Friday, 10 August 2012
UK trade deficit hits record high as exports sink
BRITAIN’S trade deficit hit a record high in June, as exports tumbled during a month in which economic activity was disturbed by the Queen’s Jubilee. The trade gap widened to £4.3bn in June, up from £2.7bn in May, as shipments of goods collapsed by 8.4 per cent. Exports of services rose 1.7 per cent, failing to offset the slump in goods shipments. Services produced a surplus of £5.8bn, while the trade in goods registered £10.1bn shortfall. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) said June was affected by May’s bank holiday being moved back a month, coupled with events surrounding the Queen’s Jubilee. For the second quarter, exports fell 3.3 per cent from their level a quarter earlier (excluding oil and erratic items). Imports slipped by 0.5 per cent in the second quarter, suggesting that economic troubles are taking their toll on trade. “Looking through the monthly volatility, it is clear that the Eurozone woes are having a major impact on our exporters,” said Mark Gregory, Ernst & Young’s chief economist. “Export volumes to EU countries fell by 3.7 per cent in the three months to June, in contrast to a fall of 2.4 per cent to non-EU countries.” Exports to France crashed by £269m in June, by £233m to the Netherlands, and by over £100m to both Italy and Spain. Bucking the trend, exports to Germany rose by £109m. “In the short-term the outlook for exports remains fragile,” Gregory added.
Source Article:- City AM
Tuesday, 7 August 2012
Through the Ages
Alfred Rosenberg
The Track of the Jew through the Ages
Translated with Notes and Introduction by Alexander Jacob
Historical Review Press, 2012
English language translations of any of Alfred Rosenberg’s works are going to be of value to scholars and laymen with an interest in the Third Reich or the philosophy of National Socialism. This volume is of particular interest because it is Rosenberg’s first published work as a refugee from Bolshevism, who fled his native Estonia to Germany, having seen a great deal of the excesses of the Jewish champions of the Russian proletariat.
http://archive.org/details/NoneRosenbergMemoirs
Another good source, Barbara Lane and Leila Rupp’s translations in Nazi Ideology Before 1933: A Documentation (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1978), includes articles by Rosenberg on “The Russian Jewish Revolution” (1919), “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Jewish World Policy,” an extract from a 1923 book on The Protocols; and “The Folkish Idea of State,” an extract from a 1924 book by Rosenberg.
From a historical perspective The Track of the Jews shows the sources from which Rosenberg derived his ideological anti-Semitism: his encounter with Jewish Bolsheviks in Russia. Dr. Jacob states that Rosenberg was already in Germany in 1918 and had joined the German Workers Party in 1919, several months prior to Hitler.
At 26, Rosenberg’s mentor in Germany was the well-known dramatist Dietrich Eckart, who was also to mentor Hitler. Rosenberg’s first work as a writer and editor was for Eckart’s periodical, Auf gut Deutsch, then for the NSDAP newspaper Münchener Beobachter, purchased by the party from the Thule Society in 1920. After Eckart’s death in 1923, Rosenberg assumed an editorial role (Jacob, p. i.).
In 1933, Rosenberg became head of the foreign political department of the party and in 1934 headed philosophical education within the NSDAP. In 1941, with the invasion of the USSR, he was appointed Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories. (Jacob, p. ii.), and was to take fatal responsibility — at Nuremberg — for the half-witted Slavophobic policy of the Third Reich in the Eastern Territories, despite his resistance to it.
Despite the ministerial appointments and party roles, Rosenberg, I think it fair to say, was one of those sincere idealists, like the economist Gottfried Feder and the agricultural minister Walther Darré, who was sidelined in favour of careerists, opportunists, and functionaries. However, like Julius Streicher, who welded little or no influence under the Third Reich, Rosenberg’s reputation as the NSDAP philosopher alone would have assured his lynching at Purim 1946 (as Streicher described it). His own disillusionment with the way National Socialism was applied under the Third Reich, with the ascendancy of opportunists, is recounted in his memoirs.
What, however, of the content of The Track of the Jew? At first glance one might get the impression that it is standard anti-Semitic fare and has nothing to say other than what is repeated over the Internet a million times and often in maniacal ways. However, Rosenberg applies his scholarly discipline to present a volume that is thoroughly documented, not overstated, not fanatical in presentation, drawing mainly from Jewish sources. This is augmented by Dr. Jacob’s many footnotes, accompanying those of Rosenberg, that explain the significance of each personality.
