Ezra Loomis Pound (1885-1972)

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

From the Friend's Of Eustace Mullins Society
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Ezra Loomis Pound (1885-1972)

American poet and critic, often called "the poet's poet" because his profound influence on 20th century writing in English. Pound believed that poetry is the highest of arts. A rebel par excellence, he challenged many of the common views of his time and spent 12 years in an American mental hospital. Pound's major work was the Cantos, which was published in ten sections between 1925 and 1969, and then as a one-volume collected edition, THE CANTOS OF EZRA POUND I-CXVII (1970).

    "The Proper METHOD for studying poetry and good letters is the method of contemporary biologists, that is careful first-hand examination of the matter, and continual COMPARISON of one 'slide' or specimen with another." (from ABC of Reading, 1934)

Ezra Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho, but he was brought up in Wyncote, Philadelphia. His father, Homer Loomis Pound, worked as an assistant assayer at the US Mint. At the age of twelve Pound entered Cheltenham, a military school, where he was introduced to Greek and Latin. He then studied languages at the University of Pennsylvania, and befriended there the young William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), who gained later fame as a poet in New York's avant-garde circles. From 1903 to 1906 Pound studied Anglo-Saxon and Romance languages at Hamilton College. In 1907 his teaching career was cut short at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana, when he had entertained an actress in his room.

In 1908 Pound travelled widely in Europe, working as a journalist. His first book of poems, A LUME SPENTO (1908), was privately printed by A. Antonini in Venice. Inspired by the work of Yeats, he went to London because he thought "Yeats knew more about poetry than anybody else": He founded with Richard Aldington (1892-1962) and others the literary 'Imagism', and edited its first anthology, Des Imagistes (1914). The movement was influenced by thoughts of Rémy de Gourmont whose book, The Natural Philosophy of Love (1904), Pound translated later, and T.E. Hulme (1883-1917), who stressed the importance of fresh language and true perception on nature. In his cautions, published in Poetry in 1913, Pound wrote: "Don't use such an expression as 'dim lands of peace'. It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer's not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol."

In their manifesto the Imagists promised: "1. Direct treatment of the 'thing' whether subject or objective. 2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation. 3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome." Pound's short "one-image poem" 'In a Station of the Metro' is among the most celebrated Imagist works: "The apparition of these faces in the crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough." Pound had seen a succession of beautiful faces one day on the Paris Metro, and in the evening he found suddenly the expression for his sudden emotion.

Pound soon lost interest in Imagism - he did not abandon totally formulaic verse - and after disputing with the poet Amy Lowell, Pound called the movement "Amygism." With Wyndham Lewis and the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, who was killed in 1915, he founded 'Vorticism', which produced a magazine, Blast. He helped Wyndham Lewis, T.S. Eliot and James Joyce to publish their works in the magazines Egoist and Poetry. When he worked in 1913-14 as W.B. Yeats's secretary, he started a correspondence with Joyce. After their first meeting the Irish poet had said that Pound "can't sing as he has no voice", but later called him a solitary volcano; Wyndham Lewis said he was the Trotsky of literature. Pound wrote on Joyce on various magazines, collected money for him, and even sent spare clothes for him. Pound also played crucial role in the cutting of Eliot's The Waste Land. Eliot dedicated the work to him, as il miglior fabbro (the better maker). In 1914 Pound married the artist Dorothy Shakespear, "surely the most charming woman in London," as Pound described her to his mother. After a vacation in Egypt, Dorothy conceived in 1926 a child, Omar. In 1922 Pound started his relationship with the violinist Olga Rudge, with whom he had a daughter, born five months before Omar. From this period date one of Pound's most widely read poems, HOMAGE TO SEXTUS PROPERTIUS (1919).

Pound has been called the "inventor" of Chinese poetry for our time. Beginning in 1913 with the notebooks of the Orientalist Ernest Fenollosa, he pursued a lifelong study of ancient Chinese texts, and translated among others the writings of Confucius. Pound's translations based on Fenollosa's notes, collected in CATHAY (1915), are considered among the most beautiful of his writings. Dante and Homer became other sources for inspiration, and especially Dante's journey through the realms have parallels with his examination of individual experiences in the Cantos.

    And round about there is a rabble
    Of the filthy, study, unkillable infants of the very poor.
    They shall inherit the earth.
    (from 'The Garden', 1913, 1916)

In 1920 Pound moved to Paris - Britain had become him "an old bitch, gone in the teeth." Four years later her settled in Italy, where he lived over 20 years, comfortable with his role as an outsider. He met Mussolini in 1933 and saw in him the long-needed economic and social reformer. In his anti-Semitic statements Pound agreed with those who believed that the economic system was being exploited by Jewish financiers. During World War II he made in Rome a series of hysterical and bitter radio broadcasts, that were openly fascist. In one of his radio talks he suggested that "if some man had a stroke of genius, and could start a pogrom against Jews... there might de something to say for it." In 1945 he was arrested by the U.S. forces and put in a six foot by six foot "gorilla cage" - he was still an American citizen. In a trial he was labelled as paranoid by the examining psychiatrists. Pound spent 12 years in Washington, D.C., in a hospital for the criminally insane. It has been suggested that Pound was feigning insanity to escape the death penalty. During this period he received the 1949 Bollingen Prize for his Pisan Cantos, which concerned his imprisonment at the camp near Pisa. After he was released, he returned to Italy, where he spent his remaining years. Pound died on November 1, 1972, in Venice. According to Katherine Anne Porter, "Pound was one of the most opinionated and unselfish men who ever lived, and he made friends and enemies everywhere by the simple exercise of the classic American constitutional right of free speech." (The Letters of E.P., 1907-1941, review in New York Times Book Review, 29 Oct. 1950)

Pound published over 70 books and translated Japanese plays and Chinese poetry. The Cantos, a series of poems which he wrote from 1920s throughout his life, are considered among his best achievements. Its last volume was DRAFTS AND FRAGMENTS OF CANTOS CX-CXVII (1968). In the Cantos Pound recorded the poet's spiritual quest for transcendence, and intellectual search for worldly wisdom. However, he did not try to imitate classical epic, but had several heroes instead of one, and projected his own self into his characters. His models were Dante's La divina commedia (c. 1320) and Robert Browning's confessional poem Sordello (1840). Just as Beatrice guided Dante's pilgrim, so also classical goddesses appear in the Cantos. In addition, through mythical, historical, and contemporary figures Pound mirrored the poetry and ideas of the past and present. Canto LXXII and Canto LXXIII were not published in the early collections due to their controversial - fascist - thoughts.

Pound's style was clear, economical and concrete. "Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree," he once said. As an essayist Pound wrote mostly about poetry. From the mid-1920s he examined the ways economic systems promote or debase culture. "Why the hell don't the schools give a little rudimentary education in economics, the history of economics, and in the use of language," he wrote in 1933 in a letter to the Idaho senator William Borah, trying to recruit him in the mainly one-sided correspondence as an advocate of his radical political and economic theories. Pound hoped, that fascism could establish the sort of society in which the arts could flourish. He also argued that poetry is not "entertainment", and as an elitist he did not appreciate the common reader.

Pound considered American culture isolated from the traditions that make the arts possible, and depicted Walt Whitman as "exceedingly nauseating pill". Pound's most influential publications on aesthetics are ABC OF READING (1934), which summarized his aesthetic theory and is said to have established the modernist poetic technique, and THE CHINESE WRITTEN CHARACTER AS A MEDIUM FOR POETRY (pub. 1936), compiled from the notes of Ernest Fenollosa.

    For further reading: The Poetry of Ezra Pound by H. Kenner (1951); Ideas into Action by C. Emery (1958); Ezra Pound by Charles Norman (1960, rev. 1969); The Rose in the Steel Dust: An Examination of the Cantos of Ezra Pound by W. Baumann (1967); The Life of Ezra Pound by N. Stock (1970); Discretions by Mary de Rachewiltz (1971); The Pound Era by Hugh Kenner (1972); Ezra Pound: the Last Rower by C. David Heyman (1976); The Poetic Achievement of Ezra Pound by Michael Alexander (1979); Ezra Pound by James F. Knapp (1979); Ezra Pound and the Cantos by Wendy Stallard Flory (1980); Ezra Pound and the Pisan Cantos by A. Woodward (1980); Ezra Pound: the Solitary Volcano by John Tytell (1987); Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism by Tim Rddman (1991); Ezra Pound as Literary Critic by K.K. Ruthven (1991); ABC of Influence: Ezra Pound and the Remaking of American Poetic Traditon by Christopher Beach (1992); The Birth of Modernism by Leon Surette (1993); Ezra Pound as Critic by G. Singh (1994); The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound, ed. by Ira B. Nadel (1999); Ezra Pound: Poet. Vol 1: The Young Genius 1885-1920 by A David Moody (2007) - See also: Fernando Pessoa, R. Tagore, T.S. Eliot, whom Pound met in 1914 and started to reform poetic diction with him. - Translations into Finnish: Poundilta on käännetty suomeksi esseekokoelma Lukemisen aakkoset ja valikoima Personae: Valikoima runoja vuosilta 1908-1919. Lisäksi Aale Tynni teoksessa Tuhat laulujen vuotta (1974) ja Ville Revon antologiassa Tähtien väri (1992) on Pound-suomennoksia. - Imagism: a short-lived movement of American and English poets whose verse was characterized by concrete language and figures of speech, modern subject matter, freedom in the use of meter, and avoidance of mystical themes. Members of the movement included Hilda Doolittle, Richard Aldington, F.S. Flint, T.E. Hulme, John Gould Fletcher, Harriet Monroe, Amy Lowell, whom Pound did not consider an imagist, but called her attempts "Amygism". The movement also influenced Conrad Aiken, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, D.H. Lawrence, T.S. Eliot, Herbert Read. -The Imaginist movement deloped in 1913; its members published poems in Poetry and The New Freewoman (later The Egoist).

