Ezra Pound is unquestionably the progenitor of modern American literature and English-speaking poetry. Yet for years there have been elite anthologies whose august lists exclude his name.
For those aware of his influence on writers ranging from Joyce to William Carlos Williams all the way to Ginsberg's 50's "Beatniks" ignoring Pound in a survey of 20th century English-speaking literature is like trying to discuss German expressionism or the score for "Star Wars" without mentioning Wagner. And yet as with the former several have made the attempt.
The reason behind each example is the modern scarlet letter known as "Anti-semitism". Once carelessly displayed by the likes of Wagner and Pound, it was then exploited to justify a second world war and wholesale slaughter. The realization that his bigoted analysis owed less to his incisive intellect than a "shallow suburban mentality" finally led Pound to admit that in speaking of race or "Jewish USURY" he was mistaking a symptom for a cause. "The cause" Pound finally admitted was not unique to race but human "AVARICE."
So it is ironic that while we claim to have recognized the danger of making the artifice of "race" a handy scapegoat for society's ills, we refuse to face the fact that while the bankers are indeed happy to profit from want and war as Pound decried -["people here for that wars never interrupted... the interest of DEBTS": from Cantos LXIX,] we continue to slave and die for their pleasure.
Think of it this way: How is our response to the economic crisis any different from those who blindly trusted Bernie Madoff? Have we demanded to see the books? Are we assured of a return on the earnings from our labor? Do we have more than the bankers' promise that our children will not be saddled with yet more feckless debt?
Testifying before Congress, Neal Barofsky, the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Assets Relief Program described the plan as "inherently vulnerable to fraud, waste and abuse, including significant issues relating to conflicts of interest facing fund managers, collusion between participants and vulnerabilities to money laundering."
Pound presaged this government "trap" by half a century: "There will certainly be minor purloinments. As long as the socialists used their accessories as red herring to keep man's mind off the creation of money."
The next time we complain about Wall Street's corruption maybe we should think about our sheepish complicity. Truth is we're mostly stuck in this fix because of that "shallow suburban mentality."
Showing posts with label corruption. Show all posts
Showing posts with label corruption. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Sunday, March 8, 2009
The Midas Touch
When Kamau Kingara was gunned down within the shadow of the presidential residence it seemed Kenya was doomed to descend into lawlessness and violent anarchy. That Kingara and his murdered friend were both campaigning against the police for illegal killings suggests that the brazenness of the attack was meant to send a message.
To their credit, the people have not been intimidated into helpless passivity. The day after the execution protesters had to be subdued by the Nairobi police who fired tear gas at students and demonstrators. But such is the tragedy that has befallen that once proud and possible land-- a legacy owed to the corrupting influence of the New World Order. As Professor Ali Masrui warned prophetically at the 23rd Congress for of the Society for International Development nine months after 9-11: "it is not just capitalism, which can be globalized. Anarchy can also be globalized. There was a time when we only knew that when the United States sneezed, Africa and Asia started coughing and shivering. But there are now signs that when Africa and Asia are in pain, it may not be long before the United States has a headache."
It was Kingara's determination to ameliorate Kenya's ills brought on by a quarter century of graft and corruption followed by the dictates of the imperial World Bank and the IMF's 'free market principles' engendering state sanctioned theft that led to the creation of his people's foundation.
About the Oscar Foundation
The tale of the social, political & economic woes & suffering that poor Kenyans are undergoing needs no retelling. The pains, fears and anxieties being experienced are written all over their faces. The question is, who will supply the true light? Who will lead the change for national salvation?
Kingara had framed his vision of OFFLACK poignantly-- "to translate into a fact the fictitious phrase that every man is deemed to know the law and that every man knows his rights and obligation and can seek justice through the law."
It has become common wisdom for us "westerners" to blame Mugabe for bringing Zimbabwe to its present abject despair. Never do we consider the possibility that the country's dilemma stems less from Mugabe's "racist misrule" than his stubborn resistance to accede to the New World Order. Europe grew rich exploiting Africa's riches. It is not preposterous to suggest that the anarchy that has spread from Rwanda to Zaire and now reaches to Sudan and the tragedy of Darfur is a result of the continent's former colonial masters sowing chaos. As observed from Lebanon to Iraq to Equatorial Guinea a country in chaos is easy to loot. When we view the anarchy taking hold across poor countries against the backdrop of our lawless bankers it comes clear that the New World Order is little more than a scheme for global extortion.
