Friday, April 9, 2010

Be vewy vewy quiet or you'll be bupkes, ehehehehehehe



'I have spoken to the heads of various Wall Street equity derivative trading desks and every single one of the senior managers told me that Bernie Madoff was a fraud. Of course no one wants undue career risk by sticking their head up and saying that the emperor isn't wearing any clothes.'
-Harry Markopolos in 2005.

'As long as the music is playing, you've got to get up and dance.'
-Chuck Prince

'You know, Paul, Reagan proved deficits don't matter'
-Dick Cheney to Paul O'Neill (a month later Cheney told O'Neill he was fired)

'To the ordinary guy, all this is a bunch of gobbledygook. But out of the gobbledygook comes a very clear thing: You can't trust the government; you can't believe what they say; and you can't rely on their judgment; and the implicit infallibility of presidents, which has been an accepted thing in America, is badly hurt by this, because it shows that people do things the President wants to do even though it's wrong, and the President can be wrong.'
-Haldeman to Nixon on Daniel Ellsberg's release of classified documents concerning a Pentagon study of US government decision making about the Vietnam War that came to be known as the Pentagon Papers.

WIKI : Ellsberg later claimed that after his trial ended, Watergate prosecutor William H. Merrill informed him of an aborted plot by Liddy and the "plumbers" to have 12 Cuban-Americans who had previously worked for the CIA to "totally incapacitate" Ellsberg as he appeared at a public rally, though it is unclear whether that meant to assassinate Ellsberg or merely to hospitalize him.

'Well, I had been consulting for the government, and this is now ’64, for about six years at that point, since ’58, in particular since ’59: Eisenhower, Kennedy, and now Johnson. And I had seen a lot of classified material by this time—I mean, tens of thousands of pages—and had been in a position to compare it with what was being said to the public. The public is lied to every day by the President, by his spokespeople, by his officers. If you can’t handle the thought that the President lies to the public for all kinds of reasons, you couldn’t stay in the government at that level, or you’re made aware of it, a week. … The fact is Presidents rarely say the whole truth—essentially, never say the whole truth—of what they expect and what they’re doing and what they believe and why they’re doing it and rarely refrain from lying, actually, about these matters.'
-Daniel Ellsberg

WIKI: Sibel Deniz Edmonds is a Turkish-American former FBI translator and founder of the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition (NSWBC). Edmonds was fired from her position as a language specialist at the FBI's Washington Field Office in March, 2002, after she accused a colleague of covering up illicit activity involving foreign nationals, alleging serious acts of security breaches, cover-ups, and intentional blocking of intelligence which, she contended, presented a danger to the United States' security. Since that time, court proceedings on her whistleblower claims have been blocked by the assertion of State Secrets Privilege.

Regarding 9/11

She alleges that the FBI received information in April 2001, from Behrooz Sarshar, one of its Farsi translators, that Osama Bin Laden was planning attacks on 4-5 cities with planes, some of the people were already in the country and the attacks would happen in a few months.

Regarding nuclear proliferation and official corruption

She alleges that she found evidence that people in the FBI, the State Department, the RAND corporation, the Pentagon, and Congress were recruited by a Turkish and Israeli-run criminal intelligence network, with connections to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, to steal nuclear weapons secrets.

She alleges that the FBI has a case file, 203A-WF-210023, detailing evidence of this.

She alleges that one high-ranking member of the State Department was selling classified information to Washington-based agents of the Republic of Turkey, who were in turn selling these secrets on the black market.