Rosenberg states that Jews are a race, and he concedes no positive traits them. He establishes a dichotomy between the Germanic and the Semitic that is metaphysical and biological. The Jews are Semites, and their religious fanaticism and intolerance is a reflection of the Semitic race, which includes the Arabs and Islam.
Much of the volume is devoted to a study of the Jewish religion, especially the Talmud. Rosenberg frequently reminds his readers that the Jew is not the product of the Talmud, but vice-versa. The Talmud is examined under the heading “The Jewish Mind.” Rosenberg carefully documents a bizarre penchant for hair-splitting over doctrinal details, which brings to mind Marxist doctrinal interpretation. In the past, such discussions were indignantly denounced as “anti-Semitic lies” about Judaism. Now we have books by heretical Jews such as Dr. Israel Shahak (Jewish History, Jewish Religion, and Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel) and Evelyn Kaye (The Hole in the Sheet) that confirm these claims.
Of particular interest are the details on usury. Jews were not only welcomed into states throughout history but were accorded privileges under law far above those of Christian subjects. Jews were granted the rights to be judged under their own laws by their own authorities, even to the point of exempting them from Christian judgements and testimony. According to Rosenberg, usury, privileges, the crass display of wealth, and undisguised hatred of Christ were the causes of anti-Semitism. These contentions broadly align with what the Jewish writer Bernard Lazare stated a few decades earlier his book Antisemitism.
One learns, for example, that Jews were originally permitted membership in the craft guilds, and much effort was made by Christian rulers to assist the Jews into taking up crafts and agriculture, with little success. Eventually they even started giving up haggling in the markets and focused on usury. The many laws that were passed against this parasitism were of little avail, and the princes and bishops found themselves in hock to Jewish money-lenders, who were so arrogant as to enter churches during communion to collect their interest.
In France under Louis IX, interest rates were set, for example, at 40%. However, such laws were circumvented. (Rosenberg, p. 78). Under Charles VII (1388) they had been permitted to take 80% at compound interest. “And when a loud murmuring went through the people, the king passed an edict according to which the Jews were protected from all complaints for ten years” (Rosenberg, p. 80). In 1394 an incident, which Rosenberg states was of itself unimportant, sparked a reaction against Jewish usury, and they were driven out of France (Rosenberg, p. 81).
The revelations regarding the character of the Talmud were primarily from Jewish converts to Christianity. However, Rosenberg states that even here the intolerance of the Jewish character was merely grafted onto the Church, and the most fanatical Inquisitors were Jewish converts. This reflects Rosenberg’s sympathy for heretical Christian sects, discussed in more detail in Dr. Whisker’s Philosophy of Alfred Rosenberg, and his anti-Catholicism, despite the Church being the primary — albeit often insufficient — bastion against Judaization.
However, Rosenberg alludes in the Track of the Jew to the thoroughly non-Jewish person and doctrine of Christ, and the demand that the New Testament must be divorced from the Old. He documents the Talmudic teachings that Christ was the son of a whore who is in hell stuck in excrement, and so forth. If read elsewhere, one would assume them to be the rantings of a Satanist. Again, there is no serious doubt as to the authenticity of these teachings among Orthodox Jewry.
Rosenberg devotes a great deal of attention to Freemasonry. The cosmopolitan doctrines of Masonry were inherently at odds with National Socialism or any doctrine that upholds national values. It was the largely Masonic revolution in France that opened the doors to Jews that had been closed since their excesses in Medieval times. Jews entered Masonry like they were soon to enter the socialist movements. Whether Masonry is nothing more than a Jewish tool is another matter. However, Masonic doctrines were certainly well-adapted to subverting traditional societies in favor of the new dispensation under which live today, and Jews used Masonry to great advantage. Masonry and the revolutionary movement converged in the French Revolution, then in the Young Europe movement of Mazzini et al. (Rosenberg, p. 112). (A more specific account of Masonry’s role in Marxism, including Marx’s own Masonic affiliations, is a matter documented by this reviewer in a forthcoming Arktos book.)
