- How U.S. Colleges Sell Enrollment to the Highest Bidders
Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,
This past Friday, Reuters published one of the most important articles I’ve read in a while relative to the attention being paid to the issue. It details a streamlined practice through which Chinese “education” companies essentially bribe college admissions officers at top U.S. universities to accept tuition paying Chinese students. It’d be bad enough if these students were actually qualified, but in many cases these companies complete the entirety of the applications for the students, including writing their essays. It’s not uncommon for these student-clients to never see their own applications.
Naturally, these companies couldn’t pull off their sleazy scam without willing American partners. Enter Thomas Benson and Stephen Gessner, two eager-beaver members of our nation’s celebrated — earn as much money as possible however possible without regard to the negative consequences to your fellow Americans — class. The entire story will make you sick, and it’s just further proof of how cronyism, bribery and a complete lack of ethics has fully penetrated into virtually every single facet of American life. It’s symptomatic of the debased, crooked Banana Republic economy we have become.
Without further ado, here are some excerpts from the must read article, How Top U.S. Colleges Hooked Up With Controversial Chinese Companies:
SHANGHAI/SHELTER ISLAND, New York – Thomas Benson once ran a small liberal arts college in Vermont. Stephen Gessner served as president of the school board for New York’s Shelter Island.
More recently, they’ve been opening doors for Chinese education companies seeking a competitive edge: getting their students direct access to admissions officers at top U.S. universities.
Over the past seven years, Benson and Gessner have worked as consultants for three major Chinese companies. They recruited dozens of U.S. admissions officers to fly to China and meet in person with the companies’ student clients, with the companies picking up most of the travel expenses. Among the schools that participated: Cornell University, the University of Chicago, Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley.
Two companies Benson and Gessner have represented – New Oriental Education & Technology Group Inc and Dipont Education Management Group – offer services to students that go far beyond meet-and-greets with admissions officers.
Eight former and current New Oriental employees and 17 former Dipont employees told Reuters the firms have engaged in college application fraud, including writing application essays and teacher recommendations, and falsifying high school transcripts.
The New Oriental employees said most clients lacked the language skills to write their own essays or personal statements, so counselors wrote them; only the top students did original work. New Oriental and Dipont deny condoning or wittingly engaging in application fraud.
Building on a model they pioneered for Dipont, Benson and Gessner helped New Oriental introduce its clients to U.S. admissions officers, linchpin players in the fast-growing business of supplying Chinese students a prestigious American education.
Beijing-based New Oriental is a behemoth. Founded in 1993, the company is China’s largest provider of private education services, serving more than two million Chinese students a year. Its shares trade on the New York Stock Exchange. The company generates about $1.5 billion in annual net revenue from programs that include test preparation and English language classes. This year, about 10,000 of its clients were enrolled in American colleges and graduate schools.
A New Oriental student contract reviewed by Reuters states that its services include “writing or polishing” parts of college applications. The contract says New Oriental will set up an email account on behalf of the client for communicating with colleges, keeping sole control of the password. Several former employees said some students never even saw their applications: The company controlled the entire process, including submitting the application to colleges.
The new insight into the business practices of Chinese education companies comes at a time when American colleges are relying more heavily on Chinese undergraduates, who tend to pay full tuition. Their numbers grew 9 percent to 135,629 students in the 2015-2016 school year, representing nearly a third of all international undergraduates, according to the Institute of International Education.
Helping Chinese kids get into U.S. schools has become a significant industry, with hundreds of companies having sprung up in China to cash in. These businesses often charge large sums for services that sometimes include helping students cheat on standardized tests and falsifying their college applications.
Ghost-writing applications for students is so common in China that some who do it speak openly about the practice.
“I wrote essays and recommendation letters for students when I worked at New Oriental, which I still do right now for my own consultancy,” former New Oriental employee David Shi told Reuters. “I know there is an ethical dilemma but it’s the nature of the industry.”
Beginning in 2009, Gessner and Benson launched tours and summer camps for U.S. admissions officers to meet Dipont students in China and advise them on applying to colleges. Benson said he and Gessner recruited the universities through contacts in secondary and higher education.
To establish credibility with the colleges, they said, they set up a New York-based non-profit called the Council for American Culture and Education Inc, or CACE.
“It was a more respectable way to work as consultants. It helped us to recruit colleges,” said Gessner.
The strategy worked. The early participants included admissions officers from such prestigious institutions as Cornell, Stanford, Swarthmore College, Emory University and the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
Reuters reported in October that the New York Attorney General’s office planned to review the charity, which had failed to disclose its ties to Dipont in U.S. and New York State tax filings. The review could lead to a formal investigation if authorities find evidence that CACE violated New York law.