Here is how an astute Zimbabwean sums up the neoliberal game plan.
Kenya has a humanitarian crisis and the United Nations is appealing for US$390.05 million.
What has happened to all the World Bank/IMF loans that have been put its way by the friendly West? Is Kenya on sanctions? No! Does Kenya have commercial farmers? Yes, in the Rift Valley. So what has happened to the productivity of these farms that Kenya is now looking for $172.75 millions in food aid? Has there been a land reform programme in Kenya? No, the peasants are still disposed of their lands.
If Kenya has a humanitarian crisis whilst it enjoys the goodwill of the West, then it does not bode well for Zimbabwe under the financial plans of MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai and his MDC-T.
The West's strategy is to borrow money from China/East at a low interest rate and then re-package it as an IMF/World Bank loan and give it to Tsvangirai at very high interest rate. There goes our Chiadzwa diamonds for free. Has Tsvangirai got any Plan B at all?
Western countries have now ditched the free market economic fundamentals that have led their economies into free fall and are now fervent adoptees of State Capitalism as practiced by China and India (which appear to have weathered the economic tsunami much better than the West).
Ten years ago Kenya was being touted by the World Bank and IMF as a model for neo-liberalism. But prosperity cannot exist where there is no stable government-- yet it remains the great wish of our global capitalists to undermine the democracies of weaker states. The consequence of that strategy has been presaged by the Greeks. Kenya now turns its eyes to the ever more powerful East. As Herodotus and Ovid explained, in the end Midas was blinded not by his gold but by his own short-sighted greed.
To their credit, the people have not been intimidated into helpless passivity. The day after the execution protesters had to be subdued by the Nairobi police who fired tear gas at students and demonstrators. But such is the tragedy that has befallen that once proud and possible land-- a legacy owed to the corrupting influence of the New World Order. As Professor Ali Masrui warned prophetically at the 23rd Congress for of the Society for International Development nine months after 9-11: "it is not just capitalism, which can be globalized. Anarchy can also be globalized. There was a time when we only knew that when the United States sneezed, Africa and Asia started coughing and shivering. But there are now signs that when Africa and Asia are in pain, it may not be long before the United States has a headache."
It was Kingara's determination to ameliorate Kenya's ills brought on by a quarter century of graft and corruption followed by the dictates of the imperial World Bank and the IMF's 'free market principles' engendering state sanctioned theft that led to the creation of his people's foundation.
About the Oscar Foundation
The tale of the social, political & economic woes & suffering that poor Kenyans are undergoing needs no retelling. The pains, fears and anxieties being experienced are written all over their faces. The question is, who will supply the true light? Who will lead the change for national salvation?
Kingara had framed his vision of OFFLACK poignantly-- "to translate into a fact the fictitious phrase that every man is deemed to know the law and that every man knows his rights and obligation and can seek justice through the law."
It has become common wisdom for us "westerners" to blame Mugabe for bringing Zimbabwe to its present abject despair. Never do we consider the possibility that the country's dilemma stems less from Mugabe's "racist misrule" than his stubborn resistance to accede to the New World Order. Europe grew rich exploiting Africa's riches. It is not preposterous to suggest that the anarchy that has spread from Rwanda to Zaire and now reaches to Sudan and the tragedy of Darfur is a result of the continent's former colonial masters sowing chaos. As observed from Lebanon to Iraq to Equatorial Guinea a country in chaos is easy to loot. When we view the anarchy taking hold across poor countries against the backdrop of our lawless bankers it comes clear that the New World Order is little more than a scheme for global extortion.
Here is how an astute Zimbabwean sums up the neoliberal game plan.
Kenya has a humanitarian crisis and the United Nations is appealing for US$390.05 million.
What has happened to all the World Bank/IMF loans that have been put its way by the friendly West? Is Kenya on sanctions? No! Does Kenya have commercial farmers? Yes, in the Rift Valley. So what has happened to the productivity of these farms that Kenya is now looking for $172.75 millions in food aid? Has there been a land reform programme in Kenya? No, the peasants are still disposed of their lands.