Selected works:

    * A LUME SPENTO, 1908
    * A QUINZAINE FOR THIS YULE, 1908
    * EXULTATIONS, 1909
    * PERSONAE, 1909
    * PROVENCA, 1910
    * THE SPIRIT OF ROMANCE
    * CANZONI, 1911
    * RIPOSTES, 1912
    * PERSONAE & EXULTATIONS, 1913
    * LUSTRA, 1916
    * NOH," OR ACCOMPLISHMENT: A STUDY OF THE CLASSICAL STAGE OF JAPAN, 1916 (with Ernest Fenollosa)
    * GAUDIER-BRZESKA, 1916
    * PAVANNES AND DIVAGATIONS, 1918
    * HOMAGE TO SEXTUS PROPERTIUS, 1919
    * QUIA PAUPER AMAVI, 1919
    * THE FOURTH CANTO, 1919
    * UMBRA, 1920
    * HUGH SELWYN MAUBERLEY, 1920
    * INSTIGATIONS, 1921
    * POEMS 1918-1921, 1921
    * INDISCRETIONS, 1923
    * ANTHEIL AND THE TREATISE OF HARMONY, 1924
    * A DRAFT OF XVI CANTOS, 1925
    * PERSONAE - THE COLLECTED POEMS OF EZRA POUND, 1926
    * A DRAFT OF THE CANTOS 17-27, 1928
    * SELECTED POEMS, 1928
    * TA HIO, 1928
    * IMAGINARY LETTERS, 1930
    * A DRAFT OF XXX CANTOS, 1930
    * HOW TO READ, 1931
    * PROLEGOMENA I, 1932
    * ABC OF ECONOMICS, 1933
    * ABC OF READING, 1934
    * MAKE IT NEW, 1934
    * ELEVEN NEW CANTOS XXXI-XLI, 1934
    * HOMAGE TO SEXTUS PROPERTIUS, 1934
    * JEFFERSON AND/OR MUSSOLINI, 1935
    * ALFRED VENISON'S POEMS, 1935
    * SOCIAL CREDIT, 1935
    * POLITE ESSAYS, 1937
    * DIGEST OF THE ANALECTS, 1937
    * THE FIFTH DECADE OF CANTOS, 1938
    * GUIDE TO KULCHUR, 1938 (US TITLE: CULTURE: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A POET)
    * WHAT IS MONEY FOR?, 1939
    * CANTOS LII, LXXI, 1940
    * A SELECTION OF POEMS, 1940
    * CARTA DA VISTA, 1942
    * L'AMERICA, ROOSEVELT E LE CAUSE DELLA GUERRA PRESENTE, 1944
    * ORO E LAVORO, 1944
    * INTRODUZIONE ALLA NATURA ECONOMICA DEGLI S.U.A., 1944
    * ORIENTAMENTI, 1944
    * 'IF THIS BE TREASON...', 1948
    * THE PISAN CANTOS, 1948
    * THE CANTOS OF EZRA POUND, 1949
    * SEVENTY CANTOS, 1950
    * PATRIA MIA, 1950
    * CONFUCIAN ANALECTS, 1951
    * THE LETTERS OF EZRA POUND, 1907-1941, 1950
    * THE CANTOS OF EZRA POUND, 1954
    * LITERARY ESSAYS, 1954
    * SELECTION: ROCK DRILL, 1955
    * DIPTYCH ROME-LONDON, 1958
    * PAVANNES AND DIVAGATIONS, 1958
    * THRONES: 96-109 DE LOS CANTARES, 1959
    * VERSI PROSAICI, 1959
    * IMPACTS, 1960
    * NUOVA ECONIMIA EDITORIALE, 1962
    * EP TO LU, 1963
    * POUND-JOYCE LETTERS, 1967
    * DRAFTS AND FRAGMENTS OF CANTOS CX-CXVII, 1968
    * SELECTED PROSE, 1909-1965, 1973
    * SELECTED POEMS, 1975
    * COLLECTED EARLY POEMS OF EZRA POUND, 1976
    * EZRA POUND AND MUSIC, 1977
    * EZRA POUND SPEAKING: RADIO SPEECHES OF WORLD WAR II, 1978
    * LETTERS TO IBBOTSON, 1979
    * EZRA POUND AND THE VISUAL ARTS, 1980
    * COLLECTED EARLY POEMS, 1982
    * EZRA POUND AND JOHN RICHMOND THEOBALD, 1983
    * EZRA POUND AND DOROTHY SHAKESPEARE, 1984
    * POUND/LEWIS, 1985
    * THE CANTOS, 1986
    * THE CORRESPONDENCE OF EZRA POUND AND WYNDHAM LEWIS, 1987
    * POUND/ZUKOFSKY, 1987
    * EZRA POUND AND JAPAN, 1987
    * POUND: THE LITTLE REVIEW, 1988
    * EZRA POUND AND MARGARET CRAVENS, 1988
    * EZRA POUND'S POETRY AND PROSE, 1991
    * SELECTED LETTERS OF EZRA POUND TO JOHN QUINN, 1991
    * EZRA AND DOROTHY POUND, LETTERS IN CAPTIVITY, 1945-1946, 1999
    * THE CORRESPONDENCE OF EZRA POUND AND SENATOR WILLIAM BORAH, 2001
    * Translator: THE SPIRIT OF ROMANCE (1910); CATHAY (1915); CERTAIN NOBLE PLAYS OF JAPAN (1916); 'NOH' OR ACCOMPLISHMENT (1916); FONTENELLE. DIALOGUES (1917); RÉMY DE GOURMONT THE NATURAL PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE (1922); ÈDOUARD ESTAUNIÉ: THE CALL OF THE ROAD (1923); CONFUCIUS: DIGEST OF THE ANALACTS (1937); ODON POR: ITALY'S POLICY OF SOCIAL ECONOMICS (1941); TESTAMENTO DI CONFUCIO (1944); CIUNG LUNG L'ASSE CHE NON VACILLA (1945); THE CLASSIC ANTHOLOGY DEFINED BY CONFUCIUS (1954); MOSCADINO: ENRICO PEA (1956); SOPHOCHLES: WOMEN OF TRACHIS (1956); LOVE POEMS OF ANCIENT EGYPT (1962)

http://foems.tripod.com/Ezra1.html

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

By the way... found this Jewish Whines about Eustace Mullins and Ezra Pound...  :x
Doofus Jews...

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Eustace Mullins (1923-2010)


Ernie Lazar sent me a link to Jeff Rense's website, where an obituary of the arch-right wing conspiracist can be found.

The best known of Mullins's many books is THE SECRETS OF THE FEDERAL RESERVE (1952), which he was inspired to write by his mentor Ezra Pound. As he wrote in the introduction to its 1992 edition, it "sounded the toxin that the Federal Reserve System is not Federal; it has no reserves; and it is not a system at all, but rather, a criminal syndicate."

    American history in the twentieth century has recorded the amazing achievements of the Federal Reserve bankers. First, the outbreak of World War I, which was made possible by the funds available from the new central bank of the United States. Second, the Agricultural Depression of 1920. Third, the Black Friday Crash on Wall Street of October, 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression. Fourth, World War II. Fifth, the conversion of the assets of the United States and its citizens from real property to paper assets from 1945 to the present, transforming a victorious America and foremost world power in 1945 to the world's largest debtor nation in 1990. Today, this nation lies in economic ruins, devastated and destitute, in much the same dire straits in which Germany and Japan found themselves in 1945.

Also notable among Mullins' writings was THE CURSE OF CANAAN: A DEMONOLOGY OF HISTORY (1987), which, a la Nesta Webster's SECRET SOCIETIES AND SUBVERSIVE MOVEMENTS (1923), traced the banker's plot back to ancient Babylon, identifying occultists, Jews, and Illuminated Masons as the architects of a vast conspiracy that would end in the destruction of white people (who are the true Israelites, the so-called Jews being Canaanite pretenders):

    The Canaanite conspiracy is to destroy American industry, and drive farmers off their land. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is their principal tool. There is a documented plan to exterminate all the white people in the United States. The plan is to announce an imminent attack. Everyone will be told to gather in schools and auditoriums across the US. Only the whites will do this, those of Canaanite extraction will be told to go home. Once herded into the buildings the "people of Shem" are to be killed by knives and hatchets in a ritual slaughter. Teams of specially trained immigrants will be used as the killers.

And here's what Mullins had to say about the Holocaust in an interview conducted in 2004: "It wasn't really an issue until the late '50's. All of the sudden, they remembered that six million Jews died in WWII. I've often said that after six million Jews died, most of them went on to own apartments in Manhattan and Tel Aviv. It's not really a topic that interests me much beyond how it's used as propaganda and mind control."

7 Comments

Filed under Conspiracy theory, anti-semitism, racism

Tags: Federal Reserve, Nesta Webster, Eustace Mullins, holocaust denial, The Curse of Canaan
7 Comments

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      ernie1241
      February 3, 2010 at 5:44 pm

      Several years ago, the late political scientist Dr. John George, co-author with Laird Wilcox of the 1992 book "Nazis, Communists, Klansmen and Others on The Fringe" told me in confidence about an interview he had with neo-nazi H. Keith Thompson Jr.

      Thompson had known Mullins since the 1950's when he recruited him to join Thompson's short-lived group, the American Committee for the Advancement of Western Culture.

      Thompson told Dr. George about a conversation he had with Mullins in which Mullins acknowledged that he often concocted fabrications to cause grief to Jews.

      An example, according to Mullins, was the fake "speech" which Mullins concocted and attributed to a fake Rabbi named Emanuel Rabinovich.

      The fake "speech" was picked up and widely reprinted by such anti-semitic organs as Conde McGinley's Common Sense newspaper [see, for example "A Rabbi Speaks: Foretells Gentile Doom", Common Sense, August 1, 1952, page 1].

      Dr. George asked me to keep the content of his interview with Thompson confidential until Thompson died — which I did.

      Other examples of Mullins' malice and unrelenting Jew-hatred are excerpted below from my report which is at: http://ernie1241.googlepages.com/mullins

      From:
      Eustace Mullins article, "Jews Mass Poison American Children!" in June 1955 issue of Women's Voice, page 11

      "One of the most shocking and sadistic episodes in the history of the world is now being carried out in the United States by Jewish mass poisoners of children! Jonas Salk, Yiddish inventor of a so-called polio vaccine, is directing the inoculation of millions of American children with this sinister concoction of live polio germs. All that is known is that it CAUSES polio in an alarming percentage of children injected with it, while its effectiveness in preventing polio is a myth of Jewish propaganda."

      "As one commentator after another warns over the radio that the Jewish Salk vaccine contains live polio germs which are killing our children, the nation's press refuses to carry these warnings, preferring to see children die rather than criticize the sacred Jew vaccine. Instead, the press prints testimonial after testimonial in FAVOR of the Jew vaccine from the filthy immoral rats in the U.S. Public Health Service in Washington which is nothing but a publicity bureau for Jewish poisons such as fluorine in water."

      Mullins describes FDR as "the late demented cripple" and goes on to observe that:

      "If we look at history, we discover that the Jews have been attacked many times for poisoning and murdering children, but seldom have they found a method so clever and diabolical as the Salk vaccine. It is not too late to save our children from this latest atrocity of the Jews!"

