history against China imports valued at more than $2.6 billion in 2008 and about $1 billion last year.”
China responded on Tuesday with anti-dumping duties against the US and Russia:
“China has imposed anti-dumping and anti-subsidy duties on a U.S. specialty steel product, and also hit Russia with anti-dumping duties in the same case, its customs administration said.
U.S. producers will be assessed anti-dumping duties of up to 64.8 percent and anti-subsidy, or “countervailing,” duties of up to 44.6 percent on the grain-oriented electrical steel, it said on its website on Monday.
Grain-oriented electrical steel, also known as grain-oriented silicon steel, is used for the cores of high-efficiency transformers, electric motors and generators.
The state-backed China Chamber of Commerce of Metals, Minerals and Chemicals Importers and Exporters hailed the Ministry of Commerce’s April 10 ruling, which the Ministry has not yet publicly announced, state news agency Xinhua said.
“During the investigation the Ministry found that U.S. producers had received subsidies by the U.S. government, and their unfair competition hurt Chinese producers,” Xinhua said, quoting an unnamed person at the chamber of commerce.”
Meanwhile, China also announced its first trade deficit since May 2004
“According to the statistics from the General Administration of Customs, China’s exports were valued at US $112.11 billion in March, up by 24.3 percent year on year, while the imports were up by 66 percent to US $119.35 billion, trade deficit were US $ 7.24 billion. This is the first monthly trade deficit for China since May of 2004.”
What’s interesting is that this trade row with the US isn’t necessarily a sign of rising protectionism in China, as the media often reports. It seems to signal a move toward more trade with emerging markets in Asia and elsewhere. Thus at the recently concluded Boao Forum for Asia, (the Chinese Davos), the Chinese Vice-President called for open markets and not protectionism. Of course, this isn’t free trade, by any means, but state-driven mercantilism. It remains to be seen whether that is any better than state-driven protectionism.
Another example.
While some top oil-exporting countries have curbed their exports to Iran to avoid penalties from the US, state-owned Chinaoil has sold two cargoes of gasoline to Iran in defiance of the US, the first direct sales since January 2009.
As Russia has hardened its position and moved closer to the European and US stance, the Chinese move has become crucial for Iran. Iran continues to be the fifth largest exporter of crude in the world, but US sanctions have meant that its refineries have suffered from lack of foreign investment and it now relies on the world market for its gasoline needs.
UK Foreign Office Warning to Travelers About Israeli Passport Forgery
I didn’t have time to complete this post from a week ago, but with the really bizarre story of the Polish plane, I thought I should revisit it, as is:
At the end of March, Haaretz (March 31) reported that the British Foreign Office issued a travel advisory last week to citizens traveling to Israel and Palestine, “hours” after it decided to expel an Israeli diplomat.
“The risk applies in particular to passports without biometric security features,” the warning on the [UK foreign office] Web site said. “We recommend that you only hand your passport over to third parties including Israeli officials when absolutely necessary.”
This follows confirmation last week that killers of a Hamas operative in Dubai used forged passports from multiple countries, including the UK, Australia, France, Ireland, and Germany.
An editor at the Guardian notes that this is the lowest point in Anglo-Israeli relations since 1988, when an Israeli diplomat was expelled for being an agent of the Mossad.
Current relations with Israel are already strained, because senior Israeli officials visiting the UK have been threatened with arrest for alleged war crimes.
[Note:
The Hamas operative Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was killed in January in a hit that Dubai police have said they are 99 percent certain was the work of Israel's spy service, Mossad. Israel has neither confirmed nor denied this.
Dubai has named 27 alleged conspirators in the pursuit and killing of the Palestinian, and has claimed that they used fraudulent British, Irish, French, German and Australian passports to enter and depart from Dubai. More than half of the people identified share the names of foreign-born Israeli nationals].
Earlier, UK foreign secretary David Miliband had said there were “compelling reasons” to believe Israel was responsible and had called the use of 12 forged British passports “intolerable,” according to an earlier report by the BBC (March 23).
Meanwhile, Israel’s ambassador to Britain, Ron Prosor, confirmed there would be no diplomatic retaliation, but expressed disappointment at Miliband’s decision. Israel has previously said there is no proof it was behind the killing at a Dubai hotel.
Israel claims the Australians are also going to follow suit, says this report:
“Official Israeli sources told The Australian newspaper that there is a high chance that Australia will follow Britain’s lead and also expel a high ranking Israeli diplomat. “It appears that Israeli officials have received indications in Canberra that Australia is preparing to expel a diplomat,” it said in the newspaper.”
Meanwhile, according to The Australian (March 31) ECAJ president Robert Goot told The Australian: “I think it would be an extreme reaction or possibly an overreaction (to expel an Israeli diplomat). The Jewish community would hope the Australian government might adopt a more nuanced position, depending on the outcome of the (Australian Federal Police) investigation.”
That’s not likely, now that former Mossad case officer Victor Ostrovsky has told ABC Radio that the spy agency had used Australian passports for previous operations before last month’s hit on a top Hamas commander in Dubai that has been blamed on Israel. (see the Sydney Morning Herald (Feb 26, 2010)
Israel has previously dismissed claims from Ostrovsky, who has detailed various accusations against the country in his books. He said Mossad prefers to use “false flag” passports, as Israeli papers frequently invoke suspicion in the Middle East.
“They need passports because you can’t go around with an Israeli passport, not even a forged one, and get away or get involved with people from the Arab world,” he said.
“So most of these (Mossad) operations are carried out on what’s called false flag, which means you pretend to be of another country which is less belligerent to those countries that you’re trying to recruit from.”
Ostrovsky said Mossad had a “very, very expensive research department” dedicated to manufacturing the fake documents which simulates different types of paper and ink.
The Australian newspaper also said Ali Kazak, a former Palestinian representative to Australia, had warned in 2004 that a Mossad agent in Sydney had obtained 25 false Australian passports.
According to The Age (Feb 26, 2010), in Dec 2004, a second secretary in the Israeli embassy in Canberra was recalled because he was suspected of ties to passport fraud in New Zealand, where in March 2004 two suspected Mossad agents were convicted for fraudulently trying to get local passports. The New Zealand case eventually led to the downgrading of diplomatic ties and the canceling of Israeli PM Moshe Katsav’s visit.
The same report notes that Mossad used forged Canadian passports in 1997 in a bungled plot to assassinate Hamas leader Khaled Meshal.
Then, as now, the Israeli prime minister, who has to approve all assassination attempts, was Benjamin Netanyahu.
Polish President Lech Kaczynski Killed In Plane Crash
[Note: The video is from Russia Today, which some claim contains Russian disinformation].
Update: Russian investigators say that there was nothing wrong with the landing instruments on the plane and that it was pilot error that caused the crash. Also, it seems that the number of bodies found is 96.
Update 8:
At Asia Times, M. K. Bhadrakumar notes that as the so-called “color” revolutions in Central Asia (Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan) have all gradually become undone, Kyrgyzstan has become destabilized, leaving the whole region from Af-Pak to Kyrgyzstan, on the very borders of China, volatile.
Point two. Like it or not, the US needs cooperation with Russia to help it out here before the excursion in Afghanistan is concluded, say, in 2011. It also needs help, as NATO expands into Central Asia, to contain both China and India, and (possibly) play them off against each other.