Reuters also reported that eight former Dipont employees had described how the company had engaged in application fraud, including writing essays for students and altering recommendation letters. Since the story, Reuters has interviewed nine additional former Dipont employees who gave similar accounts.
To get the colleges to participate in the New Oriental trips, Benson and Gessner used the playbook they perfected at Dipont. Both Chinese companies paid airfare, hotel and other travel expenses for each of the admissions officers whom Benson and Gessner brought to China between 2009 and last year. “They wouldn’t go otherwise,” Benson said.
The ethics code for college admissions officers doesn’t address the propriety of such arrangements. Cigus Vanni, a retired high school counselor from Wynnewood, Pennsylvania, said it was “absolutely” unethical for colleges to accept the money. He likened it to a “pay-for-play” scheme in which prospective Chinese students get special treatment. Many American applicants to elite U.S. colleges – which can receive five to 20 applications for each available slot – don’t get to directly interact with admissions officers.
“You’re giving these people direct access to college admissions officers that no one else has,” said Vanni, who serves on the admissions practices committee of the National Association for College Admission Counseling. “And there’s something expected in return for that.”
Corrupt, crony, parasitic economic practices have now infected every single aspect of American life.
New Oriental touts the benefits of this access to prospective clients. In promotional material on its website, the company described how, during the 2014 tour, it arranged for one of its students “to have opportunities to have close contact with a Carleton admissions officer.”
The testimonial ends with the young woman receiving an acceptance letter from Carleton College.
Olivia Qiu said she used New Oriental to apply to eight U.S. colleges in 2010. After completing a questionnaire, the counselors took over. “I didn’t write anything. They wrote everything for me,” she said.
Qiu ultimately didn’t attend any of those eight colleges. Before university, she took a job at New Oriental in Tianjin and said she wrote essays for students. Other employees, she said, wrote personal statements, supplemental essays and recommendation letters. “Sometimes, the student didn’t even see (the application) before they submitted it” to colleges, she said.
She said she quit over ethical concerns. “I just thought that’s not right, that’s not how you help students,” she said.
A current New Oriental employee said he once falsified an entire high school transcript for a student. A former employee who worked in 2014 and 2015 compared New Oriental’s college application process to an assembly line: One person was in charge of signing a service contract with parents, another compiling a college list, a third completing the application, and a fourth submitting it to universities.
By early this year, Benson and Gessner had stopped working for New Oriental and were focusing on new markets, including India, Sri Lanka and Africa.
But the duo hasn’t abandoned China. In June, CICE organized a tour for admissions officers from seven U.S. colleges on behalf of another Chinese company, EIC Group.
Class act these guys.
EIC Group paid CICE $35,000, according to Benson, and promoted the tour with an advertisement on its website. “By ‘schmoozing and exchanging ideas’ with admissions officers, you are halfway to a successful application to a famous school,” said the Chinese-language ad. The ad disappeared after Reuters questioned the company about it.
Let’s put the obvious ethical grotesqueness of it all aside for a moment and think about some of the real-world impacts of this pay-to-play pupil pipeline. With an ever growing supply of full tuition paying Chinese students waiting in the wings, what incentives do U.S. colleges have to keep tuition increases under control? Who cares if impoverished American debt slaves can afford an education or not? Like everything else in this sick society, it’s all about the money.
The Wall Street Journal published a related article earlier this year titled: Heavy Recruitment of Chinese Students Sows Discord on U.S. Campuses, where we learned that the education english speaking students receive often suffers due to the need to accommodate the surge in poorly prepared Chinese students. For example:
Students such as Mr. Shao are finding themselves separated from their American peers, sometimes through choice. Many are having a tough time fitting in and keeping up with classes. School administrators and teachers bluntly say a significant portion of international students are ill prepared for an American college education, and resent having to amend their lectures as a result.
Rebecca Karl, a professor of Chinese history at New York University, puts it more starkly: She says Chinese students can pose a “burden” on her lectures, which she needs to modify for their benefit.
Practices like these are able to sustain themselves due to public ignorance. It is imperative that we become far more informed as citizens, and far more outraged. Educate your friends and family by sharing this article.
- Bernie Camp Threatens To Sue Project Veritas After Video Revealed "Egregious Violation Of Campaign Finance Law"
The former deputy campaign manager for Bernie Sanders, Richard Pelletier, has sent a letter to Project Veritas threatening a lawsuit over his recording of a phone call, which Pelletier claims violated Nevada wiretapping laws. The phone call was related to the following undercover video published by Project Veritas back in February, potentially revealing that the Bernie campaign violated campaign finance laws by funding members of the Australian Labor Party to “deface and/or destroy campaign materials and signs of Sanders’ opponents — on both sides of the political aisle.”
In response to the lawsuit threat, Project Veritas Assistant Communications Director, Luara Loomer, told Sputnik News simply that they too would be “pursuing justice” after “The Bernie Sanders campaign committed an egregious violation of campaign finance law.”