Rosenberg’s account of Adolph Cremieux’s Alliance Universlle Israélite as an example of Jewish philanthropy as a political force (p. 116) would have benefitted from a discussion of The Protocols of Zion, which is not mentioned at all in The Track of the Jews. Rosenberg would have known of The Protocols at this time, as they had been introduced to Germany by Russian émigrés in 1918. However, they were not published in a German edition until 1920. Rosenberg did devote a book to the subject in 1923. (To digress somewhat, despite the offhanded way by which The Protocols are dismissed as a “Czarist forgery,” under other circumstances an anonymous letter to the London Times would not be sufficient to “prove” anything. If The Protocols are similar to a satirical work by the French propagandist Joly, then perhaps this is because Joly was a protégée of Cremieux, who was not only head of the Alliance Universlle Israélite, but of Grand Orient Masonry and other Orders linked to Martinism and the Illuminati.)
Zionism is discussed only briefly by Rosenberg (pp. 128–35), as is the Bolshevik Revolution (pp. 135–44). Perhaps, however, like The Protocols of Zion, Rosenberg thought that extended discussions of such subjects were best left for other times and places. What is surprising is that Rosenberg grants nothing positive to Czarism, and feels that revolution against the Czar was justified, albeit a calamity because it had been taken over by Jewish interests. Jewry at the time had no greater enemies than the Church and the Czar, and the latter was — and continues to be — vilified by sources that, in the English-speaking world, began with Jacob Schiff funding of an American journalist, George Kennan, to do a popular hatchet job on Czarism.
Rosenberg concludes the volume with a philosophical or, better yet, a metaphysical discussion of the gulf between the Jewish and the German mentalities and how this manifests in culture. He focuses for this purpose on a critical evaluation of Heinrich Heine.
In conclusion Rosenberg makes some recommendations on how to deal with the “Jewish problem.”
Rosenberg urges attacking the economic roots of Jewish power: :
The goals are clear, now briefly the means: Economically the Jew has acquired power through interests, usury, money. Earlier, directly, now through banks and stock-exchanges. The breaking of the finance slavery, a means that has not succeeded for so long, is sounded today again as a battle cry. If this could be achieved even only partially the axe would have been laid to the life-tree of the Jew. (Rosenberg, pp. 188–89)
Rosenberg also recommends denying Jews citizenship and civil rights in their host countries. He insists, however, on a distinction between “human rights” and “civil rights.” Much of what he recommends involves the abrogation of the “civil rights” of the Jews in Germany, while insisting that their “human rights” — namely the right to life – should be maintained, should they choose to remain in a state where all influence will be denied to them.
For Rosenberg, the ultimate solution to the Jewish Question is Zionism: “Zionism must be actively supported” to transport “a certain number of German Jews” to Palestine (Rosenberg, p. 189). Whether Rosenberg supported a Jewish state within Palestine, a Jewish-dominated Palestine as per present day Israel, or some other arrangement, is not stated. Whatever the case, he shows little sympathy to the Jews’ fellow Semites. Thus on Rosenberg’s account, German Nazism had much in common Jewish Nazism (Zionism).
Kerry Bolton
http://www.counter-currents.com/2012/08/through-the-ages/#more-29481
Standard Chartered shares tumble
August 7, 2012
Shares in Standard Chartered tumbled as much as 20 per cent in morning trading after the New York State financial regulator accused the UK merchant bank of hiding $250bn of transactions with the Iranian government.
The New York state Department of Financial Service claimed on Monday that the bank had concealed about 60,000 transactions with Iranian clients from US regulators, violating sanctions against the Iranian government, and labelled the UK bank a “rogue institution”.
StanChart’s shares dived on fears that the bank could lose its clearing licence for US dollars, which could wipe 30-40 per cent off the group’s earnings, according to analysts at Sanford C Bernstein.
“If you lose your US dollar clearing permission, you cannot be a wholesale bank in Asia. If you lose that licence, you cannot be a trade bank,” said Chirantan Barua, an analyst at Sanford C Bernstein.
Other analysts thought it unlikely that StanChart would be stripped of its clearing licence. “It’s difficult to think that the bank could lose its licence, but you can’t rule it out,” said Chintan Joshi, at Nomura, which downgraded the bank from “buy” to “neutral” on Monday night.
StanChart, led by chief executive Peter Sands, issued a trenchant rebuttal to the US regulator, claiming that the DFS did not present “a full and accurate picture of the facts”.
The statement said: “As we have disclosed to the authorities, well over 99.9 per cent of the transactions relating to Iran complied with the U-turn regulations [which enable non-US countries to trade with Iran using dollars]. The total value of transactions which did not follow the U-turn was under $14m.”