A strongly anti-Russian, reactionary Pole, like Kaczynski, might have been a very disturbing factor, a thorn also in the side of the much more tractable Polish PM, Donald Tusk.
Point three.
Tusk is on more amicable terms both with the Obama administration and with Russian PM Putin, with whom he met separately at Katyn last week. Tusk is also more Euro-friendly.
Point four. With Iran cementing natural gas deals not only with Pakistan, but with China and India (over US objections), and with a Euroskeptic Polish president (Kaczynski) making unexpected overtures to Russia, America’s power/leverage vis-a-vis Russia might suddenly seem less certain on both fronts, eastern and western, especially with the Russian natural gas pipeline in the Baltic, an initiative that tends to increase Russian influence in Europe.
Point five. The recent discovery of huge reserves of natural gas in Poland has foreign corporations scrambling for drilling rights there. That makes Poland a much bigger player in the region, especially in its ability to help or hurt a European recovery. Take that into account along with the recent devaluation of the Zloty, which is regarded as helpful to Polish exporters and the economy, but bad for Europe..
Update 7:
On April 8 Obama signed a new arms reduction treaty with Dmitri Medvedev (President of Russia) and met with East European heads of state, including Donald Tusk (Polish PM) to discuss the future of NATO and to allay fears Eastern Europe might have over the US-Russia deal.
In December 2009 Obama asked for stronger Polish support in Afghanistan
Update 6:
The more I think about it, the more this crash looks odd to me.
Digging for more information, I find the following:
Donald Tusk, the PM, was much less antagonistic to Russia and much more supportive of free market policies and integration of the country into the EU than Kaczynski.
From wiki:
“After being elected prime minister, relations between Tusk and President Lech Kaczynski were often acrimonious due to different political ideologies and the constitutional role of the
presidency. Using presidential veto powers, Kaczynski blocked legislation drafted by the Tusk government, including pension reform, agricultural and urban zoning plans, and restructuring state television.[16]Tusk and Kaczynski repeatedly sparred over issues ranging from European integration, homosexuality, foreign policy, to constitutional issues, with Tusk taking more socially liberal opinions than the conservative Kaczynski.
In his premiership, Tusk has proposed various reforms to the Polish constitution. In 2009, Tusk proposed changes to the power of the presidency, by abolishing the presidential veto”
It’s wholly plausible that as the second and worse leg of the economic crisis unfolds, and as sovereign default threatens several countries in Europe, a less prickly person as president of Poland might have seemed an attractive option to NATO.
Of course, at this point, all this is no more than speculation…
Update 5:
Former Czech president, Vaclav Havel comments on mounting speculation over the bizarre crash:
‘That speculation [that it was sabotage and not an accident] will influence the elections,’ he said, predicting some Poles would see an analogy to the 1943 plane-crash death of Wladyslaw Sikorski, Poland’s premier-in-exile. Some believe that Sikorski’s plane was deliberately brought down.
Update 4:
Eyewitness accounts says no explosion:
“A witness named himself Roman said he was washing his car in the village near the airport, when he saw a plane crashed down in the woods. “It was foggy here at that time, I couldn’t see it very clearly. I didn’t hear any explosion, but saw a lot of smoke. The plane flew forward a distance after one of the wings had been knocked off by the trees. Then the other wing also broke down, and the plane crashed in the woods 300 to 400 meters away from the airport, ” Roman recalled. A Xinhua reporter at the site saw pieces of the plane wreckage scattering in the sealed-off woods, where four rescuers were carrying out a body from the wreckage.”
One police officer pointed at a topless white birch tree about 300 meter away and told Xinhua that it was the first tree hit by the plane. Behind it, a number of treetops were cut off straight in the accident.”
Another eyewitness account says there was an explosion (Lila: this contradicts the other account, but that could be because the witness was closer to the crash).
The explosion was apparently so powerful that pieces were scattered near the outskirts of the town at a distance of a mile.
The plane is said to have crashed about half a mile on the runway. Some sections of the plane burned for more than an hour.
Update 3:
Some background on energy rivalry between Russia and Poland, which as focused on natural gas reserves/pipe line deals that had recently been cemented.
“Without consulting the Poles, Mr. Schroder (former German chancellor) had supported a major Russian-German gas pipeline, called Nord Stream, now being built under the Baltic Sea. For the first time, Russia could send gas directly to Western Europe, reducing its dependence on Poland, Belarus and the Baltic States as transit countries for sending Russian gas to its lucrative European markets.When the deal was struck between Mr. Schroder and then-President Vladmir Putin in September 2005, some Polish politicians said it was the beginning of a new Russian-German alliance.” (Lila: This would bring back to many Poles the history of German-Russian collusion at Gdansk to divide Poland)
“American technology to produce shale gas is unleashing a scramble for drilling rights in Poland, where experts believe vast reserves of unconventional gas exist that could help to weaken Russia’s grip on Europe’s energy supplies.
(Lila: Russia supplied 33% of European oil in 2009 and cut supplies to Ukraine during a fight over prices)
ConocoPhillips is poised to launch Poland’s first shale gas drilling programme next month near Gdansk on the Baltic coast. Two other American oil groups — Exxon-Mobil and Marathon — and Talisman Energy, of Canada, are set to follow. The technology has transformed America’s energy industry and driven gas prices to their lowest level in years.”
Update 2:
“In one of those rare moments of unity, the National Bank of Poland and the Polish government agreed on the need to weaken the Polish zloty, which over recent weeks has rebounded close to its pre-crisis strength. The currency’s strength is now seen a possible threat to economic recovery. After several verbal interventions over the past few days, the central bank intervened with real money Friday, for the first time in more than a decade.”
Update 1 (the following is paraphrased from a Polish newspaper that I translated with Google translator):
Smolensk’s Severny airport was, until October 15, the 103rd airport Military Transport Aviation Regiment. And, half an hour before the presidential plane landed, a military plane, Ilyushin Il-76, from Moscow, which was carrying a branch of the Federal Protection Service officers (the equivalent of BOR-u), tried to land. The pilot, originally from Smolensk was thoroughly familiar with local conditions and tried to land twice, before returning to Moscow. A Pole living in a hotel near the site says that the left wing hit a tree and the plane fell to the ground and disintegrated, immediately catching fire. Emergency services on the spot appeared after several minutes.
[Lila: Now this part sounds a bit odd to me, although it could just be confusion at the scene of an accident].
The Russians stated that it made no sense to send ambulances to the site, since everyone was dead. The crash occurred in the forest, and the Russian services couldn’t enter the disaster area because of the mud at the site.
[Lila: How could they be so sure everyone was dead, especially, when many more bodies were recovered than were on the flight list (132 bodies versus 89 on the list)?]
ORIGINAL BLOG POST
Accident, Sabotage, or False Flag?
MSNBC reports that Polish President (from 2005-2010) Lech Kaczynski (1949-2010) and top Polish military and civilian leaders, historians, and activists were killed when the presidential plane crashed on landing in thick fog in Smolensk in western Russia on Saturday, killing 130, according to this report.
(Other reports have placed the death toll at 96, 97 88 (the number on the passenger list according to the Poles), 132, and 135).
Communication with the plane was lost at 10:50 local time (0656 GMT).
Pravda.ru says the plane came down at 11 AM local time about 1.5 km from the airport and 225 km from Moscow.
The Governor of Smolensk told official media there were no survivors of the crash and that the plane had clipped the top of the trees, crashed, and then broken into pieces.