      In his self-published virulently anti-Jewish book "The Biological Jew" [Faith and Service Books, Staunton, VA, 1968], Mullins compares Jews with biological parasites. He also gives his unique interpretation of Nazism:

      "The Jew has always functioned best as a panderer, a pornographer, a master of prostitution, an apostle of sexual perversion, an enemy of the prevailing sexual standards and prohibitions of the gentile community." (page 22)

      "Treason, fraud, perversion, [are] all the hallmarks of Jewish life among the gentiles in the Diaspora. And it is parasitism. All of these things are not merely crimes in themselves, they are crimes which are committed as essential parts of the Jew's parasitical relationship with the gentile host. We must remember that there is no Jewish crime per se, since the existence of the Jewish parasite upon the host is a crime against nature, because its existence imperils the health and the life of the host. Thus, everything that the Jew does in connection with this parasitic existence is a criminal act, and part of an overall criminal existence." (page 28)

      "This religious ceremony of drinking the blood of an innocent gentile child is basic to the Jew's entire concept of his existence as a parasite, living off of the blood of the host. That is why he refuses to abandon this custom, even though it has brought him close to extinction many times. When the Jew can no longer symbolize his role by kidnapping a perfectly formed gentile child, spiriting him away to a synagogue, and ritually puncturing his body in the places which they boasted they had wounded the Body of Christ, and drinking the blood of the dying child, then, according to Jewish belief, he is doomed. His prophets have warned him that when this custom can no longer be observed, the Jewish parasite's hold onto the host will be loosened, and he will be cast off. Even though this ceremony is so horrible that most Jews refuse to participate in it, and all of them deny its practice, it still remains the final method by which the Jewish leaders signify and retain their control over this people." (page 25)

      "Ask any American college graduate – 'What is the greatest evil which has ever existed upon this earth? He will reply very promptly, and energetically, 'Nazism!'

      He gives this answer because it is what he has been taught. In fact, it is all he has been taught, and it is the sole result of four years of higher education. Do not ask him WHY Nazism is the greatest evil that has ever been known, because he does not know. You will only perplex and confuse him, and make him angry at you, because he does not know the WHY of anything. He has only been indoctrinated with conditioned responses, he is repeating the lesson which has been drummed into him until he has learned it by heart, at the hands of his Jewish and shabez goi professors.

      In all of the hundreds of books which have been written about Nazism, you will not find a definition of what Nazism is. This is quite understandable. The Jews do not want anyone to know what Nazism is. Nazism is simply this – a proposal that the German people rid themselves of the parasitic Jews. The gentile host dared to protest against the continued presence of the parasite, and attempted to throw it off. It was an ineffectual reaction, because it was emotional and ill-informed, as were all the gentile reactions which preceded it for five thousand years. And how futile it all was, because today, Jewish bankers own sixty per cent of German industry, and their holdings are protected by the occupation army of America." (page 32)
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            arthurgoldwag
            February 3, 2010 at 6:27 pm

            Mullins's rant about the polio vaccine reminds me of his book MURDER BY INJECTION (1988), which traces all of America's ills to the Rockefellers, whom he identifies as agents of the Rothschilds. Working through the AMA, the Rockefellers imposed such horrors as vaccination, fluoridation ("Soviet studies....[show] fluorides were extremely important in introducing a docile, sheep-like obedience in the general population..... The Soviet Union maintained its concentration camps since 1940 by administering increasing dosages of fluorides to the prison population in its vast empire, the Gulag Archipelago....the envy of every bureaucrat in Washington. American totalitarian, alike in every way to their Soviet counterparts, also want all dissension stifled, all resistance ended, and a slave population which pays ever increasing amounts of taxes while having no voice in their own government. The fluoridation campaign has been an important step towards this goal"); AIDS (The initial reaction of many homosexuals, on being informed that they had AIDS, was what has been termed by psychologists, 'homosexual rage,' a dementia in which the patient is possessed by a mad desire for revenge. The phenomenon of this type of 'AIDS dementia' has been observed in some 60 per cent of AIDS patients.....Not only is the Medical Monopoly waiting in the wings to reap more billions of dollars in profits from this new epidemic, but the civil libertarians are forestalling investigations of AIDS by defending the 'privacy' of its victims"); and fertilizer ("Nutritionists now believe that the use of chemical fertilizers in the soil causes seventy per cent of all anemia in the citizens of the United States.....The use of chemical fertilizers also accelerated the domination of the world's grain supply by large corporations which are closely affiliated with the Rockefeller interests") on unsuspecting Americans.

            Bottom line? "America became the greatest and most productive nation in the world because we had the healthiest citizens in the world. When the Rockefeller Syndicate began its takeover of our medical profession in 1910, our citizens went into a sharp decline. Today, we suffer from a host of debilitating ailments, both mental and physical, nearly all of which can be traced directly to the operations of the chemical and drug monopoly, and which pose the greatest threat to our continued existence as a nation."
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      ernie1241
      February 3, 2010 at 6:34 pm

      FYI: I just revised my Mullins report to incorporate a scanned copy of the email I received in 2006 from Dr. John George concerning Mullins' admission to H. Keith Thompson that he (Mullins) fabricated the "Rabbi Rabinovich" speech.
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            arthurgoldwag
            February 3, 2010 at 6:58 pm

            Readers who are interested in reading this speech need click no further than Jeff Rense's website, where it can be found along with annotations and commentary by an Australian Jewish anti-Zionist, who explains that "Whether it is a forgery or not IS IRRELEVANT for the simple reason that our Zionist 'Jewish' 'brothers' have already implemented most, if not all of it. That is a fact. Every Jew who reads the Protocols knows that it was written by Jews, NO ONE ELSE could have written them."

            http://www.rense.com/general45/full.htm
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                  ernie1241
                  February 8, 2010 at 4:05 am

                  Arthur: You might be interested in this — since you are also mentioned:

                  http://curtmaynardsnewestblog.blogspot. ... olcom.html
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                  arthurgoldwag
                  February 8, 2010 at 4:21 am

                  I wonder how he figured out that I'm Jewish
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      David Kahn
      February 11, 2010 at 5:03 am

      While it is valuable to have documentation of Mullins' unbridled antisemitic jags, let's not forget about the baby in the bathwater.

      I'll let Kent Welton say it, since I can't improve on his "Op Ed" (http://www.opednews.com/populum/page.ph ... ce-Mullins–Last-Wr-by-Kent-Welton-100206-626.html). These points are crucial, yet I haven't seen them at all on the net since Mullins' passing. Here are a few of his observations:

      "While I may not agree with many of Mullins' other positions and assertions he remains worthy of respect for his voluminous research into the ruling elites and his revelations concerning their grasp on our institutions and way of life."

      He "was cleared by the Office of Naval Intelligence to photograph top secret documents [in the Library of Congress], and he also had entree to many offices on Capitol Hill. This led to his ability to research many arcane books, documents and records not available to the public, a fascination that eventually became a lifelong pursuit."

      " [His mentor, Ezra Pound, as per Wickipedia, believed that] 'representative democracy has been usurped by bankers' infiltration of governments through the existence of central banks, which made governments pay interest to private banks for the use of their own money. He maintained that the central bank's ability to create money out of thin air allowed banking interests to buy up American and British media outlets...' "

      "[T]he struggles over banking, as well as the treason of Woodrow Wilson in signing the Federal Reserve Act (an act he deeply regretted on his death bed) had been raging ever since the founding of the country. Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln attempted to unseat the 'London Connection' bankers among others. Later, the 1929 Crash on Wall Street and the Great Depression meant the issue was again red hot, and with rhetoric to match. Today, with another market crash and emerging depression, and rapacious looting by bankers, we are again at the same juncture in history.
      In any event, the epithet of antisemitism, and the ever-reliable ad hominem deflection, has been hurled at many of the critics of central banks and their private owners, including Mullins. The latest to experience this unwarranted defamation is Matt Taibi, for his revealing articles in Rolling Stone Magazine on the corruption on Wall Street and in 'our' banking system.
      Clearly, however, with regard to the banking system and the 'Federal' Reserve, the issue of anti-semitism is completely irrelevant. It is not a matter of religion or the ethnicity of central bank stock owners, it is a matter of the few controlling the money and credit of the many, period – and in contravention of the Constitution and intent of the founders."

http://arthurgoldwag.wordpress.com/2010 ... 1923-2010/

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The Big Takeover
 
The global economic crisis isn't about money - it's about power. How Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution

MATT TAIBBI  -  Posted Mar 19, 2009



It's over — we're officially, royally fucked. No empire can survive being rendered a permanent laughingstock, which is what happened as of a few weeks ago, when the buffoons who have been running things in this country finally went one step too far. It happened when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was forced to admit that he was once again going to have to stuff billions of taxpayer dollars into a dying insurance giant called AIG, itself a profound symbol of our national decline — a corporation that got rich insuring the concrete and steel of American industry in the country's heyday, only to destroy itself chasing phantom fortunes at the Wall Street card tables, like a dissolute nobleman gambling away the family estate in the waning days of the British Empire.

   The Dirty Dozen: Meet the bankers and brokers responsible for the financial crisis - and the officials who let them get away with it.  
 
The latest bailout came as AIG admitted to having just posted the largest quarterly loss in American corporate history — some $61.7 billion. In the final three months of last year, the company lost more than $27 million every hour. That's $465,000 a minute, a yearly income for a median American household every six seconds, roughly $7,750 a second. And all this happened at the end of eight straight years that America devoted to frantically chasing the shadow of a terrorist threat to no avail, eight years spent stopping every citizen at every airport to search every purse, bag, crotch and briefcase for juice boxes and explosive tubes of toothpaste. Yet in the end, our government had no mechanism for searching the balance sheets of companies that held life-or-death power over our society and was unable to spot holes in the national economy the size of Libya (whose entire GDP last year was smaller than AIG's 2008 losses).

So it's time to admit it: We're fools, protagonists in a kind of gruesome comedy about the marriage of greed and stupidity. And the worst part about it is that we're still in denial — we still think this is some kind of unfortunate accident, not something that was created by the group of psychopaths on Wall Street whom we allowed to gang-rape the American Dream. When Geithner announced the new $30 billion bailout, the party line was that poor AIG was just a victim of a lot of shitty luck — bad year for business, you know, what with the financial crisis and all. Edward Liddy, the company's CEO, actually compared it to catching a cold: "The marketplace is a pretty crummy place to be right now," he said. "When the world catches pneumonia, we get it too." In a pathetic attempt at name-dropping, he even whined that AIG was being "consumed by the same issues that are driving house prices down and 401K statements down and Warren Buffet's investment portfolio down."
Liddy made AIG sound like an orphan begging in a soup line, hungry and sick from being left out in someone else's financial weather. He conveniently forgot to mention that AIG had spent more than a decade systematically scheming to evade U.S. and international regulators, or that one of the causes of its "pneumonia" was making colossal, world-sinking $500 billion bets with money it didn't have, in a toxic and completely unregulated derivatives market.

   
National Affairs Daily Blog: All the news from the Beltway and beyond.  
 
Nor did anyone mention that when AIG finally got up from its seat at the Wall Street casino, broke and busted in the afterdawn light, it owed money all over town — and that a huge chunk of your taxpayer dollars in this particular bailout scam will be going to pay off the other high rollers at its table. Or that this was a casino unique among all casinos, one where middle-class taxpayers cover the bets of billionaires.

People are pissed off about this financial crisis, and about this bailout, but they're not pissed off enough. The reality is that the worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were together a kind of revolution, a coup d'état. They cemented and formalized a political trend that has been snowballing for decades: the gradual takeover of the government by a small class of connected insiders, who used money to control elections, buy influence and systematically weaken financial regulations.