The drop in its London share price accelerated losses on Standard Chartered’s dual listing in Hong Kong, with the group’s fall more than doubling after the London open.
A spokesman for the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, the Chinese territory’s banking regulator, said it was “reviewing the order concerning the Standard Chartered Bank issued by the New York State Department of Financial Services, to see if there are issues that have relevant implications for Hong Kong”.
The Financial Services Authority in London could not be reached for comment.
Shares in the group were down 16 per cent at £12.31 just before 9am.
By Duncan Robinson
Financial Times
Friday, 27 July 2012
Bank secrecy masks a world of crime and destruction
The Observer, Sunday 22 July 2012
Banks seem willing to exploit the loopholes found in tax havens and it’s costing the British taxpayer dear.
But while the headlines have been about cocaine cartels, the most troubling aspect of the Senate’s investigation is that the criminal, often violent, activities of the drug lords were facilitated by a byzantine, albeit legal, infrastructure that made tracking their activities near impossible.
This is particularly true of the subsidiary set up in the Cayman Islands by HSBC’s Mexico division that handled some 60,000 accounts. According to the report, the drug lords used these accounts to fuel their jet-set lives. But, staggeringly, HSBC’s oversight was so lax it knew nothing about who was behind 41% of the accounts.
This lack of transparency is troubling. Tax avoidance is big business. A report by the TUC found that the UK’s four largest banks – HSBC, Barclays, Lloyds and RBS – have some 1,200 subsidiaries in tax havens. At a time when the banks are in the dock following a spate of scandals that have exploded the arguments for “light-touch regulation”, the lack of oversight afforded by structuring transactions through tax havens threatens further scandals.
As we report today, new research by the campaign group Tax Justice Network suggests a global plutocracy has exploited gaps in cross-border tax rules to hide an extraordinary $21tn of wealth offshore in tax havens.
This gargantuan sum is difficult to comprehend, but it becomes more understandable at a parochial level. According to an earlier report by the PCS union, the Tax Justice Network and War on Want, the use of tax havens costs the UK taxpayer at least £16bn a year, double the annual budget of the Department for International Development.
That many of the tax havens depriving UK taxpayers of billions of pounds are crown dependencies and British overseas territories should be a subject of acute national embarrassment. It should also be a source of profound concern. Tax havens perpetuate wealth inequalities by depriving governments of legitimate revenues that should be used to address social problems. As Carl Levin, who chaired the Senate committee into the HSBC scandal, said: “Ultimately, the rest of us are forced to pay more on our tax bills to make up for those who shirk their taxpaying responsibilities.”
Tax havens also allow companies to avoid accountability through their opaque structures. And, as the Senate report highlights, by facilitating money laundering, they perpetuate criminal behaviour including corruption, piracy, terrorism, drug trafficking, human trafficking, counterfeiting, bribery and extortion.
What is to be done? Experts suggest the UK should embrace a range of remedies, from pressing for automatic information-sharing agreements with other countries to increasing the level of corporate transparency in its own crown dependencies and overseas territories.
A publicly available registers of trusts – the vehicles commonly used for tax avoidance in tax havens – would also be a positive step. So, too, would a decision by the UK government to support “country by country” reporting, whereby companies are required to show the profits and the tax they pay in each country within which they operate, an accounting initiative that would encourage transparency and accountability and highlight when tax havens were being used.
Politicians must also step forward. Ed Miliband has made the right noises by calling for Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man to reveal the identity of British tax evaders with money hidden on the islands. But more needs to be done to make more accountable those in the City who push tax havens. Highly remunerated executives must be held responsible for what happens on their watch in these often poorly supervised territories. For this reason, tax campaigners are pushing for a new law that recognises a crime of “wilful blindness”. Under this scenario, executives and their financial advisers would be held accountable if they failed to ask searching questions of those clients for whom they opened dubious accounts in tax havens.
Admittedly, what constitutes wilful blindness would be difficult for legislators to define. But HSBC’s chronic failure to know its customers in the Cayman Islands might just provide a definitive case study.
Source:- Observer - Editorial.
Friday, 18 May 2012
Kerry Bolton’s Revolution from Above
Alexander Jacob - London: Arktos, 2011
To those who suffer from the general malaise that is induced by American globalism today, Kerry Bolton’s new book provides a useful guide to the specific financial elites that have been directing geopolitics since the early twentieth century, beginning with the Jewish bankers Warburg and Schiff and continuing, through the CIA, with the American Council on Foreign Relations, the Institute for Policy Studies, the National Endowment for Democracy, and the foundations of Rockefeller, Ford, and Soros.