Of course, the undercover video, published back in February, potentially reveals the violation of several federal laws including enlisting the help of a foreign national with a federal election and tampering with “political advertising which is placed on or affixed to public property or any private property.”
Federal election law prohibits a foreign national from directly or indirectly contributing money or any other thing of value to a Federal, state, or local election. This includes the payment by any person of compensation for the personal services of another person which are rendered to a political committee without charge for any purpose.
“The payment for the personal services of another person if those services are rendered without charge to a political committee for any purpose, except for legal and accounting services… is a contribution,: 52 U.S.C. 30101(8)(A) explains.
The volunteers were allegedly used to deface and/or destroy campaign materials and signs of Sanders’ opponents — on both sides of the political aisle.
Stealing or vandalizing political advertisement is illegal, the law states “no person shall remove, deface,or knowingly destroy any political advertising which is placed on or affixed to public property or any private property.”
In the video released by Project Veritas, the Australian nationals are seen stealing Trump signs. The footage also features a recording of Australian citizen Rebecca Doyle stating “they [the ALP] pay for our flights, they pay for the cost of accommodation, which is just the staff house, and then we get $60 stipend per day.”
So while the Washington Post and other mainstream media outlets continue to blast alleged election tampering by “Russian” agents, we expect their advice would be that you promptly ignore this documented evidence of actual election tampering by full-time employees of Australia’s Labor Party.
Here is the full letter sent to Project Veritas by Pelletier’s Attorney:
- Students Demand "Sanctuary" From Immigration Laws, Student Loan Debt, And Finals
Submitted by Amber Athey ad Cabot Phillips via CampusReform.org,
- Students at George Washington University, site of a recent walkout to demand a "sanctuary campus" to protect illegal immigrant students, say they favor defiance of other federal laws, too.
- Several students said they would like to make the campus a "sanctuary" from student loan debt, while others favored exemptions from underage drinking laws.
- Some students even felt they should be given a pass on final exams due to the stress of the election, explaining that "it’s really hard to focus on your studies when there’s so much else going on.”
Students across the country are asking for their schools to be “sanctuary campuses” for undocumented students, meaning university administrators would ignore federal immigration law and refuse to share information about undocumented students with immigration officials.
Several schools have already declared themselves sanctuary campuses, including Portland State University, Reed College, and Columbia University.
To find out more about what motivates students to support the sanctuary campus movement, Campus Reform visited George Washington University, where many students participated in a pro-sanctuary walk-out several weeks ago.
The students interviewed were overwhelmingly in favor of GW becoming a sanctuary campus, calling it a “great thing,” and claiming that undocumented students “have a right to be going to this school” because “it’s really important for students to feel safe while they’re going to school.”
Since the GW students were asking their administration to ignore federal law, Campus Reform asked if they wanted the campus to be a “sanctuary” from other laws, as well.
“What about a sanctuary campus where student loan laws don’t affect you here?” Campus Reform asked.
“Oh, absolutely,” responded one student, while another agreed, saying, “Yes, that’d be cool.”
Students were also on board with making GW a sanctuary campus from underage drinking laws, because students “would feel safer” if they could drink and go to parties without breaking the law.
“I do agree with that one,” declared one student.
“Yeah, I think it [campus] should be a safe space for everybody,” replied another, explaining, “I don’t think anybody should be judged.”
Some students even went so far as to say that campus should be a safe space from final exams, given recent stress from the 2016 election.
“School’s been really stressful especially after the Trump election,” one student vented. “Like, it’s really hard to focus on your studies when there’s so much else going on.”
Throughout the day, Campus Reform spoke with just one student who refused to support the idea of ignoring federal laws on campus.
“I don’t believe in harboring criminals,” the student, who said he voted for Donald Trump, told Campus Reform. “I think, it’s against the law, we have to enforce federal law where it stands.”
- Amazon Goes Offline With Bricks-And-Mortar Grocery Chain; Envisions Opening 2,000 Stores
After launching Amazon Fresh, an online food delivery service, in numerous cities just a few years ago, Amazon has now decided it has to go “offline” to capture incremental share of the grocery market. As such, the company today revealed its first brick-and-mortar small-format grocery store, Amazon Go, one of at least three formats the online retail giant is exploring as it makes a play for a higher share of grocery spending. With in-store technology designed to track customers’ every step, the Amazon Go concept promises “No Lines” and “No Checkout.”
The first Amazon Go concept store is roughly the size of a convenience store, though according to the Wall Street Journal the company is also testing a drive-thru concept as well as a traditional 30-to-40,000 square foot grocery store that would combine in-store shopping and curbside pickup.
