The Same But Made To Look Different

Popular protests have erupted in Thailand not long ago and they went on for several weeks. According to reports at least 88 people including a Western journalist were killed and scores of Thai civilians and journalists were injured. The images that were generated and broadcast by professional journalists and those generated and circulated by citizen journalists told of a brutality on the part of the authorities that exceeded anything seen during the brief Iranian uprising not long before that. Yet, not a word was uttered by the political leaders in America on the Thai uprising while the news of the event barely made it onto the pages of the American print media and the newscasts of American television.

Contrast this situation with the reaction generated in America during the Iranian uprising where the political leaders expressed sentiments ranging from sorrow to horror and where a near carnival atmosphere filled the studios of such networks as CNN and some others, as they all stayed with the Iranian story almost nonstop around the clock, and remained with it even after it had fizzled out, hoping undoubtedly to see it explode again. Anchor after anchor and guest after guest came on the air to encourage the crowds in Iran to fight on, and they cheered the sight of blood spilling in view of the camera as well as the blood that was said to spill behind the cameras. Experts came to the studio that knew what they were talking about, and charlatans came as well who had no idea what they were talking about. When all was said and done you were left to wonder what was going on in the hearts and minds, and in the souls of the politico-journalistic establishment in America. And you asked yourself what could possibly have motivated CNN, the other networks and the politicians in America to behave the way that they did. Were they enamored with the Iranian people more than they were with the Thai people? Did they wish to see their brand of democracy spread in one part of the world and not the other?

No, I'm afraid the answer was none of the above. The sad truth is that CNN, the other networks and the American politicians are puppets on a string, and they are animated by the Israeli propaganda machine which tells them what to say, how to behave, even what to feel at any given time. Simply put, Israel could not care less about Thailand but cares a lot about what goes on inside Iran, therefore America was made to care less about Thailand and care a lot about what goes on inside Iran. But while this situation looks on the surface to be simple enough to understand, it really is a psycho-political construct with parts that are difficult to untangle and equally difficult to understand as to how the parts fit together. The thing to do, therefore, is to use a simpler situation from which we may extract a few principles and use these to explain the more complicated construct.

The one thing that every living organism cares about is food. This is a principle simple enough to understand. Thus, when you study how an organism relates to food you learn a great deal about it. By the same token, get to understand the food situation in Israel and you blow your mind. In fact, what can be determined from published statistics is that Israel produces one third of its nutritional needs while importing the rest from the neighboring countries, paying for the imports with money donated by the American people, and money borrowed from lending institutions, a borrowing that is guaranteed by the American taxpayer. But this alone will not blow your mind. What will do that is the knowledge that the food produced in Israel is grown almost exclusively by the Israeli Arabs who live in the north of the country where the productive land exists and water flows. And while the Arab men find it necessary to commute to the nearby towns to work in industries other than farming to supplement the household income, the Arab women are the ones that farm the land and feed the Jewish nation to the extent that it is possible to do so given the limited availability of the resources.

And while there is enough here to blow your mind, there is something that will stir your bile and provoke your anger too. You are pushed into this state when you see published statistics to the effect that Israel has the highest rate of poverty in the Middle East. In fact, figures are published every year by international organizations such as the World Bank, UNESCO and others which state that nearly a quarter of the people living in Israel live below the poverty line. And neither the government of Israel nor any local organization disputes these figures when they speak officially. But let the media casually engage Israeli officials on the subject and they will deny there is poverty on this scale in Israel. They will go on to explain that the few who are poor in the country are Palestinian women, adding that this is so because the religion of these women forbids them from working and earning a living. But knowing that the character who is speaking to the camera actually grew up on the food produced by the women he is slandering, you feel your bile stir, feel your anger mount and you cease to wonder what a low life looks like because you realize that you are looking at the worst example of a low, low, low life.

You wonder how someone got to be like this and you ask yourself why these people wish to remain in that state. You decide to observe the Jewish propaganda machine in search of answers, and the first thing you notice is that the machine is a distortion mirror of cosmic dimensions. You check it out from all angles and discover that nothing which is reflected by this mirror is seen like it is. You find that everything is made uglier than ugly by the mirror or made prettier than pretty by it depending on what argument serves the image of Israel at the moment and what does not. And you deduce from all this that the situation will change tomorrow depending on the direction from which the political wind will blow then, a situation where the ugly of today may become the pretty of tomorrow, and the pretty of today become the ugly of tomorrow.

Smart enough by now, you realize that you are looking at an ideology with roots that go back thousands of years. You leave the study of history and that of its evolution for later and look instead at the effect that the ideology may have on a people who do not suspect they are being taken advantage of for a purpose they would resent if they knew. You study the narrative that is recited about Israel and you find this place to be described in superlatives that paint a magnificence of such perfection, it would bring a derisive smile to anyone's face if attributed to the gods let alone to a land of mortals. You then study what is being said about Israel's enemies and find the narrative here to be an exaggerated pile of slanderous accusations aimed at creating a hatred that serves a specific purpose. You study the matter further and learn that the hatred of a real or imagined enemy is used like a glue to hold together the narrative about Israel's perfection. The truth now revealed to the effect that the image of Israel would disintegrate if it were not hitched to the image of a hated enemy, you conclude that the artificial love of one and the hatred of the other were two notions coined at the same time to form the two sides of one and the same coin. And all the machination that is created by the Jewish organizations feeds into one purpose only, that of milking the American people by mobilizing their institutions to serve and to promote the glory of Israel. The truth is really nothing more and nothing less than this because nothing else matters to these organizations, a reality that the American people would surely resent if they knew the extent to which they are being taken advantage of.

To go back to the example above, you have here an Israel that would look like North Korea -- complete with chronic famine and the capacity to produce nuclear weapons -- if it were not for the generosity of the American people and that of Israel's Arab and Turkish neighbors who have, over the years, been instrumental in preventing the Jewish people of Israel from literally starving to death. In fact, there is an American rabbi called Ekstein who got tired of being asked to go along with the phony narrative of a perfect Israel. He decided to tape video appeals in which he asked for donations from the Christian people of America to help feed the Jewish people of Israel. He filmed the poor people the way they lived as hungry, sick and destitute individuals and as wretched looking groups that wallowed in the abject filth and privation of their daily existence. The rabbi was criticized for telling it like it was but he could not end the appeals because of the dire situation in which he saw the poor people of Israel. He continued to make the videos but he modified the narrative to make the appeals look like they were describing poor Christians living in Israel or poor Jews living in Eastern Europe but not the poor Jews living in Israel.

And this turning upside down of reality by the Jewish organizations is one more example that shows how a narrative of quackery usually starts and how it evolves to be woven into the existing folklore thus enforce and enlarge it. Here, what started as a drive to raise money to feed the poor Jews of Israel was transformed into a propaganda piece that was used to fashion and to strengthen a synthetic folklore about an Israel that is so perfect, it has no poor Jews living in it despite the statistics that tell a different story. But the donations continued to be solicited and they continued to come in to help feed a mythical group of Israeli Christians and a group of Jewish Europeans because there are no hungry Jews in Israel says the myth. Mind blowing.