If Kenya has a humanitarian crisis whilst it enjoys the goodwill of the West, then it does not bode well for Zimbabwe under the financial plans of MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai and his MDC-T.
The West's strategy is to borrow money from China/East at a low interest rate and then re-package it as an IMF/World Bank loan and give it to Tsvangirai at very high interest rate. There goes our Chiadzwa diamonds for free. Has Tsvangirai got any Plan B at all?
Western countries have now ditched the free market economic fundamentals that have led their economies into free fall and are now fervent adoptees of State Capitalism as practiced by China and India (which appear to have weathered the economic tsunami much better than the West).
Ten years ago Kenya was being touted by the World Bank and IMF as a model for neo-liberalism. But prosperity cannot exist where there is no stable government-- yet it remains the great wish of our global capitalists to undermine the democracies of weaker states. The consequence of that strategy has been presaged by the Greeks. Kenya now turns its eyes to the ever more powerful East. As Herodotus and Ovid explained, in the end Midas was blinded not by his gold but by his own short-sighted greed.
Thursday, March 5, 2009
The Trap for Obama, Updated w/video
Ever Deeper:
Now comes word that the official at the center of the fraud scandal at the Treasury Department has been allowed to quietly quit and retire from his job as a government regulator, despite allegations that he allowed a bank to falsify financial records (The federal government took over IndyMac back in July, after the bank's stock price plummeted to just pennies a share when it was revealed the bank had financial troubles due to defaulted mortgages and subprime loans, costing taxpayers over $9 billion. )
One becomes both dismayed and slightly amused when celebrated novelists bemoan the limitations of fiction. What their lament is meant to suggest is that there are realities specific to a particular time and place that demand authentic, unbiased reporting, that the conceit of universal truth is a 19th century pretense. One wonders where, if one accepts their premise, such an impartial observer might exist.
Just as the global financial meltdown continues to expose the glaring flaws in "free-market" capitalism, so have the recurrent tragedies of history shown that human stupidity, shortsightedness and greed know no cultural or geographical boundaries. For instance reading this : “If there is a single episode in this entire 18 months that has made me more angry, I can’t think of one other than AIG,” Bernanke said. “AIG exploited a huge gap in the regulatory system, there was no oversight of the financial-products division, this was a hedge fund basically that was attached to a large and stable insurance company.” --one doesn't know whether to laugh and go stock up on gold or simply become a hermit. Does the Chairman of the Federal Reserve not read the newspaper?
I submit that not only did Mr. Bernanke know that the "regulatory system" was being abused, his predecessor enabled the criminals. It is a crisis that President Obama, having wisely foreseen has now inherited, but he would be advised to observe the upheavals taking place in the land of his father. He will be facing a powerful backlash if he turns into the lightning-rod for the American public's simmering rage.
January 17, 2008 Protests Bring New Violence in Kenya
Jeffrey Gettleman, NYTimes, NAIROBI:
Opposition protests resumed in Kenya on Wednesday, and as many people here feared, violence erupted across the country once again. [ ] Opposition leaders have vowed to carry on protests for two more days, and it seems that Kenya’s security forces, which have deemed all protests illegal, are cracking down harshly. On Wednesday afternoon, police officers in padded suits sealed off downtown Nairobi, the capital, and ordered everyone out...
In the near quarter century of Daniel Arap Moi's rule the Kenyan people saw their once hopeful future crushed by their ruler's apparent greed. According to a report by the "Kroll Risk Consultancy", Mr Moi and his sons used a web of front men to manage their secret deals and hide their money. It estimated that Gideon Moi was worth some £550 million as of 2002, while Philip was worth about £384 million. The report was prepared at the request of the new Kibaki administration which succeeded in replacing President Moi by promising to end state corruption.
In 1999 John Githongo founded the Kenyan chapter of the anti-corruption organization Transparency International. In line with his pledge to wipe out government corruption Kibaki appointed Githongo as his "anti-corruption czar". When Githongo revealed that an Anglo Leasing fraud had siphoned off $100 million from inflated government security contracts via a phantom company listed in Britain he was denounced by his fellow ministers and eventually forced to leave the country. Githongo has finally returned to Kenya but what he is finding does not inspire him with hope.
