New York Times GOLD article

[reichstag911]

*Contrarian confirmation that GOLD has indeed topped for the move*

(and China has been on the front cover of NewsWeek too - i wonder what that means...)

-----------------------------------------------

Saturday, June 4, 2005

Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:


Sunday's New York Times Magazine has a long article
on gold, for which GATA was asked to and did provide
information. Unfortunately the article is mainly a lot
of attitudinizing with predictable emphasis on the
eccentricities of certain gold advocates. It's as if
the Times had set out to analyze the economic policy
of the Clinton administration and concentrated on
Monica Lewinsky while never mentioning Robert Rubin.


The article never raises the gold price manipulation
issue, though even after receiving a lot of
documentation from GATA, the author interviewed and
quoted both Jim Sinclair, CEO of Tan Range Exploration
and proprietor of JSMineset.com, and Don Doyle, CEO
of Blanchard & Co. in New Orleans, whose anti-trust
lawsuit against Barrick Gold and J.P. MorganChase
is now the focus of the gold cause.


It is hard to imagine that these men would not also
have mentioned the manipulation issue.


That the author could get so close to the
manipulation issue THREE TIMES but still not mention
it may give you an idea of just how sensitive and
even prohibited the issue is. Maybe gold's friends
can take this omission as some vindication.


The article did manage to spell gold's name right.
It's appended here.


CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.


////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////


Believing (and Believing and Believing) in Bullion

By Stephen Metcalf
The New York Times Magazine
Sunday, June 5, 2005


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/05/magazine/05GOLD.html?pagewanted=1

On a recent early spring morning, I made my way down to the
appropriately poker-faced and austere building that houses the
Federal Reserve Bank of New York. In its sub-basement, 80 feet below
street level, there is a vault that rests on the granite bedrock of
Manhattan. "No man-made floor could hold the weight of all this,"
Peter Bakstansky, a Fed spokesman, assured me. The vault holds 7,000
tons of gold. This represents the world's largest stash of the
precious metal, and it is worth about $100 billion. To view it, you
descend to an underground bunker and pass through a narrow
passageway cut into a 90-ton steel cylinder. Like most people, I'd
seen gold before, though only in small quantities -- a filling here,
a vanity wristwatch there. In front of me now, stacked in bricks
atop wooden pallets, lay some pretty serious bling.


Gold is a majestic condenser of wealth. A standard bar is seven
inches long, three and five-eighths inches wide, and about one and
three-quarters inches thick. It weighs 27.4 pounds, and at the
current market price -- roughly $420 a troy ounce, the unit in which
gold is measured -- is worth about $170,000. As miraculous as gold
is in itself -- it is soft, dense, ductile, sectile, highly
conductive, all but indestructible and, of course, very beautiful --
when you look at any quantity of it, you immediately exchange it in
your head for something else. One bar, college education; 10 bars,
Brooklyn town house. The cage in front of me appeared fairly small.
Filled to the ceiling with gold bars as it was, it might well hold
the financial health of a nation in the balance.


Most of the bullion at the New York Fed is kept -- in 122 separate
lockers -- in custody for foreign countries. (Most American gold is
in Fort Knox.) There is something ancient and strange about the
vault, in which workers wear magnesium shoe covers to protect their
toes from falling ingots. Egyptians were casting bars of gold
thousands of years ago; but the thrust of human history has been
away from hard money and toward virtual money, like paper bills, or
even little electronic pulses shot off by the trillion across the
ether. When I remarked that all this brute physical wealth
represented an anachronism, Bakstansky seized upon the word
brightly.


"Yes, exactly. Gold is an anachronism."


"And yet," I said, "all these nations, they hold on to this
anachronism, just in case...."


At this, a light chill entered his voice. "I don't think anyone in
a policy-making position," he explained to me politely, "seriously
believes that everything else of value could disappear, leaving only
gold."