Preliminary data collected show that the plane hit the treetops while approaching the airport in bad visibility, says an official with the Russian general prosecutor’s office, according to ITAR-Tass news agency, (reported by CBS).
A spokesman for the Smolensk regional government said publicly that air traffic controllers there had advised the pilot not to land in the thick fog at the military airport and to divert to Moscow or to Minsk (the capital of Belarus) instead.
BBC reported that Russian PM Putin visited the scene of the crash and said he would personally supervise the investigation. He also said the investigation would be a joint Polish-Russian investigation. The Russian emergency ministers said both of the plane’s information recorders (black boxes) had been found and would be examined.
The Polish group was on its way to the 70th anniversary of the massacre at Katyn forest near Smolensk, when thousands of Polish officers (including some who were also Jewish) were killed by the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, in 1940.
My Comment 2:
The significance of Katyn was that it was blamed on the Nazis by the Soviets, and, that despite this betrayal of its own ally, Poland, the US continued to treat the Soviets preferentially and cover-up for it.
Furthermore, at the end of WW II, the western powers again betrayed Poland - over whom the war was supposed to have been fought - by allowing it remain under the Soviet sphere of influence.
So, Katyn is not simply about Poland and Russia, as nation states, it’s also, equally, about Poland’s betrayal by the US and the Allies.
And it’s about the Polish Catholic suspicion of the atheistic Bolsheviks who primarily carried out the massacres ….
Religion, ethnicity, and nationalism all converge in this profound national trauma.
It’s important to remember that President Roosevelt officially rejected the conclusion of his own research team, and stated he was convinced that the Nazis were culpable. That is, he sided with Stalin against the Poles. And he actually ordered that the report that he himself had commissioned be suppressed. It was only more recently that the true history of the massacre of the flower of Poland by the Soviet NKVD has become common knowledge. This secret history is vital to understanding the symbolism involved in this crash.
This is not just about Poland and Russia. It is about the anti-Communist and anti-Nazi feelings of Catholics in Poland and their betrayal by the West.
Smolensk is only 11/2 hours away from Warsaw and the symbolism of the crash has struck many people, including former President Kwasniewski, who called Katyn “cursed.”
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk called it the most tragic event of Poland’s post-World War II history, according to BBC.
My Comment 1:
1. It’s very strange that so many of the top brass would be on a single flight, especially on a plane as known for being unreliable and dangerous as the Soviet built Tupolev-154, which has suffered 16 crashes since 1994 (AP).
According to the Aviation Safety Network, there have been 66 crashes involving Tu-154 in the last 40 years, 6 in the last 5 years alone, and Aeroflot has withdrawn its Tu-154 fleet from service, although the TU-154 used to be the workhorse of the Soviets and the eastern bloc in the 1970s and 1980s. The Polish government had been thinking of replacing the planes for flights carrying government officials, but didn’t have the money for it.
Wouldn’t high level personnel have normally been booked on separate flights to avoid difficulties in the military/government in case of an accident? This particular plane was also 26 years old, had been overhauled recently at a Russian aviation facility, and had only few hours on it.
However, the Russian facility Aviakor has said that the plane was in good condition for the flight.
Another aviation expert also told Al-Jazeera that the TU-154 can operate in extreme weather conditions and can land on an unpaved airstrip. He believes the crash was a “fluke”.
2. How is it that the information that the president’s wife had an uncle who was killed at Katyn was so widely and uniformly known that it appeared in a majority of global reports about the crash?
(Katyn is a national symbol of WW II and the anti-Communist struggle and stirs deep nationalistic feelings in Poland).
Another oddity in the media reports was the varying numbers given for the dead, when according to early reports, the Russians were able to collect all the bodies, and had verified that all on board had died. In that case, why such different numbers?
Also, how is it that the original flight list was for only 89 people (one didn’t show up)? How did some 30 plus extra passengers apparently fly…or is this a reference to something else?
3. What a bizarre coincidence that several people whose death would be calculated to arouse nationalist remembrance of the past (Katyn, communist crimes, Solidarity), should all die on a trip to Katyn, along with significant members of the political and military establishment? The people who died were all people significant to Poland’s anti-communist history. Kaczynski and his twin brother, Soviet era child actors, both played important roles in Polish politics.
“The twins (Kaczynski and his brother) pushed unashamedly for conservative values and a righting of historical wrongs with 20th century foes Russia and Germany in ways that ruffled feathers and often seemed out of step with the times,” says the WSJ.
The BBC noted that Kaczynski was a right-wing Catholic, who opposed rapid free-market reforms and favored retaining social welfare programs:
“He had advocated a right-wing Catholic agenda, opposed rapid free-market reforms and favoured retaining social welfare programmes.”
The LA Times noted his campaign against liberal sexual mores:
“At home, Kaczynzki, who was mayor of Warsaw before becoming president, sought to expose former communists and cleanse what he and his brother regarded as pervasive liberalism. He took a hard line against homosexuality and often assailed the media over salacious magazines and TV shows. His critics regarded him as a politically dangerous mix of Polish nationalism and religious conservatism.”
“The president was a conservative and a lifelong skeptic of Russia with many detractors at home and abroad.”
Consider also this piece of symbolism, among many other coincidences:
“Rossiya-24 showed footage from the crash site, with pieces of the plane scattered widely amid leafless trees and small fires burning in woods shrouded with fog. A tail fin with the red and white national colors of Poland stuck up from the debris.”(BBC)
4. In case this proves not to be an accident, Poles might be tempted look to the FSB (and Putin) as the possible culprit, since the plane was recently overhauled in Russia. Yet, Russia is unlikely to have downed a Polish plane with top military and civilian commanders on its own territory. That would be a political and military blunder almost unthinkable.
5. Exploring another angle, it’s been known for a while now that the CIA has a presence in Eastern Europe, as also suggested in a piece I wrote in 2005 on CIA black sites there.
Poland is a staunch ally of the US in other areas as well, thus provoking some dislike in Russia:
“The European Union member nation of 38 million people sent troops to the U.S.-led war in Iraq and recently boosted its contingent in Afghanistan to some 2,600 soldiers.
U.S. Patriot missiles are expected to be deployed in Poland this year. That was a Polish condition for a 2008 deal — backed by both Kaczynski and Tusk — to host long-range missile defense interceptors. The deal, which was struck by the Bush administration, angered Russia and was later reconfigured under President Barack Obama’s administration. Under the Obama plan, Poland would host a different type of missile defense interceptors as part of a more mobile system and at a later date, probably not until 2018.” (CNN)
Russians also distrusted his advocacy of NATO membership for the former Soviet states of Ukraine and Georgia and his support of Georgian President Mikhael Saakashvili during the 2008 Russo-Georgian war (CS Monitor).
6. However, in recent times, relations with Russia had thawed:
“Polish-Russian relations had been improving of late after being poisoned for decades over the Katyn massacre of some 22,000 Polish officers.”(Stanford Advocate, April 10, 2010).
Last year in September, Russian PM Putin met Kaczynski in Gdansk (Danzig) on the anniversary of the Hitler’s invasion of Poland and had made partial amends for the USSR’s role in breaking up Poland under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (the Non-Aggression Treaty between Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939).
and this:
“Russia never has formally apologized for the murders but Putin’s decision to attend a memorial ceremony earlier this week in the forest was seen as a gesture of goodwill toward reconciliation. Kaczynski wasn’t invited to that event because Putin, as prime minister, had invited his Polish counterpart, Tusk.” (CBS) http://wcco.com/national/polish.Kaczynski.dead.2.1623978.html)
6. Exploring this from another angle, could this tragedy have anything to do with the another strange incident in Eastern Europe a few weeks ago?