And when you realize that this folklore has been a part of the American politico-journalistic set-up for several generations you understand why you get two different reactions from that set-up to what is basically one and the same story. Thus, while the situation in Iran and the one in Thailand are seen as similar by an impartial observer, they appear as two different situations requiring different reactions from those who were raised in the era of the Jewish propaganda machine, and are now instructed at every moment of their lives what to say and what not to say with regard to all such situations, what attitude to develop towards them, even how to relate to them emotionally. This is where the mentality that blew your mind now begins to disgust you as well.

And this, my friend, is what America has been reduced to, the America of the founding fathers who authored the federalist papers, the America of the men and women who dreamed of a nation of individualists, the America of free thought and free expression, the America of a Constitution that everyone on the Planet used to wish emulating but no more. Where has this America gone?

Bravo Angela Merkel Of Germany

The government of Germany led by Angela Merkel began the process of putting an end to the practice of short selling securities on the markets, and the promise is that the process will continue till it is completed and duplicated everywhere in the world. The reaction of the investors who want to make a living by investing their money honestly has been to praise the German leader while the reaction of the confused who don't know what they are talking about, and that of the con artists who want to live off other people's money has been to attack the good woman and accuse her of shooting the messengers. To understand this part of their argument we must go back in time to an earlier era.

There was a time when the motto of journalism was: “To comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,” a saying coined by Peter Dunne in the Nineteenth Century. This was a time when journalists were true observers of life in the sense that they had no skin in the game. However, by observing and reporting what they saw, they inevitably spoke truth to power and this made them a class of people that irritated the powerful. In an epoch still earlier than the Nineteenth Century, the messenger that brought bad news to the powerful was put to death. Later on, this reality spawned the saying: “don't shoot the messenger” which was a metaphor to convey the notion that you must not resent those who point out your imperfections. Luckily, the Nineteenth Century did not see the shooting of journalists but these people and everyone who spoke truth to power were resented and often maltreated by the powerful.

And like everything else, that saying was abused with the passage of time when its true meaning began to fade from the memory of people. This happened because some individuals used the saying to justify behavior that was never meant to be covered by it. A good example in this regard are the journalists who, in violation of the law, took hidden items inside an airport to point out the security deficiencies that exist at some airports. These individuals were successfully prosecuted despite the protest that they and their supporters mounted while arguing that they were only the messengers who brought bad news to the authorities. In fact, they had expected to be praised not punished but they were wrong and they paid for their bad judgment.

Now take this mentality a step or two further and see how far you can go with it. Say, for example, a bank robber robs a bank and calls the police to have a discussion. When the police arrives, the robber argues that he should be praised for pointing out the security deficiency at the bank and he insists on being allowed to keep the money he robbed as a reward for the service he just rendered to the public. Far fetched, you say? Not at all. This is what the short sellers do with the markets. And here is an example as to how the thing often unfolds: The stock of a company owned by thousands of people and institutions races ahead of itself for a flimsy reason or no reason at all. A professional short seller spots the discrepancy between what the estimated value of the stock ought to be and the price at which the stock currently trades. Instead of alerting the shareholders by going public with his observations, he sell shares of the company he does not own and this causes the price of the stock to come down. A number of shareholders who actually own those shares panic and dump their holdings at a low price, a move that sends the price lower still. The short seller then buys the shares at a low price and delivers them to the people who bought them from him at a high price; and he pockets the difference. Most of the time the shares of such companies rebound to their former level or near to it. In such a case, the people who get hurt would be the ones that panicked and sold at a low price. At other times, however, the company collapses and the shares go to zero. In this case, everyone who had a skin in the game gets hurt except the short sellers whose fortune rises in direct proportion to the hurt that everyone else suffers.

We are then treated with the unseemly spectacle of the short sellers arguing -- much like the bank robber -- that they have rendered a service to the public by pointing to the temporarily inflated value of the stock. And they try with this argument to convince the authorities that they should be allowed to continue making such gains if not be praised for the altruistic behavior they exhibit given that they can lose their shirt in a transaction like this, which they sometimes do and go sob to the media. You may feel depressed by now, dear reader, so here is a true story that should bring a smile to your face. Sometime during the Mulroney era in the Nineteen Nineties, the bond vigilantes -- or as the late Louis Rukeyser used to call them, the bond goulds -- started to attack the Canadian dollar in the pits of the Chicago Board of Trade for no reason except that there was no other host at the time on which to feed and satisfy their insatiable parasitic appetite. These were the short sellers who probably thought they had bad news to send to the Minister of Finance in Ottawa, news to the effect that the Canadian dollar was inflated. But Minister Wilson had thoughts of his own that were lingering in his head for some time, and he was itching to deliver them to the short selling goulds in the pits of Chicago.

Now take a deep breath, my friend, and read on to find out what happened. Here it comes; the Canadian Minister of Finance contacted his colleagues in the other wealthy nations and asked them to set up a temporary line of credit on which he can draw the hundreds of millions he will need for a worthy operation. They most certainly understood what he had in mind so they gave him the lines of credit he requested. He waited for the bond goulds to finish short selling all the Canadian dollars they could sell but did not own. This done, the Minister swooped down on them like the hungry eagle who has a preference for the succulent meat of parasites. He used the lines of credit set up for the operation and bought every Canadian dollar in sight, paying for the transactions with American, British, Japanese, German, Swiss, Australian and French currencies. This is where the naked short selling parasites started to scurry hysterically trying to cover their bottoms. They bought back what they sold at a price much higher than they sold them just minutes ago. And guess who they bought these dollars from; yes they bought them from the Minister who made a nice little profit for his country. And by the time the whole operation was over, the goulds had lost not only their shirts but their underwear too. And no one tried to pull a number like this on the Canadian dollar ever again. Now you can smile and breathe again, my friend.

This is probably not the reason why this kind of selling is called naked short selling but the incident illustrates why people instinctively resent the naked short sellers. When these people attack the currency of a nation or its bonds or when they attack the stock of a company, they do so by upsetting the existing balance between supply and demand. In essence, they create a fictitious supply of a commodity that is endless. With this, they overwhelm the demand side of the equation thus drive the price down long enough to buy back at a low price what they sold at a high price. In reality, therefore, they violate the law of supply and demand which is the absolute most fundamental law governing the capitalist system to serve their own end. This is what we normally call stealing yet, these people execute unimpeded what they falsely and shamelessly call a capitalist transaction, and they find enough voices in the echo chambers of some prestigious publications to support their definition. But if we all come to accept this definition, we must also accept that every bank robbery is a capitalist transaction and every bank robber a great capitalist. Who wants that?