The crisis was the coup de grâce: Given virtually free rein over the economy, these same insiders first wrecked the financial world, then cunningly granted themselves nearly unlimited emergency powers to clean up their own mess. And so the gambling-addict leaders of companies like AIG end up not penniless and in jail, but with an Alien-style death grip on the Treasury and the Federal Reserve — "our partners in the government," as Liddy put it with a shockingly casual matter-of-factness after the most recent bailout.

The mistake most people make in looking at the financial crisis is thinking of it in terms of money, a habit that might lead you to look at the unfolding mess as a huge bonus-killing downer for the Wall Street class. But if you look at it in purely Machiavellian terms, what you see is a colossal power grab that threatens to turn the federal government into a kind of giant Enron — a huge, impenetrable black box filled with self-dealing insiders whose scheme is the securing of individual profits at the expense of an ocean of unwitting involuntary shareholders, previously known as taxpayers.

I. PATIENT ZERO

The best way to understand the financial crisis is to understand the meltdown at AIG. AIG is what happens when short, bald managers of otherwise boring financial bureaucracies start seeing Brad Pitt in the mirror. This is a company that built a giant fortune across more than a century by betting on safety-conscious policyholders — people who wear seat belts and build houses on high ground — and then blew it all in a year or two by turning their entire balance sheet over to a guy who acted like making huge bets with other people's money would make his dick bigger.

That guy — the Patient Zero of the global economic meltdown — was one Joseph Cassano, the head of a tiny, 400-person unit within the company called AIG Financial Products, or AIGFP. Cassano, a pudgy, balding Brooklyn College grad with beady eyes and way too much forehead, cut his teeth in the Eighties working for Mike Milken, the granddaddy of modern Wall Street debt alchemists. Milken, who pioneered the creative use of junk bonds, relied on messianic genius and a whole array of insider schemes to evade detection while wreaking financial disaster. Cassano, by contrast, was just a greedy little turd with a knack for selective accounting who ran his scam right out in the open, thanks to Washington's deregulation of the Wall Street casino. "It's all about the regulatory environment," says a government source involved with the AIG bailout. "These guys look for holes in the system, for ways they can do trades without government interference. Whatever is unregulated, all the action is going to pile into that."

The mess Cassano created had its roots in an investment boom fueled in part by a relatively new type of financial instrument called a collateralized-debt obligation. A CDO is like a box full of diced-up assets. They can be anything: mortgages, corporate loans, aircraft loans, credit-card loans, even other CDOs. So as X mortgage holder pays his bill, and Y corporate debtor pays his bill, and Z credit-card debtor pays his bill, money flows into the box.

The key idea behind a CDO is that there will always be at least some money in the box, regardless of how dicey the individual assets inside it are. No matter how you look at a single unemployed ex-con trying to pay the note on a six-bedroom house, he looks like a bad investment. But dump his loan in a box with a smorgasbord of auto loans, credit-card debt, corporate bonds and other crap, and you can be reasonably sure that somebody is going to pay up. Say $100 is supposed to come into the box every month. Even in an apocalypse, when $90 in payments might default, you'll still get $10. What the inventors of the CDO did is divide up the box into groups of investors and put that $10 into its own level, or "tranche." They then convinced ratings agencies like Moody's and S&P to give that top tranche the highest AAA rating — meaning it has close to zero credit risk.

Suddenly, thanks to this financial seal of approval, banks had a way to turn their shittiest mortgages and other financial waste into investment-grade paper and sell them to institutional investors like pensions and insurance companies, which were forced by regulators to keep their portfolios as safe as possible. Because CDOs offered higher rates of return than truly safe products like Treasury bills, it was a win-win: Banks made a fortune selling CDOs, and big investors made much more holding them.

The problem was, none of this was based on reality. "The banks knew they were selling crap," says a London-based trader from one of the bailed-out companies. To get AAA ratings, the CDOs relied not on their actual underlying assets but on crazy mathematical formulas that the banks cooked up to make the investments look safer than they really were. "They had some back room somewhere where a bunch of Indian guys who'd been doing nothing but math for God knows how many years would come up with some kind of model saying that this or that combination of debtors would only default once every 10,000 years," says one young trader who sold CDOs for a major investment bank. "It was nuts."

Now that even the crappiest mortgages could be sold to conservative investors, the CDOs spurred a massive explosion of irresponsible and predatory lending. In fact, there was such a crush to underwrite CDOs that it became hard to find enough subprime mortgages — read: enough unemployed meth dealers willing to buy million-dollar homes for no money down — to fill them all. As banks and investors of all kinds took on more and more in CDOs and similar instruments, they needed some way to hedge their massive bets — some kind of insurance policy, in case the housing bubble burst and all that debt went south at the same time. This was particularly true for investment banks, many of which got stuck holding or "warehousing" CDOs when they wrote more than they could sell. And that's were Joe Cassano came in.

Known for his boldness and arrogance, Cassano took over as chief of AIGFP in 2001. He was the favorite of Maurice "Hank" Greenberg, the head of AIG, who admired the younger man's hard-driving ways, even if neither he nor his successors fully understood exactly what it was that Cassano did. According to a source familiar with AIG's internal operations, Cassano basically told senior management, "You know insurance, I know investments, so you do what you do, and I'll do what I do — leave me alone." Given a free hand within the company, Cassano set out from his offices in London to sell a lucrative form of "insurance" to all those investors holding lots of CDOs. His tool of choice was another new financial instrument known as a credit-default swap, or CDS.

The CDS was popularized by J.P. Morgan, in particular by a group of young, creative bankers who would later become known as the "Morgan Mafia," as many of them would go on to assume influential positions in the finance world. In 1994, in between booze and games of tennis at a resort in Boca Raton, Florida, the Morgan gang plotted a way to help boost the bank's returns. One of their goals was to find a way to lend more money, while working around regulations that required them to keep a set amount of cash in reserve to back those loans. What they came up with was an early version of the credit-default swap.

In its simplest form, a CDS is just a bet on an outcome. Say Bank A writes a million-dollar mortgage to the Pope for a town house in the West Village. Bank A wants to hedge its mortgage risk in case the Pope can't make his monthly payments, so it buys CDS protection from Bank B, wherein it agrees to pay Bank B a premium of $1,000 a month for five years. In return, Bank B agrees to pay Bank A the full million-dollar value of the Pope's mortgage if he defaults. In theory, Bank A is covered if the Pope goes on a meth binge and loses his job.

When Morgan presented their plans for credit swaps to regulators in the late Nineties, they argued that if they bought CDS protection for enough of the investments in their portfolio, they had effectively moved the risk off their books. Therefore, they argued, they should be allowed to lend more, without keeping more cash in reserve. A whole host of regulators — from the Federal Reserve to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency — accepted the argument, and Morgan was allowed to put more money on the street.

What Cassano did was to transform the credit swaps that Morgan popularized into the world's largest bet on the housing boom. In theory, at least, there's nothing wrong with buying a CDS to insure your investments. Investors paid a premium to AIGFP, and in return the company promised to pick up the tab if the mortgage-backed CDOs went bust. But as Cassano went on a selling spree, the deals he made differed from traditional insurance in several significant ways. First, the party selling CDS protection didn't have to post any money upfront. When a $100 corporate bond is sold, for example, someone has to show 100 actual dollars. But when you sell a $100 CDS guarantee, you don't have to show a dime. So Cassano could sell investment banks billions in guarantees without having any single asset to back it up.

Secondly, Cassano was selling so-called "naked" CDS deals. In a "naked" CDS, neither party actually holds the underlying loan. In other words, Bank B not only sells CDS protection to Bank A for its mortgage on the Pope — it turns around and sells protection to Bank C for the very same mortgage. This could go on ad nauseam: You could have Banks D through Z also betting on Bank A's mortgage. Unlike traditional insurance, Cassano was offering investors an opportunity to bet that someone else's house would burn down, or take out a term life policy on the guy with AIDS down the street. It was no different from gambling, the Wall Street version of a bunch of frat brothers betting on Jay Feely to make a field goal. Cassano was taking book for every bank that bet short on the housing market, but he didn't have the cash to pay off if the kick went wide.

In a span of only seven years, Cassano sold some $500 billion worth of CDS protection, with at least $64 billion of that tied to the subprime mortgage market. AIG didn't have even a fraction of that amount of cash on hand to cover its bets, but neither did it expect it would ever need any reserves. So long as defaults on the underlying securities remained a highly unlikely proposition, AIG was essentially collecting huge and steadily climbing premiums by selling insurance for the disaster it thought would never come.

Initially, at least, the revenues were enormous: AIGFP's returns went from $737 million in 1999 to $3.2 billion in 2005. Over the past seven years, the subsidiary's 400 employees were paid a total of $3.5 billion; Cassano himself pocketed at least $280 million in compensation. Everyone made their money — and then it all went to shit.

II. THE REGULATORS

Cassano's outrageous gamble wouldn't have been possible had he not had the good fortune to take over AIGFP just as Sen. Phil Gramm — a grinning, laissez-faire ideologue from Texas — had finished engineering the most dramatic deregulation of the financial industry since Emperor Hien Tsung invented paper money in 806 A.D. For years, Washington had kept a watchful eye on the nation's banks. Ever since the Great Depression, commercial banks — those that kept money on deposit for individuals and businesses — had not been allowed to double as investment banks, which raise money by issuing and selling securities. The Glass-Steagall Act, passed during the Depression, also prevented banks of any kind from getting into the insurance business.

But in the late Nineties, a few years before Cassano took over AIGFP, all that changed. The Democrats, tired of getting slaughtered in the fundraising arena by Republicans, decided to throw off their old reliance on unions and interest groups and become more "business-friendly." Wall Street responded by flooding Washington with money, buying allies in both parties. In the 10-year period beginning in 1998, financial companies spent $1.7 billion on federal campaign contributions and another $3.4 billion on lobbyists. They quickly got what they paid for. In 1999, Gramm co-sponsored a bill that repealed key aspects of the Glass-Steagall Act, smoothing the way for the creation of financial megafirms like Citigroup. The move did away with the built-in protections afforded by smaller banks. In the old days, a local banker knew the people whose loans were on his balance sheet: He wasn't going to give a million-dollar mortgage to a homeless meth addict, since he would have to keep that loan on his books. But a giant merged bank might write that loan and then sell it off to some fool in China, and who cared?

The very next year, Gramm compounded the problem by writing a sweeping new law called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act that made it impossible to regulate credit swaps as either gambling or securities. Commercial banks — which, thanks to Gramm, were now competing directly with investment banks for customers — were driven to buy credit swaps to loosen capital in search of higher yields. "By ruling that credit-default swaps were not gaming and not a security, the way was cleared for the growth of the market," said Eric Dinallo, head of the New York State Insurance Department.

