Bread, Land and Peace

Hugo Chavez has become a bit of a darling among the anti-American far left in this country. So much that they ignore the fact that he is much more of a dictator in reality than they ever could imagine that Bush is. I wrote my senior thesis on collectivization in the Soviet Union, the forced seizure of land that eventually led to massive famines killing over 7 million people, and although the genocide has not begun here, there are still eerie parallels. There was a great article on the Wall Street Journal on this subject. Unfortunately you need a subscription to read the whole thing.

The government bills land reform as a way to make Venezuela self-sufficient in food. But so far, the effect has been to undercut production of beef, sugar and other foods, as productive land is handed to city dwellers with no knowledge of farming. Established farmers and ranchers, fearing their land may be seized next, are cutting investment in their operations to a minimum.

The chaos in the countryside has contributed to shortages in basic items like milk and meat, a paradox in a country enjoying an economic boom traceable to high oil prices. Also spurring the shortages are price controls on certain foods that keep them priced below the cost of production. Meanwhile, 19%-plus inflation -- as oil revenue floods the economy -- spurs panic buying: purchasing price-controlled and other goods the shopper might not immediately need for fear of having higher prices in the future or not finding the items at all.

"You get up at dawn to hunt for a breast of chicken all over town. Housewives are in a foul mood," says Lucylde González, a Caracas homemaker, who says she hasn't seen an egg in a week.

After squatters took part of Mr. Lecuna's land, his bank said he could no longer use what remained as collateral for loans, and asked him to put up a Caracas office building he owns instead. Mr. Lecuna says he can't get financing from state banks, because they now won't lend to farmers with more than 100 acres. He has stopped buying fertilizer and machinery. "I'm afraid of investing," he says. In addition, kidnappings of farmers and ranchers for ransom are on the rise, and scandals have plagued the co-op program.

Mr. Chávez blames the shortages on "speculation" by distributors and producers. Agriculture Minister Elias Jaua recently called a news conference to deny there's been any decline in food production during the eight years of Chávez rule. The central bank stopped publishing agricultural statistics in 2005. A private farm association called Fedeagro estimates Venezuela grew 8% less food last year than the year before, citing factors including the price controls, land seizures and the wave of kidnappings of farmers.

Living Beyond Your Means

I have always thought of the Brits as thrifty folk, unlike us crazy irresponsible Americans. It turns out that they are even crazier than we are. Expensive country though.

LONDON -- To understand why economists are increasingly worried about Britain, it helps to look to Adam Smith.

Not the 18th-century Scottish philosopher, but rather a 28-year-old Cheltenham mortgage-debt collector who shares the famous name. Last June, Mr. Smith was in debt to the tune of $50,000. Like many British consumers -- who are even more leveraged than Americans -- he had been borrowing largely to cover his rising living expenses.

Struggling to keep up with credit-card and loan payments on his $1,900 monthly salary, he sought protection from creditors. "I was just trying to live an independent life away
...

Globalism Quote O' the Day

I haven't cited Don Luskin over at the Conspiracy to Keep You Poor and Stupid much lately, Krugman-bashing has fallen off since they started making you pay to read his editorials, but he still gets in some good lines.

The advocates of free trade have on their side over 200 years of settled science in economics, going all the way back to Adam Smith. The advocates of protectionism have Lou Dobbs.

An article worth reading.

Stock Returns

One of the things about getting an MBA is you end up eating, breathing and sleeping Excel. I got in a discussion about the effect of inflation on stock returns, so I came up with this. It teaches you one thing, never buy in at the top of a bubble.

I Blame Al Gore For the Otters!

Yes, I know you should never extrapolate a trend based of off a single anecdotal example, but given how often the proponents of global warming do, I will make an exception.

ANCHORAGE — An unbudging sheath of sea ice has blocked off the waters where the Alaska Peninsula's sea otters forage, forcing the starving animals inland on a search for food and making them easy prey for wolves and humans.