And you will understand why this is a serious problem when you look at the May 20, 2010 edition of the Wall Street journal. There is in it an editorial published under the title: “Germany Shoots the Messengers”. Here you have what used to be the flagship of capitalist publications treating the equivalent of bank robbers as victims of the authorities whose job it is to uphold and defend the principle of law and order from the activities of the lawless who violate something as fundamental as the law of supply and demand, a violation that does not seem to bother the editors of the Journal.

Worse, the Journal paraphrases and uses as subtitle a quote from Shakespeare's King Henry IV: “First thing we do, let's kill all the short sellers.” Notice that the idea which the Wall Street Journal preaches here is the reverse of what we accept as normal behavior. The Journal's view is this: In the same way that the lawyers defend the country in Shakespeare's play against the lawless who would spread anarchy, the short sellers of today are the good capitalists who defend the world against the socialist agenda of leaders like Angela Merkel, a leader that is destroying the brave new capitalist system we imagine, a system that tries to blossom here, in Germany and everywhere else in the world. And this says that the Wall Street Journal is no longer the impartial messenger that speaks to power; it has become the power that speaks for itself to itself.

In the face of this reality, you begin to wonder what skin these people have in the game. You realize that when the messenger acquires the power and he decides to speak, he tends not to speak at all but to sing a pleasing falsehood to himself. What he says does not travel out in a straight line but reverses itself and comes back to enchant the ear on the head from where the mouth spoke the falsehood. You wonder if these people are not trying to comfort the already comfortable and further afflict the already afflicted. You then notice their demonstration of financial dyslexia and you readily understand why the center of economic gravity is shifting to the Orient. To use an apt analogy from the art of the make-believe, when Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock both get infected by a disease, someone from outside the Federation is bound to take control of the Enterprise; and the enterprise here is the capitalist system no less. Goodbye Manhattan; hello Mumbai and Shanghai!

Please speak up again, Angela Merkel, those who wish to see a nicely balanced world want to hear from you more often and hear you louder than before.

Mohamed El-Arian On Greece

On May 22, 2010 Mohamed El-Arian, CEO of Pimco published an article in the Wall Street Journal under the title “Return of the Nervous Weekend” in which he expresses the hope, among other things, that the leaders of the European Union will recognize the insolvency of Greece rather than view the problem as one of liquidity. If this were to happen, it will entail the restructuring of Greece's debt which is euphemism for Greece defaulting, and the creditors taking a hair cut. And all this can only happen with consequences that Mr. El-Arian recognizes too well and for which he does not hide his dread.

It may come to this in the final analysis but there is another possibility worth looking into, one that can solve the immediate problem and also put down the foundation for a long term solution. The Germans have already suggested that the Greeks sell some of their islands which undoubtedly many Germans would love to buy and have the money to buy them with. But this is such a drastic approach, it goes to the core of Greek sovereignty and pride, and is very unlikely to happen.

What the Greeks can do instead is lease some of these islands on a long term basis -- such as 49 years or 99 years -- to those who would begin to develop them immediately for tourism or something else and thus bring much needed cash to the country right away. This will begin to solve the immediate problem, but concurrent with it must come the effort to put down the foundation for a more permanent and long term solution.

Greece's long term problem is that, like the rest of Europe and other parts of the World, the nation has an aging population that does not reproduce itself sufficiently. The population is shrinking while getting older thus needs immigration from countries where the populations are growing and need a place to which they can migrate and start a new life.

Well, Greece is situated in a region where there are such populations. Not only that but the cultures of Greece and these places have so intertwined over the millennial, they can all get along like pals. That does not mean the old rivalries will die out overnight but Europe as a whole is beginning to learn from such countries as Canada, the US and Australia how to handle populations that come from different places.

I have no illusion about the Greek people suddenly welcoming young Turkish immigrants with open arms, for example, but I can see them welcome Egyptians from Alexandria who might have had Greek ancestors and who might even speak Greek today. But the question remains: What will these Turks or Egyptians or Tunisians or Moroccans or Syrians or Jordanians do in Greece? Well, they will work in agriculture, in hotels and most importantly in factories which will probably be built and run by Germans or French.

This will help provide the long term solution that Greece is looking for, and may even serve as a prototype for the other Mediterranean nations that have problems similar to those of Greece and are looking for a viable solution.

Israel On The Brink Again

Israel has again asked America for money and America seems to have agreed to help so I ask this simple question: What is going on? Not long ago the central bank of Israel was raising the interest rates claiming that the country had survived the recession which was brought about by the meltdown of the world financial system, and had come out of the crisis almost intact. Well, if the Israeli economy is doing this good, why ask for 205 million dollars from a country that is on its knees and could deliver the aid only if it borrowed the money from say, the Chinese or the Arabs?

You don't understand says the mysterious voice, the money will be used to develop and deploy a system of defense that will protect Israel from rockets fired from the Gaza Strip and from Lebanon. It is not that Israel is about to default on paying loans it took previously or anything like that. Yes, these loans were guaranteed by the US government, a fact that will compel America to pay Israel's creditors if the latter defaulted but this is not what is happening here. No ... No, it's not … Not really. Well then here is another question for you: Is it not true that having trumpeted the glorious magnificence of the Israeli economy, it would be a mortifying scandal to have to bear by the spin doctors in Tel Aviv and New York if the mask were to drop and Israel were to be revealed as the bankrupt entity that never had a real economy? That is, Israel never had an economy that can function without donations, holocaust payments, phony compensation settlements and welfare appropriations from America? But never mind answering these questions because the thing has become redundant and boring to the extreme.

Let us also forget about the mysterious voice that tries to explain the inexplicable, and let us look instead at reality in the face. The meltdown of the world financial system and the recession that followed made it hard for all donors, be they governments or individuals to sustain Israel's consumption economy. In fact, the Israelis went to the Germans and tried to extort from them a billion more Euros but this time the Germans told them to take a hike, having to bail out half of Europe as it is. This being made clear to Israel -- and made in no uncertain terms -- the central bank of the Jewish state raised the interest rate in the hope of attracting money to the country but the trick did not work. Not only that, but the depositors who were keeping monies in Israel started to withdraw them and deploy them in the booming economies of Asia, Africa, South America and the MENA region. And the central bank of Israel which put out the lie that it was raising the interest rates because the economy was doing well responded to the withdrawals by fabricating another lie. It said it was the one that decided on the necessity to reduce the money in the commercial banks because there was too much money in the country. Oh yeah! Why then ask the Americans for 205 million dollars if you have more dollars than you know what to do with? But don't bother answering this question; we've had it up to here with your belabored answers. You bore us to death.

Let us now look at the system of defense that is supposed to protect Israel against incoming rockets. Is it not the one you once called the “Iron Dome,” the one you promised with fanfare, with pomp and with ceremony will be operational by June 2010, a few days from now? Given that it takes decades to develop a system like this and a few more years to test and deploy it -- which Israel claims to have done already with super glowing success -- why the need to ask the nearly bankrupt America to borrow money to give to Israel at this stage of the game? Answer this one if you can or maybe not because, really, no one cares anymore. We are bored.