That is the challenge facing President Obama ... as the SEC complicity clearly shows... the rot in Washington reaches clear to the head of the stinking fish. Now we learn that Obama's own White House Counsel Greg Craig represented Rove in his recent book deal, while Craig’s law partner, close associate and mentor, Emmet Flood, is representing Bush in executive privilege matters before the Washington D.C. Court of Appeals, where Bush officials are charged with the political firings of U.S. attorneys for failing to act on orders to prosecute Democrats prior to elections.
One does not need to be a famous novelist to conjure all the dire consequences to a country that accepts this level of corruption.
Charles Dickens' GREAT EXPECTATIONS
In his 'Great Expectations' Dickens takes on the corruption of the judicial system of his time. Dickens' masterful work was intended to propel those in power to institute reforms at a time when children, their parents having been forced into crime, were destined to share the same fate. Great Expectations contained the implicit warning that left unchecked, England would be guaranteed a future of violence, lawlessness and despair-- a fate that still gravely faces Kenya and our own USA.
Luckily, though we may not have a Dickensian novelist, we do have at least one incorruptible reporter who moonlights as a comedian:
Now comes word that the official at the center of the fraud scandal at the Treasury Department has been allowed to quietly quit and retire from his job as a government regulator, despite allegations that he allowed a bank to falsify financial records (The federal government took over IndyMac back in July, after the bank's stock price plummeted to just pennies a share when it was revealed the bank had financial troubles due to defaulted mortgages and subprime loans, costing taxpayers over $9 billion. )
One becomes both dismayed and slightly amused when celebrated novelists bemoan the limitations of fiction. What their lament is meant to suggest is that there are realities specific to a particular time and place that demand authentic, unbiased reporting, that the conceit of universal truth is a 19th century pretense. One wonders where, if one accepts their premise, such an impartial observer might exist.
Just as the global financial meltdown continues to expose the glaring flaws in "free-market" capitalism, so have the recurrent tragedies of history shown that human stupidity, shortsightedness and greed know no cultural or geographical boundaries. For instance reading this : “If there is a single episode in this entire 18 months that has made me more angry, I can’t think of one other than AIG,” Bernanke said. “AIG exploited a huge gap in the regulatory system, there was no oversight of the financial-products division, this was a hedge fund basically that was attached to a large and stable insurance company.” --one doesn't know whether to laugh and go stock up on gold or simply become a hermit. Does the Chairman of the Federal Reserve not read the newspaper?
I submit that not only did Mr. Bernanke know that the "regulatory system" was being abused, his predecessor enabled the criminals. It is a crisis that President Obama, having wisely foreseen has now inherited, but he would be advised to observe the upheavals taking place in the land of his father. He will be facing a powerful backlash if he turns into the lightning-rod for the American public's simmering rage.
January 17, 2008 Protests Bring New Violence in Kenya
Jeffrey Gettleman, NYTimes, NAIROBI:
Opposition protests resumed in Kenya on Wednesday, and as many people here feared, violence erupted across the country once again. [ ] Opposition leaders have vowed to carry on protests for two more days, and it seems that Kenya’s security forces, which have deemed all protests illegal, are cracking down harshly. On Wednesday afternoon, police officers in padded suits sealed off downtown Nairobi, the capital, and ordered everyone out...
In the near quarter century of Daniel Arap Moi's rule the Kenyan people saw their once hopeful future crushed by their ruler's apparent greed. According to a report by the "Kroll Risk Consultancy", Mr Moi and his sons used a web of front men to manage their secret deals and hide their money. It estimated that Gideon Moi was worth some £550 million as of 2002, while Philip was worth about £384 million. The report was prepared at the request of the new Kibaki administration which succeeded in replacing President Moi by promising to end state corruption.
In 1999 John Githongo founded the Kenyan chapter of the anti-corruption organization Transparency International. In line with his pledge to wipe out government corruption Kibaki appointed Githongo as his "anti-corruption czar". When Githongo revealed that an Anglo Leasing fraud had siphoned off $100 million from inflated government security contracts via a phantom company listed in Britain he was denounced by his fellow ministers and eventually forced to leave the country. Githongo has finally returned to Kenya but what he is finding does not inspire him with hope.