Carefully documented with references to the standard literature on these various bodies that constitute the present plutocracy of America, this work shows us how the American ambition to rule the world began indeed with President Wilson’s efforts, during and after the first World War, to end European imperialism and institute a new age of world-democracy. Wilson’s anti-imperialism also allowed America to work in sympathetic, especially financial, collaboration with the Bolsheviks during the first years of their reign of terror.
Indeed, the Cold War between American and Russia was begun only because the Bolshevik rule was transformed into a nationalistic dictatorship under Stalin and the pro-American Jewish communist leader, Leon Trotsky, was forced into exile from Russia in 1929. Since that time, America’s globalist aims have been tinged with Trotskyist internationalism and, as is well-known, even the so-called “Neo-Conservatives” of today are former Trotskyists who have transformed themselves into bourgeois capitalists.
Bolton maintains that most of the socialist revolutions of the world were simply used by the plutocratic elites to effect their own agenda of an international world order based on commercial exploitation. He devotes a lengthy chapter (Ch. 6: “Revolution from Above”) to show how the Americans supported the Bolsheviks during the Revolution and the Civil War that followed it because they hoped to achieve commercial gains from the Soviets that they could not have contemplated during the closed Tsarist regime.
The next chapters, in which Bolton demonstrates the “socialistic” techniques used by the oligarchic elites, are focused on the American leftist movements of the sixties that aimed, through feminism, drugs, and degenerate art, to destroy the family and all national authority as obstacles to the establishment of a world tyranny.
But these social evils had in fact been combated, successfully, for decades, by the Stalinist Soviet Union, which rightly considered the entire West as “decadent,” and it would have been useful if Bolton had highlighted this as indeed one of the reasons why America, in league with the Hungarian Jewish speculator billionaire George Soros, engineered the various Eastern European “color” revolutions that brought down the Soviet Union in 1989 and threaten the Russian Federation today.
Bolton goes on to show how even the “Arab Spring” revolts were, partially at least, products of secret American interventions in order to promote democracy and capitalism in the Middle East. While this cannot be denied given the fact that shady American organizations such as the National Endowment for Democracy and the International Republican Institute do operate in these vulnerable areas, it is less clear what the American elites that already supported moderate dictators like Mubarak in the past hope to gain by revolutions against the latter and by the installation of more Islamist governments in their place.
The final chapters consider the other internationalist agendas of today, such as family planning and global warming, that serve to facilitate the establishment of a world government. This world government, Bolton predicts, will be a “World Collectivist State” that is “communistic in organisation but run by oligarchs” (p. 251).
The question of how the Marxist notion of a collectivist workers’ utopia with a total aversion to private property was turned into a bourgeois one with monstrous acquisitions of private wealth is not specifically addressed. But we may infer from the conduct of the American Trotskyists who turned into “Neo-Conservatives” that Trotskyism was only used by the American Jews to counter Stalinism while they continued to pursue their own Jewish oligarchic ambitions. Indeed, a major fault of Bolton’s work is his failure to observe that the vast majority of the oligarchic organizations determining the agendas of globalism were, and are, predominantly Jewish. He also does not seem to have noted the chronological coincidence between the western cooperation with the Russian Revolution of October 1917 and the triumph of Zionism (itself a movement of international scope and ambition)[1] in the British Balfour Declaration of November 1917, both of which served as preparatory steps for the establishment of Wilson’s world-democracy.
Indeed, we may wonder whether the globalism that Bolton, as well as many others, rightly despises is not inextricably linked to Zionism itself and, when Bolton decries the “creation of a ‘World State’ built on the edifice of Mammon” (p. 8), whether it may not have been more pertinent to mention, instead of a god derived from classical mythology, the actual god of the Jews.
Another question that arises in connection with Bolton’s view of the globalist threat — namely, how capitalism, based on private property and individualism, can lead to a “collectivist” state — is more difficult to answer. Bolton attempts to do this by highlighting the interlocking institutions that have directed education in America towards an “international viewpoint” (p. 28) as well as the methods of indoctrination adopted by the American elite organizations that sponsored, first, abstract art, atonal music and jazz in the forties and fifties (under the guidance of the Jewish Marxist Theodor Adorno, the Institute of Social Research in New York and the CIA’s Council for Cultural Freedom) and, then, the sex, drugs and rock-and-roll revolution of the sixties.