Some otters have waddled or slid on their bellies for several miles onto the tundra near Port Heiden, where they have been attacked by dogs, killed for their pelts or have died of malnourishment.

Anti-American Myths Never Die

One thing I have learned from following conspiracy theories, is that once one starts, they never die, no matter how many times they have been debunked. Look at all the people who still cite Lauro Chavez as an authority.

So I was offended, but not suprised to see Paul Rockwell cite accounts of Iraqi war crimes by Jimmy Massey:


For nearly 12 years, Staff Sergeant Jimmy Massey was a hard-core, some say “gung-ho,” Marine. For three years he trained fellow Marines in one of the most grueling indoctrination rituals in military life — Marine boot camp. The Iraqi war changed Massey. The brutality, the sheer carnage of the U.S. invasion, touched his conscience and transformed him forever. He was honorably discharged last December 31 and is now back in his hometown, Waynsville, North Carolina. When I talked with Sergeant Massey last week, he expressed his remorse at the civilian loss of life in incidents in which he himself was involved.

There is just one problem, Massey was exposed as a fake by St. Louis Post reporter Ron Harris, nearly two years ago.

Massey's claims have gained him celebrity. Last month, Massey's book, "Kill, Kill, Kill," was released in France. His allegations have been reported in nationwide publications such as Vanity Fair and USA Today, as well as numerous broadcast reports. Earlier this year, he joined the anti-war bus tour of Cindy Sheehan, and he's spoken at Cornell and Syracuse universities, among others.

News organizations worldwide published or broadcast Massey's claims without any corroboration and in most cases without investigation. Outside of the Marines, almost no one has seriously questioned whether Massey, a 12-year veteran who was honorably discharged, was telling the truth.

He wasn't.

Each of his claims is either demonstrably false or exaggerated - according to his fellow Marines, Massey's own admissions, and the five journalists who were embedded with Massey's unit, including a reporter and photographer from the Post-Dispatch and reporters from The Associated Press and The Wall StreetJournal.

Donate to the University of Washington Medal of Honor Memorial

I covered the Pappy Boyington controversy last year, but now I have more favorable news to cover. The University of Washington is raising money ($100,000) to build a memorial to the 7 Huskies who have been awarded the Medal of Honor. KVI talk show host Kirby Wilbur was promoting this project this morning, and apparently until tomorrow the health insurance company Triwest will match all donations, up to a total of $25,000, until tomorrow. To do this put "KVI" in the comments box on the donation form, which you can find here.

The Fallacies of Cheap Labor

As I mentioned previously, I just got back from a trip to China. The trip was a tour sponsored by the business school, so as a part of this we got to visit a variety of companies, both Chinese and multi-national.

One of the most interesting visits was to Lenovo, the Chinese computer manufacturer who recently purchased IBM's PC division. They showed us around their new manufacturing facility, including a completely automated warehouse. The warehouse was stacked several floors up, and had aisles just wide enough to accomodate the tracks the robotic forklifts ran on, as they zipped back and forth to pick up the parts needed to fill orders for computers.

The most interesting part came with the explanation from our guide, that when the warehouse was built, they reduced the number of workers required from 100, to just 5. This is in China, the country that built the Great Wall with cheap labor, and has only added to its reputation since. But for them, the way to compete was still to become more efficient, to do more with less, smarter.

Another company that we visited, which will remain nameless, specialized in outsourcing certain data processing activities to China. They recruited a bunch of college graduates, because they needed people who could speak foreign languages, to sit in front of monitors and type in data all day. One of the managers grumbled to us that their only advantage, cheap labor, was being challenged, because wage rates were going up, and so other companies in lesser developed regions of China. The competition for skilled labor in their city was so great it was pushing up wages.

Even in China, you cannot fool with the laws of supply and demand.

Between which of those two companies will succeed, I will put my money on Lenovo.