To a small but extremely avid subculture in the American financial
community, gold doesn't mean bling, or King Midas, or them thar
hills. Gold is money; and not just money, but the one true money.
The gold subculture divides along several lines -- some of its
members are gold speculators, some gold hoarders, some gold
philosophers and some outright nut jobs -- but it unites behind a
single idea: Paper money issued by governments, when not redeemable
for actual gold, is fraudulent. Most of us accept the existence of
dollar bills unconsciously. To the gold faithful, however, a dollar
bill is "ink money," or better yet, "fiat currency," a nearly
constant term of abuse at gold conferences and in gold chat
rooms. "Fiat currency -- it's a floating abstraction," Doug Casey,
a star speaker on the gold circuit, bellowed at me over the
phone. "What's its worth? I don't know what it's worth! It's a
figment of some government bureaucrat's imagination!"


The "gold bugs," as they often are referred to with more than a
hint of disdain, find gold appealing because they believe it
represents the one enduring form of nonstate money. "Money is far
too important to be left in the hands of bankers, Congress or the
Federal Reserve System," Gary North, a legendary gold bug who has
edited financial newsletters for decades, told me via e-mail.
North's Web commentaries include everything from advice regarding
prostate problems (saw palmetto has helped his immensely) to a
recently completed 700-page "economic commentary" on the Gospel of
Luke, which he encourages readers to download onto their hard
drives, in case he were to "drop dead and the site is taken down
for any reason." But the focus of his writings is politics, and
North's politics aren't hard to pin down. His is the fierce
libertarianism of the ardent gold bug.


I had sought out Casey and North, two leading voices among gold
enthusiasts, because after 20 years during which paper assets --
stocks, bonds, and the world's leading "fiat currency," the
dollar -- soared, gold was making a comeback. If you bought $10,000
worth of gold in 1980, by 2001 you would have lost $6,800. But then
the long bull market in stocks ended, and the dollar, responding to
the growing debt burden of the average American, not to mention the
federal debt and our trade deficit, began a steep decline. And so,
starting in 2001, gold, which like many commodities moves in the
opposite direction of the dollar, began to recover some of its lost
glamour as a store of value. The price of gold broke through the
$300 barrier in February 2002, then the $400 barrier at the end of
2003. Could this be the dawn of the apocalypse that the gold bugs,
whose prevailing attitude might best be described as a wishful
pessimism, have been predicting? Could the dollar collapse, leaving
only gold?


"I will accept questions by e-mail," North wrote me, adding, "I
will answer the following type question: 'In your article on [ ],
you write that [ ]. But what about this? How could this work?'" I
apparently phrased my first questions according to protocol, because
North e-mailed me back, relaying his nine-point plan for returning
gold to its proper status as the only money. Among his
ideas: "Government collects tax payments in gold. ... Abolish legal
tender law. ... Let anyone set up a bank/warehouse company
who wants to." Gold bugs are notoriously squirrelly, and North had
warned me ahead of time: no questions regarding the future price of
gold, and all questions must hew closely to his published work. When
I e-mailed him again, asking whether the rising price of gold might
be signaling doom, I must have crossed some invisible line. His one-
sentence reply read simply, "Here endeth the lesson."


For the past 70 years, the United States has been conducting an
experiment regarding the dollar. The experiment asks: Can the United
States manage its currency responsibly, without having that currency
backed by gold? The U.S. effectively went off the gold standard
twice in the 20th century, and both times responsible men in
positions of power foresaw cataclysm. "This is the end of Western
civilization!" Lewis Douglas, Franklin Roosevelt's budget director,
declared in 1933, when Roosevelt terminated the right of American
citizens to demand gold in exchange for their dollars. "Pravda
would write that this was a sign of the collapse of capitalism,"
Arthur Burns, chairman of the Federal Reserve, warned Richard Nixon
in 1971, when Nixon terminated the right of our international
trading partners to demand gold in exchange for their dollars.