The Amazon Go store, at roughly 1,800 square feet in downtown Seattle, resembles a convenience store-format in a video Amazon released Monday. It features artificial intelligence-powered technology that eliminates checkouts, cash registers and lines. Instead, customers scan their phone on a kiosk as they walk in, and Amazon automatically determines what items customers take from the shelves. After leaving the store, Amazon charges their account for the items and sends a receipt.
Meanwhile, in the suburban Seattle neighborhood of Ballard, a handful of workers on Monday were finishing up one of Amazon’s two drive-through prototypes in the area, which according to the people close to the situation are slated to open in the next few weeks. The wood-paneled building with green trim and an overhang appeared to have at least three covered bays for cars to pull up and pick up orders, with a paved driveway in front.
The third concept, the newly approved multi-format store, combines in-store shopping with curbside pickups, according to the people. It will likely adopt a 30,000- to 40,000-square-foot floor plans and spartan stocking style like European discount grocery chains Aldi or Lidl, offering a limited fresh selection in store and more via touch-screen orders for delivery later. Stores in this format, which are smaller than traditional U.S. grocery stores, could start appearing late next year.
While the store formats are still in the concept stage, Amazon ultimately envisions opening up to 2,000 brick-and-mortar locations.
Amazon envisions opening more than 2,000 brick-and-mortar grocery stores under its name, depending on the success of the new test locations, according to the people. By comparison, Kroger Co. operates about 2,800 locations across 35 states.
Adding grocery pickups will be “part of their secret sauce in terms of all of the different ways in which they can engage the customer in bringing the product to them,” says Bill Bishop, chief architect at grocery and retail consultancy Brick Meets Click. “Everyone is looking at grocery because of frequency. Frequency guarantees that you have density.”
Of course, Amazon isn’t the first to test drive-thru and curbside grocery as Target and Wal-Mart both plan to launch curbside pickup in 1,000 stores by the end of next year.
Meanwhile, with nearly 40,000 grocery stores in the U.S. employing roughly 3.5mm people, most of whom work at or near minimum wage, Bernie’s “Fight for $15” agitators may want to take note of this development.
- Auditor Deloitte Fined A Record $8 Million For Massive Fraud
Remember when auditors were, by their very definition, supposed to be the embodiment of credibility, trustworthiness and moral fiber? The Brazilian arm of Big Four auditing giant, Deloitte, forgot these simple prerequisites and as a result the US auditing watchdog fined the firm a record $8 million for what amounts to massive fraud: falsifying audit reports, altering documents and providing false testimony during an investigation that unearthed what it described as its “most serious” finding of misconduct.
The US Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, or PCAOB, also penalized or barred 12 former partners, including a national practice director, and auditors of the Brazil-based Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Auditores Independentes.
The Deloitte Brazil case is the first time the PCAOB has “charged a member of the Big Four auditing firms with fraud and for failing to co-operate with an investigation” according to the FT. Worse, unlike banks which resolve similar cases without admitting or denying guilt, in settling, Deloitte Brazil admitted it had violated quality control standards and failed to co-operate with the auditing board’s inspection and subsequent investigation.
“This is the most serious misconduct we’ve uncovered. It’s cover-up after cover-up after cover-up,” Claudius Modesti, director of enforcement at the PCAOB, said. “As an investor you’re expecting that the audit was done properly and sufficiently and that wasn’t the case here.”
Not only was that not the case, but the details read like straight out of a fictional account of third-world crime.
As the FT details, the PCAOB alleges Deloitte knew that its client, low-cost airline Gol Linhas Aéreas Inteligentes, did not have enough evidence to support “a potentially material amount of the maintenance deposits” that it was reporting. Deloitte’s senior auditors also knew the books were being reviewed for potential material misstatements when it released its audit report and signed off on the accuracy of the financial statements.
In 2012, PCAOB inspectors looked at the Gol audits during their review of Deloitte Brazil. The engagement partner for the Gol account allegedly instructed his team to alter the work papers, according to the settlement. The partner also told his staff to alter the work papers for another client whose audit was also under review, the PCAOB alleged.
The auditing watchdog later opened an investigation and alleges that this was further obstructed by the Deloitte auditors who provided the altered work papers to regulators. Senior Deloitte auditors falsely testified under oath that the altered work papers were the original documents, according to the settlement.
Investigators compared documents and realised something had changed. “The documentation that they had generated during the audit had changed so that our inspectors wouldn’t be able to identify, for example, the significance of these maintenance deposit deficiencies,” said Mr Modesti.
After Deloitte conducted its own internal investigation when regulators brought concerns about altered documents, it found 70 altered work papers related to the Gol audits. PCAOB said senior leaders of the firm also obstructed investigators when they sought to look into the second client.