"In the past, the scandals that we had were of a scale that was mind-boggling to most people. Big sums, hundreds of millions of dollars! Those are many zeros and sometimes difficult to connect to your everyday circumstances," he said. "What is happening now is having a very direct impact on the poor."
Back to "Business as usual"
Despite President Kibaki's promises, Mr Moi and his sons remain highly influential, Gideon Moi is now an MP and former President Moi was recently named special envoy to Sudan's north-south peace process. Kenyans' great expectations that followed Kibaki's election have given way to despair as they watch the vultures both in and out of Kenya pick away their future through stealth and criminal deceit. As one reporter put it, "There was a feeling [in the new government]that pursuing corruption of the past was provoking corruption allegations in the present".That is the challenge facing President Obama ... as the SEC complicity clearly shows... the rot in Washington reaches clear to the head of the stinking fish. Now we learn that Obama's own White House Counsel Greg Craig represented Rove in his recent book deal, while Craig’s law partner, close associate and mentor, Emmet Flood, is representing Bush in executive privilege matters before the Washington D.C. Court of Appeals, where Bush officials are charged with the political firings of U.S. attorneys for failing to act on orders to prosecute Democrats prior to elections.
One does not need to be a famous novelist to conjure all the dire consequences to a country that accepts this level of corruption.
Charles Dickens' GREAT EXPECTATIONS
In his 'Great Expectations' Dickens takes on the corruption of the judicial system of his time. Dickens' masterful work was intended to propel those in power to institute reforms at a time when children, their parents having been forced into crime, were destined to share the same fate. Great Expectations contained the implicit warning that left unchecked, England would be guaranteed a future of violence, lawlessness and despair-- a fate that still gravely faces Kenya and our own USA.
Luckily, though we may not have a Dickensian novelist, we do have at least one incorruptible reporter who moonlights as a comedian:
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Murder for Profit pt 3: The Stench of Avarice
Greed without end, spasmodic lust; Murderers' hands, usurers' hands, hands of prayer; Exhales in foetid breath the human swarm
Whipped on by fear and lust, blood raw, blood war,
Breathing blessedness and savage heats,
Eating itself and spewing what it eats,
Hatching war...
-"The Immortals", Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf
It began long before the Iraq invasion.
As George Monbiot reported back in 2005- The government of the US, though it had been informed about a smuggling operation which brought Saddam Hussein's regime some $4.6bn, decided to let it continue. It did so because it deemed the smuggling to be in its national interest, as it helped friendly countries (Turkey and Jordan) evade the sanctions on Iraq... But this isn't the half of it.
Four days before Volcker reported his findings about Saddam Hussein, the US inspector general for Iraq reconstruction published a report about the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) - the US agency which governed Iraq between April 2003 and June 2004. The inspector general's job is to make sure that the money the authority spent was properly accounted for. It wasn't. In just 14 months, $8.8bn went absent without leave. This is more than Mobutu Sese Seko managed to steal in 32 years of looting Zaire."
It appears that the moment U.S. boots hit Iraqi ground the army brass was preparing to arrange its kickbacks. Though the CPA's inspector general claimed that the agency was "burdened by severe inefficiencies and poor management", more serious investigations now reveal that it was actually "burdened" by endemic fraud, corruption and false accounting-- the "Enron model".
From as early as 2004 officials in the CPA were demanding bribes of up to $300,000 in return for awarding contracts. Iraqi money seized by US forces simply disappeared. Some $800m was handed out to US commanders without being counted or even weighed. $1.4billion was secreted out of Baghdad and somehow ended up with the Kurdish regional government in the town of Irbil. The Iraq invasion had given the military and its co-dependents a license to steal.
As the Guardian reports: "Contracts to US companies were awarded by the CPA without any financial safeguards. They were issued without competition, in the form of "cost-plus" deals. This means that the companies were paid for the expenses they incurred, plus a percentage of those expenses in the form of profit. They had a powerful incentive, in other words, to spend as much money as possible."
They shoot reporters, don't they?