In spirit, the gold bugs are the heirs to Douglas and Burns. Every
day is the end of Western civilization -- or should be, now that our
currencies float free of gold. In fact, the recent weakness of the
dollar has become an idée fixe within the gold community, as it
opens up one possible route back to an economic system ballasted by
gold. Representative Ron Paul, a Republican from Texas who is gold's
lonely advocate in Congress, put it to me this way: "We will go
back to the gold standard, even if it takes the near-destruction of
the dollar to get there."


James Sinclair is a 64-year-old American businessman in a tan blazer
and navy blue slacks. From his manner and dress, he could be host to
an Amway seminar. But when he speaks, he sounds more like a karma
yogi. It's as if you're watching a movie dubbed with the wrong
soundtrack. "Silence is deep rest," Sinclair told me as we waited
for sandwiches at a deli. "It's the only way to restructure
ourselves." Among the most famous gold speculators, Sinclair
proclaimed in the 1970's that gold, then at $150 a troy ounce, would
hit $900. (It eventually peaked at $887.50; he sold his position the
following day, for a profit of more than $15 million.) Then, with
some analysts predicting that gold could go as high as $2,000, he
declared the gold bull market dead. (Within months, he was proved
right.) In 2001, with gold near its bear-market lows, Sinclair told
Forbes magazine that it could hit $430. On the day I met him, gold
was trading at $434.


Sinclair remains a star attraction at gold conferences around the
world, but in the 1980s he sold his brokerage firm and took his
wife and two of his daughters to the foothills of the Berkshires,
where he lives on a 40-acre equestrian compound featuring its own
9,000-gallon water system, its own electrical system and a shooting
range. ("I like to cut a target every now and again," he told
me. "Get out my aggressions.") Sinclair's private office sports
the typical CEO blandishments -- a massive mahogany desk, a wall-
mounted flat-panel computer monitor -- but also a profusion of
religious items. Incense always burns, and a temple gong sits in the
corner, along with a prominently displayed statue of Ganesh. Behind
the desk there is a full-color portrait of Bhagavan Sri Sathya Baba,
whom Sinclair visits frequently in India. "I am an enquiring
soul," he replied, when I asked if he was Hindu. "All the great
minds have wandered the Indus Valley."


Perhaps because he has found spiritual satisfaction elsewhere,
Sinclair regards gold with dispassion. "Gold is not to be loved or
hated, accepted or refused," he said. "Gold is not barbaric or
angelic. It fixes nothing in itself. But it is a mirror." Sinclair
sees the health of the dollar reflected in the price of gold, and
the health of the dollar is now in foreign hands.


"We're not talking about what I want, but about what is," he told
me, as he picked through a tuna salad. "If we go over $529, that is
not good news," he said, referring to the price of gold. "Anyone
cheering for a high price of gold should get on Prozac." Sinclair
says that when the dollar acts successfully as the world's currency,
gold naturally returns to its status as a mere commodity. In the
parlance, it demonetizes -- it loses out to the dollar as the
world's reserve currency. But a mismanaged dollar, he said, could
cause gold to remonetize. Our world would look very different
then. "The first sign is the foreign banks will diversify out of
dollars. Then they will cease buying dollars. And then they will
sell them." What could happen then? "Stagflation. ... Expansion
of U.S. federal deficit. Expenses rise and incomes drop."


Are we talking apocalypse? "The most likely crisis is the collapse
in the common stock of the operating entity. In this case, the
operating entity is the United States, and the common stock is its
currency." We had made our way up a hill, to Sinclair's koi pond
and its accompanying meditation gazebo. As if on cue, what appeared
to be a military airplane flew across the sky. "That's carrying
Iraqi supplies," Sinclair told me. "We have war and monetary
easing at the same time," he said, shaking his head. "Everything
has its season. That includes gold. Do I have a bet on gold? You
know I do. Will I one day unravel that bet? You know I will."