In January, a senior manager who worked on the Gol audit gave PCAOB investigators recordings taken on his mobile phone of conversations he had had with a senior partner. In one of those recordings, made in 2014 amid the enforcement investigation, the senior partner told the manager, “any evidence that you have of this, remove it from your machine. Keep it in a — if you have that, keep it somewhere else, but not in your machine, not in the office. OK?”
“Everything you told me, everything we discussed, never happened,” the senior partner added.
In an attempt to save face after this “massive fraud” was uncovered, Deloitte tried to cast it off as a one-time event, the result of a few corrupt individuals, and said: “Integrity in delivering high-quality services is
critical to our business, our clients and the public interest; it is
non-negotiable.” It added that the actions of “a limited number” of
individuals was “wholly unacceptable”. And yet, all but one of the former partners and auditors have been banned from working for companies and broker dealers that fall under the PCAOB’s oversight.In addition to the fine, which is the largest that the PCAOB has ever
obtained, Deloitte agreed to an independent monitor and is banned from
accepting new audit clients in Brazil until the firm meets remedial
benchmarks.One wonders if Deloitte was caught with one such brazenly egregious case, just what else is there that goes unreported, and undiscovered when it comes to corporate “books”, not only in Brazil but also in the US.
- A Banana Republic In The Making – "The Glue Of Reason In India Is Flaking"
Submitted by Jayant Bhandari via Acting-Man.com,
A Brief Recap
India’s Prime Minister announced on 8th November 2016 that Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 banknotes will no longer be legal tender. Linked are Part-I, Part-II, Part-III, and Part-IV , which provide updates on the rapidly encroaching police state
Expect a continuation of new social engineering notifications, each sabotaging wealth-creation, confiscating people’s wealth, and tyrannizing those who refuse to be a part of the herd, in the process destroying the very backbone of the economy and civilization.
There are clear signs that in a very convoluted way, possession of gold for investment purposes will be made illegal. Expect capital controls to follow. Chaos from people’s inability to access the money in their bank accounts is now spreading to the people who have so far been unaffected: the middle class.
This is a completely unnecessary man-made disaster, with the single aim of glorifying Narendra Modi.
Indian prime minister Narendra Modi
Photo credit: Reuters
Fracturing Institutions
Several petitions in various courts across India were immediately filed against the central bank, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), for repudiating its IOU obligation which the currency bills represent, after Modi’s announcement on 8th November.
Several postponements later, the first hearing at the Supreme Court will likely take place on 5th December 2016, almost a month after the announcement of the ban. That does not mean that the court did not deliberate over “more important issues” affecting this wretched poor country.
It inter alia heard a petition and passed a judgment that makes playing the national anthem compulsory at cinema halls before the start of every movie, to promote nationalism. It also decreed that people have to stand up while the anthem is played. Henceforth one can be charged with sedition for not actively showing proper respect to the flag and the anthem.
Only someone very numb can avoid being horrified by this.
By law, the national anthem must henceforth be played in Indian cinemas before the start of a movie (as an aside, the anthem sounds actually interesting from a musical standpoint). Per the court’s order, everyone present must stand up while it is playing, so as to show proper respect. A failure to stand up can lead to an indictment for sedition, and sometimes it leads to offenders being berated and getting beaten up on the spot by irate nationalists. Happily, it is not yet mandatory to shout “Sieg Heil”. [PT]
Salaried middle class Indians — lacking moral instincts and incapable of imagining the concept of individual liberty in this extremely irrational society — are happy with the court’s decision. Insecure in their own skin, they prefer the comfort of the collective. They are the true source of this collectivist poison.
Indian courts are often referred to as “honorable court” and they very actively taking steps against anyone who shows the slightest of disrespect or challenges their judgments. So any direct challenge to their “authority” would be unwise.
Indian institutions have continued to deteriorate and mutate since the British left India. They are now merely hollowed out structures, devoid of any meaning or essence. We are in the final phase in which these institutions are crumbling, but in the meantime pomp and show are amped up to fool the gullible.
Indian culture in its immense irrationality does not provide the glue to even maintain these institutions, let alone improve on them. That glue could only have come from reason and moral instincts.
Anyone with a sense of history also realizes that India produced its finest leaders while it was still under the control of the British. It was during British rule that a cultural renaissance was happening in India, which ended with the emergence of the politicized, so-called independence movement.
Britain had set up institutions that allowed the ablest and the best to rise up. Not only is this no longer happening, but Indian institutions today actively suppress the ablest and the finest, as the recent judgment of the Supreme Court on the anthem exemplifies. This happens because most Indians euphorically support suppression of the individual both in theory and practice.
Institutions of liberty have mutated into institutions of slavery. It is this inversion that is hastening the rapid decay of Indian society. India must eventually end up with institutions that reflect its underlying culture: a hugely fractured, tribal set-up, and very likely a disintegrated India.