Imagine you are a young journalist, say with the NYTimes and you've been shipped to Baghdad to cover a war that half the world and the U.S. military already know is an all out lie. There you discover that your new army buddies, the very men you may need to rely on should you be forced to leave the Green Zone and report from a "free fire zone" are getting a cut of the loot. Just how deeply would you dig to get that story? In hindsight, not that far...
"Until now, the investigations have never reached the people at the top," The London Independent's Patrick Cockburn told Radio National's Fran Kelly.
"One scandal in 2004-05 saw the entire military procurement budget for Iraq's Ministry of Defence, $US1.3 billion, disappear.
"Disappear in the sense that contracts were signed with small companies in Poland and Pakistan and a few bits of some ancient Soviet helicopters were purchased and never delivered. At that time the ministry was being run by American officers. Either they were incredibly negligent or they were in on it, and most of the Iraqis believe they were in on it."
For the NYTimes the scandal apparently comes as a grand surprise. Despite having reported on the conviction of a former Coalition Provisional Authority official for money laundering, bribery and conspiracy. In fact although little of the U.S. military's role in the widespread corruption was reported on in the paper itself both the Sydney Herald and the Christian Scientist Monitor quote the NYTimes International edition as saying that the probe was certain to expand to include US Army Reserve officers.
Of course, now that there is a new Obama administration it is safe for the mind-boggling breadth of the scandal to be exposed, but for all the good intentions of Justice officials as Cockburn notes: "[The corruption] was pervasive. There were very large sums of money to be made and the guys in charge realized that [having been given what amounts to blanket immunity by the Bush regime] there wasn't going to be any comeback."
Whipped on by fear and lust, blood raw, blood war,
Breathing blessedness and savage heats,
Eating itself and spewing what it eats,
Hatching war...
-"The Immortals", Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf
It began long before the Iraq invasion.
As George Monbiot reported back in 2005- The government of the US, though it had been informed about a smuggling operation which brought Saddam Hussein's regime some $4.6bn, decided to let it continue. It did so because it deemed the smuggling to be in its national interest, as it helped friendly countries (Turkey and Jordan) evade the sanctions on Iraq... But this isn't the half of it.
Four days before Volcker reported his findings about Saddam Hussein, the US inspector general for Iraq reconstruction published a report about the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) - the US agency which governed Iraq between April 2003 and June 2004. The inspector general's job is to make sure that the money the authority spent was properly accounted for. It wasn't. In just 14 months, $8.8bn went absent without leave. This is more than Mobutu Sese Seko managed to steal in 32 years of looting Zaire."
It appears that the moment U.S. boots hit Iraqi ground the army brass was preparing to arrange its kickbacks. Though the CPA's inspector general claimed that the agency was "burdened by severe inefficiencies and poor management", more serious investigations now reveal that it was actually "burdened" by endemic fraud, corruption and false accounting-- the "Enron model".
From as early as 2004 officials in the CPA were demanding bribes of up to $300,000 in return for awarding contracts. Iraqi money seized by US forces simply disappeared. Some $800m was handed out to US commanders without being counted or even weighed. $1.4billion was secreted out of Baghdad and somehow ended up with the Kurdish regional government in the town of Irbil. The Iraq invasion had given the military and its co-dependents a license to steal.
As the Guardian reports: "Contracts to US companies were awarded by the CPA without any financial safeguards. They were issued without competition, in the form of "cost-plus" deals. This means that the companies were paid for the expenses they incurred, plus a percentage of those expenses in the form of profit. They had a powerful incentive, in other words, to spend as much money as possible."
They shoot reporters, don't they?
Imagine you are a young journalist, say with the NYTimes and you've been shipped to Baghdad to cover a war that half the world and the U.S. military already know is an all out lie. There you discover that your new army buddies, the very men you may need to rely on should you be forced to leave the Green Zone and report from a "free fire zone" are getting a cut of the loot. Just how deeply would you dig to get that story? In hindsight, not that far...
"Until now, the investigations have never reached the people at the top," The London Independent's Patrick Cockburn told Radio National's Fran Kelly.
"One scandal in 2004-05 saw the entire military procurement budget for Iraq's Ministry of Defence, $US1.3 billion, disappear.