The Daily Reckoning is a freewheeling Web site for libertarians,
gold bugs and doom enthusiasts of every stripe. Its editorial
director is Addison Wiggin, and before we met, I pictured
an "Addison Wiggin" as an ancient gold-hoarding Yankee, and the
offices of The Daily Reckoning as a cinder-block bunker patrolled by
Minutemen. I was wrong on both counts. Wiggin is a sober, black-clad
37-year-old who is active in libertarian circles. The Daily
Reckoning, meanwhile, is nestled in the lovely Mount Vernon section
of Baltimore, and its interior could pass for any 1990s dot-com,
with a glass-enclosed conference room, exposed brick walls and a
couple of nerdy 20-somethings in sneakers and T-shirts.


The narrative Wiggin spun out for me over lunch is repeated, nearly
verbatim, by almost everyone in the gold community. "This is the
blow-off phase for the Great Dollar Era. We're in an unsustainable
trend right now," Wiggin told me, ticking off the miscalculations
that have brought us to the brink of an economic apocalypse. To
begin with, the U.S. has become the world's biggest debtor, with
three outstanding obligations at alarming highs: consumer debt, or
our mortgages and credit cards; the federal deficit; and our current
account deficit with foreign countries. Federal Reserve Chairman
Alan Greenspan, Wiggin continued, has simply shifted one bubble --
the 90's bubble in stocks and bonds -- into another, in real estate
and "overconsumption," or the American propensity to pay for an
ever-more-lavish lifestyle on credit.


But the real nightmare involves the U.S. dollar. If Asian central
banks weary of buying Treasury bonds -- an asset denominated in the
weakening dollar -- then look out below. "What is that Dylan Thomas
quote?" Wiggin wondered over his fusilli. "The dollar will not go
gently into that good night."


Wiggin offered up his analysis with a confident and steady aplomb.
And for good reason. While no one in the mainstream financial elite
seriously advocates a return to the gold standard -- the modern
global economy is too fluid and dynamic for such austere discipline -
- at this moment, the gold bugs' grim prognosis for the dollar
happens to align with a more mainstream view. A low-level panic
about the debt crisis, and its possible effect on the American
economy, is gathering strength. "Our little post-bubble workout is
not over, not by any stretch of the imagination," Stephen Roach,
the chief economist at Morgan Stanley and himself a noted pessimist,
told me recently by phone. Roach says he firmly believes that an
adjustment is necessary and inevitable, and that when it comes, it
will be very, very painful. From appearances, Warren Buffett, the
savviest investor who ever lived, agrees. His company, Berkshire
Hathaway, has placed a $21 billion bet against the U.S. dollar.


Meanwhile, the general tone is darkening. In February, Paul Volcker,
the former Federal Reserve chairman, publicly stated in a speech
that "there are disturbing trends" undergirding the U.S. economy,
including "huge imbalances, disequilibria, risks." These
demand "a strong sense of monetary and fiscal discipline," he
said, gently chiding both the U.S. government and its citizens to
live within their means. Volcker, a man known for his prudence and a
cautious tone, let his words ring ominously. "Altogether, the
circumstances seem to me as dangerous and intractable as any I can
remember," Volcker continued, referring to the very same warning
signs as Addison Wiggin, "and I can remember quite a lot."


Recently, Comptroller General David Walker, surveying America's debt
crisis, uttered a one-word synopsis for the long-term future:
"Argentina."


Money is entirely conventional. It's a system of equivalence, a
medium of exchange. In a society of any sophistication whatsoever,
money is used reflexively. You hand me 50 cowrie shells, I give you
a head of cattle. I give you a 20, you give me a tuna on rye and
some change. As the greatest theorist of money, the German
sociologist Georg Simmel, recognized, money is only money when it is
in motion: "When money stands still, it is no longer money
according to its specific value and significance." Furthermore, the
set of conventions that lend money its credibility as a medium of
exchange must be universal and stable, so that the shells for which
I relinquished my good cow today will be worth as much tomorrow,
when I exchange them for something else. Money is built on motion
and trust.