No. This hogwash will not wash in the mind of any thinking person. The truth is that Israel is once again on the brink and it is doing what it always does when it finds itself in this situation. Either it uses the US Congress and the New York courts to extort money from the Germans or the Swiss or someone, or it uses American weapons to go on a killing orgy and get paid for the morbid display it puts on. This time, Israel first tried the German option but was told to get out of there. It then floated a balloon about the Arabs owing the Jews more money than there ever was money in the Arab lands where the Jews once dwelt but the idiotic attempt at mugging the Arabs was shot down before it produced any traction. The angry Israelis then broke out in their spontaneous dance of the eunuch where they rattled the sabers at the Iranians and promised to unleash a hellish war on them. The bluff was called, Israel chickened out and this had the effect of chopping half of Israel's manhood. The Israelis then waved the remaining half of their manhood at the Syrians but this half was chopped as well. Now penniless and penis-less, the Israelis realized there was no option they can take to rescue their economy but to go hat in hand to the Americans and ask for help. In turn, the Americans agreed to go hat in hand to the Chinese and the Arabs and ask for 205 million dollars to be added to the trillions they took out already. And what a pathetic looking spectacle this has been! If the political leaders of America deserve to be kicked in the pants for being this low and this degraded in their outlook and behavior, it must be said that the American people deserve something better than this sickly looking crowd.

What made the spectacle even more pathetic was the charade in which it was wrapped. The narrative thus far has been that Israel and the Jews are so perfect, nothing they touch can ever go wrong. But the reality being that everything they touched has gone very wrong, it was explained that the Israelis live in a tough neighborhood full of evil people who keep messing things up for the Jews. It followed from this explanation that the neighbors must not be given the satisfaction of knowing that Israel was deficient in anything at all. In other words, Israel must always be portrayed as the perfect country that is doing everything perfectly well no matter what the thing looks like in the eyes of an observer. But since Israel alone cannot make this claim and remain credible for any length of time, America must play along and give Israel cover by rolling with it in the mud of lies, ambiguities, deception, double-talk, imprecision and all the filth you can imagine.

This charade has been going on for a while but nothing good came of it because the reality remains that instead of America pulling Israel out of the mud and the filth, it was Israel that pulled America into the mud and the filth, and has kept it there during all these years. In the meantime, not the neighbors of Israel and no one serious in the world has come to believe that Israel is anything like it is portrayed in the English media. The fact remains that most people now believe that Israel is the biggest threat to mankind and that America has become more menacing to the civilized order than it has ever been. And the world shakes its head in sorrow seeing the once beloved America push itself deeper into the Israeli pool of mud as it uses the power of the veto at the UN to protect Israel from the consequences of the criminal acts it commits by habit, by culture and by religious belief.

So then, what is there to do? The answer is to be found in the wisdom which says that there is no better way to fight a nearly invincible opponent than to turn his weapon against him. The Israelis and the Jewish organizations have used a number of techniques to control and subjugate the feeble minded in previous American Administrations and Congresses, and these very techniques must now be used against the Israelis and the Jewish organizations to weaken them, defeat them and do away with them. For example, the Israelis used to say that this Arab leader or that one must be humiliated. The thing to do now is to humiliate the Israeli leaders. They used to say that Yasser Arafat must be rendered irrelevant. The thing to do now is to render Benjamin Netanyahu irrelevant. They used to say that the United Nation had become irrelevant in the scheme of things. The thing to do now is to render Israel and the Jewish organizations irrelevant in the scheme of things ... and so on and so on and so on. In the end, making these people and these organizations drink from the cup of their own evil will render them less evil and will turn them into a lesser threat to the world. And America will be rehabilitated in the eyes, the minds and the hearts of human beings everywhere because the Administration and the Congress will be seen as having regained the power to think for themselves.

And there is no better way to begin this process than for the Congress of the United States of America to seize the opportunity and be the first to say: Enough is enough, Israel shall get the 205 million dollars it seeks over our dead bodies. And just think of the consequences if this idea came to pass. It has been said that the stories of the Middle East are among the greatest stories ever told. Given that there never was a great story which did not contain a great reversal, imagine what a reversal on the part of the Congress will do to the old narrative. The stories that will flow from such a move will truly be the greatest stories ever told, and they will do something else; they will once and for all kill the notion that the Final Solution is the way to go.

Yes, instead of having an endless stream of pogroms and holocausts brought on the Jews by their self-appointed leaders, we shall have one ultimate solution that will be humane and civilized. It will bring about the sought after happy ending because a country that has supported the Jewish aspirations as much as America has will be saying: I am tired of you but I shall not turn against you as they did in Europe of old. Instead, I shall show you how to live among the good people of the Earth without you believing that you have a special relationship with God. You will understand that you cannot do anything you want in the belief that God will come to your rescue or that He will deputize someone like America to support you till you fall flat on your face, something you do all the time. The trouble is that your system of beliefs has often led you astray. Instead of taking you on the road to salvation, it made your journeys end on a sour note. Such endings came about because those who promised to come to your rescue did an about face and sent you to the gas chambers and the crematoria instead. America will not do this to you but neither will it allow the status quo to go on for ever. On the contrary, America will act through its Congress and will do the right thing which you may call tough love but we call saving mankind from a hideous ideology that has plagued it for centuries.

And all the Jews will be thankful for that, and they will cooperate with the new order by publicly denouncing the self-serving Jewish organizations that did nothing for the Jews but send them to their destruction over and over and over again.

They Inflate The Judeo Israeli Brand

We seem to be going through a period when the Jewish propaganda machine finds itself at a loss, unable to sell Israel to the audiences it has under its control by virtue of the editorial monopoly it maintains over the English media. There was a time not long ago when the Judeo Israeli brand was described in superlatives so grand they were deemed laughable even if attributed to the gods, yet there they were being attributed lavishly to Israel and to everything Jewish as if these people were beings from a Universe so grand that God Himself would dwarf by comparison. I have no doubt that the Jewish propaganda machine will try to find a way by which to inflate Israel and the Jewish causes again but until then, let me recount the experiences I had with regard to this subject as I lived through them during the past few decades.

I wrote about my friend, Ralph Cohen previously, a lawyer of impeccable integrity and humanity but he was not the only Jewish lawyer I knew. This time I wish to write about another Jewish lawyer who was also a good friend and a gentle human being. I came to know Hart Margolian because he had an office in the same building where I had a small private institute of technology in Montreal. He was a corporate lawyer not a litigator so he spent much of his time in the office. After the first meeting during which we discussed legal work I had retained him to do for the school, I went to visit him often when I had no class to teach or he came to visit me in my office. We had many things to talk about, one of them being his passion for gadgets. He bought everything new that appeared on the market because he was fascinated by what they did, and so he asked me to explain how they worked.