Timothy Leary, the drug guru who was funded by the CIA, for instance, was not just a “hippy” but apparently sought to “set up new social forms” that corresponded to “the possibilities of expanded consciousness” (p. 121). The problem with such pleasure-indoctrinations (Aldous Huxley’s alternative to George Orwell’s indoctrinations of pain), however, is that they are not collectivist in any economic sense but only in a cultural one.
The danger of the American oligarchic world-rule today is, thus, no longer a problem pivoted on the old Marxist categories of collectivism and capitalism but rather one of the erosion of aristocratic social cultures by a universal proletarian one. In other words, whereas Marx focused mainly on the economic and social independence of the working classes, the American plutocrats used the Cultural Marxists to destroy the culture of all classes as a necessary condition of their international commercial gains and rule.
Bolton’s early reference (Chapter 2: “Plato: The Father of Collectivism”) to the collectivist aspects of Plato’s ideal republic is, in this respect, quite unfortunate since it seems to give the present Jewish-American world-order an excellent classical precedent. I feel obliged therefore to correct here this misleading impression. Plato’s ideal republic is, in fact, a eugenic one which is to be ruled by guardians who are “good and noble” and who unite in themselves “philosophy and spirit and swiftness and strength” (Jowett translation). The education of these guardians is aimed at controlling the intellectual and passionate aspects of the soul through a regimen of well-chosen music (as well as literature) and gymnastics. Particular care should be taken to see that the guardians do not “grow up amid images of moral deformity” which might allow them to develop “a festering mass of corruption in their own soul.” This is the very opposite of the education and art propagated by the oligarchic elites of the American world order.
As regards the equalization of the sexes, too, Plato takes care to first point out the differences between men and women: “all the pursuits of men are the pursuits of women also, but in all of them a woman is inferior to a man.” However, “those women who have such qualities [as those of the male guardians] are to be selected as the companions and colleagues of men who have similar qualities and whom they resemble in capacity and in character.”
The apparently “communistic” recommendation of the sharing of wives and children in Platonic eugenic republic is also restricted to the noble guardians of it: “’that the wives of our guardians are to be common, and their children are to be common, and no parent is to know his own child, nor any child his parent.” The reason for this is that guardians will therefore not stoop to base actions through envy. Since all guardians “have nothing but their persons which they can call their own, suits and complaints will have no existence among them; they will be delivered from all those quarrels of which money or children or relations are the occasion.”
The more important reason for the establishment of a communal life among the guardians, however, is to instil, from the top down, a common nationalistic feeling among all the citizens of the state. Plato’s cultivation of a national aristocracy thus has something in common with the National Socialist, Walther Darré’s attempt to create a new aristocracy in Neuadel aus Blut und Boden (1930), and also with the effort to preserve the integrity of the upper castes in the caste-system of India. It has nothing to do with Marxist, or modern Jewish American, notions of the equality of the sexes or of any economic cooperatives.
Besides, Plato’s political guardians are obliged to be philosophers, for they must always have in their minds the ideal of “another and a better life than that of a ruler, and then you may have a well-ordered State; for only in the State which offers this, will they rule who are truly rich, not in silver and gold, but in virtue and wisdom, which are the true blessings of life. Whereas if they go to the administration of public affairs, poor and hungering after their own private advantage, thinking that hence they are to snatch the chief good, order there can never be; for they will be fighting about office, and the civil and domestic broils which thus arise will be the ruin of the rulers themselves and of the whole State.” Aristocratic elevation is thus an indispensable Platonic political ideal and the entire eighth and ninth books of the Republic are devoted to a study of the inevitable ruin of nations that abandon timocracy (or aristocracy) for oligarchy, democracy, and tyranny (the chief characteristics of the present American world order).
We see, from Plato’s model of the development of states as well as Bolton’s revelations of the American oligarchic networks, that the destruction of the aristocratic rule of Europe at the end of the first World War has indeed driven the world into the hands of a primarily Jewish plutocracy that relentlessly works for “democracy” in order to establish its own “tyranny”. The reader of Bolton’s fascinating book should certainly be grateful to the author for having carefully unraveled the socio-political mechanisms of an anti-aristocratic oligarchy that can only rule the world by essentially destroying it.