Gold, like everything else, is a commodity whose price is
established by supply and demand. But gold is unlike everything else
in that an ancient fantasy of solidity attaches to it. We produce
things, but to exchange them efficiently, we throw over them what
economists refer to as "the veil of money." Interest rate swaps,
swap curves, swaptions -- the veil only thickens with time. If the
gold bugs are apocalyptic, it's worth recalling the etymology of the
word "apocalypse": to uncover or reveal. Gold holds out the
promise, however chimerical, that one day we might pierce the veil
of money.


On the final leg of my tour of gold bugs, I visited the Blanchard
Co. in New Orleans. Blanchard is the largest retailer of gold to
the American public, and it is owned and run by Donald Doyle, a soft-
spoken man who might well be the living embodiment of the metal he
sells: There is something soft but indestructible about his courtly
Southern manner.


After talking gold for the better part of an hour, we descended to
the company vault. There he picked up two coins and placed one into
each of my hands. They were "Saint-Gaudens," named after the great
American sculptor who designed them for Teddy Roosevelt. They had a
face value of $20 and a value based on the amount of gold they
contain -- probably a few hundred dollars. But the ornate coins were
impossible to stack, and had been discontinued after a short run. On
the open market now, thanks to their rarity, the coins together
might fetch $800,000. They were heavy, and transfixingly beautiful,
and even as I did the math in my head -- five coins, Brooklyn town
house -- I heard Doyle say over my shoulder, "And they sure feel
good in your hands, don't they?"

--------------------------------------

Stephen Metcalf is the book critic for Slate and a regular
contributor to The Times Book Review.

 

[reichstag911]

Why Gold Rigging is Ignored by the Media

Why Gold Rigging is Ignored by the Media
by Nelson Hultberg

Americans for a Free Republic
June 7, 2005



In Bill Murphy's recent Midas commentary (June 6th), he hit upon one of the more devastating condemnations that can be expressed about a people and their society.

"It will surprise no veteran Café member/GATA supporter," Murphy wrote, "that the New York Times failed to even mention GATA in their New York Times Magazine story on gold on Sunday. I have been through this drill for more than six years....

"This will give you some idea of why I rant the way I do at times -- and have been doing so for many years now. We DO NOT have a free press in the United States. We DO NOT have free markets in America. As a result of controlling the press and rigging US markets, as well as distorting the real US economic numbers, the Orwellians are taking this once great country down the chute. The coming US financial market / economic disaster is going to devastate the average American, as they won’t know what hit them and why."

What makes Murphy's commentary such a devastating appraisal of our people and our society? The answer lies in the reason WHY we no longer have a free press in America. For ours is a far more ignominious usurpation of press freedom than those of our historical predecessors.

In all the dictatorships of history, the process of enslavement is always brought about through a blanket "government enforced censorship." It becomes ILLEGAL to tell the truth. It is against the law to utter derogatory statements about one's leaders. To expose the Emperor's nakedness, is punishable by fines and imprisonment. Read the accounts of all the despotisms throughout history -- from the ancient Pharaohs, to the savage monarchial tyrannies of the Middle Ages, to the Nazis and the Communists of the 20th century -- and you will find the heavy hand of the State dictating what can and cannot be uttered in the press. The press is basically nationalized in some way so that the ruling bureaucracy decides what is reported every day to the people. Those who try to report truths deviating from the accepted government line are PROHIBITED BY THE LAW from doing so.

Observe, however, the form of "truth suppression" that is taking place in America today. It is not the kind that the 20th century Germans and Russians endured under their oppressors. In fact, if one looks around today, he sees no laws stifling the freedom of the press at all. This is what allows the elites in Washington and Wall Street to present themselves to the people as legitimate governing agents rather than the sinister cabalists and tyrants that they are in reality. For there are no laws suppressing freedom of the press in America today. There is no legal censorship of the press. Yet we in the gold community know that we do not have a FREE press in this country today! So what gives? How do we explain this conundrum?

The Sanction of the Victim

The answer lies in what Ayn Rand called the "sanction of the victim." Our dictatorship in America today is coming about voluntarily. And because it is, it is the most despicable and shameful form of enslavement that there is. Our media pundits and academics are willingly giving up their freedom, their rights, and their money to the unbridled State. They are willingly muzzling themselves. Like Pavlovian dogs, they continuously react to the appropriate stimuli of the statist elites in hopes of gaining the offered rewards -- acceptance in the herd and its rituals.