Two Gulf Stream V type jets equipped with sophisticated intelligence equipment violated Hungarian laws by flying low into Hungary without landing and then flew 1300 miles over Turkey, Hungary and Romania and disappeared, all around the same time a Syrian-Hungarian man implicated in money-laundering was mysteriously killed in Budapest, in what some have suggested was a Mossad hit. That incidence should be read in light of the recent expulsion of the Israeli ambassador from the UK, and the threat of diplomatic sanctions against Israel in Australia, following the revelation that the Mossad had forged multiple passports from different countries in carrying out the killing of a Hamas operative in Dubai, earlier this year.
But Kaczynski was on very good terms with the Jewish community in Poland, once almost wiped out by the Holocaust. In 2008, he became the first head of state to attend service at a synagogue in Poland, and before that, as mayor of Warsaw, he donated land for a projected museum on Jewish history. Israel and the Jewish community expressed deep shock at the deaths and called Kaczynski a great leader.
That would seem to make him an unlikely target for an Israeli false-flag operation.
Update: AP has a list of the top officials and political significant people who died in the crash. Here are some of them:
Lech Kaczynski (President), Maria Kaczynska (his wife), Andrzej Kremer (deputy foreign minister and chief of staff), General Franciszek Gagor (army chief of staff since 2006, Polish rep at NATO, 2004-06), General Andrzej Blasik (head of airforce, trained in Montgomery, Alabama in 2005), (Vice-Admiral Andrzej Karweta, Navy Chief since 2009, served as Supreme Allied Command Atlantic, Norfolk, Virginia, 2002-05), Gen. Tadeusz Buk (land forces commander, 2009, commander of Polish troop in Iraq since 2007), Slawomir Skrzypek (president of the National Bank since 2007, close friend of the president), Alexander Szczyglo, head of National Security Office, former defense minister, Jerzy Szmajdzinski (opposition candidate for president, deputy parliamentary speaker, defense minister during Iraq war), Ryszard Kaczorowski (last president in exile, who passed on presidency to first democratic president Lech Walesa), Janusz Kurtyka (head of the state-run National Remembrance Institute, commemorating communist crimes), Anna Walentynowicz (Solidarity activist whose firing sparked the movement which led to Polish freedom), Piotr Nurowski (head of Poland’s Olympic Committee), Krystyna Bochenek (deputy parliamentary speaker)
Arms and Mark Thatcher..
Mark Thatcher, son of the former UK PM, seems to have been dogged with accusations of financial impropriety. I bring him up, because of a comment on this blog about his direct involvement in an international conspiracy to cover up the manipulation of precious metals that was apparently outed in 2002 in the UK, but was covered up. In researching the comment, I began with some background on Mark Thatcher.
Here’s a brief summary of some financial “improprieties” as they show up in a Guardian article from 2004.
“But hit controversy in 1984 when the Observer alleged that he benefited from his mother’s position when a large construction deal in Oman was awarded to a building firm, Cementation, with which he was involved, after Mrs Thatcher visited the tiny Gulf state. The accusations were never proven.
Further controversy dogged him through his friendship with the Middle East businessman Wafic Said - a quiet-spoken Syrian with close links with Saudi royalty.
Among other business ventures in the 1980s, he was involved in several large-scale arms deals, most notably a £20bn contract between British Aerospace and Saudi Arabia.
Although rumours of impropriety have dogged his business career, he largely disappeared off Fleet Street’s radar after moving to the US.
But it is recorded that his wealth grew to the point where he spent periods as a tax exile in Switzerland.
In the 1990s he helped secure the multimillion pound contract for his mother’s Downing Street memoirs, but after the failure of a security alarm business in the US and a prosecution for tax evasion, Mark, his wife and their two children moved again - this time to South Africa.
Three years after the move to Cape Town, in 1998, he was investigated by South African police over a money-lending business to police officers. He counter-claimed that officers working for him as agents had defrauded him and the investigation was eventually dropped.
He returned to the UK last July for the funeral of his father, Sir Denis, a former oil businessman, who died aged 88. He inherited his father’s hereditary baronetcy to become Sir Mark.
Sir Mark, who was known as “Thickie Mork” among other nicknames at Harrow and who has been criticised for his lack of charm, was once described by the Financial Times as “a sort of Harrovian Arthur Daley with a famous Mum”.
A devoted Lady Thatcher, however, has always had faith in him. “Mark could sell snow to the Eskimos, and sand to the Arabs,” she is reported to have said.
His notoriety was not welcomed by Sir Bernard Ingham, Lady Thatcher’s former press secretary.
Asked by Sir Mark how he could best help his mother win the 1987 general election, Ingham reportedly replied: “Leave the country.”
Barack Obama: The Case For Impeachment
David Lindorff lays out the grounds for impeaching President Obama:
Let’s start with the war in Afghanistan, which Obama has taken full ownership of with an escalation that will bring the number of US troops in that country (not counting mercenaries hired by the Pentagon and CIA) to 100,000 by this August.
The president has authorized the use of Predator drone aircraft for a program of bombing conducted against Pakistan which has illegally expanded the Afghan War into another country without any authorization from Congress. These pilotless drones are known to kill far more innocent bystanders than enemy targets, making them fundamentally illegal on principle as weapons. Furthermore, this wave of attacks in Pakistan is a war of aggression against another nation if the word “war” is to have any meaning at all, and as such it is illegal under the UN Charter. Indeed initiating a war of aggression against a country which does not pose an immediate threat to the invader is described in the Charter and in the Nuremberg Tribunal Charter as the gravest of all war crimes.
The president, as commander in chief, has also, in collusion with Attorney Eric Holder, blocked any prosecution of those who authorized and perpetrated torture against captives in the War in Iraq, the War in Afghanistan, and the so-called War on Terror–notably Federal Appeals Court Judge Jay Baybee, and Berkeley Law Professor John Yoo, who as Justice Department attorneys authored the legal briefs justifying torture– and has in fact continued to permit the application of torture against captives. All of this is in clear violation of the Geneva Conventions, which as a signed set of treaties, are part of the law of the United States. Under those treaties, failure on the part of those up the chain of command to halt or to punish those who commit torture are themselves guilty of the crime of torture.
As commander in chief, President Obama has also overseen a strategy in Afghanistan of expanded attacks on civilians in Afghanistan. As in Iraq under the Bush administration, this current phase of the war in Afghanistan is seeing more civilians killed than enemy combatants, because of the widespread use of weapons like helicopter gunships, aerial bombardment, fragmentation bombs, etc., as well as a tactic of night raids on housing compounds where insurgents are suspected of hiding–raids that frequently lead to the deaths of many women and children and innocent men. It is significant that even the recent execution-style slaying of nine students, aged 11-18, by US-led forces, has not led to an investigation or prosecution of a individual. Rather, the incident is being covered up and ignored, with the clear acquiescence of the White House and the leadership at the Pentagon.
It is also widely believed that under the command of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who is known to have directed a large-scale death-squad operation in Iraq before moving to his current position, a similar death-squad campaign of assassination is being conducted now in Afghanistan--a campaign that like the notorious Phoenix Program in the 1960s in Vietnam, is almost certainly resulting in the deaths of many innocent Afghans.