It so happened that before I launched my school I was working for another school where they were having a difficult time finding a reasonably priced textbook containing only the fundamentals of circuit analysis that were needed for one of the courses taught at the school. Since I had my notes and the students of my class were happy to get photocopies of them, the administrators of the school asked me to put all the notes in the form of a book they can print and distribute to the students of my class and those of the other classes. I complied with the request and the school printed a number of copies, handing me a few which I kept till the day I opened my own school. I lent one copy to Hart Margolian so as to acquire some background in basic electronics before I started to explain to him how the gadgets worked.

Studying my book and understanding very little of it prompted him to reveal something about a client he had without telling me his name so as to maintain the principle of lawyer-client confidentiality. The man had come to him with an invention, not to obtain a patent but to represent him on an upcoming negotiation or some such thing. But Hart could not decide whether or not the invention had merit so he asked me what I thought. This was a time -- much like today -- when everybody was talking about saving energy, and what the client had done was to whip up a contraption to be used in cars. The thing was supposed to indicate how much energy remained in the battery because having a red light indicating a low battery -- which all cars now have -- was not enough for that man. And without explaining his reasoning, he insisted that knowing exactly how much juice was left in the battery would save energy. Strange!

I explained to Hart how a battery tester works which is basically a low tech circuit that has existed for nearly two hundred years now. But Hart wanted to know why the client had a microcomputer in his contraption with a secret program he refuses to reveal to anyone. This is when bells rang in my head because testing a battery can only be based on principles of physics not a secret computer program. And so I used my friendship with Hart to get to the bottom of the matter in a lighthearted way. He had known many Canadians of Egyptian origin before me and was fond of them; I had known many Jews before him and was fond of them. For this reason neither of us minded the other making ethnic jokes about each other. So I looked Hart in the eye and asked him if this guy was one of those bullshiting Jews. In fact, he was Israeli, said Hart. That explains it, I said but he quickly corrected me: it's not bullshit; it is chutzpah.

This reminded me of something that happened years previous to that. I was working as inspector at Douglas Aircraft in Ontario when shortly after 1967 a number of Israelis came to Canada and went to work for that aircraft manufacturer. These people had documents and letters of recommendation that would make you believe they were miracle workers. However, looking at them using the equipment or trying to, you could tell they were peasants who never touched this sort of machinery before. I dealt with a couple of them in the course of my work and we became such good friends that I was invited to their homes a few times on religious and non-religious occasions. This is when I learned that they grew up in kibbutzes doing farm work and other manual labor. When the war broke out in 1967 they were hired by the air force, were given a quick training and were shown how to load bombs and rockets onto the warplanes; nothing more technical than that. Yet, even after they told me of the meager extent of their training, they still argued forcefully trying to convince me to stamp the work they did as having passed inspection when it was so shoddy even they could see that.

Back to Montreal where I was in contact with another Jew who was barely out of law school. This one was as much interested in politics as he was in the law. A female relative of his was running for office and he was helping with her campaign using a computer to reach the delegates that were to elect a candidate to represent the party. At the time, the computers were not as friendly as those of today in that they used the Disc Operating Systems (DOS) instead of the easy to use myriad of softwares we have today. I was not better at using the DOS than he was because my background was hardware and programing in machine language as well as the higher language called Basic. So we spent hours together, most of them on the phone, trying to figure out how to use DOS in the most efficient way possible. But this was also an occasion for me to learn what the man was communicating to the delegates. In simple terms, what he did to sell his relative was so exaggerated, it could only be described as hogwash like you would not believe.

Eventually, the woman was elected and in no time at all, they started to talk about her in the news. I never saw her speak to the camera but other people spoke about her. They said glowing things as if she were the goddess that the country could not do without. According to these people, she was the most intelligent thing to grace the political scene with her presence, having a grasp of the subjects she handled like no one ever grasped them before. The striking thing was that the people who spoke about her used the exact same words that her relative was using when selling her to the delegates. It seemed that the hogwash he brewed to impress the delegates at the level of the riding had worked its way to the national level via the media.

And this reminded me of the notorious letter writing campaigns that the Jewish organizations were known to initiate in the 1960s and the 1970s. At first, the people in politics and the editors of the various publications thought they were genuine letters written by concerned citizens worried about the fate of Israel, that pantheon of everything glorious, exquisite and smart about the human race. But then the politicians and the journalists discovered that many of the words used and most of the themes articulated in those letters were repeated over and over again. This is when the good people concluded that the letters had one and the same source even if, on the surface, they appeared to have been sent by different people from addresses across the country. And so the politicians and the editors treated the letters as if they were one and the same letter coming from one and the same source.

In the meantime, as I got older and gradually lost interest in what young people get excited about, I devoted more of my time to combing what was being said on behalf of the Jewish causes because I found it amusing to study what their organizations were up to at any given moment. I discovered that some themes come and go, lasting as long as a month or two but that other themes linger on seemingly for ever. With regard to the quick-to-fade themes there was, for example, the attempt to popularize the idea that America should invade Syria because the regime in that country was an offshoot of the one in Iraq to which Saddam was a disciple. As to the themes that never die, there is the idea that Jews are smarter than everyone else, the reason why they should rule the world. For example, the spectacle of the woman in Montreal was later repeated in Ontario when a Jewish man was hired to report on the system of education in the Province. This prompted several people to trot in front of the camera and marvel loudly at the excellent work that the man had done. Had God written that report, there would have been at least one person from the opposition parties to criticize something about it but when it comes to a Jew in Canada, criticism comes rarely if at all in front of the camera.

As for America where the stakes are even higher, the attention of the Jewish propaganda machine has been focused on the Congress more than anything else. For example, the idea was advanced to the effect that the only reason why the Republican Party still exists today is because Eric Cantor the Jew was said to have taken charge of the last campaign whereby he single handedly scored the victories that kept the Party alive. On the Democratic side, there was the Jewish Rahm Emanuel in the Congress before the President picked him to be his chief of staff. This man was said to have been the genius that explained to his colleagues how things worked on Wall Street thus helped them understand what they should be doing to prevent a meltdown of the financial system. The meltdown happened anyway and nobody trotted back in front of the cameras to retract the superlatives they attributed to Emanuel. In any case, this pair of Jewish saviors in America is not ruling the world yet but the two are trying hard to get in that position.

As for the rest of us, we must now recognize that the only way to prevent that infamous propaganda machine from getting carried away again and rev up to its high level of operation is to keep unmasking it. The people of goodwill who have taken it upon themselves to tell it like it is must from here on maintain a state of eternal vigilance and watch the machine on a continuous basis because the aim of the propagandists is to create a class of parasites that can live off the rest of humanity, and parasites never fade away on their own. We must help them do that.

Hate Thicker Than Water And Blood

The Nile Basin countries are negotiating to reach an agreement on the use and development of the river they share, an event that must be viewed as having great significance given the place that the Nile occupies in the social and political history of the region stretching back thousands of years, and the place it occupies in the evolutionary history of the human species stretching back millions of years. And while the event may be viewed as a human drama of epic proportion, it has a subplot woven into it which serves to show that something as beautiful as the history of the Nile cannot unfold without being shadowed by something as ugly and evil as the Talmudic state of mind. Let us review the background that is animating the subplot.