The blanket exemption meant that Joe Cassano could now sell as many CDS contracts as he wanted, building up as huge a position as he wanted, without anyone in government saying a word. "You have to remember, investment banks aren't in the business of making huge directional bets," says the government source involved in the AIG bailout. When investment banks write CDS deals, they hedge them. But insurance companies don't have to hedge. And that's what AIG did. "They just bet massively long on the housing market," says the source. "Billions and billions."

In the biggest joke of all, Cassano's wheeling and dealing was regulated by the Office of Thrift Supervision, an agency that would prove to be defiantly uninterested in keeping watch over his operations. How a behemoth like AIG came to be regulated by the little-known and relatively small OTS is yet another triumph of the deregulatory instinct. Under another law passed in 1999, certain kinds of holding companies could choose the OTS as their regulator, provided they owned one or more thrifts (better known as savings-and-loans). Because the OTS was viewed as more compliant than the Fed or the Securities and Exchange Commission, companies rushed to reclassify themselves as thrifts. In 1999, AIG purchased a thrift in Delaware and managed to get approval for OTS regulation of its entire operation.

Making matters even more hilarious, AIGFP — a London-based subsidiary of an American insurance company — ought to have been regulated by one of Europe's more stringent regulators, like Britain's Financial Services Authority. But the OTS managed to convince the Europeans that it had the muscle to regulate these giant companies. By 2007, the EU had conferred legitimacy to OTS supervision of three mammoth firms — GE, AIG and Ameriprise.

That same year, as the subprime crisis was exploding, the Government Accountability Office criticized the OTS, noting a "disparity between the size of the agency and the diverse firms it oversees." Among other things, the GAO report noted that the entire OTS had only one insurance specialist on staff — and this despite the fact that it was the primary regulator for the world's largest insurer!

"There's this notion that the regulators couldn't do anything to stop AIG," says a government official who was present during the bailout. "That's bullshit. What you have to understand is that these regulators have ultimate power. They can send you a letter and say, 'You don't exist anymore,' and that's basically that. They don't even really need due process. The OTS could have said, 'We're going to pull your charter; we're going to pull your license; we're going to sue you.' And getting sued by your primary regulator is the kiss of death."

When AIG finally blew up, the OTS regulator ostensibly in charge of overseeing the insurance giant — a guy named C.K. Lee — basically admitted that he had blown it. His mistake, Lee said, was that he believed all those credit swaps in Cassano's portfolio were "fairly benign products." Why? Because the company told him so. "The judgment the company was making was that there was no big credit risk," he explained. (Lee now works as Midwest region director of the OTS; the agency declined to make him available for an interview.)

In early March, after the latest bailout of AIG, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner took what seemed to be a thinly veiled shot at the OTS, calling AIG a "huge, complex global insurance company attached to a very complicated investment bank/hedge fund that was allowed to build up without any adult supervision." But even without that "adult supervision," AIG might have been OK had it not been for a complete lack of internal controls. For six months before its meltdown, according to insiders, the company had been searching for a full-time chief financial officer and a chief risk-assessment officer, but never got around to hiring either. That meant that the 18th-largest company in the world had no one checking to make sure its balance sheet was safe and no one keeping track of how much cash and assets the firm had on hand. The situation was so bad that when outside consultants were called in a few weeks before the bailout, senior executives were unable to answer even the most basic questions about their company — like, for instance, how much exposure the firm had to the residential-mortgage market.

III. THE CRASH

Ironically, when reality finally caught up to Cassano, it wasn't because the housing market crapped but because of AIG itself. Before 2005, the company's debt was rated triple-A, meaning he didn't need to post much cash to sell CDS protection: The solid creditworthiness of AIG's name was guarantee enough. But the company's crummy accounting practices eventually caused its credit rating to be downgraded, triggering clauses in the CDS contracts that forced Cassano to post substantially more collateral to back his deals.

By the fall of 2007, it was evident that AIGFP's portfolio had turned poisonous, but like every good Wall Street huckster, Cassano schemed to keep his insane, Earth-swallowing gamble hidden from public view. That August, balls bulging, he announced to investors on a conference call that "it is hard for us, without being flippant, to even see a scenario within any kind of realm of reason that would see us losing $1 in any of those transactions." As he spoke, his CDS portfolio was racking up $352 million in losses. When the growing credit crunch prompted senior AIG executives to re-examine its liabilities, a company accountant named Joseph St. Denis became "gravely concerned" about the CDS deals and their potential for mass destruction. Cassano responded by personally forcing the poor sap out of the firm, telling him he was "deliberately excluded" from the financial review for fear that he might "pollute the process."

The following February, when AIG posted $11.5 billion in annual losses, it announced the resignation of Cassano as head of AIGFP, saying an auditor had found a "material weakness" in the CDS portfolio. But amazingly, the company not only allowed Cassano to keep $34 million in bonuses, it kept him on as a consultant for $1 million a month. In fact, Cassano remained on the payroll and kept collecting his monthly million through the end of September 2008, even after taxpayers had been forced to hand AIG $85 billion to patch up his fuck-ups. When asked in October why the company still retained Cassano at his $1 million-a-month rate despite his role in the probable downfall of Western civilization, CEO Martin Sullivan told Congress with a straight face that AIG wanted to "retain the 20-year knowledge that Mr. Cassano had." (Cassano, who is apparently hiding out in his lavish town house near Harrods in London, could not be reached for comment.)

What sank AIG in the end was another credit downgrade. Cassano had written so many CDS deals that when the company was facing another downgrade to its credit rating last September, from AA to A, it needed to post billions in collateral — not only more cash than it had on its balance sheet but more cash than it could raise even if it sold off every single one of its liquid assets. Even so, management dithered for days, not believing the company was in serious trouble. AIG was a dried-up prune, sapped of any real value, and its top executives didn't even know it.

On the weekend of September 13th, AIG's senior leaders were summoned to the offices of the New York Federal Reserve. Regulators from Dinallo's insurance office were there, as was Geithner, then chief of the New York Fed. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, who spent most of the weekend preoccupied with the collapse of Lehman Brothers, came in and out. Also present, for reasons that would emerge later, was Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs. The only relevant government office that wasn't represented was the regulator that should have been there all along: the OTS.

"We sat down with Paulson, Geithner and Dinallo," says a person present at the negotiations. "I didn't see the OTS even once."

On September 14th, according to another person present, Treasury officials presented Blankfein and other bankers in attendance with an absurd proposal: "They basically asked them to spend a day and check to see if they could raise the money privately." The laughably short time span to complete the mammoth task made the answer a foregone conclusion. At the end of the day, the bankers came back and told the government officials, gee, we checked, but we can't raise that much. And the bailout was on.

A short time later, it came out that AIG was planning to pay some $90 million in deferred compensation to former executives, and to accelerate the payout of $277 million in bonuses to others — a move the company insisted was necessary to "retain key employees." When Congress balked, AIG canceled the $90 million in payments.

Then, in January 2009, the company did it again. After all those years letting Cassano run wild, and after already getting caught paying out insane bonuses while on the public till, AIG decided to pay out another $450 million in bonuses. And to whom? To the 400 or so employees in Cassano's old unit, AIGFP, which is due to go out of business shortly! Yes, that's right, an average of $1.1 million in taxpayer-backed money apiece, to the very people who spent the past decade or so punching a hole in the fabric of the universe!

"We, uh, needed to keep these highly expert people in their seats," AIG spokeswoman Christina Pretto says to me in early February.

"But didn't these 'highly expert people' basically destroy your company?" I ask.

Pretto protests, says this isn't fair. The employees at AIGFP have already taken pay cuts, she says. Not retaining them would dilute the value of the company even further, make it harder to wrap up the unit's operations in an orderly fashion.

The bonuses are a nice comic touch highlighting one of the more outrageous tangents of the bailout age, namely the fact that, even with the planet in flames, some members of the Wall Street class can't even get used to the tragedy of having to fly coach. "These people need their trips to Baja, their spa treatments, their hand jobs," says an official involved in the AIG bailout, a serious look on his face, apparently not even half-kidding. "They don't function well without them."

IV. THE POWER GRAB

So that's the first step in wall street's power grab: making up things like credit-default swaps and collateralized-debt obligations, financial products so complex and inscrutable that ordinary American dumb people — to say nothing of federal regulators and even the CEOs of major corporations like AIG — are too intimidated to even try to understand them. That, combined with wise political investments, enabled the nation's top bankers to effectively scrap any meaningful oversight of the financial industry. In 1997 and 1998, the years leading up to the passage of Phil Gramm's fateful act that gutted Glass-Steagall, the banking, brokerage and insurance industries spent $350 million on political contributions and lobbying. Gramm alone — then the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee — collected $2.6 million in only five years. The law passed 90-8 in the Senate, with the support of 38 Democrats, including some names that might surprise you: Joe Biden, John Kerry, Tom Daschle, Dick Durbin, even John Edwards.

The act helped create the too-big-to-fail financial behemoths like Citigroup, AIG and Bank of America — and in turn helped those companies slowly crush their smaller competitors, leaving the major Wall Street firms with even more money and power to lobby for further deregulatory measures. "We're moving to an oligopolistic situation," Kenneth Guenther, a top executive with the Independent Community Bankers of America, lamented after the Gramm measure was passed.

The situation worsened in 2004, in an extraordinary move toward deregulation that never even got to a vote. At the time, the European Union was threatening to more strictly regulate the foreign operations of America's big investment banks if the U.S. didn't strengthen its own oversight. So the top five investment banks got together on April 28th of that year and — with the helpful assistance of then-Goldman Sachs chief and future Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson — made a pitch to George Bush's SEC chief at the time, William Donaldson, himself a former investment banker. The banks generously volunteered to submit to new rules restricting them from engaging in excessively risky activity. In exchange, they asked to be released from any lending restrictions. The discussion about the new rules lasted just 55 minutes, and there was not a single representative of a major media outlet there to record the fateful decision.

Donaldson OK'd the proposal, and the new rules were enough to get the EU to drop its threat to regulate the five firms. The only catch was, neither Donaldson nor his successor, Christopher Cox, actually did any regulating of the banks. They named a commission of seven people to oversee the five companies, whose combined assets came to total more than $4 trillion. But in the last year and a half of Cox's tenure, the group had no director and did not complete a single inspection. Great deal for the banks, which originally complained about being regulated by both Europe and the SEC, and ended up being regulated by no one.

Once the capital requirements were gone, those top five banks went hog-wild, jumping ass-first into the then-raging housing bubble. One of those was Bear Stearns, which used its freedom to drown itself in bad mortgage loans. In the short period between the 2004 change and Bear's collapse, the firm's debt-to-equity ratio soared from 12-1 to an insane 33-1. Another culprit was Goldman Sachs, which also had the good fortune, around then, to see its CEO, a bald-headed Frankensteinian goon named Hank Paulson (who received an estimated $200 million tax deferral by joining the government), ascend to Treasury secretary.