Without reason, institutions are destroyed by entropy
Photo via indiaspend.com
The Forgotten Ones
Modi’s policies on demonetization are changing on a daily basis, sometimes more than once a day. This had to happen, for once you take up a mindless social engineering project of this enormity — killing 88% of monetary value in circulation overnight in a country where most people depend on cash — massive patch-up jobs have to be undertaken for the foreseeable future, helping India to degrade and sprint toward becoming a police state.
Alas, there are simply not enough patches available. India’s economy and society will are facing massive problems. So far, it has been the poorest citizens who have suffered the most.
The horrendous struggles of more than 50% of the population, whose situation is worse than that of the average African on virtually every metric – who have no toilets, no electricity, no water supply, no access to even primary health care or basic education – will go unrecorded.
These poorest of India’s people are seen as nobodies. International organizations only have an interest in them in terms of aggregate headline figures — Gini coefficient, poverty level, population growth, etc. India’s middle class, while it might claim to be against the caste system, does not really see these people or account for them, as they are widely perceived as mere servants.
The western media, the IMF and many international economists — if they are paying attention to the current demonetization at all — are siding with the Indian government. It is as if the forces in favor of one-world government and their craving to control people’s cash and private lives have become their sole aim in life.
Obsessed with Keynesian economics, they think that all one has to do to increase wealth is to finely adjust the currency-printing machine. Most of these people have never studied philosophy, watched or understood human psychology, investigated society in its complexity outside of econometrics and statistics, or participated in running a business.
In their eyes, India is on the path of progress and institutional reform. From their perspective — colored by a rather simplistic, socialistic indoctrination — they are completely failing to see the situation in its entirety, particularly the massive suffering the ban on currency has inflicted on society and the inevitable systemic risks it has imposed on India’s future.
This is the water supply for the lucky ones. Many do not have even this.
Photo credit: Adnan Abidi / Reuters
A Banana Republic in the Making
Our interest here is in exploring deeper undercurrents and what they mean for the future of India. Every single indication is that India is on an inevitable path to becoming a full-scale police state. But the Indian police state will not be a Nazi-kind of system.
Being inherently disorganized, undisciplined and lacking the capacity to plan and having no commitment to values, India will go the way of autocracies in Africa, the Middle East, Pakistan and Bangladesh. With GDP per capita of USD 1,604, India is already drenched in poverty, and wallowing in suffering and disease.
In India, suffering and violence — not reason or moral instincts — bring stability. The concept of reason is conspicuous by its absence in Indian society. Such societies — as in the Middle East, Africa, and elsewhere in the backward part of the world — tend to go through a phase of violence before stability arises. If they could reason, they would be able to bypass the phase of violence.
The last thing anyone should do is to transplant such people into a different setting or to change the structure of their societies, as Modi has tried with the demonetization edict. People with tribal mindsets do not flourish, assimilate or evolve when transplanted or destabilized.
This has been the consistent experience from trying to enforce institutional changes in these countries through top-down mechanisms. In what way have Iraq or Libya become any better after their ruthless rulers were forcibly removed?
Societies lacking in reason also lack moral instincts. They are mostly oblivious to the pain of other people. In India, those from the lower castes — even though the formal caste system is crumbling — do not register as human beings in the minds of members of the richer classes.
Scores of people have died because of lack of treatment, having to queue for too long in their old age, etc., but in the imagination of the salaried middle class they are mere numbers, all somehow contributing to the greater good.
Throngs of desperate people are storming a bank. How can such scenes possibly strike anyone as symptomatic of “good economic policy”? [PT]
But now, with the month of November having ended, salaried people are starting to get hit as well. The money that they thought was safe in the banks is no longer available. It is now their turn to join the queues and return home empty-handed, as the banks have mostly run out of cash.
The middle class is now starting to suffer as well, as cash in the banking system has been depleted
Photo credit: PTI
Pensioners and salary earners will likely change their view about the demonetization policy as they increasingly realize that their pensions and salaries are now stuck in the banks
Gold Bullion Is Now Effectively Illegal
Assaults on people’s private property and the integrity of their homes through tax-raids continue. In a recent notification, government has made it clear that any ownership of jewelry above 500 grams of gold per married woman will be put under the microscopic scrutiny of tax authorities.
Steep taxes and penalties will be imposed on those who cannot prove the source of their gold. In India’s Orwellian new-speak this means that because bullion has not been explicitly mentioned, its ownership will be deemed to be illegal. Courts will do what Modi wants. Huge bribes will have to be paid.
Sane people are of course cleaning up their bank lockers. The secondary consequence of this will be a steep increase in unreported crimes, for people will be afraid of going to the police after a theft, fearing that the tax authorities will then ask questions. At the same time, the gold market has mostly gone underground, and apparently the volume of gold buying has gone up.