'The few who understand the system, will either be so interested from it's profits or so dependant on it's favors, that there will be no opposition from that class.'
-Rothschild Brothers of London, 1863

'I have never seen more Senators express discontent with their jobs....I think the major cause is that, deep down in our hearts, we have been accomplices in doing something terrible and unforgivable to our wonderful country. Deep down in our heart, we know that we have given our children a legacy of bankruptcy. We have defrauded our country to get ourselves elected.'
— John Danforth (R-Mo)

'It is well that the people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.'
— Henry Ford

'By this means government may secretly and unobserved, confiscate the wealth of the people, and not one man in a million will detect the theft.'
— John Maynard Keynes

'Give me control of a nation's money and I care not who makes it's laws'
—Mayer Amschel Bauer Rothschild

A long-held belief of your humble blogger when presented with, most often in the presence of alcohol, 'proof' of some conspiracy, is that at the end of the day all conspiracy falls under the same auspices.... the conspiracy of silence.

The secret is, at the end of the day, there are no secrets. Power and privilege afford a sensibility which typically involves keeping your neck in, your shoes polished, and your mouth shut.

Of course when someone violates the Federales Omertà, when someone dares to disregard the code of 'u è surdu, orbu e taci, campa cent'anni 'mpaci' ("He who is deaf, blind, and silent will live a hundred years in peace"), then of them an example must be made.

Even though hard and difficult truths can not be enunciated plainly that does not mean that the architects of the pablum narrative and the enablers thereof are totally unawares of their obfuscation and completely unsympathetic to the principals they espouse (but do not follow), and sometimes, much akin to the robber barons of old, they toss doubloons of disambiguation, from their carriages, to us humble folk.

But to get to these 'clues' sometimes you have to hold the MSM comics up to the light with magnifying glass and indignity extended.

To wit: Sycophantic Lawrence Summers stating,'There's a quiet depression in small business.'

And why?

Just connect the dots of the Federales having staff at each of the major banksters to monitor asset levels on a daily basis with the revelation? that the Mayan Long Count will probably expire before ZIRP does.

This Great Cycle of tight credit for homeowners and small businesses and the 'lingering' housing downturn keeps spinning chiefly because the asset levels being monitored and perpetually obfuscated by our blessed squints are sucking the capitalist 'love' right outta the middle class room.

But who in the MSM will beat the drum that the banskters are too bankrupt to go broke, and the consequences thereof?

Who will articulate again and again, who will pound the table, that the suffering and pain that is unfolding like a slow motion car crash is directly attributable to the ring-fencing of rich folks bad speculative bets? Who among the Amerikantura will call out the Nancy Capitalists as being antithetical to the American dream, as wholly unpatriotic, and dare one even suggest ... subversive? Socializing the downside and piratizing the upside is a national security threat and is for its' victims nothing short of domestic terrorism.

Can you imagine someone at Smells Fargo, a bankster coven heralded as one of the strongest that in reality is the granddaddy of insolvency, coming out and saying, 'We aren't just insolvent, we aren't just double secret insolvent we are cosmic s%*t sandwich insolvent..., hell we could gulp down another TARP whole and still be gurgling for oxygen. I mean seriously folks we got 1.7 trillion in QSPE and I'd be damned if I could find a handful of that crap that would realistically be 90% of par (maybe the quadruple A stuff) and brother the whole boatload would have to get to 94% to not wipe out in total our Tier One Kapital. We are Tier None. We've shuffled off the mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisible!! THIS IS AN EX-BANK!!'

No one wants to be Markopolis, Ellsberg or Edmonds. Everyone within the silent conspiracy knows that they must be vewy vewy quiet or they'll be bupkes, ehehehehehehe...

What we need is a hero, or it's generation zero.

6 comments:

William said...

"Generation Hero, or Generation Zero."

The best five-word summary of where we are I've come across thus far.

I'm of the opinion now that we've crossed the Collective Rubicon because we, Individually, made decisions (or failed to) on a daily basis that allowed our principles, ideals, and inherent knowledge of right and wrong to be slowly eroded like so much limestone from a Mediterranean cliff (Greece?).

The symbolism within your earlier post regarding Mandelbrot applies here as well, I think. Our individual failures so easily scale up to a collective failure.

"Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, this he will also reap."

Until a critical mass of individuals (oxymoron?) decides to take substantive action, we'll continue watching this epic feature in slow-motion, just as you describe.