Freed from all capital restraints, sitting pretty with its man running the Treasury, Goldman jumped into the housing craze just like everyone else on Wall Street. Although it famously scored an $11 billion coup in 2007 when one of its trading units smartly shorted the housing market, the move didn't tell the whole story. In truth, Goldman still had a huge exposure come that fateful summer of 2008 — to none other than Joe Cassano.

Goldman Sachs, it turns out, was Cassano's biggest customer, with $20 billion of exposure in Cassano's CDS book. Which might explain why Goldman chief Lloyd Blankfein was in the room with ex-Goldmanite Hank Paulson that weekend of September 13th, when the federal government was supposedly bailing out AIG.

When asked why Blankfein was there, one of the government officials who was in the meeting shrugs. "One might say that it's because Goldman had so much exposure to AIGFP's portfolio," he says. "You'll never prove that, but one might suppose."

Market analyst Eric Salzman is more blunt. "If AIG went down," he says, "there was a good chance Goldman would not be able to collect." The AIG bailout, in effect, was Goldman bailing out Goldman.

Eventually, Paulson went a step further, elevating another ex-Goldmanite named Edward Liddy to run AIG — a company whose bailout money would be coming, in part, from the newly created TARP program, administered by another Goldman banker named Neel Kashkari.

V. REPO MEN

There are plenty of people who have noticed, in recent years, that when they lost their homes to foreclosure or were forced into bankruptcy because of crippling credit-card debt, no one in the government was there to rescue them. But when Goldman Sachs — a company whose average employee still made more than $350,000 last year, even in the midst of a depression — was suddenly faced with the possibility of losing money on the unregulated insurance deals it bought for its insane housing bets, the government was there in an instant to patch the hole. That's the essence of the bailout: rich bankers bailing out rich bankers, using the taxpayers' credit card.

The people who have spent their lives cloistered in this Wall Street community aren't much for sharing information with the great unwashed. Because all of this shit is complicated, because most of us mortals don't know what the hell LIBOR is or how a REIT works or how to use the word "zero coupon bond" in a sentence without sounding stupid — well, then, the people who do speak this idiotic language cannot under any circumstances be bothered to explain it to us and instead spend a lot of time rolling their eyes and asking us to trust them.

That roll of the eyes is a key part of the psychology of Paulsonism. The state is now being asked not just to call off its regulators or give tax breaks or funnel a few contracts to connected companies; it is intervening directly in the economy, for the sole purpose of preserving the influence of the megafirms. In essence, Paulson used the bailout to transform the government into a giant bureaucracy of entitled assholedom, one that would socialize "toxic" risks but keep both the profits and the management of the bailed-out firms in private hands. Moreover, this whole process would be done in secret, away from the prying eyes of NASCAR dads, broke-ass liberals who read translations of French novels, subprime mortgage holders and other such financial losers.

Some aspects of the bailout were secretive to the point of absurdity. In fact, if you look closely at just a few lines in the Federal Reserve's weekly public disclosures, you can literally see the moment where a big chunk of your money disappeared for good. The H4 report (called "Factors Affecting Reserve Balances") summarizes the activities of the Fed each week. You can find it online, and it's pretty much the only thing the Fed ever tells the world about what it does. For the week ending February 18th, the number under the heading "Repurchase Agreements" on the table is zero. It's a significant number.

Why? In the pre-crisis days, the Fed used to manage the money supply by periodically buying and selling securities on the open market through so-called Repurchase Agreements, or Repos. The Fed would typically dump $25 billion or so in cash onto the market every week, buying up Treasury bills, U.S. securities and even mortgage-backed securities from institutions like Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan, who would then "repurchase" them in a short period of time, usually one to seven days. This was the Fed's primary mechanism for controlling interest rates: Buying up securities gives banks more money to lend, which makes interest rates go down. Selling the securities back to the banks reduces the money available for lending, which makes interest rates go up.

If you look at the weekly H4 reports going back to the summer of 2007, you start to notice something alarming. At the start of the credit crunch, around August of that year, you see the Fed buying a few more Repos than usual — $33 billion or so. By November, as private-bank reserves were dwindling to alarmingly low levels, the Fed started injecting even more cash than usual into the economy: $48 billion. By late December, the number was up to $58 billion; by the following March, around the time of the Bear Stearns rescue, the Repo number had jumped to $77 billion. In the week of May 1st, 2008, the number was $115 billion — "out of control now," according to one congressional aide. For the rest of 2008, the numbers remained similarly in the stratosphere, the Fed pumping as much as $125 billion of these short-term loans into the economy — until suddenly, at the start of this year, the number drops to nothing. Zero.

The reason the number has dropped to nothing is that the Fed had simply stopped using relatively transparent devices like repurchase agreements to pump its money into the hands of private companies. By early 2009, a whole series of new government operations had been invented to inject cash into the economy, most all of them completely secretive and with names you've never heard of. There is the Term Auction Facility, the Term Securities Lending Facility, the Primary Dealer Credit Facility, the Commercial Paper Funding Facility and a monster called the Asset-Backed Commercial Paper Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility (boasting the chat-room horror-show acronym ABCPMMMFLF). For good measure, there's also something called a Money Market Investor Funding Facility, plus three facilities called Maiden Lane I, II and III to aid bailout recipients like Bear Stearns and AIG.

While the rest of America, and most of Congress, have been bugging out about the $700 billion bailout program called TARP, all of these newly created organisms in the Federal Reserve zoo have quietly been pumping not billions but trillions of dollars into the hands of private companies (at least $3 trillion so far in loans, with as much as $5.7 trillion more in guarantees of private investments). Although this technically isn't taxpayer money, it still affects taxpayers directly, because the activities of the Fed impact the economy as a whole. And this new, secretive activity by the Fed completely eclipses the TARP program in terms of its influence on the economy.

No one knows who's getting that money or exactly how much of it is disappearing through these new holes in the hull of America's credit rating. Moreover, no one can really be sure if these new institutions are even temporary at all — or whether they are being set up as permanent, state-aided crutches to Wall Street, designed to systematically suck bad investments off the ledgers of irresponsible lenders.

"They're supposed to be temporary," says Paul-Martin Foss, an aide to Rep. Ron Paul. "But we keep getting notices every six months or so that they're being renewed. They just sort of quietly announce it."

None other than disgraced senator Ted Stevens was the poor sap who made the unpleasant discovery that if Congress didn't like the Fed handing trillions of dollars to banks without any oversight, Congress could apparently go fuck itself — or so said the law. When Stevens asked the GAO about what authority Congress has to monitor the Fed, he got back a letter citing an obscure statute that nobody had ever heard of before: the Accounting and Auditing Act of 1950. The relevant section, 31 USC 714(b), dictated that congressional audits of the Federal Reserve may not include "deliberations, decisions and actions on monetary policy matters." The exemption, as Foss notes, "basically includes everything." According to the law, in other words, the Fed simply cannot be audited by Congress. Or by anyone else, for that matter.

VI. WINNERS AND LOSERS

Stevens isn't the only person in Congress to be given the finger by the Fed. In January, when Rep. Alan Grayson of Florida asked Federal Reserve vice chairman Donald Kohn where all the money went — only $1.2 trillion had vanished by then — Kohn gave Grayson a classic eye roll, saying he would be "very hesitant" to name names because it might discourage banks from taking the money.

"Has that ever happened?" Grayson asked. "Have people ever said, 'We will not take your $100 billion because people will find out about it?'"

"Well, we said we would not publish the names of the borrowers, so we have no test of that," Kohn answered, visibly annoyed with Grayson's meddling.

Grayson pressed on, demanding to know on what terms the Fed was lending the money. Presumably it was buying assets and making loans, but no one knew how it was pricing those assets — in other words, no one knew what kind of deal it was striking on behalf of taxpayers. So when Grayson asked if the purchased assets were "marked to market" — a methodology that assigns a concrete value to assets, based on the market rate on the day they are traded — Kohn answered, mysteriously, "The ones that have market values are marked to market." The implication was that the Fed was purchasing derivatives like credit swaps or other instruments that were basically impossible to value objectively — paying real money for God knows what.

"Well, how much of them don't have market values?" asked Grayson. "How much of them are worthless?"

"None are worthless," Kohn snapped.

"Then why don't you mark them to market?" Grayson demanded.

"Well," Kohn sighed, "we are marking the ones to market that have market values."

In essence, the Fed was telling Congress to lay off and let the experts handle things. "It's like buying a car in a used-car lot without opening the hood, and saying, 'I think it's fine,'" says Dan Fuss, an analyst with the investment firm Loomis Sayles. "The salesman says, 'Don't worry about it. Trust me.' It'll probably get us out of the lot, but how much farther? None of us knows."

When one considers the comparatively extensive system of congressional checks and balances that goes into the spending of every dollar in the budget via the normal appropriations process, what's happening in the Fed amounts to something truly revolutionary — a kind of shadow government with a budget many times the size of the normal federal outlay, administered dictatorially by one man, Fed chairman Ben Bernanke. "We spend hours and hours and hours arguing over $10 million amendments on the floor of the Senate, but there has been no discussion about who has been receiving this $3 trillion," says Sen. Bernie Sanders. "It is beyond comprehension."

Count Sanders among those who don't buy the argument that Wall Street firms shouldn't have to face being outed as recipients of public funds, that making this information public might cause investors to panic and dump their holdings in these firms. "I guess if we made that public, they'd go on strike or something," he muses.

And the Fed isn't the only arm of the bailout that has closed ranks. The Treasury, too, has maintained incredible secrecy surrounding its implementation even of the TARP program, which was mandated by Congress. To this date, no one knows exactly what criteria the Treasury Department used to determine which banks received bailout funds and which didn't — particularly the first $350 billion given out under Bush appointee Hank Paulson.

The situation with the first TARP payments grew so absurd that when the Congressional Oversight Panel, charged with monitoring the bailout money, sent a query to Paulson asking how he decided whom to give money to, Treasury responded — and this isn't a joke — by directing the panel to a copy of the TARP application form on its website. Elizabeth Warren, the chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel, was struck nearly speechless by the response.

"Do you believe that?" she says incredulously. "That's not what we had in mind."

Another member of Congress, who asked not to be named, offers his own theory about the TARP process. "I think basically if you knew Hank Paulson, you got the money," he says.

This cozy arrangement created yet another opportunity for big banks to devour market share at the expense of smaller regional lenders. While all the bigwigs at Citi and Goldman and Bank of America who had Paulson on speed-dial got bailed out right away — remember that TARP was originally passed because money had to be lent right now, that day, that minute, to stave off emergency — many small banks are still waiting for help. Five months into the TARP program, some not only haven't received any funds, they haven't even gotten a call back about their applications.

"There's definitely a feeling among community bankers that no one up there cares much if they make it or not," says Tanya Wheeless, president of the Arizona Bankers Association.

Which, of course, is exactly the opposite of what should be happening, since small, regional banks are far less guilty of the kinds of predatory lending that sank the economy. "They're not giving out subprime loans or easy credit," says Wheeless. "At the community level, it's much more bread-and-butter banking."