The salaried middle class is the consumption class, often heavily indebted. Poor people have limited amounts of gold. The government is merely doing what pleases the majority and their sense of envy, to the detriment of small businesses and savers. Now, the middle class is starting to face problems as well. This will worsen once the the impact of the destruction of small businesses becomes obvious.
India has always had a negative-yielding economy. It has suddenly become even more negative-yielding. Business risk has gone through the roof. Savers will be victimized. It is because of negative yields that Indian savers buy gold. They will buy more going forward.
Sane Indians should stay a step ahead of their rapacious government and the evolving totalitarian society, which are less and less inhibited by any institutions or values in support of liberty.
Conclusion
India will become a police state, likely with the full support of most Indians. Nationalism will be the thread that weaves them together. But it is a fake thread, devoid of any value. Eventually, there will be far too many stresses in the system, whose institutions are already in an advance stage of decay.
India as it exists today is a British creation. With the British now gone for 69 years, it is an entity has less and less reason to exist in its current form. The glue of reason that the British have applied is flaking, and it is doing so rapidly under the catalyst by name of Narendra Modi.
- The "Pizzagate" Arrest: Police Release Criminal Complaint Against Comet Restaurant Shooter
As we reported last night, the “Pizzagate” scandal took a turn for the bizarre, when a man with an assault rifle walked into the Comet Ping Pong restaurant on Sunday afternoon to “self-investigate” the popular Washington pizza parlor owned by James Alefantis that has been accused of being an international child sex ring run by prominent Democrats, following the release of Podesta emails. 28-year-old Edgar Maddison Welch, of Salisbury, N.C., fired the rifle at least once inside the restaurant but no one was injured, before he turned himself in.
On Monday, the police released the criminal complaint against Welch, in which he admitted that he was motivated by the numerous online reports about a suspected child trafficking ring allegedly operating out of the restaurant and run by top Democrats, including Mrs. Clinton and her campaign chairman, John D. Podesta.
Welch said in an arraignment released on Monday that he had read online that the Comet Ping Pong restaurant in Northwest Washington was “harboring child sex slaves, and he wanted to see for himself if they were there,” according to court documents. He said he was armed to help rescue children but surrendered peacefully “when he found no evidence that underage children were being harbored in the restaurant.”
Welch was charged with four counts, including felony assault with a deadly weapon and carrying a gun without a license outside a home or business. Wearing a white jumpsuit and shackles, Welch told the judge his name and stood silently as he was advised of his rights. The judge ordered him to remain in custody.
Welch, 28, of Salisbury, N.C., fired from an assault-like AR-15 rifle. The police had found two weapons in the restaurant, and one in the suspect’s car. No one was hurt.
Will this arrest mute the relentless online allegations of a pedophile ring run out of the pizza store, and which allegedly implicates some of the top democrats in the country? Somehow we doubt it.
Full police report below:
- Did The US-Led Coalition Give The Coordinates Of A Russian Aleppo Hospital To Al-Qaeda For A Missile Attack
Submitted by Alex Christoforou of The Duran
This is becoming a familiar pattern. Every time Lavrov and Kerry appear to be making some sort of progress on ending hostilities in Syria, an unwarranted, and oddly timed attack on forces sided with the Syrian government occur.
On September 9th, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and US Secretary John Kerry agreed to a cessation of hostilities in Syria, amid an ultimatum for the US to finally separate the “moderate rebels” from the Al Qaeda-Al Nusra jihadi fighters.
As pressure mounted to have the full text of the Lavrov – Kerry agreement published for the international community to understand the exact conditions outlined (something the US was admittedly opposed to), the American air force “accidentally” attacked the Syrian Arab Army positions at Deir Ezzor, which resulted in the death of 80 soldiers who were making strong gains against ISIS.
The Duran’s Adam Garrie noted…
–the timing of the event, the political response, the way in which the US has disregarded the UN as a serious forum, and the uncertainty over whether the crime was an intentional or unintentional blunder, cannot be ignored.
The Russian Foreign Ministry have said quite frankly that the US airstrike has been an aid to ISIS. This is material fact and will be recorded in the annals of military history.
This morning, The Duran’s Alexander Mercouris reported that the Syrian army is rapidly moving closer to taking back Aleppo from US-Saudi backed Al Qaeda jihadists…some predict the end game is days away, the Syrian army predicts final defeat of Jihadis “within weeks”.
Lavrov and Kerry are once again discussing a diplomatic end to hostilities in and around Aleppo. The US, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and the EU, are anxious to save whatever remains of their Al Qaeda regime change investment.
The Duran’s Alexander Mercouris reported that Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has spelled out clearly the terms Russia is giving to the US and to the Jihadis in eastern Aleppo: “they must all leave the city by a fixed date or be treated as terrorists.”