Domestically, the president has continued to allow the policy of detention without trial of hundreds of captives in Guantanamo Bay and other prisons, including Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan, and his director of national security has even stated that it is the policy of this administration that American citizens deemed by the administration to be enemy combatants or terrorists may be targeted for summary execution. Such officially sanctioned state murder is a blatant violation of the Constitution’s insistence that every American has a right to a presumption of innocence and to a trial by a jury of his or her peers.
The president has also continued and in some ways even expanded the Bush/Cheney administration’s program of warrantless spying by the National Security Agency on the electronic communications of millions of Americans. A part of that program, the monitoring of communications of a now defunct Islamic charity, was just declared illegal by a federal judge in a case that was brought against the Bush/Cheney administration, but which continued to be defended by the current administration. There has not been a decision as yet by the Obama administration about whether to appeal that decision. While the case in question does not represent a crime by the Obama administration, it is clear that it only represents the very tip of the huge iceberg of domestic spying, and the administration’s vigorous efforts to shut down this case or to win it are clear evidence that the NSA is continuing to do the same thing on a vast scale. In fact, the only reason this case even got to trial is because of a government error that resulted in a memo describing the monitoring being mailed inadvertently to the victims of the spying.
While we’re at it, I would also suggest that there is ample evidence to call for the impeachment of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who appears, as head of the New York Federal Reserve, to have colluded in an effort to cover up a massive fraud at Lehman Brothers, and who has subsequently as Treasurer, participated in unprecedented giveaways of taxpayer funds to several of the country’s largest banking institutions.
The above enumeration of criminal and Constitutional transgressions makes it clear that this president, like his predecessor, has, almost since his first day in office, continued down a road of criminal and unconstitutional behavior that threatens the survival of Constitutional government in the United States.
Let me state it simply: President Barack Obama, as well as Attorney General Eric Holder, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and Treasury Secretary Geithner, should be impeached for war crimes and high crimes against the Constitution.”
A Brief History Of The War On Gold
GATA posts a helpful compilation of links to articles on gold price manipulation and a page on the history of that manipulation at The Privateer.com. And excerpt from that (from the period after 1960):
“The End Of the “Fixed” Dollar
Gold War I - The “London Gold Pool” - 1961 to 1968
By the beginning of the 1960s, the $US 35 = 1 oz. Gold ratio was becoming more and more difficult to sustain. Gold demand was rising and U.S. Gold reserves were falling, both as a result of the ever increasing trade deficits which the U.S. continued to run with the rest of the world. Shortly after President Kennedy was Inaugurated in January 1961, and to combat this situation, newly-appointed Undersecretary of the Treasury Robert Roosa suggested that the U.S. and Europe should pool their Gold resources to prevent the private market price for Gold from exceeding the mandated rate of $US 35 per ounce. Acting on this suggestion, the Central Banks of the U.S., Britain, West Germany, France, Switzerland, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg set up the “London Gold Pool” in early 1961.The Pool came unstuck when the French, under Charles de Gaulle, reneged and began to send the Dollars earned by exporting to the U.S. back and demanding Gold rather than Treasury debt paper in return. Under the terms of the Bretton Woods Agreement signed in 1944, France was legally entitled to do this. The drain on U.S. Gold became acute, and the London Gold Pool folded in April 1968. But the demand for U.S. Gold did not abate.
By the end of the 1960s, the U.S. faced the stark choice of eliminating their trade deficits or revaluing the Dollar downwards against Gold to reflect the actual situation. President Nixon decided to do neither. Instead, he repudiated the international obligation of the U.S. to redeem its Dollar in Gold just as President Roosevelt had repudiated the domestic obligation in 1933. On August 15, 1971, Mr Nixon closed the “Gold Window”. The last link between Gold and the Dollar was gone. The result was inevitable. In February 1973, the world’s currencies “floated”. By the end of 1974, Gold had soared from $35 to $195 an ounce.
Gold War II - The IMF/U.S. Treasury Gold Auctions - 1975 to 1979
On January 1, 1975, after 42 years, it again became “legal” for individual Americans to own Gold. Anticipating the demand, the U.S. Treasury in particular and many other Central Banks sold large quantities of Gold, taking large paper profits in the process. This had two results. It depressed the price of Gold, which fell to $US 103 in eighteen months. More important by far, it “burned” large numbers of small individual investors.But this “pre-emptive strike” against the Gold price did not solve the imbalances inherent in the floating currency regime. As the Gold price began to recover from its August 1976 low, the (US-controlled) IMF along with the Treasury itself, began a series of Gold auctions in an attempt to hold down the price through official means. But the problem of yet another free fall in the international value of the Dollar got in the way. Between January and October of 1978, the Dollar lost fully 25% of its value against a basket of the currencies of its major trading partners. By early 1979, due to this precipitous fall, the demand for Gold was overwhelming the amount that the IMF/Treasury dared supply, and the Gold auctions came to an end.
Gold regained its ($195) December 1974 level by July 1978. It then pressed on to new highs, hitting $250 in February 1979 and $300 in July. Also in July, Paul Volcker was appointed as Fed Chairman by a desperate Jimmy Carter. Gold continued to surge, hitting $400 in October. While this was happening, Mr Volcker was attending a conference in Belgrade. There the assessment was made that the global financial system was on the verge of collapse. When Mr Volcker returned to the U.S. from Belgrade, he took a momentous step. He announced that the Fed was switching its policy from controlling interest rates to controlling the money supply.
This new Fed policy took some time to have effect. In the meantime, Gold soared from $381 on Nov. 1, 1979 to $850 on Jan. 21, 1980. The public, who had been burned in 1975, were late on the scene. The great burst of public Gold buying came in the four weeks between Christmas 1979 and the Jan 21, 1980 high. As in 1975, they were “burned” again.
The Paper Era Begins
In early 1980, Mr Volcker’s new Fed policy began to bite. U.S. interest rates began to skyrocket. As they rose, the Dollar first slowed its descent, then stopped falling, and then began to rise. Both the public and the investment community which had stampeded into Gold was lured back into paper by this huge rise in interest rates - and by the prospect of a higher U.S. Dollar. The threat of financial meltdown was averted, but at a cost. The U.S. Prime rate hit 20% in April 1980 and stayed there (with a brief dive in mid-1980) until the end of 1981. There was a rush out of Gold and back to Dollars.Once interest rates began to come down, in early/mid 1982, the choice of where to put the Dollars faced investors once more. The initial solution was just as it had been in the 1970s. The Dow took off - rising from 776 to almost 1100 between mid August 1982 and late January 1983. Gold started earlier and took off even harder - rising from $296 in late June 1982 to $510 at the end of January 1983.
That’s where the similarity to the 1970s ended. Gold fell $105 in the last four trading days of February 1983. As it fell, the Dow broke above the 1100 point level for the first time. The long bull market in stocks, and the long stagnation of Gold, had begun…..”
JP Morgan Gets $3.4 Billion For Buying Wa-Mu; Shareholders Get Zip
At Seeking Alpha, Troy Racki writes about the second rape of Washington Mutual stock-holders and US tax-payers by JP Morgan:
“In the settlement offer WaMu will relinquish all claims against JP Morgan and the FDIC. In return WaMu will be allowed to keep a $3.9 billion dollar deposit it held in its own bank. Most of the $3.9 billion deposit was generated from the sale of preferred securities in 2006 and 2007. Additionally WaMu will be allowed to keep $1.8 to $2.0 billion of its own tax return created from huge losses in 2008. The rest of the projected $5.6 billion return will be split between the FDIC and JP Morgan.