There are no laws that say the punditry of America must shun Bill Murphy, or ostracize GATA, or refuse to investigate the blatant "rigging of the markets" in today's world. Yet the pundits never bring GATA's issues of gold and equities rigging up. Silence is all we get. Total silence in face of evidence any educated, intelligent person could understand. And it's not because Murphy's style is the confrontational, in-your-face kind of attack journalism. There are other pundits and journalists (John Embry of Sprott Asset Management in Toronto, Kelly Patricia O'Meara of Insight magazine, etc.) who are not possessed of the pit bull intensity of Murphy, but are equally ostracized by Planet Wall Street and its pusillanimous lackeys.

Why then is this inexcusable default on the truth taking place? Why is our press NOT FREE in a country where there are no laws dictating what can and cannot be written? Our press is not free today because its operators have CHOSEN to sanction the enslavement process that is being smuggled into our lives by the Washington-Wall Street cartel of economic fascism. They have CHOSEN to give up the essence of what makes men manly and women stalwart. They have relinquished that inner spirit that drives all strong-willed people to never bend in face of what they know to be wrong, what they know to be tyrannical, what they know to be sinister and slimy.

This is what Ayn Rand meant with her formulation of the "sanction of the victim" in her great novel Atlas Shrugged. She demonstrated quite powerfully that the modern dictatorship comes about because its victims willingly sanction it. They actually work for it; they subconsciously assist their rulers in taking away the most treasured gift they have been given -- their freedom.

How this "sanction of the victim" mindset has come about is a complex phenomenon that naturally cannot be analyzed deeply in one article. But I have written a good general overview of why and how it has been brought about in my article, Invasion of the Mind Snatchers, for any readers who are interested in delving further into the issue. And it is a very big issue -- why Americans are so readily giving up their freedom and their rights in their embrace of the deceptive sirens of the New World Order.

Suffice it to say that Rand exposed one of the most powerful tools that modern day dictatorships make use of to take people's freedom away from them. The power elites convince the populace that what they (the elites) are doing is "inevitable," "desirable," and "progressive." The pitiful thing is that it requires a servile mentality to buy into it. And regrettably there are thousands of pundits today who are just such servile mentalities.

These are the members of today's media. There are no laws that say they must obey the establishment elites and ignore all reports about market rigging. Yet this is precisely what they ritualistically do.

The Archetype Servile Mentality

Back in the 1970s, I worked in the real estate business in Las Vegas over a ten-year period. And during that decade I traveled in a social circle that included real estate agents, finance people, lawyers, stockbrokers, etc. It also included two aspiring journalists who worked for one of the secondary (or weekly) newspapers in the area. As I think back on these two media wanabees now, I see that they were very dangerous humans because of the warped philosophical and psychological drives that motivated them.

I would like to portray a brief depiction of their personas and their beliefs, for these two aspiring journalists were basically archetypes of the mindset that permeates today's media class from L.A. to New York. The difference lies only in the fact that they were never going to make it into the big leagues. But in regards to their guiding philosophy and their level of intellectual integrity, they were identical to the bigger league models.

In observing the twisted cerebral workings of these two aggravating per*sonalities, I came to understand one of the most important reasons why freedom is always in jeopardy of being destroyed whenever and wherever it has gained ascendancy in civilization. We'll call these two past associates of mine Robo and Barry.

Robo was a short, stocky Charlie Chaplan look alike, with the person*ality of Cliff Claven on the TV sitcom, Cheers. Barry informed him one night over beer, that he was the "most interesting bore he'd ever met." Robo needed elevator shoes to reach five and a half feet, and apparently suffered from a complex about his shortness. All his conversations were pedantic marathons devoted to giant, detailed dissertations on every mundane subject mankind had ever chronicled in the Statistical Abstract. It was as if he hoped glib, gargantuan displays of "facts" would make him into a big man like other men. Not unlike the Orwellians of today's establishment media hoping to bamboozle the populace into acceptance of their own lie -- that they still revere adherence to truth because they portray voluminous government released data glibly and skillfully. One thinks of the bland automatons that work for each new administration in Washington (such as former Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer).