The Chief in China

I haven't been posting much recently, one of the reasons being because I spent 2 weeks in China. It was a rather interesting trip. One of the reasons I decided to study Russian politics and history in college was because I found it complex, but they have nothing on the Chinese. How do you hope to understand a country with 1.3 billion people and a 5,000 year old culture, which simulataneously has a thriving capitalist entrepeneurial class, and a Communist dictatorship?

Going to China has also turned me into a bit of an environmentalist. I have no idea how they intend to host the Olympics next year, unless they shut down Beijing for 2 months. The smog was horrible. How ironic that they were exempted from the Kyoto Accords, given their air pollution was far beyond the worst nightmare of the Sierra Club types, not to mention the lack of sewage systems.

Here are some photographs I took. Hopefully a picture is worth a thousand words:

Mass Transportation in Beijing

The Reds are still there, and this was on a clear sunny afternoon

My artistic photo, at a kindergarten we visited in Beijing.

How Ironical

Would someone please explain to me the fuss they are making over a handful of attorneys being fired at the Justice Department. From the WSJ:

Mr. Stephanopoulos remains just as sober when working solo on Sunday mornings as the host of "This Week" or helping out on "Good Morning America." There hasn't been this much stone-faced comedy in circulation since Buster Keaton's heyday.

It's a pity, because Mr. Stephanopoulos might be able to help viewers understand why the firing of eight U.S. attorneys in the Bush administration has been by far the biggest television-news story lately, and yet when dozens of federal prosecutors were fired during the Clinton administration, it was barely noticed by network newscasts. According to the Tyndall Report, which tracks this sort of thing, during the week of March 12-16, the three network evening newscasts spent a total of 45 minutes on the prosecutors story, with the war in Iraq placing second at 16 minutes. "World News with Charles Gibson" logged 13 of those 45 minutes on the prosecutors.

By contrast, in 1993, Attorney General Janet Reno's wholesale firing of U.S. attorneys appointed by George H.W. Bush was a non-story on the ABC evening news -- literally a non-story, according to records kept by the Vanderbilt University Television News Archive, as in zero coverage. CBS also skipped it; NBC gave it 20 seconds.

And yes, I know ironical is not a word.

The Russians are Coming!

Now, I have covered a lot of nutty conspiracy theories, both here and over at Screw Loose Change, but this article on Russian weather control weapons sets a new benchmark:

Thanks to readers (and you know who you are) who supplied new links to valuable information, we find there are more players in the game of weather terror and control than the US with its HAARP system. One prime rival as you might expect is our old Cold War enemy, Russia. And perhaps it is no coincidence that Katrina as well as Ivan are both Russian names.

I almost hate to mention that Katrina is not Russian, the Russian equivilant is Ekaterina. Hmm, maybe that is why it snowed yesterday morning, and I was almost late for class.

Chris Story Finds Religion

Christopher Story, in his latest Leo Wanta pseudo-update, doesn't even bother trying to fake presenting actual evidence, instead he indicates that he missed his true calling as a evangelist on cable TV to instead edit an overpriced journal spreading silly financial rumors:

NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN: SEE BELOW

In the meantime, we display below the pertinent quotations from Scripture and other sources that have been appended to these reports recently, augmented by two new Scripture quotations. The point of these citations, self-evidently, is that they are ALL precisely pertinent to the Wanta case. They may also serve as a reminder to those perpetrators of Jewish extraction as to how far they may have strayed from the glorious tradition and enlightenment of their age-old community:'

YE SHALL NOT STEAL, NEITHER DEAL FALSELY, NEITHER LIE TO ONE ANOTHER'. Leviticus, Chapter 19, verse 11.

'THOU SHALT NOT BEAR FALSE WITNESS AGAINST THY EIGHBOUR'.Exodus 20, verse 16.

'THOU SHALT NOT DEFRAUD THY NEIGHBOUR, NEITHER ROB HIM'.Leviticus, Chapter 19, verse 13.