There was a time when Israel had run out of workers to do cheap manual work as immigration from the former Soviet Union and its satellites was drying up, and young Israelis were leaving the country in large numbers. Those that stayed home were drafted in the army or they were the religious freaks who would not work because they thought that God, the world and their government owed them a living. In the face of this recipe for economic ruin, the Israelis brought into Israel the people they could identify as being Ethiopian Jews and those who claimed to be. This influx of Blacks into Israel resulted in a racist backlash of such force that the ministry of health was compelled to ban the infusion of White Jews with blood donated by Blacks. In turn, the policy created a controversy which took time to die down but as soon as this happened, the controversy was rekindled by an explosive event. It is that after years of denial, the Israelis finally admitted they were harvesting the organs of the Palestinians they killed for transplantation into the bodies of those same White Jews who would rather die than have the blood of a Black transfused into them. The ironic question was then posed: What would it take to make a Black Jew equal to a White Jew or to a Palestinian Arab in the eyes of the Israelis and those of the Jewish state? Apparently, we have some sort of answer now: Maybe it takes a graduate degree or maybe not.

Here is the story. On April 29, 2010 Wondwosen Michago Seide wrote an article in a publication called Jimma under the title: “On Nile, Ethiopia's diplomacy paying off over Egypt's hard power”, a publication financed by the most blood thirsty organizations you can find in New York, the type that describe themselves as being Jewish oriented. Mr. Seide holds a degree in water science and says he used to do research for the Ethiopian Nile Basin Dialogue Forum but now writes for a publication that was banned in Ethiopia. When you read the article, you get the sense that yes, this man has learned his Talmudic lesson and you hasten to ask: Will they now accept him as an honorary White Jew in the same way that the racist regime in apartheid South Africa of yesteryear considered the Japanese to be honorary Whites when the regime was desperate to find someone who will do business with it? And will the Jews now accept to be transfused with the blood of this Ethiopian with the same enthusiasm they milk him for the credibility he can bring to their hateful incitement?

And you read the article expecting that someone who was educated in water science and who writes about the Nile would say something in the field of his expertise to enlighten the reader on the technical issues that escape the laymen. Indeed, doing just that may have been the natural inclination of this young man but look what the Jewish organizations got him to do instead. They got him to write something in the style of the Talmud, the usual run-of-the-mill incitement to hate; that which says something sordid about the organizations and nothing about water science. The aim of the article is to make Egypt look bad, a familiar theme that is the signature which gives away the identity of the real writers. But how do these people accomplish their aim? Well, what can be said is this: see what Seide was made to write and judge for yourself.

In trying to make Egypt look bad, he writes this: “Egypt ... insisted on the historical rights of the Nile water.” And he says this: “Egypt supports the: No appreciable harm principle.” He also says this: “Egypt tries to speed up projects that are related to the environment and flooding.” As we shall see, he gives these sayings the Talmudic spin and hopes they will make Egypt look bad in the eyes of the reader not realizing that they are having the opposite effect.

And in trying to make Ethiopia look good by comparison, he writes this: “... there were many occasions that Emperors of Ethiopia ... tried to use the Nile as a weapon ... [they] threatened to block the flow of water for various reasons.” He also says this: “In the past ... Ethiopia, avoided Egypt's influence by not taking part in pre-NBI cooperation. Waterbury ... described Ethiopia's measure as: a diplomatic tactic of aggressive silence." And here too he gives those sayings the Talmudic spin and hopes they will make Ethiopia look good in the eyes of the reader.

To spin the readers, he takes them for a ride on the notorious Talmudic carousel of intellectual dyslexia. As if to hit them on the head with a baseball bat and make them see things in reverse, he begins the article with this introduction: “Water can defy gravity and flow uphill towards power. Ethiopia uses water to get more power; Egypt uses power to get more water. In the Nile Basin reality, power plays more of a role than cooperation.” He thus sets the terms of reference at the start by telling the reader that even though Egypt goes to the negotiating table in good faith to negotiate about water while Ethiopia uses the negotiations as an excuse to gain power, it is an African reality that power is more important than cooperation, which is as it should be ... three cheers for Ethiopia.

So then what kind of fantasy does this upside-down reality generate in the mind of its authors, the Israelis and their New York allies who are the ghostwriters of the article? Well, they actually answer the question in the second paragraph like this: “Currently, there is a power tug-of-war between ... Ethiopia and Egypt. For the first time in the history of the Nile Basin, there are indications that the power balance is tilting towards Ethiopia's advantage.” Later on they let out a cry of triumph like this: “After a grueling debate past midnight on April 14, 2010, the riparian countries ADMITTED (emphasis mine) that they could not reach any agreement on the allocation of the Nile waters.” This apparent discord is what they have been dreaming about and now that they believe they have it, they beat their breasts in celebration. If anything, this goes to prove that the power game is more a game in their own mind than it is a reality around the Nile basin.

But to cement the fantasy in their mind lest they relinquish it, and cement it in the mind of the readers lest they become distracted by something else, the authors of the article deliver the famous one-two punch. First, they assert the following unequivocal proposition: “Historically, the power struggle was at the center of the Nile Basin.” Second, they remind the reader of the maxim which says: “He who controls the Nile controls Egypt.” And they claim that this was the motivation that triggered the Egyptian leaders to want to control the Nile Basin. But realizing that this alone will not damn the Egyptians to any great extent, the authors of the article hastened to add the postscript: “by any means.”

Let us look at the first proposition. In the same way that DNA yields the best proof as to the identity of a deceased, the word “historically” placed at the beginning of a sentence yields the best proof that the authors of the sentence are the diseased Talmudists. These people want you to believe that every Jew is a born historian even though history is something they improvise on the go to suit the moment then contradict it a moment later when the circumstances change. Thus, when you hear them begin a sentence with the word: “HISTORICALLY,” you must turn around and run like hell because – take it from me -- you would rather have a witch doctor perform brain surgery on you than have these characters tell you about history.

We now look at their use of the maxim concerning the control of the Nile and of Egypt. They want you to believe that because the Egyptians feared being controlled by someone, they were triggered into action to control the Nile Basin. In reality, this is the principle of preemption which is more a Judeo-Israeli strategy than it is an Egyptian one. These Talmudists are so immersed in this sort of behavior that they could not find another accusation to throw at Egypt except to add the postscript: “by any means.” But then you ask: What were these means? and they answer: “In the 19th Century, the Egyptian President Mohammed Ali, launched a hegemonic strategy [Unity of the Nile Valley] a resources capture tactic to bring Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, Uganda and Kenya under the umbrella of Egypt.” And they tell you that this Egyptian strategy came after 600 years of continuous provocation by the Ethiopian Emperors who threatened to block the flow of the Nile. And you ask: what resources did the Egyptians try to capture in response to these horrible provocations? And they answer: the waters of the Nile that have been flowing for millions of years, idiot. And they go on to say: if you, the reader, cannot see from these explications why the Egyptians are such a bad people for desiring what they desire and for doing what they do, then you have no business staying on this planet, and you should find another place for yourself in the vast Universe out there.