Nonetheless, the lion's share of the bailout money has gone to the larger, so-called "systemically important" banks. "It's like Treasury is picking winners and losers," says one state banking official who asked not to be identified.

This itself is a hugely important political development. In essence, the bailout accelerated the decline of regional community lenders by boosting the political power of their giant national competitors.

Which, when you think about it, is insane: What had brought us to the brink of collapse in the first place was this relentless instinct for building ever-larger megacompanies, passing deregulatory measures to gradually feed all the little fish in the sea to an ever-shrinking pool of Bigger Fish. To fix this problem, the government should have slowly liquidated these monster, too-big-to-fail firms and broken them down to smaller, more manageable companies. Instead, federal regulators closed ranks and used an almost completely secret bailout process to double down on the same faulty, merger-happy thinking that got us here in the first place, creating a constellation of megafirms under government control that are even bigger, more unwieldy and more crammed to the gills with systemic risk.

In essence, Paulson and his cronies turned the federal government into one gigantic, half-opaque holding company, one whose balance sheet includes the world's most appallingly large and risky hedge fund, a controlling stake in a dying insurance giant, huge investments in a group of teetering megabanks, and shares here and there in various auto-finance companies, student loans, and other failing businesses. Like AIG, this new federal holding company is a firm that has no mechanism for auditing itself and is run by leaders who have very little grasp of the daily operations of its disparate subsidiary operations.

In other words, it's AIG's rip-roaringly shitty business model writ almost inconceivably massive — to echo Geithner, a huge, complex global company attached to a very complicated investment bank/hedge fund that's been allowed to build up without adult supervision. How much of what kinds of crap is actually on our balance sheet, and what did we pay for it? When exactly will the rent come due, when will the money run out? Does anyone know what the hell is going on? And on the linear spectrum of capitalism to socialism, where exactly are we now? Is there a dictionary word that even describes what we are now? It would be funny, if it weren't such a nightmare.

VII. YOU DON'T GET IT

The real question from here is whether the Obama administration is going to move to bring the financial system back to a place where sanity is restored and the general public can have a say in things or whether the new financial bureaucracy will remain obscure, secretive and hopelessly complex. It might not bode well that Geithner, Obama's Treasury secretary, is one of the architects of the Paulson bailouts; as chief of the New York Fed, he helped orchestrate the Goldman-friendly AIG bailout and the secretive Maiden Lane facilities used to funnel funds to the dying company. Neither did it look good when Geithner — himself a protégé of notorious Goldman alum John Thain, the Merrill Lynch chief who paid out billions in bonuses after the state spent billions bailing out his firm — picked a former Goldman lobbyist named Mark Patterson to be his top aide.

In fact, most of Geithner's early moves reek strongly of Paulsonism. He has continually talked about partnering with private investors to create a so-called "bad bank" that would systemically relieve private lenders of bad assets — the kind of massive, opaque, quasi-private bureaucratic nightmare that Paulson specialized in. Geithner even refloated a Paulson proposal to use TALF, one of the Fed's new facilities, to essentially lend cheap money to hedge funds to invest in troubled banks while practically guaranteeing them enormous profits.

God knows exactly what this does for the taxpayer, but hedge-fund managers sure love the idea. "This is exactly what the financial system needs," said Andrew Feldstein, CEO of Blue Mountain Capital and one of the Morgan Mafia. Strangely, there aren't many people who don't run hedge funds who have expressed anything like that kind of enthusiasm for Geithner's ideas.

As complex as all the finances are, the politics aren't hard to follow. By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future. There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power. In the age of the CDS and CDO, most of us are financial illiterates. By making an already too-complex economy even more complex, Wall Street has used the crisis to effect a historic, revolutionary change in our political system — transforming a democracy into a two-tiered state, one with plugged-in financial bureaucrats above and clueless customers below.

The most galling thing about this financial crisis is that so many Wall Street types think they actually deserve not only their huge bonuses and lavish lifestyles but the awesome political power their own mistakes have left them in possession of. When challenged, they talk about how hard they work, the 90-hour weeks, the stress, the failed marriages, the hemorrhoids and gallstones they all get before they hit 40.

"But wait a minute," you say to them. "No one ever asked you to stay up all night eight days a week trying to get filthy rich shorting what's left of the American auto industry or selling $600 billion in toxic, irredeemable mortgages to ex-strippers on work release and Taco Bell clerks. Actually, come to think of it, why are we even giving taxpayer money to you people? Why are we not throwing your ass in jail instead?"

But before you even finish saying that, they're rolling their eyes, because You Don't Get It. These people were never about anything except turning money into money, in order to get more money; valueswise they're on par with crack addicts, or obsessive sexual deviants who burgle homes to steal panties. Yet these are the people in whose hands our entire political future now rests.

Good luck with that, America. And enjoy tax season.

[From Issue 1075 — April 2, 2009]

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/26793903/the_big_takeover

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[scorpio]

I highly recommend This Difficult Individual, by Eustace Mullins.
The only authorized biography of Ezra Pound.
All the other books on Pound are hack jobs and designed to make Pound look like a nut, a traitor, or 'anti-semite'  :roll:

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Ezra Pound on Money
By: Carolina Hartley

We're never far from money. We spend most of our time and energy in quest of money.

But how did this thing become an intermediary between us and the world around us? Before money, we bartered. Why did money supplant barter and who is custodian of the money system?

These questions are dangerous: they cost Ezra Pound twelve years. Pound was a victim of political persecution at the behest of financiers and their minions like Franklin Delano Roosevelt. These people feared Ezra because he asked "what is money for," and came up with an inconvenient answer.

Pound understood that money is ticket for exchange. People who make things can trade more easily with other people who make things using money. There should only be as much money as there are things to trade. Another way of saying this is: money supply should increase and decrease along with the change in economic output.

Here's the rub. If money supply grows faster than the amount of things made, then theft is taking place. The thief creates extraneous dollars and spends them first: at the time when the rest of us expect a dollar to be worth a certain amount. By the time the thief's dollars have been absorbed into the economy, we notice our dollars are buying less. This is inflation. The thief has dipped into our savings and traded with shoddy bills.

What happens when money supply shrinks compared to things made? Then a new characteristic of money emerges. Things made don't always last — take bread for instance. A baker must sell his bread in a matter of days, otherwise it's lost. Money isn't bound by such considerations. A thief can horde money until the baker's goods rot, then buy his bakery at a huge discount.

The "thief" in both these examples holds a special place in society: he controls the supply of money and "future money" called credit. Controlling money supply is economic power; it is a sovereign privilege. The people who really control a nation control its money supply. 1

Pound's criticism of the financial class was that they were bad sovereigns. They managed money supply for their own benefit: they were thieves. In contrast, the Founding Fathers were good rulers because they designed a system where Congress managed the money supply; and Congress was answerable to a large swathe of the population.

Pound identified the grasping, vampire-like nature of international finance, and the venal nature of its supporters in national governments.2 He was interested in finding ways to systematically limit their power: perfecting what the Founding Fathers started in Article 1 Section 8 of the Constitution. This is why Pound studied in the work of Silvio Gesell.

One of Gesell's ideas was to eliminate the disparity between money and perishable goods. A way to do this is to discount large bills over time: holders of large bills would need to get them stamped every month, each stamp representing a decrease in their value. This way, hoarders bear the cost of their behavior and investment is encouraged. Small denominations would not be discounted.

Gesell recognized that the economy is like a body and money is like its blood. If blood builds up systematically in any one place, a disease results. His discounted script discouraged people from taking advantage of others' simple lack of cash. (Note: this is very different than being forced to lend to people who aren't creditworthy.) Saving in the form of investment was systematically encouraged.

Pound notes that Gesell's system worked imperfectly in Alberta, Canada mostly due to planning errors that could easily be fixed. The system worked very well in the Austrian village of Wörgl, and it was promptly closed down by mainstream financial interests.



These financial interests were trying to preserve their privilege: they benefited from the increasing productivity of the societies they milked. Pound didn't see how being born into a banking family; or buying the latest politician; should give them the right to those benefits. Ezra liked the ideas of Major Clifford Douglas: the people who worked should accrue those benefits. This is the essence of Social Credit.

The text of the 1933 version of Major Douglas' book Social Credit, can be found here. Pound appreciated Maj. Douglas' ideas, but thought they needed further exploration. What Pound really felt passionate about was fixing the money problem. Ezra wrote during the Great Depression when, much like now, people were captivated by the supposed security of gold.

Pound was never an advocate of gold-backed money. He understood how easily such systems can be subverted by controlling the supply or the clearing market for the backing commodity. Much of Britain's power during the 19th century came from the fact that London was the clearing market for gold; and other nations used a gold-standard currency. They had to go to England to manage their money!

In Ezra's words:

The trick is simple. Whenever the Rothschild and other gents in the gold business have gold to sell, they raise the price. The public is fooled by propagandizing the devaluation of the dollar, or other monetary unit according to the country chosen to be victimized. The argument is that the high price of the monetary unit is injurious to the nation's commerce.

But when the nation, that is, the people of that nation own the gold and the financiers own the dollars or other monetary units, the gold standard is restored. This raises the value of the dollar and the citizens of "rich" nations, as well as citizens of other nations, are diddled.

Preventing nations from being "diddled" is why Pound supported Fascism in Italy. He saw Fascism as the only system available to the Italians that was likely to deal with the threat from international finance. Mussolini's Fascism let Italy be ruled in an Italian fashion — and until Anglo-American banking interests were threatened, things worked better in Italy than they had in a long time.

Pound never supported Fascism in America. We have our Constitution, which describes a government for Americans run in the American fashion. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Pound realized that America's challenge was implementing the laws we already have. Read Jefferson and/or Mussolini for his whole argument. 3

Ezra was a true economic historian. He explained his analysis in the following way:

"The definition of an idea, as observed by someone who understands the events of the day, may shed more light on the historical process than many volumes."

"History, as seen by a Monetary Economist, is a continuous struggle between producers and non-producers, and those who try to make a living by inserting a false system of book-keeping between the producers and their just recompense."

"The usurers act through fraud, falsification, superstitions, habits and, when these methods do not function, they let loose a war. Everything hinges on monopoly, and the particular monopolies hinge around the great illusionistic monetary monopoly."

Pound's analysis identified the canker in American life: the cooperation between government and finance to defraud the public — the "monetary monopoly." Monopolies don't exist without tacit government approval. Beneficiaries of the financial monopoly have collaborated with venal officials against producers for a long time. The history of the largest American fortunes, since the Civil War at least, have followed this trend.

Historically, banking was begun by families as private businesses. As these businesses grew and issued receipts for gold and silver deposits, they gradually developed "fractional reserve" banking by issuing more notes than they had gold on deposit. Although kings would mint coins of gold and silver they owned at their royal mints, fractional reserve banking was a dangerous business, and Kings did not want to gamble with their sovereign power by going into that business. Rather, kings and especially parliaments, became dependent upon these fractional reserve bankers for loans, and would grant monopoly charters to a group of private bankers to create a national or central bank which would then have the power to regulate the size of the money stock through its fractional reserve activities, as it collected taxes, issued the national paper currency and sold sovereign debt on behalf of the government.