Note
1. Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, for instance, remarked in his work on the projected Jewish state, Der Judenstaat (1896) that “The world will be liberated by our freedom, enriched by our wealth, magnified by our greatness.”
Monday, 7 May 2012
Pot heads may cause new Holocaust.
http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/new-yorkers-seek-new-zionist-high-from-israeli-gas-mask-bongs-1.425809
It’s A Real Gas, Man
I think this is a HOOT!
The Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz reports: “Israel has a shortage of civilian gas masks, but you wouldn’t know it from walking down Manhattan’s St. Mark’s Place, where the masks are on sale in half a dozen stores for a mere $25 each. The Israeli model 4A1 gas masks on display in the East Village — where storefront noodle shops bump up against vintage clothing stores — might not protect you from a chemical weapons attack. That’s because their protective filters have been removed and replaced with foot-long acrylic bongs meant for smoking marijuana.
Ha’aretz goes on: “Gas mask bongs, used by pot aficionados to intensify the drug’s impact, started flooding American head shops about a decade ago, some insiders say. That is roughly around the same time that the Israeli government recalled millions of masks it had distributed to civilians during the 2003 invasion of Iraq that the United States led. It’s hard to say whether that timing is coincidental. But it is clear that the black gas masks with circular glass eyeholes, sold in American head shops, are authentic Israeli masks, down to the telltale rubber-triangle seal of Shalon Chemical Industries Ltd., the Tel Aviv-based company that makes all the civilian gas masks of Israel. ‘They’re the real deal,’ said Tony Lomeli, manager of RDD USA, a Los Angeles military surplus dealer that sells Israeli 4A1s for use as survival gear.”
So—in light of the impending Israeli attack on Iran, the Jews in Israel are scrambling for gas masks, which may well be needed in view of the thousands of rockets and missiles that are pointed at the small country from all around it, Lebanon, Syria, Gaza, etc. some of which this time might contain for real nerve gas and other chemical agents.
But they’re short on masks—because some hebe spirited them out of Israel, converted them to marijuana-smoking bongs, and they’re now being sold in head shops in New York.
I swear to God, you couldn’t make this stuff up!
Back to Ha’aretz: “Though the masks themselves all look alike, the attached bongs vary. Some are long and straight, others end in a bubble. One mask-attached bong spotted in a display on St. Mark’s Place was shaped like a human face. Though the appeal of the gas mask bongs may lie partially in their spooky aesthetic, they are valued mostly for the way they force smoke into the lungs. The seal around the user’s face, designed to keep out chemicals during an attack, locks in the marijuana smoke, forcing the smoker to inhale it all at once. ‘It’s kind of a step above a bong,’ said Rick Cusick, associate publisher of the marijuana-themed magazine High Times. ‘It makes for a slam dunk kind of thing.’”
So it’s just possible that while Israeli citizens huddled in shelters in Tel Aviv and Herzliya will be sucking in sarin or anthrax, their Brooklyn cousins will be sucking in reefer fumes through the masks that might have saved them, just to put a few shekels in some profiteering hebe’s pocket.
Like, far out, man.
Sunday, 22 April 2012
Community Security trust said jump - 'how high?' said May
The cool Mrs Theresa May is acting like a hothead
New Labour’s first rule of government was a point blank refusal to be outflanked from the Right when it came to law and order.
Theresa May leaves the Houses of Parliament after making a statement defending the Home Office's handling of the Abu Qatada affair
By Peter Oborne
Telegraph
Every one of the great principles which for centuries have underpinned the criminal justice system in Britain came under attack: trial by jury, habeas corpus, free speech, even the separation of powers between executive and judiciary.
Tony Blair, who had trained as a barrister, took the view that ancient liberties like a fair trial and the presumption of innocence belonged were Dickensian. He licensed a series of home secretaries, from David Blunkett to John Reid, to wage war on the judges, and undermined the judiciary’s standing and independence.
It is greatly to the credit of Theresa May that when the Conservatives were in opposition she resisted this calculated populism and stood up for traditional liberties. Almost her first act in office was to put an end to ID cards, and early on she displayed a level-headed and unexcitable statesmanship of a kind that the Home Office had not experienced for many years.
For some reason, Mrs May has “immatured” in power. The first sign that something was going wrong was when the Supreme Court sensibly ruled that sex offenders would be given the right to appeal against having to register with the police. Mrs May expressed outrage, announcing that she was “appalled’ by the ruling and would set the bar for appeals as high as she could.