Yeah, OK. You might want to keep that in mind the next time you try spreading a story about being able to pay $24 trillion a year in taxes to the IRS.

'Bout Damn Time!

Greg Kinnear gave a classic portrayal of him in We Were Soldiers:

WASHINGTON, D.C. -An unarmed helicopter pilot from Manchester, Wash., who flew through a hail of bullets to rescue 70 wounded Americans in one of the fiercest battles of the Vietnam War was awarded the Medal of Honor on Monday, 41 years after his heroism.

Lt. Col. (Ret.) Bruce Crandall, now 74, received the nation's highest military honor from President Bush in the White House East Room. The medal recognizes Crandall
for his valor in repeatedly flying into enemy fire to bring in ammunition and supplies and evacuate the wounded.

Crandall, then a 32-year-old major, completed a total of 22 flights in a 14-hour period on Nov. 14, 1965, most under intense enemy fire. His actions in the Battle at Ia Drang Valley were depicted in the 2002 movie "We Were Soldiers," adapted from the book "We Were Soldiers Once ... And Young."

It was a long time coming, but you deserve it Colonel.

The Crash

Being in the Pacific Northwest we have been studying China a fair amount in B-school, so this is not that surprising:

Yesterday's plunge in stock prices around the world, including the steepest percentage decline in the Dow Jones Industrial Average in nearly four years, signals that investors may finally be re-evaluating their insatiable appetite for risky investments.

The catalyst was Tuesday's nearly 9% fall in stock prices in Shanghai, one of the hottest and most volatile markets in the world. That helped send U.S. stocks on a roller coaster that ended with the DJIA down 416.02 points, or 3.3%, to 12216.24.

While China has had phenomenal industrial growth over the last two decades, their financial and regulator systems are still rather backwards, so get ready for a rough ride. Many companies are poorly managed, and accounting systems tend to be rather... uh... loose. Hopefully things will shake themselves out over the next two decades, and not disrupt the world markets.

I am actually visiting China for a couple of weeks on a study tour, starting next week, including visiting the Shanghai Stock Exchange. Maybe I can get some tips?

Welcome Kos Kidz

The two blogs I work on have been cited in a number of places, Instapundit, Michelle Malkin, Time, US News, Vanity Fair, but this is the first time I remember being mentioned in the Daily Kos. Well... welcome. And to answer your questions, yes I am a conservative. No, I don't have a giant picture of George W. Bush on the wall that I bow to every morning. No, I don't sacrifice small children in the basement, and yes, I did graduate from high school.

A Summary of the Story Wanta

A writer named Sol Aris has compiled a rather comprehensive saga of the history of this whole Wanta/Story story in the Conspiracy Times. It is well worth a read for you Wanta buffs.

A Thieve's World

An article from the Capital Times I had cited earlier mentioned that Leo Wanta was mentioned in the book A Thieve's World. Due to the ongoing interest in this story, I decided to look up a copy, and see what it had to say. It was actually quite interesting.

The book as a whole covers the world of global organized crime, in fact the whole title is "A Thieve's World: Threat of the New Global Network of Organized Crime". Wanta is specifically mentioned in a section of the book, titled "The Great Ruble Scam", extending from page 169 to 225.

While the book can be rather speculative and maddenly vague at times, the author, Claire Sterling, suggests that Leo Wanta actually did participate in the ruble trade, as Wanta himself insists. Although she did not have him connected to the the US government, as Wanta claims he was a Secret Service agent, but tied to a shadowy group of mafia figures.

Wanta apparently did try to buy rubles at discount rates, at one point 140 billion rubles, but the deal fell through, ironically because of the US government. From page 180:

Whether or not Yeltsin consented personally, his closest adviser, Gennady Burbulis, did so implicityly: the proposal was referred to him, and he did not object. In fact, the Comission of Inquiry found an agreement already drawn up by Silaev's cabinet, accepting Wanta's offer. The agreement fell through, or seemed to, when the U.S. State Department warned that Wanta "had major debts and some credit card problems." ("I confronted him in November 1990, and he fled," said the chief investigator, Kalinichenko.)