Barry, on the other hand, was a big, grungy Woody Allen sort of character, with a penchant for cutting cynicism and humorous vulgarity that would put Andrew Dice Clay to shame. One of his favorite movie heroes was actually Ratso Ritzo in the 1969 trash exploitation flick, Midnight Cowboy. Oozing envy for all who displayed superior skills, Barry saw life basically in terms of what he could mooch from his friends by means of his weird wit, and coax from the government by means of his crypto socialism.

Barry could articulate thought, no doubt about that, but it was thought that squirted all over the place and lacked logical coherence. What's worse, it was adrift from moral-philosophical moorings. It was totally amoral (very much like our big league media pundits today). Vulgarized humor was the real distinctive talent nature had bestowed upon him, and he cultivated this attribute as other men practice music, or law, or athletics. Every human encounter with him inevitably turned into bouts of pornographic crudity, peppered with razor like barbs hurled at mankind's traditional values (very much like today's Rolling Stones journalists, or the rank vulgarity of Chris Rock.)

Infatuation with vulgarity was only a sideline to Barry, however. His real dream was to be an intellectual. Actually becoming one was apparently too much work, so he settled for the appearance of intellectuality, which he had decided meant the knowledge and use of large words sprinkled into collectivist diatribes against the American concept of free enterprise. He was constantly memorizing vocabulary books, as if prolific displays of "big words" would somehow make him into a thinker who was respected for his mind. Such books sat everywhere like icons of salvation in the dingy two room flat out of which he operated.

Over the years as I became more philosophically educated, I came to see that these two America haters were the ultimate result of the modern school system and its inculcation of Marxist-Keynesian irrationalism. Their brains were cognitively stunted, for they thought only in terms of the short run. (When asked once about the fact that in the long run, his inflationist monetary policies would surely wreak havoc, Keynes replied that, "In the long run, we're all dead." This kind of clever superficiality has come to pass for wisdom in today's illiterate journalistic world.)

Thus, discussing the long-range ideological forces of civilization, or the integrated nature of existence, or the "big picture" with Robo and Barry was like washing water over glass. Nothing ever soaked in. They were incapable of any vision beyond a decade, unable to carry cause and effect relationships back to first principles, exasperatingly devoid of all sense of history, impervious to reason, and obsessively enamored with the gaucheries of materialism. Truth, idealism and the long run were not concepts to which they were able to relate.

Sophistry governed their modus operandi as instinct drives worker ants. But this was inevitable, for the dominating characteristic of the modern mind is its compulsion to evade reality. (Witness Wall Street and Washington these days.) Skillful sophistry naturally becomes the first and most important tool all media pundits need to acquire so as to maintain their evasions. Sophistry allows them to hold contradictory premises; to flaunt the facts; to choose pusillanimous paths, yet still consider themselves brave; to employ massive government coer*cion and dispense arbitrary privileges, yet still claim to advocate freedom and objective law. It allows them to sanction the evils of despotism yet con themselves into believing it is a "new kind of freedom."

Robo and Barry had decided early in life that any form of a free-market world was intolerable. Early on they had taken flight into the paradigmatic falsities of Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, Herbert Marcuse, and Noam Chomsky. Like homing pigeons, all their ideas moved toward justifications of the leftist world-view: America is a democracy, and "the people" have a right to vote for whatever they desire. Our environment molds us, so there is no such thing as free will. The state must regulate everything in order to establish "justice." Equality demands more redistribution of the "national income," so a 90% progressive income tax would be fair. America should emulate Sweden where everyone is guaranteed happiness and security by a centralized government. Arguments for bigger government tumbled out of their brains like rats scurrying from a flushed out sewer. Their journalistic output always expressed to some degree or another their antagonism toward the ideas of freedom upon which America had been built.