After a while, dear reader, you get tired of this shenanigan and decide to comb the article one more time to see if you can discover what really bugs these people. This is where you leave the realm of the absurd and plunge into the realm of the bizarre. You find them incite the upper riparian countries to resent Egypt's hegemony, accrued to it by “the virtue of their technical and legal expertise and relative economic and political influence...” In fact, this was the approach that the Israelis and their Zionist allies in America took when trying to pit the Arabs of the Gulf states against Egypt. When they failed to find an Arab in the Gulf who will listen to them, they assembled a bunch of people in New York and in Toronto who looked like Arabs and spoke like them; they put them on television and told them what to say to drum into the heads of the American and Canadian audiences that Egypt was losing influence in the Arab World. But guess what, I have bad news for these pathetic Talmudists. They are doing what the people of Egypt have always wanted. Indeed, the Egyptians told the late President Sadat they did not want a world leader (which he was becoming having kicked the Israelis out of the Sinai) but wanted a leader who will work for Egypt and for them. Mubarak has been this kind of leader and that is why he lasted this long.

What is also bizarre is their use of the current debate on climate change which they try to exploit so as to weave and to spin something anti-Egyptian. Having accused Egypt of trying “...to speed up projects that are related to the environment and flooding,” they say the following a few paragraphs later: “The fear is that the status quo may aggravate the calamities of climate change,” then say this in their final conclusion: “Egypt is going to be less attractive and acceptable in the face of looming climate change.”

And then there is this paragraph which is puzzling considering what it omits: “The unfair nature of the 1959 agreement is self-explanatory from its title [Agreement for the Full Utilization of the Nile Waters] even if the Nile belongs to 10 countries.” The authors of the article had only mentioned 7 upper riparian and 2 lower riparian countries up to now without mentioning the tenth country, Eritrea. And this is the country that only a few days ago urged the 7 upper riparian countries not to rush and sign an agreement among themselves that will go contrary to international law and serve the purpose of those who want to keep on looting Africa's resources.

The reference to the 1959 agreement brings out the important point omitted by the authors. It is an agreement between Egypt and Sudan on how to share the portion of the Nile that nature has given them millions of years ago. The reality is that the Nile is endowed with 1.65 trillion cubic meters of water every year. About 4% of this water flows north of the Sudanese city, Khartoum where the White Nile and the Blue Nile meet. From there the Nile goes on to Northern Sudan and to Egypt. Of this water, the 1959 agreement stipulates that Egypt is to receive 55.5 billion cubic meters which amounts to only 3% of the totality of the Nile waters; and the rest stays with the other 9 countries. Yes, Egypt gets three quarters or so of the water that flows north of Khartoum but the other countries are all situated south of Khartoum where 96% of the Nile water flows. Thus, to speak of the unfairness of the agreement because it uses the words “Full Utilization” and to suggest accordingly that Egypt gets more than its fair share is such an idiotic proposition, you must conclude that it is Talmudic because only someone endowed with a Talmudic wisdom can be this stupid.

So then, armed with these notions, how do the scheming people in Tel Aviv and New York hope to set the Horn of Africa on fire and feed on the ensuing misery? Well, there is the usual Judeo-Israeli trick which is to fashion an argument aimed at pulling America by the nose and get it to help them do what they want to see done. The argument is this: “America cannot survive without us because there is evil out there trying to destroy America but we can destroy the evil and give America a lease on life. The evil is Al-Qaeda, and we can fight the thing like no American is capable of fighting it.” This is what Israel used to say and this is what these characters are now saying on behalf of Ethiopia. To paraphrase a French saying, the more the thing changes, the more it remains a Talmudic idiocy tailor-made to spring into action the usually sclerotic congressional asses of America.

Finally, if Wondwosen Michago Seide has a note in his pocket saying he wishes to donate his organs in case he drops dead, he better not drop in Israel because the racist characters out there may not deem him worthy enough as yet to donate his organs for transplantation in the body of a White Jew. And the organs may end up in the trashcan.

Conspiracy Of The Opportunistic Predators

In the ongoing debate on financial reform several analogies were made by the debaters to illustrate the points they were making, and these were good analogies. However, it must be said that they were incomplete inferences because they missed out on one important detail. The purpose of this essay is not to rehash the entire debate or to put it in a nutshell but to illustrate that one detail and to highlight its importance in the context of the larger debate.

To describe the credit default derivatives, the analogy was made to the effect that such derivatives are like betting that your neighbor's house will burn down, wishing of course that it does so that you may collect. Another analogy was made to the effect that the derivatives are like betting on a team losing the game and wishing that it does. The question was then asked if it were possible to imagine someone being tempted to set ablaze her neighbor's house and collect, or a player betting against his own team then play to lose the game and win the bet. Well, the record does not show someone ever making a bet against her neighbor's house and setting it ablaze but it does show instances where players made bets against their own team then played to lose the game. Worse, the record shows people taking insurance on their spouses and killing them to collect, or taking insurance on themselves and faking their own death to allow the beneficiaries to collect. The point is that where there is the possibility of getting away with a fraudulent insurance claim, people will find ingenuous ways to game the system and to act dishonestly.

This said, what the analogies show is that you can play this sort of game but that you can play it only once. When the house burns down, you win the bet and it is the end of this story. When a team loses the game, you win the bet and it is the end of this story. The difference between these situations and the games they play in the financial world is that the financial instruments stay alive for as long as you want them alive. Their value goes up and down in cycles, never ending the story in a sudden death because the games are played with money, and money is never completely withdrawn from the economy. On the contrary, money is made to gradually increase in the system thus forming a bubble that gets bigger with each cycle till it bursts and takes down part of the system or all of it without killing the economy which keeps on going albeit in a recessionary state or a depressed one. Let me illustrate my point with a real incident that happened long ago.

I started playing the stock market in 1965, never on a full time basis, always as an amateur beginning with the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX) which had a good reputation. I then traded on the Vancouver and the Alberta Exchanges whose reputations were not so good. With time I became suspicious of the latter two from experience as I felt that trades executed on my behalf were not entirely clean. I decided to check and see if Toronto was as clean as people said it was. It so happened that some two decades ago a company called Joutel was trading on the TSX. It has since merged with another company, changed its name and done a 1 for 6 reverse split. I bought 35,000 shares of the company before the reverse split at an average price of perhaps 20 cents and saw the price go up to about 32 cents where it continued to trade in a range around there.