It is also interesting the earliest mention of Wanta's involvement was in October 1990, because Wanta himself insists that then President Reagan sent him on this mission. Reagan of course left office in January of 1989.

There were evidently several attempts by various organized crime figures to buy up Russian rubles on the cheap, either as part of their crime business, such as money laundering, or an attempt to then get Russian resources, such as oil or gold at a discount. Most of these attempts failed, but some apparently succeeded, thus the title "The Great Ruble Scam". The author found no evidence that Wanta ever accomplished this though, and certainly not on the scale he has boasted about, in the hundreds of billions, or even trillions of dollars. In fact the entire value of Russian Rubles in 1990 was cited as $10 billion, hardly enough to for one person to make trillions of off trading.

The one trade which Wanta apparently was successful at was getting, was a contract to export petroleum, and import food, although no amount of money is cited. Sterling also speculates that Wanta may have been connected to a considerable amount of missing Russian gold, 2000 tons, although the only proof she gives for that is Wanta claiming that he was trying to sell large amounts of gold. It is odd that she just believes him, considering she spends the rest of the section, saying what a con man he is. From page 186:

Leo Emil Wanta, born in Appleton, Wisconsin, was a fifty-year-old, heavyset snake oil salesman, as Mr. X described him. Starting in out in the pinball machine business in Menomonee Falls, he had gone on to "work credit card and many, many other scam," said a senior FBI official.

For the U.S. Secret Service, where the files on him are a yard long, he is a "flim-flam artist," convicted in Switzerland for money laundering involving the Charleston Bank in Panama, deported to the United States to stand trial for tax evasion and wanted in Austria for aggravated fraud arising out of events going back to September 1990, just as he was moving in on the Russian government.

An eclectic trader, Wanta faxed offers to a worldwide clientele in the summer of 1990, including atropine tablets from Germany; ten million jute sandbags from Saudi Arabia; twenty million cartons a month of tax-free Marlboros from the Ukranian capital of Kiev; and two million gas masks from the U.S.S.R. "while the supply lasts." Apart from miscellaneous goods, Wanta was trading not just in rubles but in lire, yen, pesetas, deutche markes, Swiss francs, pounds sterling, and Singapore dollars for commissions up to 14 percent - the clear mark of a money launderer.

All in all, it appears he was up to something, but the line between fantasy and reality, becomes quite blurred.

I Didn't Realize Being an Idiot Was a Criminal Defense

I am still shaking my head at this Ehren Watada thing. They declared a mistrial because he didn't understand a document he signed. OK... I realize lieutenants aren't always the smartest people in the world, but he did somehow manage to graduate college and make it through OBC. I would assume he has at least basic reading comprehension skills. Anyway, Front Page Magazine has an interesting article pointing out that disobeying an order is actually only one of his problems.

Wanta Nutiness Now Even Nuttier

In our latest update, it is appears Chris Story is getting even more bizarre. Now British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and others, are at risk of being arrested by the ICJ.

Twelve of the 22 operatives facing ICJ warrants are senior US public officials. Associates of AmeriTrust Groupe, Inc. have informed the Principals that these officials are unconcerned about the ICJ warrants, even though they are now strengthened with jurisdiction within the United States – because they believe that President Bush Jr. will pardon them at the end of his term.

But this consideration does not apply to the Prime Minister of Britain, Tony Blair, and to Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor herself – both of whom are now vulnerable to arrest for conspiracy to commit financial crimes in the Wanta Settlement context. This means that the crisis has split the West and that three Western Great Powers are now at each others’ throats, while Robert Gates [see below] is warning Congress to prepare for war with Russia and China.

As I mentioned before, the ICJ merely handles civil disputes between nations, and not criminal cases, so it doesn't even have arrest powers, nevermind trying to arrest a head of state.