As diplomatic talks between Lavrov and Kerry intensify, to bring an end to fighting, the pattern of oddly timed attacks on forces sided with the Syrian government once again hit the news wires. This time the victim is not the Syrian army, but Russian doctors.
RT reported today that Russian doctors were killed in rebel shelling of a hospital in Aleppo…
A female Russian medical specialist has been killed and two more medics have been injured in a militant shelling of a mobile military hospital in Aleppo, the Russian Defense Ministry said.
Some local residents attending medical appointments were also injured during the shelling that targeted one of the field hospitals set up in the government held part of the city, the ministry added.
Russian military medics have begun to consult the residents of Syrian Aleppo’s eastern districts liberated from militants. They opened a clinic, a medical ward for children, a surgery department, an intensive care department, a laboratory and an x-ray room.
Some of my team in the hospital now say it's overflowing with injured civilians, lots of kids from non stop shelling 2day #Aleppo pic.twitter.com/CZB5gDWzmj
— Lizzie Phelan (@LizziePhelan) December 5, 2016
Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov issued a statement on the sudden attack that may ensure a decisive end to any sort of diplomacy that remains between Kerry and Lavrov.
The statement not only condemns the attack, but clearly places the blame on “terrorists’ patrons from the US, UK, France and their sympathizers” who, according to Konashenkov “provided the militants with information on the Russian hospital and its exact coordinates.”
“Today, between 12:21 and 12:30pm [local time], a medical center of the Russian Defense Ministry’s mobile hospital in Aleppo was shelled by the militants during the reception time.”
“As a result of the direct hit of the reception ward, one female Russian military medic was killed [and] two medical specialists were severely injured.”
“We know who provided the militants with information on the Russian hospital and its exact coordinates. Therefore it’s not only the actual perpetrators who are responsible for murdering and wounding our medics who were administering aid to Aleppo children.”
“The hands of those who instigated this murder are also coated with the blood of our servicemen. Those who created, fed and armed those beats in human disguise, naming them ‘opposition’ for justification before their own conscience and voters. Yes, [this blood is on your hands], terrorists’ patrons from the US, UK, France and their sympathizers.”
The Russian Defense Ministry is calling on the international community to condemn the attack. We will wait and see if the establishment mainstream media even mentions the story within their news cycle.
We may also expect a western inspired false flag attack on, “say a UN convoy“, so as to divert attention away from this crime and thrust some good old “fake news” blame on Russian aggression.
“We calls on the entire international community, as well as the International Red Cross and Red Crescent, Doctors Without Borders (MSF) and other international organizations to strongly condemn the murder of Russian doctors who carried out their duty by delivering medical assistance to the civilians in Aleppo. All perpetrators and all those who ordered the shelling of the Russian Defense Ministry’s hospital in Aleppo must be held accountable for their actions.”
- "Fake News" Site Threatens Washington Post With Defamation Suit, Demands Retraction
As the “fake news” narrative grows, and The House quietly passes a bill to “counter Russian propoganda” websites, one alleged ‘fake’ news wesbite – as defined by the farcical PropOrNot organization – has struck back. Naked Capitalism’s Yves Smith has threatened The Washington Post with a defamation suit and demanded a retraction.
As the lawyers like to say, res ipsa loquitur. Please tweet and circulate this letter widely. You will notice that our attorney Jim Moody is a seasoned litigator who has won cases before the Supreme Court. He has considerable experience in First Amendment and defamation actions. Past high profile representations include Westomoreland v. CBS and defending Linda Tripp.
I also hope, particularly for those of you who don’t regularly visit Naked Capitalism, that you’ll check out our related pieces that give more color to how the fact the Washington Post was taken for a ride by inept propagandists, particularly our introduction to our spoof PropOrNot.org site, which uses the PropOrNot project as an example of sorely deficient propaganda and shows where it went wrong, or the humor site itself. Be sure not to miss its FAQ.
We have another post today that describes how the few things that are verifiable on the PropOrNot site don’t pan out, as in the organization is not simply a group of inept propagandists but also appears to deal solely in fabrications.
If the site is flagrantly false with respect to things that can be checked, why pray tell did the Washington Post and its fellow useful idiots in the mainstream media validate and amplify its message? Strong claims demand strong proofs, yet the Post appeared content to give a megaphone to people who make stuff up with abandon. No wonder the members of PropOrNot hide as much as they can about what they are up to; more transparency would expose their work to be a tissue of lies.
We fully endorse Yves Smith’s efforts.
Additionally, we note that the only reason we haven’t followed up with a similar action is because i) the allegations were beyond laughable – we have rejected all of them on the record, and ii) there are simply too much other events taking place in what should otherwise be a quiet end to the year taking place to focus on what may be a lenghty, if gratifying, legal process.
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