According to the settlement terms JP Morgan will receive $5 billion in HELOC backed securities valued on the open market at 60% of par, $193 million in Visa class B securities, $2.1 billion in cash, and a $20 million wind farm, all from WaMu. Given the initial purchase price of WaMu for $1.9 billion in 2008, these additional assets received means that JP Morgan will pay a negative $3.4 billion for their purchase of the bank.
The loss of these assets will heavily impact WaMu’s balance sheet which now stands to make only the bondholders whole, according to the settlement’s disclosure statement. Currently senior WaMu holding company debt trades at 106 cents on the dollar.
Under the terms of the settlement WaMu shareholders will receive nothing.
In the disclosure statement WaMu’s attorneys stated that the proposed settlement will net the most for all creditors and that further legal dispute would only financially harm the estate. This comes in stark contrast to prior statements by WaMu’s equity counsel that a protracted legal battle with JP Morgan and the FDIC may have returned up to $20 billion to the estate.
Currently the settlement is awaiting the approval of the FDIC, Washington Mutual bank bondholders, WaMu unsecured creditors, WaMu preferred shareholders, and the bankruptcy judge. An incomplete plan of reorganization was also filed on Friday along with the disclosure statement. The incomplete POR lacks a balance sheet meaning that WaMu’s unsecured creditors are left only to guess at what they may eventually recover, if anything.
Despite the negative purchase price, Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan has indicated that the purchase of WaMu could have been closed for less, much less. In July 2009 he stated that JP Morgan “could have bought WaMu for a dollar” because of the projected losses that would have been taken on the deal.
The losses never materialized. In May 2009, JP Morgan wrote up its WaMu loan portfolio by $25 billion.
Had the $1 purchase price gone through JP Morgan would have eventually been paid $5.1 billion by WaMu and the FDIC to assume the bank.
While the deal may be good for JP Morgan, former WaMu customers are not so fortunate. Nationally many WaMu Providian credit card customers have since experienced dramatic rate increases. In Oregon, WaMu checking clients report that deposits are being held for fourteen days prior to being accredited to accounts. This abnormally long waiting period means that many checking customers are now being hit by multiple $35-a-peice overdraft charges for having insufficient funds. In northern California, out-the-door waiting lines for teller service at one branch sparked verbal outrage and multiple client threats to move deposits to a community bank branch. The branch responded after twenty minutes by temporarily adding a teller.
Meanwhile FDIC chairwoman Sheila Bair is continuing to push for additional powers that would allow the FDIC to not only shutter banks but their holding companies. This authority would allow for the FDIC to avoid future conflicts when it closes a bank but is unable to force a holding company to capitulate, as is in the case with WaMu. It has come under scrutiny after internal JP Morgan e-mails and PowerPoint presentations revealed that as early as March 2008 regulators were in negotiations with JP Morgan on the closure of Washington Mutual, termed “Project West”, six months prior to the bank’s seizure.”
More later…
Blair’s “Oily” Deals Greased His Iraq War-Mongering
Turns out Tony Blair had his hand in the oil jar, while he was talking up the Iraq war….and after. The Daily Mail (UK) reports:
Last night Tory MP Douglas Carswell said of Mr Blair’s links to UI Energy Corporation: ‘This doesn’t just look bad, it stinks.
‘It seems that the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom has been in the pay of a very big foreign oil corporation and we have been kept in the dark about it.
‘Even now we do not know what he was paid or what the company got out of it. We need that information now.
“This is revolving door politics at its worst. It’s not as if Mr Blair has even stepped back from politics, because he is still politically active in the Middle East.
‘I’m afraid I have no confidence at all in the committee that vets these appointments. It’s no good telling us these deals may be commercially sensitive - we are talking about the appointment of our former Prime Minister and the public interest, rather than any commercial interests, must come first.’
Liberal Democrat MP Norman Baker said: ‘These revelations show that our former Prime Minister is for sale - he is driven by making as much money as possible.
‘I think many people will find it deeply insensitive that he is apparently cashing in on his contacts from the Iraq war to make money for himself.’
“The committee said yesterday that Mr Blair had taken a paid job advising a consortium of investors led by UI Energy in August 2008. The exact nature of the deal is unknown, but UI Energy is one of the biggest investors in Iraq’s oil-rich Kurdistan region, which became semi-autonomous in the wake of the Iraq war.
“Mr Blair’s fee has not been disclosed but is likely to have run into hundreds of thousands of pounds.
“The secrecy is particularly odd because UI Energy is fond of boasting of its foreign political advisers, who include the former Australian prime minister Bob Hawke and several prominent American politicians.
“Mr Blair successfully persuaded the committee that the appointment was ‘market sensitive’ and could not be made public.”
Vatican Moves Away from Frankenfoods
The head of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Cardinal Peter Turkson, has moved away from his predecessor’s support for developing genetically modified food to alleviate hunger in poor countries. Instead, he argues that adoption of the “precautionary principle” is warranted:
“There are a lot of claims that are disputed (like) that GMOs never call for the use of pesticides or insecticides or anything because they are resistant,” he said. Such claims have been challenged, he said, and some say “at a certain point (these crops) require insecticides whose chemicals break up later in the soil and render the soil less fertile.”
Given the disputed claims and doubts, “I think that we should go easy and probably satisfy all of these objections to the full satisfaction of those who raise these objections,” he said.
Because of the companies’ control over the patented seeds, “what is meant to alleviate hunger and poverty may actually in the hands of some people become really weapons of infliction of poverty and hunger,” Cardinal Turkson said.
Previously, opponents of GM carried the burden of proving that some harm was being inflicted. Under the PP, companies that planned on introducing genetic changes into an organism would have to bear the burden of proving that it was safe.
While this might seem counter-libertarian, I would argue it is not.
1. Since changes in genetics are impossible to regulate post facto, they cannot be subject to the usual economic arguments available to libertarians. The potential devastation is so irreparable that the principle of liberty demands that the bar be raised ahead of the event.
2. Biotechnology as an industry is concentrated in so few and such large companies, that free market conditions do not prevail at all in other respects. The companies owe their position in the market to their influence on government regulations and laws, to begin with. That suggests that there will be little in the way of normal market forces to check their natural profit-seeking from turning into rent-seeking based on preferential treatment, captive markets/monopoly, and government enforcement. PP is simply a thoughtful mechanism to prevent profit from careening into plunder.
Bottom line, PP prevents looting or theft.
That makes it libertarian.
Tom Woods On Pro-War “Progressives”
The always thoughtful Tom Woods unmasks so-called “progressives”:
“Just weeks ago, Think Progress, after a one-sentence summary of my career that (as usual) left out the past 16 years, actually quoted Max Boot against me, as if Boot’s opposition to my work was sufficient to bury me forever. So instead of an antiwar libertarian, these progressives prefer neocon Max Boot, who according to Juan Cole “never saw a war he didn’t love, never saw a conquest he didn’t find exhilarating, never saw an occupied land he didn’t think could be handled.” They approvingly quoted Boot’s dumb-guy propaganda line that “Woods’ sympathy extends not only to slave-owning rebels but also to German militarists” (because, like 99 percent of people who have studied the matter, I think Woodrow Wilson’s conduct during the early years of World War I was based on a double standard between Britain and Germany). This is the same sense in which Ron Paul “sympathizes” with al-Qaeda because he doesn’t buy U.S. war propaganda. (I did reply to Boot, by the way.)