Even stranger, 2 members of the US Supreme Court are involved:

03 February: Associates of AmeriTrust Groupe, Inc. inform the two Principals that former US Supreme Court Justice Sandra O’Connor and current US Supreme Court Justice Bader-Ginsburg are in Frankfurt, Germany, where they are engaged in monitoring and perfecting the international legal arrangements for the Wanta settlement. The same sources advise that a third US Supreme Court Justice is monitoring developments in the United States. As indicated above, the US Supreme Court Justices have explicitly extended US jurisdiction to the warrants issued by the ‘ad hoc’ Tribunal of three Judges implementing the orders of the International Court of Justice.

Hey, everyone knows, if you get any two justices of the Supreme Court together, they can do anything!

Story repeats his claim that the Federal Reserve is on the brink of being dismantled.

03 February: H.R. 2778 is to be approved by the US House of Representatives on
Monday the 5th February, when it will thus be ready to be signed. Under this Bill, the entire Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve is to be discharged, the Federal Reserve is to be abolished as a legislated authority empowered to issue currency on behalf of the US Treasury, and all Federal Reserve Banks and offices in the United States and around the world are to be closed. This will have the consequence that the US Treasury will again perform the functions of the United States’ Central Bank, reverting to the situation prior to the 1951 accord between the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve, which has hidden derivatives liabilities estimated at around $1,100 trillion. That explains why it is to be closed down.

With respect to this story, one of the posters at the JREF forum has done some good research. It is all pretty silly.

The End Game

Christopher story has to continually come up with stranger and stranger excuses to explain why Leo Wanta has not received the mythical $4.5 trillion due to him. Now apparently there has been a near coup in the US government:

Specifically, on Thursday 1st February, Cheney corruptly negated the authority of US Treasury compliance staff, preventing them from activating the prearranged banking codes and remitting the $4.5 trillion at last to the ambassador’s securities account.

CHENEY COUNTERMANDS EXPLICIT INSTRUCTIONS OF THE PRESIDENT

In so doing, he countermanded the signed bank instructions of the President of the United States himself, representing an act of treason which probably has no historical precedent. This arrogant man appears to be running rings round President Bush Jr., who may or may not realise that Cheney, like Paulson, has been thumbing his nose at the White House for his own personal gain.

Prior to the arrest of US Treasury Secretary Paulson, we predicted that his rrogance would lead to a dramatic fall: and this duly happened. We now predict that Vice President Richard Cheney is heading for an even more humiliating stumble, and, having delayed his resignation, may find that his official colleagues turn sharply against him.

Dramatic fall? Paulson is doing fine, although he did get grilled in front of the Senate this week over China's currency policy.

Story now involves the Bank of England:

Investigators informed us at 3.00 am UK time on Friday 2nd February that enormously large dollar movements out of the United States to a ‘back room’ operation at the Bank of England, which functions round the clock, have been monitored. The Bank of England office is issuing short-term loans with interest rates starting at 25%, the informed New York financial sources tell us. These loans represent bridge (or ‘gap’) loans to large businesses.

Wow, 25% is higher than my credit card. Maybe they can a loan from ditech.com or something?

Even more bizarrely:

U.S. HOUSE BILL TO ABOLISH THE FEDERAL RESERVE
The US House of Representatives has a Bill to abolish the Federal Reserve (see previous postings) which had been expected to be approved on 1st February. The House appears to have refrained from voting on this Resolution, raising suspicions of collusion with the Cheney-directed (OMEGA OPS) conspirators, to enable further fiat money to be generated from Wanta’s funds pending the Fed's abolition – following which the Treasury will assume central banking functions.The House Bill [HR. 2778] contains a schedule for phasing out the Federal Reserve, details of which, like the Bill itself, have not yet been disclosed.

Somehow this was left out of my issue of the Wall Street Journal.