As an aside, it's especially troubling to look into our crystal ball and see the result of a lost generation:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori

Cheers, AM,

MP

joe said...

anon M,

Don't lose hope. There are more people doing the best they can to fight the good fight.

For example, the Aguirre brothers, plaintiff attorneys, who turned to public service: one joined the SEC and was fired for investigating Pequot, Samberg, and Mack, but in the end, Pequot lost. The other brother worked as a district attorney in San Diego and did things like fight against the grant of $900 million in pension benefits he believes were granted illegally and argue San Diego ought to file chapter 9 bankruptcy to get a fresh start.

http://whistleblower.org/program-areas/corporate-a-financial-accountability/national-finance-reform/secgary-aguirre

http://legacy.signonsandiego.com/news/politics/20080525-9999-1m25pension.html

Plus, there's people like you spreading knowledge on the system.

Changing topics, one criticism I have of indexinvestor.com is that I their attempt to value gold, based on GDP growth, supply growth, etc. I think that approach is misguided. I haven't yet found an approach that makes sense to me, but I think it would have to involve psychology, monetary policy, and fiscal policy.

Anonymous Monetarist said...

Agree that there are many good folks out there, and organizations ... demos.org comes to mind.

My optimism is shall we say, pragmatic, and colored by the realization that our solons seem to be enslaved by the mentality that the most intelligent way to climb out of a big hole is to sell the populace on the need for a bigger shovel.

The mendacity of hope and the urgency of not is where pragmatism takes me, for if wishes were dishes we would all be living in five-star restaurants.

A flat tax and an across the board 20% cut would balance our budget. We will of course never take those steps so we risk being 'pushed' down the fiscal stairs.

Dipping the banks in the acid bath of price discovery would allow for the organic phoenix of creative destruction to lift all of us up to a brighter future. We will of course never take that path so we risk trailblazing down 'generation zero' gulch.

Removing the profit element from health care would allow us to join the rest of the civilized world but of course we will never take that advice so we will be eternally cajoled by the idiot box to 'ask our doctors' into perpetuity.

We'll deal with headlines when they become deadlines.

From now until then all we can do is 'save' what and who we can in whatever way we are able.

Anonymous Monetarist said...

William,

You are spot on good sir.

Atomization of society along with the growing dissonance between one's life and the mind-numbing pablum narrative (spewed in copious portions) will invariably spawn technological and social luddites.

Although my most recent company would not exist without the internet and my next proposed endeavor most certainly would not I too find myself moving into the technological luddite camp.

For me, not having a blackberry nor a pager, and having a message on my cell phone (not a Iphone thank you! and the ipod received as a gift awhile back is still in the box) saying that I check my messages on an irregular basis, is a 'personal' status symbol. Heck, other than during a Disney vacation as demanded by the missus, I've never texted!

See this as an qualitative addition not a quanitative subtraction. My world is trained that it takes awhile to get a hold of me, ain't that sweet?

Time to think, perchance to dream....

William said...

AM, you're only slightly ahead of me on the path to personal enlightenment. I am, at this instant, beginning to train those with whom I correspond not to expect emails from me more than once a week, at best.

I have no Crackberry, I do not subscribe to Wastebook, and I take some amount of pride to row against the current when it comes to all of the dissonance facilitators (though I must confess to an iPod Touch; it's a good music player / job search machine). The iPhone? Never!

If you need intellectual capital for your next venture, that's all I can offer you. I am a man of few fiduciary means, but I'd like to, before my death, discover that I do have something to offer to the world on other levels!

Keep up the good fight by not fighting. I've noticed that hostility and defeatist attitudes have come to be the order of the day, even on sites such as ZH, so it's refreshing to come here for immersion in rational, critical thought. You're doing great work; look forward to your next venture...

Cheers, AM!

Anonymous Monetarist said...

William,

Amen Brother.

Free Thinkers of the World Unite!

We have nothing to lose but our manufactured inner monologue.