The came her hysterical call for the abolition of the Human Rights Act at last autumn’s Conservative Party conference, in the course of which she alerted her audience to the case of an illegal immigrant “who cannot be deported because – and I am not making this up – he had a pet cat”.
Embarrassingly for Mrs May, further investigation showed that her telling of the cat story was exaggerated. It turned out that the immigrant she cited, a Bolivian man named Camilo Soria Avila, did indeed own a cat. But his feline companion was only one factor taken into account by the immigration tribunal that allowed him to stay in this country on human rights grounds.
A second example of Mrs May’s recklessness with the facts was more serious. It concerns Sheikh Raed Salah, a distinguished Palestinian politician, who was invited to address a meeting in the House of Commons. Mrs May banned the sheikh on the grounds that he had supported terrorism, had once written an anti-Semitic poem, and constituted a grave threat to public order. But, to the Home Secretary’s consternation, he was able to enter Britain unhindered last June. Sheikh Salah was imprisoned, and later detained under close house arrest. Earlier this month Mr Justice Ockelton of the Upper Immigration Tribunal found that the Home Secretary had been ''under a misapprehension as to the facts’’, that the sheikh did not hold the views she attributed to him, and that he represented no threat of any kind.
More devastating, it now emerges that Mrs May made her decision on the basis of information provided by a single source, the Community Security Trust, an organisation that combats anti-Semitism in Britain. She appears to have made no serious attempt to check its allegations, and reached her decision in a matter of minutes.
There are no two ways about it. Mr Justice Ockelton’s ruling, which received very little publicity, was humiliating for Mrs May, and damaging to Britain. It is important that we should be seen as a disinterested broker in the Middle Eastern peace process. To jail a distinguished visiting Palestinian on the basis of such limited testimony looks like evidence of bias.
And now along comes the Abu Qatada affair, which threatens to pin down Mrs May as a serial bungler. To her credit she has resisted the temptation to deport Qatada immediately. When the appalling Conservative MP Charles Walker urged her in the Commons to press on without delay ''in getting this scumbag and his murderous mates on a plane and out of this country’’ the Home Secretary was dismissive. She very correctly insisted that, whatever her personal inclinations, she would respect the rule of law.
Nor should she be blamed over the muddle over the date set for Qatada’s appeal. Mrs May has gallantly volunteered to shoulder the blame, but it is surely not her job to engage in such recondite technical questions as the difference between a legal month and an actual one. Her legal advisers should accept responsibility, if a mistake has been made, something that is not yet certain.
Mrs May has not, however, displayed the cool, calm deliberation one would expect from a Home Secretary properly conscious of the gravity of her office. Lawyers for Qatada have asserted that he is liable to be tortured or, at the very least, convicted on the basis of evidence gathered under torture. This claim may be wrong, but it is a serious one. It was therefore disgraceful of Mrs May to exploit the prospect of Qatada’s imminent departure to his native Jordan as some kind of propaganda coup.
There is a common calculation underlying the Home Secretary’s handling of Abu Qatada, Sheikh Salah and the cat at last year’s Tory conference. In each case Mrs May appears to have been extremely poorly briefed. She has acted in haste, without making sure of the facts, or even the lawful basis for her action.
It may be she has been calculating that none of this matters. Mrs May is a renowned moderniser who once informed Conservative conference that the Tories must lose their image as the ''nasty’’ party. This modernising mission seems, in Mrs May’s mind, to involve an attack on the criminal justice system. Certainly New Labour gloried in its wars with the judiciary. It may have lost the fight in the courts, but it always won the battle of public opinion.
Yesterday, the newspaper proprietor Rupert Murdoch arrived in Britain in preparation for next week’s Leveson hearing. For more than two decades his newspapers were openly hostile to the rule of law. They did not merely break the law themselves, but collaborated with Labour and Tory ministers in vicious battles against the judiciary, at one point threatening a ''name and shame’’ campaign against ''liberal judges’’ and other vulnerable minorities.
Sometimes we may not like the decisions judges make, or the people they protect, but it is nevertheless important to recall the rule of law is at the heart of everything we are and do. It protects property, contract, freedom. Without it democracy is impossible. Every Home Secretary faces a choice between courting popularity and doing the right thing. Mrs May needs to return to the lucid rectitude of her early days in office.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)