"Disappear in the sense that contracts were signed with small companies in Poland and Pakistan and a few bits of some ancient Soviet helicopters were purchased and never delivered. At that time the ministry was being run by American officers. Either they were incredibly negligent or they were in on it, and most of the Iraqis believe they were in on it."
For the NYTimes the scandal apparently comes as a grand surprise. Despite having reported on the conviction of a former Coalition Provisional Authority official for money laundering, bribery and conspiracy. In fact although little of the U.S. military's role in the widespread corruption was reported on in the paper itself both the Sydney Herald and the Christian Scientist Monitor quote the NYTimes International edition as saying that the probe was certain to expand to include US Army Reserve officers.
Of course, now that there is a new Obama administration it is safe for the mind-boggling breadth of the scandal to be exposed, but for all the good intentions of Justice officials as Cockburn notes: "[The corruption] was pervasive. There were very large sums of money to be made and the guys in charge realized that [having been given what amounts to blanket immunity by the Bush regime] there wasn't going to be any comeback."
Monday, January 5, 2009
A Brand New Year Breeds New Corruption
"The protests (against the Israeli Invasion of Gaza) represent corruption on Earth, and not righteousness or reform." Those are not the words of a far-right Likudnik; they are from the printed declaration of a top Saudi cleric and justice official who claims that the protests in support of the Palestinians are corrupt, and "only serve to foment anger and aggression".
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak (R) shakes hands with Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni during their meeting in Cairo, December 25, 2008.
In Egypt, as Robert Fisk reports: "the true disgrace of Egypt ... is not in its (lack of) response to the slaughter in Gaza--it is the corruption that has become embedded in an Egyptian society. "the idea of service --health, education, genuine security for ordinary people -- has simply ceased to exist. There has developed in Egypt a kind of religious facade in which the meaning of Islam has become effaced by its physical representation. Egyptian civil "servants" and government officials are often scrupulous in their religious observances -- yet they tolerate and connive in rigged elections, violations of the law and prison torture."
Greed Uber Alles
There was a time when the Kibbutz represented the highest of human aspirations-- an ideal to live in communion with the Earth-- to thrive and worship in Peace. Such innocence could not long survive in a neighborhood bought off and gilded by Western Avarice. High Principles only last as long or extend as far as the interest on a dollar. A distraught Israeli asks:
"how is it possible for one of Israel's greatest military heroes, a man with a reputation as a patriot and even as a "hard-line" supporter of Israeli settlement in Gaza, Judea and Samaria, to bulldoze through a suicidal project that runs counter to everything he has stood for during the past fifty-seven years? Apparently, new revelations have caused suspicions of a more tangible motive: corruption.
Sharon appears to be personally and financially beholden to a circle of financial backers and campaign contributors who stand to make a killing from the Gaza "disengagement." In addition, at least one, and possibly three, other powerful officials in the Sharon administration seem to have a financial interest in the expulsion/withdrawal operation.
Three years ago, a mysterious loan that Sharon had received from an old friend and former army buddy, a wealthy British businessman named Cyril Kern, dominated Israel's headlines. Sharon had apparently used the money to pay a stiff fine imposed on him by Israel's election authority for his solicitation of illegal campaign contributions. One of the arguments that he used to defend himself was that Kern had absolutely no business interests in Israel; hence, the loan could not be construed as a bribe.
Now, it seems that a corporation has been formed to develop a gambling casino on the site of the Gaza Jewish community of Elei Sinai, whose land is slated for confiscation and whose inhabitants are marked for expulsion in August, only two weeks from the time that this is being written. The principal organizer of this venture is a financier, Samuel Flatto-Sharon, who has been a fugitive from justice in France for over 20 years, charged with embezzling hundreds of millions of dollars from investors in a fund he had managed. Israel gave Flatto-Sharon refuge and citizenship under its Law of the Return, which allows Jews of every background and past history to immigrate to Israel. Among the other investors are a Saudi billionaire and--you guessed it--a British citizen named Cyril Kern.
Nor, as it turns out, is this Kern's first venture into the Palestinian casino world. He has been a major investor in the casino in Jericho, which had to close down during the recent "intifada" because the terrorists couldn't resist the impulse to shoot it up.