And these are the progressives”
More at Lew Rockwell...
Financiers Used 9-11 Diversion of FBI to Loot American Middle-Class
Great interview at Forbes, between Steve Forbes and Senator Ted Kaufman on the capital markets, naked short selling, the uptick rule, sponsored access, HFT (high frequency trading) and digitalization, dark pools, and fraud…
“Forbes: Finally, Fraud Enforcement Recovery Act.
Kaufman: Yeah, yeah.
Forbes: You’re proud of it.Kaufman: Yeah, I am.
Forbes: What it does, and what will it do?
Kaufman: OK, here’s what it did. After 9/11, we moved a lot of FBI agents over to cover terrorism, which we should have done. But we left only like 250 FBI agents in the country to cover financial fraud. We did more financial fraud cases in 2001 than we did in 2007, can you believe that? So, what we did with this financial and regulatory forum, with Pat Leahy, who is chairman of judiciary committee and Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican. It’s a bipartisan bill and we got a bill passed to give us more FBI agents, give us more prosecutors and to go after these folks. And so that’s basic what we passed, and we’re getting organized. Had a really good hearing of the judiciary committee. Rob Khuzami at the Securities Exchange Commission, Lanny Breuer’s head of the criminal division, Kevin [Perkins] from the FBI financial thing.
And we’re really, we’re going after this thing. And I know you agree with me. You know, if you, the folks that committed crimes while this thing was going on, we can all argue about what caused it or not, anybody who took advantage of this situation and lined their own pocket for it should go jail.”
Games of Knowledge, Games of Power
“The academic game is the game of knowledge (and ignorance) which is inextricably, if not always intentionally, also a game of power. The only way to put an end to this game (…under conditions of domination…) is to play it better than the players themselves. The only way to undermine the power of Western definitions of the world that burden the rest of the world is to beat the powers at their own game….play enough or as much as necessary to expose it for what it really is — only a game — a game not because it is innocuous but because it is arbitrary and cannot be grounded anywhere.”
– Vassos Argyrou, “Anthropology and the Will to Meaning”, cited at Zeroanthropology
(My only caveat with this is to suggest it needs the word imperial added before the word West. It is the fundamentally imperial (state-centric) nature of the organization of knowledge - the privileging of elite schools, of certain forms of learning, of certain evidence of expertise - that is the problem. It is Western in so far as the west is the predominant carrier and transmitter of the virus. But the state everywhere is infectious….)
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…)
Fed-State Partnership Parallels Nazi Gleichschaltung
Will Grigg (in an LRC blog post) describes another crucial step in the centralizing and totalizing of federal government power in the incipient Fourth Reich of America:
“Yesterday (January 11), Barack Obama added another critical element to the architecture of wartime presidential dictatorship by signing an executive order establishing a “Council of Governors” for the supposed purpose of strengthening federal-state “partnership” in military and homeland security affairs.
The Machinery of Habit
A piece I wrote four years ago, The Burgh: Downsizing,” examines the nature of change and habit in relation to urban economies transformed by globalization and war.
“The boys come in and the beer flows. Ricardo tells us about training. Four-mile runs, 200 push-ups every morning, wall-climbing. “They break you, man,” he shakes his head. “They make you tough.
“I said I hoped so, considering where he was going. But Melanie, who studies the theology of the medieval anchoress Juliana of Norwich and sells papers on a corner in Oakland for the Socialist Worker, is more worried about his getting into what she calls killing mode. I ask her if a mode is the same as a habit. It takes time after all to form a habit. A mode on the other hand sounds like a gearshift on an Audi. And if you can shift into a gear, you can shift out. Maybe it’s really a question of what sort of habits. Learning, retraining, moving need effort. They don’t come easily. But war is a machinery that moves on its own and blood-lust, like a winter flu, might be easy to pick up and impossible to get rid of.
War and demolition come too easily to human nature. And take away too much. Anything worth pursuing, on the other hand, needs to be stalked through the years with the patience and vigilance of a hunter, cultivated through seasons of scarcity and remembered in times of forgetting. In our sophistication we laugh at those who buy dear and hold dearer. Who stay when they should have left. Bag holders. Fools. Who step into the river and expect the waters to stay the same. The immobilized in our mobile society. What is the value of an abandoned church, an obsolete mill, an aging worker? Flux, we shrug, is the only certainty. Change is the first law of nature.
“People talk about joining but they don’t,” says Ricardo, “I’m the only one who did.” He sounds proud.
“I ask him if he thinks good health insurance and tuition money are worth risking his life for. He laughs.
“Look — I ain’t gonna die. Most of the guys who teach me, they’ve been there. They got through. More chances I’d get shot in a ghetto. So some guy’s lost an arm…or a leg. So what? All this new technology now, reconstruction…they can make you another leg; it’s really no big deal.”At 26, you can think of that as a good trade. An amputation of the body or the mind is all it takes to keep up with change. Like those translucent lizards which shed their tails seasonally as they wait immobile and vigilant for flies on dusty window sills, we might grow new limbs just as good. New memories to replace old ones. Here in the hills, at the confluence of three rivers, we have learned not to resist the laws of nature.
“But perhaps we don’t live by nature alone. Perhaps, as Juliana of Norwich said, we also need mercy and grace.”
“The need to change and the machinery of habit that makes it difficult - a theme I find myself returning to , over and over, especially when I’m confronted with the depressing spectacle of people going back to the same propaganda, the same bogus assertions that caused this global catastrophe in the first place.
Going back, like dogs to vomit.
I’m sorry if that sounds ugly, but what’s happening now in DC is ugly….and very very dangerous.
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.”
Bush Redux: The Obama Doctrine
Glenn Greenwald on the Obama Doctrine:
“Indeed, Obama insisted upon what he called the ”right” to wage wars “unilaterally”; articulated a wide array of circumstances in which war is supposedly “just” far beyond being attacked or facing imminent attack by another country; explicitly rejected the non-violence espoused by King and Gandhi as too narrow and insufficiently pragmatic for a Commander-in-Chief like Obama to embrace; endowed us with the mission to use war as a means of combating “evil”; and hailed the U.S. for underwriting global security for the last six decades (without mentioning how our heroic efforts affected, say, the people of Vietnam, or Iraq, or Central America, or Gaza, and so many other places where “security” is not exactly what our wars “underwrote”). So it’s not difficult to see why Rovian conservatives are embracing his speech; so much of it was devoted to an affirmation of their core beliefs.
The more difficult question to answer is why – given what Drum described – so many liberals found the speech so inspiring and agreeable? Is that what liberals were hoping for when they elected Obama: someone who would march right into Oslo and proudly announce to the world that we have a unilateral right to wage war when we want and to sing the virtues of war as a key instrument for peace? As Tom Friedman put it on CNN yesterday: ”He got into their faces . . . I’m for getting into the Europeans’ face.” Is that what we needed more of?”
Israeli National Airline a Front for Israeli Secret Police?