One lucky day in the winter of 1993, Joutel broke out on the upside, opening higher than 30 cents and reaching close to 40 cents in a matter of hours. To do the test I had in mind, I put a stop loss on 15,000 shares at 29 cents -- below the opening price of that day. Within seconds, Joutel reversed direction and started to go down on a heavy volume. It reached 29 cents where my 15,000 shares were scooped up. The stock then abruptly reversed direction and went up again closing that day around 40 cents. A few months later it had reached a maximum of 75 cents or thereabout, always going up and down like a yo-yo. Undoubtedly some brokerage firms bet several times for and against it during that roller-coaster ride making tons of money coming and going. And the repetition of either the cycle or the bet is what you cannot do with a house that burns down or a team that loses the game.

Now, you can argue all you want it was just a coincidence that several brokerage houses discovered they had a whole bunch of Joutel shares they wanted to dump right after I placed my stop loss order but no one in his right mind will believe this argument. The most likely thing to have happened was that a number of arbitrageurs, specialists and market makers who knew each other but worked in different brokerage houses knew exactly what to do when they saw my stop loss order come in. They delayed for a split second the buy orders that were coming from the outside while they shorted and churned a few Joutel shares over and over again, spiraling the price down to 29 cents where they “legally” grabbed my 15,000 shares. This done, they let the price rise again and sold my shares, each to their respective clients making a handsome profit for their troubles. Call it silent conspiracy, outrageous conspiracy, legal conspiracy or what you want but conspiracy it is no matter what you choose to call it.

Those arbitrageurs, specialists and market makers are people who work in a building where the stock exchange is housed, or they work in buildings near it. Whether they work on the same street or on nearby streets, they are collectively called by the name of the street where the exchange stands. In New York it is Wall street; in Toronto it is Bay Street. The important thing to remember is that all of these people have one thing in common; they want to get rich not by creating real wealth which they have no skill to do but by creating the illusion of wealth in the eyes of others. It is then possible for them to monetize this illusion in the fantasy world of the street then translate the fantasy into a life of fabulous riches for themselves in the real world of the real economy. But what mechanism do they employ to do that?

In the real economy, wealth is something tangible you create using the skills you have. For example, you know how to plant a field or make a piece of furniture or construct a house. Or you have a skill of a different kind whereby you render a valuable service such as teach the young or heal the sick or cook a meal for a large number of people. In the old days, members of a clan exchanged some of the surplus products they made or the services they rendered with products made by someone else or services rendered by still another. When life became more complicated and the variety of goods and services multiplied, people used pieces of precious metal such as gold or silver to exchange for and against those goods and services. When life became still more complicated, paper money in the form of banknotes were printed and used as a medium of exchange. These banknotes are still in use today and they have an intrinsic value that is close to zero but have a higher value ascribed to them, a value that resides in the fact they are promissory notes made by the government to the holders of the notes.

And this is what makes it possible for the people who have no skill to get fabulously rich. Let us go back to the example above to see how these people can do it in practice. I used my own money to buy those Joutel penny stocks and I paid for them in cash. However, I could have bought a more expensive stock that would have been eligible for a margin trade. That is, I could have used my 7,000 dollars and borrowed 7,000 more to invest 14,000 dollars altogether. Borrowing 7,000 dollars from the broker would have prompted the broker to borrow that amount directly from the central bank or by going through a commercial bank depending on the status of the broker. This would not have added one scrap of food to the tables of the nation, one chair around a kitchen table or one shingle to the roof of the house next door. Neither would it have taught one child in school, healed one soul in hospital or cooked one meal in a restaurant. In brief, while my borrowing would not have added wealth to the nation, it would have added to the money supply which would have diluted the monetary holdings of everyone else in the nation while inflating the value of all the hard assets. And it would have done one more thing; it would have expanded my balance sheet thus giving me the opportunity to make more money if things went the way I speculated or lose more money if things went the other way.

But because I did not borrow, all that happened was that 15,000 of my shares were scooped up. They were bought legally but unethically at a low price and sold at a high price where the arbitrageurs, the specialists and the market makers -- known collectively as Bay Street -- made the profit that should have been mine, a client of one of them. Had I borrowed the money, things would have been worse, especially if I had kept on borrowing to buy more of the stock as it went up. The streeters would have waited till such time they felt that the stock had gone high enough before shorting it and spiraling the price down to half the average I paid for it. My holding now worth the amount I borrowed or less, I would have been declared insolvent if I had no other assets in my portfolio; and the broker would have given me that dreaded margin call. He would have asked for cash or failing this, he would have sold the stock and paid for my borrowings, leaving me with a balance of zero or even a negative one. Thus the difference between the stop loss feature and that of the margin buying is that in the first instance I had the opportunity to decide when to act and I set the price at which the stock was to be sold whereas in the second instance the timing to issue the margin call and the decision to set the sale price of the stock would have been left in the hands of the streeters and my broker. This is why the short-sell that guts the portfolio of those who buy on margin is worse than the short-sell that scoops up the stocks on a stop loss.

Most of the time, however, people would have more than one stock, even have assets of different classes in their portfolios which makes it easier to avoid getting a margin call when one stock goes bad. But if all the stocks on the exchange and all the asset classes are inflated at the same time in what is known as a financial bubble, the careless borrowers can neither run nor hide when the bubble is made to burst. They become sitting ducks ready to be scooped up and plucked one feather at a time or they are swallowed whole. And who does the plucking and the swallowing? The streeters do.

Here we see why it is in the interest of the Wall streeters, the Bay streeters and the streeters everywhere to have the bubbles get as large as they can, and to have them form simultaneously in all classes of the financial assets. This is the way that the streeters can turn their clients into objects in whose name money is borrowed legitimately from the central bank, and it is the way that they can use the clients as a conduit to channel the money to their own accounts where it sits for a while. When the time comes, the streeters burst the bubble and scoop up not only the money but the assets as well. And with the price of the real assets in the real world falling like a stone as a result of the mayhem that follows, money becomes king and the streeters buy themselves an empire of little kingdoms. Again, you may call this a silent conspiracy, an outrageous conspiracy, a legal conspiracy or what you want but conspiracy it is; and it is so no matter what name you choose to give it.

Except for the big crash of the nineteen twenties and the meltdown that occurred at the beginning of the twenty first century where the fault could clearly be traced to the streeters, these people were able to deflect all other criticism by blaming the crashes on someone else. The argument has always been that they did not engineer the bubbles or precipitate the crashes which may well be partially correct. But if the streeters were not fully responsible for those calamities, they were the opportunistic predators who took advantage of every circumstance that materialized outside their sphere of influence to encourage the forming of bubbles and conspire to cause the crashes through the use of the short-sell. For example, the Y2K scare and the call to build affordable housing for the poor were not of their doing but were the circumstances they took advantage of to monetize the scare, “bubblize” the call to build and make money on their backs. In essence, what these people did in each incidence is that they turned the printing presses of the central bank into their personal presses. And they did not need a basement to hide their near counterfeiting activities as they let the presses stay where they were and legally used them like subsidiaries of their firms.

The legislators and the regulators of financial institutions must find a way to make the engagement in this sort of activities impossible to happen again.