Another major investor in the Jericho casino is an Austrian financier named Martin Schlaf. Described in the Israeli press as a close personal friend of Sharon, he was also a major source of the illegal campaign contributions that enabled Sharon to be elected Israel's Prime Minister in 2001.
Not that the Flatto-Sharon and Schlaf groups are the only ones that stand to profit from the confiscated land of the Israeli "settlers." Yet a third such enterprise has as its managing director none other than Eival Giladi, the official in the Prime Minister's office whom Sharon has designated as the "coordinator" of the expulsion-retreat. The British-owned Portland Trust corporation has plans to raise $500 million to build 150,000 housing units for Arabs on the land seized from the Jewish farmers. Giladi will substantially augment his meager income as an Israeli civil servant by directing the development of the land, whose present owners are to be "evacuated," after he supervises their expulsion himself. No public official, it would seem, has ever had a stronger incentive for getting his job done!
The principal investor in the Portland Trust is Sir Ronald Cohen, a British billionaire who is a close advisor and political backer of the number two man in the British government, Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown. Cohen also recently bought up Israel's monopoly telephone company, Bezeq.
Another public official who has a possible financial interest in the "disengagement" is Sharon's closest advisor, his chief of staff and personal emissary Dov Weissglass. Virtually all-knowledgeable Israelis believe that Weissglass is the principal architect of, and driving force behind, the "disengagement." Weissglass is (also) a friend of the shadowy Palestinian financier Muhammad Rashid, who managed the looting of the PA-owned companies and the transfer of their assets to the personal accounts of Yasir Arafat, Jabril Rajoub, and other Palestinian officials.
Gaza: A History of Corruption
Whether it be in the Palestinian Territories, apartheid South Africa or Northern Arizona, a subject people are easily exploited. Gambling casinos are the perfect cover for laundering one's ill-gotten gains, avoiding the law and unwelcome taxation. Indeed, the Blago scandal seems almost laughable after witnessing the Grand Theft now taking place in Washington. One must conclude that our Congress, for all its transparent failings, has finally produced the unabashed symbiosis between politics, graft and corruption.
“Lobbyists, legislators, and inside-the-Beltway lawyers are the real stakeholders in Indian gambling,” says Alexis Johnson, a lawyer based in Arizona, who has served as an advisor to campaigns against the legalization of tribal gambling in several states. “Abramoff is just the tip of the iceberg.” Johnson likens casinos to the infected goods that the British distributed to Indians during the colonial period. “This is the new smallpox blanket, but everyone is enamored of it because it has got dollar signs all over it.”
Where Mr. Blagojevich crossed the line was in letting the truth escape from his own lips. Were he a more skillful politician he would understand that in high-profile positions such as say the governor of a state, or leader of the Senate, it is incumbent that one run the shakedown through a surrogate. It is a concept that Washington intimately respects as Harry Reid and his three sons will no doubt attest. From the LATimes:
'The name alone made the eyes glaze over: “The Clark County Conservation of Public Land and Natural Resources Act of 2002.” In a welter of technical jargon, it dealt with boundary shifts, land trades and other arcane matters – all in Nevada.
As he introduced it, Nevada’s senior U.S. senator, Democrat Harry Reid, assured colleagues that his bill was a bipartisan measure to protect the environment and help the economy in America’s fastest-growing state. What Reid did not explain was that the bill promised a cavalcade of benefits to real estate developers, corporations and local institutions that were paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in lobbying fees to his sons’ and son-in-law’s firms, federal lobbyist reports show.'
War As Distraction
Timing an Invasion
Israel’s attack on Gaza has made a mish-mash of that country’s upcoming national election.
“They’re saying no political considerations will be part of the decision-making process — which is of course quite ridiculous,” said Shmuel Rosner, a columnist for The Jerusalem Post.
The election is about corruption, say most knowledgeable Israeli observers, because of Olmert’s indictment, competence and leadership, and the economic crisis. If [Gaza] is a successful operation, Olmert will get some credit and Barak and Livni will share some credit, but the underlying issues for Netanyahu, particularly the economic situation, will still be there.
Meanwhile the Palestinian people, cut off from the world, abandoned by their Arab neighbors, are being burned, shot and bombarded, all for the depth our oil-fed greed and political corruption.
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