Jonathan Cook in Dissident Voice:
“South Africa deported an Israeli airline official last week following allegations that Israel’s secret police, the Shin Bet, had infiltrated Johannesburg international airport in an effort to gather information on South African citizens, particularly black and Muslim travellers.
The move by the South African government followed an investigation by local TV showing an undercover reporter being illegally interrogated by an official with El Al, Israel’s national carrier, in a public area of Johannesburg’s OR Tambo airport.
The programme also featured testimony from Jonathan Garb, a former El Al guard, who claimed that the airline company had been a front for the Shin Bet in South Africa for many years.
Of the footage of the undercover reporter’s questioning, he commented: “Here is a secret service operating above the law in South Africa. We pull the wool over everyone’s eyes. We do exactly what we want. The local authorities do not know what we are doing.”
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.
Berlusconi Immunity Thrown Out by Constitutional Court
Italy’s top court, the Constitutional Court, has thrown out a law granting immunity from prosecution to the president, Silvio Berlusconi:
“The law overturned Wednesday was pushed through by Berlusconi’s conservative coalition in 2008 when he faced separate trials in Milan for corruption and tax fraud tied to his Mediaset broadcasting empire. It granted immunity from prosecution while in office to the country’s four top office holders — the premier, the president of the republic and the two parliament speakers.
The proceedings against Berlusconi were suspended as a result of the law, drawing accusations that it was tailor-made for the premier.
The corruption trial is particularly threatening because, in the meantime, the premier’s co-defendant has been convicted of accepting a bribe to lie in court to protect Berlusconi in another case.
Still, even if convicted, the premier would not be obliged to resign and could simply appeal, as sentences in Italy are usually not served until all avenues of appeal are exhausted.”
Ron Paul: There Will Be Violence….
Ron Paul on Glenn Beck, via Lew Rockwell:
“I think that there will be violence,” he explained. “I hope we don’t have to go through, you know, a very violent period of time, but that’s what happens too often when the government runs out of money and runs out of wealth, the people argue over, you know, a shrinking pie and, of course, the people who have to produce are sick and tired of producing.”
Obama Heads UN Security Council..
“Barack Obama will cement the new co-operative relationship between the US and the United Nations this month when he becomes the first American president to chair its 15-member Security Council.
The topic for the summit-level session of the council on September 24 is nuclear non-proliferation and nuclear disarmament – one of several global challenges that the US now wants to see addressed at a multinational level.
“The council has a very important role to play in preventing the spread and use of nuclear weapons, and it’s the world’s principal body for dealing with global security cooperation,” Susan Rice, US envoy to the UN, said last week.
Her remarks were the latest by the Obama administration to emphasise a shift from the strategy of the previous Bush administration, sometimes criticised by its UN partners for seeking to use the world body principally to endorse its own unilateral policies. The US currently holds the month-long rotating presidency of the Security Council…”
More at the Financial Times.
My Comment:
Did I read that right? The way to shift away from the Bush administration’s tendency to use the UN to endorse its own unilateral policies is to put Obama at the head of the UN Security Council??
Am I missing something here? How does this represent a shift away? Isn’t it more like coming out of the closet on it?Economic Freedom in US in Decline..
An interactive map of world economic freedom at the Cato Institute (2007)
Cato also has the 2009 Economic Freedom of the World Annual Report which shows the US number 6 in the world, much lower than the number 2 spot it held in 2000.
Time to Run
My latest piece, “Time to Run”, at Lew Rockwell:
“Is it time to run?
That’s what I’ve been asking myself for three years now.
Before that, I thought it was simply a matter of finding a better place to live. A place that was quieter and cheaper. Where flippers and developers hadn’t taken over the neighborhood. Somewhere safe I could park my car on the street and not worry about it.
But by the time I found it, I also found that the thieves were inside the house, not on the street. There’s really no hiding from them. And no hiding from what they can do.
Our mene, mene, tekel upharsin is on the wall.It’s time to run, not hide.
I mean that. We’re in the throes of an economic collapse of a kind last seen in the 1930s. The government is intent on grabbing control of whatever it can. American firms are dropping like flies. Unemployment is soaring. Debt is soaring. The money supply is soaring. Our foreign policy is a wreck – we have more enemies than we can count. We have a drug war on the borders, we have gang war in the ghettos, we have culture wars in the academy and media.We have criminals in government.
The future isn’t any brighter. Subprime is only the first leg down. We still have a second wave of housing trouble in store, centering around commercial real estate and option ARM loans.Gerald Celente, the CEO of Trends Research, wrote a piece last year predicting that by 2012 there would be food riots, tax rebellion, and revolution across the country. Celente has a good track record in the forecasting business.
Experts predict a 100% rise in prices across the board. In the best-case scenario, it will happen over ten years. In the worst case, it might happen within months….”Read the rest at Lew Rockwell
Paul Craig Roberts on the End of Empire (comment added)
Washington Arrogance Has Fomented a Muslim Revolution
by Paul Craig RobertsHat-tip to David Redick for the link
“In a government of law, the existence of the government will be imperiled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously. Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for the law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.”
~ Justice Louis Brandeis
Is Pakistan responsible for the Mumbai attack in India? No.
Is India’s repression of its Muslim minority responsible? No.
Is the United States government responsible? Yes.The attack on Mumbai required radicalized Muslims. Radicalized Muslims resulted from; (Item numbers inserted by ARTS)
1. the US overthrowing the elected government in Iran and imposed the Shah;
2. from the US stationing troops in Saudi Arabia;
3. from the US invading and attempting to occupy Afghanistan and Iraq,
4. bombing weddings, funerals, and children’s soccer games;
5. from the US violating international and US law by torturing its Muslim victims
6. from the US enlisting Pakistan in its war against the Taliban;
7. from the US violating Pakistan’s sovereignty by conducting military operations on Pakistani territory, killing Pakistani civilians;
8. from the US government supporting a half century of Israeli ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their lands, towns and villages;
9. from the assault of American culture on Muslim values;
10. from the US purchasing the government of Egypt to act as its puppet;
11. from US arrogance that America is the supreme arbiter of morality.As Justice Brandeis said, crime is contagious. Government teaches by example, and America’s example is lawlessness. America’s brutal crimes against the Muslim world have invited every Muslim to become a law unto himself – a revolutionary. It is not terror that Washington confronts but revolution……
The change over which Obama will preside will have no American victories. The change will come from
1. America as a failed state,
2. from the dollar dethroned as reserve currency,
3. from America repudiated by its allies and paid puppets,
4. from massive unemployment for which there is no solution,
5. from hyperinflation that produces anarchy.
6. The day might arrive when Washington is faced with revolution at home as well as abroad.December 5, 2008
My Comment
Roberts’s piece is provocatively stated, so I thought should add this comment. I think he’s fairly correct to state that the Pakistani and Indian governments are not to blame, fundamentally, for what’s happening. However, to the degree that these governments - like others - tend to take the line of least resistance and go along with Washington’s agenda, or buy into it, or stand on the sidelines while that agenda is enacted elsewhere, they encourage the misdeeds of the prime culprit. And, to the degree that they are themselves corrupt or lawless, they don’t help the situation…
(Not following either of the two countries’ internal politics, I can’t do more than make a general statement).
How not to go along, you might ask?
Well, there’s Angela Merkel’s recent condemnation of global central bank interventionism. Why can’t we hear more of that from the global community?
Or has the cat got its tongue on every issue but the issue of Israel-Palestine?
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