Seeing that I was young and unsophisticated at the time, it took me a little while to grasp why I immediately did not like Robo and Barry. But I soon came to realize I didn't like them because they personified weakness in a world that demanded mental and spiritual strength. With their clever sophistry and incessant whining about the rigors of reality, they were violating the unwritten law of manliness that men carry ingrained in the essence of their being. These two soft, indulgent, little liberals were copping out on life's foremost duty of self-reliance -- and it was not pleasant to have to endure their relentless egalitarianism.

They Love their Servitude

What kind of nation will America of the 21st century become with recreants of this nature at the helm of our media -- so fearful of facing up to reality, so anxious to compel their fellow man to fight the battle of existence for them through more and more redistribution of wealth, so forgetful of the great truths upon which our country stands, so desirous of greasing the path of the manipulators who now rule Washington?

What kind? Read the Wall Street Journal, or the Washington Post, or tune into CNBC on any given day. And you will see the servile, egalitarian mindsets that are ever so eager to "sanction their own enslavement" and ease the way for a New World Order. They speak the language of free enterprise and emanate Americanism, but it is only lip service. They are not advocates of freedom. They are not in search of truth and what our country is really all about.

One of the 20th century's most percipient intellects, Aldous Huxley, had their number. In the Introduction to Brave New World, Huxley wrote, "A really effi*cient totalitarian state would be one in which the all powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves WHO DO NOT HAVE TO BE COERCED, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and schoolteachers." [Brave New World, Bantam Books, 1967, p. xii. Caps added.]

The "army of managers" Huxley was warning about is already upon us. They are the statist bankers and bureaucrats of New York and Washington. And horrifyingly, they do not have to pass any laws to censor today's press because today's journalists censor themselves. Today's journalists LOVE THEIR SERVITUDE. They have been taught to love it by the "ministries of propaganda" -- the intellectuals in our colleges.

Today's media pundits have willingly and pusillanimously chosen to relinquish their freedom. This is why we have no free press in this country! The journalists of America have chosen to live the lives of lackeys rather than free men. They have chosen popularity over principle. They have succumbed to an obsession with being liked, to being a part of the establishment's "in crowd," to being invited to elegant Washington soirees of smarmy fascist insiders and gala Wall Street bashes of the mega-bankers and financial quislings.

Such pigmy men dare not bite the hand that feeds them their obsessive desires. Such craven humbugs are not journalists; they are dutiful apparatchiks serving the menacing State. The real journalists of old -- men like H.L. Mencken of the Baltimore Sun, Garet Garrett of The Saturday Evening Post, John T. Flynn of the New York Globe, etc. -- are turning over in their graves at sight of this display of submissive sophistry and renunciation of the journalist's creed to seek always the truth even if it brings one down outside the boundaries of respectability and popularity. This is not a pretty sight. This is the capitulation of a nation's intellectual leaders. It will bring us nothing but the ignominy of a serf's existence under the lordship of centralized Washington oligarchs.

So Bill Murphy, don't stop your rant. Keep pouring out the pit bull prose and that intensity that scalds your opponents' sensitivities. Your adversaries are seedy sycophants that are defaulting on the fundamental reason for their being. They well deserve the lambasting you give them for their contemptible groveling at the feet of their controllers.

 

[DTM]

Re: NewYork Times GOLD article.

Totally agree with your assessment Reichstag. The death of the independant journalist is much a real problem that will only blow up in their faces. I read somewhere that people even considered the two journalists who broke the story of "the Watergate affair" as traitors now. Times have changed.

Journo's are too scared of upsetting the White house because then they'll be denied access to the "inner sanctum".

 

[Mofra]

Re: NewYork Times GOLD article.

Excellent articles Riech - although some of the economic Machiavellians that walk amongst us may argue that the capacity for journalistic & economic manipulation could come in handy if there is ever a global hedge fund collapse.....