These national or central banks conferred significant advantages on the private banks that organized and owned them. Private banks were allowed to borrow at the discount window at special rates provided that they posted reserves with the central bank. Of course, the real advantage of the central bank for its owners and organizers was inside information. During the years of the gold standard, having a seat on the board of a central bank meant that the insider would know when emergency borrowings ticked up, telegraphing the probable start of a bank crisis and stock market crash. In the case of war, it was an easy task for a private bank with seats in several different national banks to calculate the deposits and income of the contesting states and the loans they secured to raise their armies, thus allowing the privileged few to bet on the probable winner.

The gold standard was popular among bankers for the simple reason that the supply of gold increased irregularly but on average more slowly than the increase in population, meaning that the value of loans would gradually increase over time as would the burden of repayment. Debtors resented the power of gold, hence William Jennings Bryan's political appeal and his famous "Cross of Gold" speech. Coincidentally the gold standard was finally abandoned in 1971, six years after the birth control pill descended upon the civilized world.

Pound recognized two very important threats to the international banking community that arose out of the Third Reich. First, Hitler abandoned the gold standard, meaning that Nazi Germany suddenly had the power to prevent defaulting on its future debt simply by printing money — a power that the U.S. copied from Germany just as it copied the autobahns. Second, and much more important, the Reich took back the power of central banks by financing infrastructure projects directly, issuing notes in payment to the laborers, contractors, and suppliers rather than first borrowing the money from a central bank at interest. (See here and here.) If this practice had spread, bankers would be no more powerful than plumbers.

Furthermore, as long as the supply of this newly printed money in the form of notes matched the increase in GNP and future productivity from these new highways, rails, and factories, the printing of money would not necessarily produce inflation. The Reich also issued debt directly to German citizens and businesses to finance Hitler's economic miracle, but the central banks lost control over the money supply and lost the ability to trigger banking panics and depressions inside the Reich. It was a mortal threat, and it had to be stopped. Pound was right.

Hitler's experiment in freedom from banking was broken, and the finance/government partnership was preserved at the cost of millions of lives in World War II.

This finance/government collaboration explains the American elites' love affair with international socialism. They don't know how to make money any other way. Competition is a sin. Government organized monopolies are profitable when you control the government. If there are no national restrictions on moving profits around, they can hide their loot offshore. The perfect crime.

Pound recommended the writings of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Martin Van Buren4 for a practical explanation of how the young Republic wrested itself from London finance. He recommended Classical study (Aristotle's Politics and the works of Demosthenes) for understanding the tricks financiers use. Nationally-controlled money was popular politics until the Civil War; when Pound notes a collective amnesia took the mind of the American public. Tragedy and forgetfulness. This is also the time when Lincoln let the bankers back in with the National Banking Act.

Ezra didn't revel in victimhood. The "monetary monopoly" was made possible by voters' laziness. In his ABC of Economics, Pound castigates the American public for letting its money fall into the hands of enemies and irresponsible men. Americans circa 1930 were ignorant about money and banking; the situation now is even worse. It is a national tragedy that we have been lazy enough to let Congress sell its responsibilities; and let hostile elites control our credit.

The way to fix the situation is to dissolve the Federal Reserve; force Congress to manage money supply as described in the Constitution; and vote the venal or incompetent out of office. The revolutionary patriots gave us the tools; we need to step up to the plate and use them.

Our amnesia and laziness have had a lot of help. Pound pointed out that hostile elites were overrepresented in academia and the media — a situation which has worsened with time. Now we are reaping the harvest: schools devoid of the Classics; universities teaching castrated Economics; and Gloria Vanderbilt's boy on TV. Ezra saw it coming, and he told us how to fix it.



Carolina Hartley (email her) has a degree in Finance and Economics from MIT. She is also student of aesthetics and social history, though not from the orthodox perspective.

1 Pound's repeated recommendation of Christopher Hollis' work The Two Nations is based on the book's excellent explanation of British economic power over the centuries. Return to text.

2 "Ezra Pound Speaking": Radio Speeches of World War II. Edited by Leonard W. Doob. Greenwood Press, 1978. Return to text.

3 Pound recommended the correspondence between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson and the writings of Van Buren for the economic history of the United States.

Pound's Pamphlets on Money are excellent; the first "An Introduction to the Economic Nature of the United States" and "A Visiting Card" are particularly useful. (Published by Peter Russell, London. 1950.) Return to text.

4 The Works of John Adams: Second President of the United States: with A Life of the Author, notes and illustrations, by his Grandson, Charles Francis Adams. Little, Brown and Co. Boston 1850–56.

The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Memorial Edition, XX Volumes, Washington, 1903-04.

The Autobiography of Martin Van Buren, written in 1854 and remaining in manuscript until its publication as Vol. II of the "Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the year 1918," Government Printing Office, Washington 1920.

Pound also recommends Jefferson and Hamilton by Claude G. Bower. Return to text.

http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/au ... ey.html#CH

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Found an interesting link that Angleton was on a mission to capture Ezra Pound when he was in Italy...and like Fidel Castro...is a typical Crypto-Jew....carrying out operations for Jew control.

At this point, it is very clear, IMHO, the USA's CIA is simply a Jewish run operation for the Protocols of the Elders of Zion... -- The CSR


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June 10, 2009
William Empson's influence on the CIA

Counterintelligence, argued James Angleton, called for the kind of practical criticism he learned at Yale

Terence Hawkes

Ryder Street in the City of Westminster might not currently seem a site to conjure with, but in 1943, when Section V of MI6 moved to offices there, it stood as the core of Anglo-American chicanery and cozenage. If you came to work early enough you could see, from the upper floors, the employees of Quaglino's restaurant recycling its garbage from the night before.

Counter-intelligence, the concern of the office members, is also a mode of recycling. The task is not to detect and remove the enemy's agents: quite the reverse. Counterintelligence aims to collect and master the enemy's intelligence in order to turn it against him. By sifting and ordering the information that the enemy's agents transmit, it analyses the questions they are aiming to answer, obtains evidence of their plans and intentions as a result, and then tries to influence or supplant these by the answers that it carefully supplies. Rather than execute spies, counterintelligence aims to "turn" them. This proved a handy skill when Russia threatened India, the jewel in the British Empire's crown, and Kipling's novel Kim offers a fitting memorial to what was called the Great Game. An updated scheme called the "Double Cross" later emerged from Whitehall as a way of dealing with the subsequent threat from Hitler's Germany. When the American allies arrived in London in 1942, they were so impressed by the massive British card index of agents that they modelled the system of their own Office of Strategic Services (OSS) on it.

Norman Holmes Pearson, formerly an instructor in the English Department at Yale University before becoming a major element in the OSS, was wholly approving. As a student of literary criticism, he was naturally attracted to the subtleties of a text-based system that put a crucial emphasis on recognition of thematic and structural patterns. New Criticism, as the practice was called at Yale, concerned itself not with literary history and the personality of authors, but with the specific use poems made of language on the page. It fostered an interest in multiple levels of meaning, ambivalence, paradox, wit, puns and the peculiarities of Sprachgefühl: all devices on which cryptic codes or obscure messages might draw. In fact, when he described the whole Double Cross system, Pearson made it sound like a poem elucidated in class, its ironies nicely balanced, its contrasts wittily shaped. The power produced by this kind of close reading was intense, and as a result he was delighted to welcome as one of his new assistants in the OSS a graduate of Yale who had studied these mysteries: James Angleton. Based in Europe, educated at Malvern and clad in bespoke English tailoring, James Angleton fitted comfortably into an Anglophiliac Yale. The photo on the cover of Michael Holzman's book makes him look remarkably like T. S. Eliot. Yet his full name, James Jesus Angleton, sets free its own vitalizing American ambiguity. He was the son of the US-born James Hugh Angleton and Carmen Mercedes Moreno from Nogales, Mexico. And though he never used his Mexican name in later life, that "Jesus" marks him, by our standards, as a Chicano: from a British perspective he seems exotically transatlantic.

Holzman's brisk, uncluttered book offers valuable access to previously untapped material on Angleton, who became the first head of the Counter-intelligence Staff of the CIA. In particular, it makes incisive use of his years as a student of English at Yale and the influence on him of the New Critics and modernist poets of his day. Previous biographers such as Robin Winks have pointed out that at Yale he was co-editor of the literary journal Furioso. But Holzman takes a more spirited line, publishing two of Angleton's grating undergraduate poems and a list of his correspondence with writers such as T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, I. A. Richards, William Empson, Ezra Pound and Louis MacNeice. These famous poets all "took this young man very seriously" and he, in return, was greatly impressed by their writings, particularly the book that became a crucial text of New Criticism, Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity. For Empson, ambiguity is the central aspect of language. Not a minor stylistic flourish, it is an unavoidable linguistic feature permanently in place and in effect seems to exploit the fundamental characteristics of language itself. This means that "opposite" meanings will always illuminate and invade the primary meanings of ordinary words, so that "in a sufficiently extended sense any prose statement could be called ambiguous". Thus, Empson argues, a word may have several distinct meanings; several meanings connected with one another; several meanings which need one another to complete their meaning; or several meanings which unite together so that the word means one relation or one process . . . what often happens when a piece of writing is felt to offer hidden riches is that one phrase after another lights up and appears as the heart of it; one part after another catches fire.

Given the allure of this, it seemed quite appropriate that Angleton should be sedulously practising in Ryder Street the reading arts he had learned in the Yale classroom. Of course the issue of ambiguity is insignificant when it involves intelligence data of a practical kind. The decoding of military messages is a relatively simple matter. But when counter-intelligence is at stake, when agents may be recognized as "turned", so that what they supply either prevents access to the enemy's spy system or actively penetrates our own, they themselves become "texts" which demand complex analysis. A sensitivity to ambiguity then becomes a crucial weapon. The improbable but undeniable impact of modern literary criticism on practical politics has no better model, and Angleton later described his work in counter-intelligence as "the practical criticism of ambiguity". His rise was swift. In November 1944, Pearson became chief of the OSS counterintelligence department, or X-2, for all of Europe, and his protégé Angleton was transferred to Italy as the commander of SCI (Special Counter Intelligence) Unit Z. One of his tasks was to deal with fascist placemen, and he frequently used double agents. A particular experience in Italy was the capture of Ezra Pound. The spectacle of the much admired poet dejectedly emptying his night-bucket was presumably chastening, and Angleton left a "bottle of good spirits" to Pound in his will.

Angleton was one of a number of professionals in intelligence who chose to remain in government service at the end of the war. In 1947, with the capital of the Western world starting to shift from Whitehall to Washington, he returned to the US. On December 20 of that year he joined the Central Intelligence Group, one of the organizations designed to succeed the OSS. The Italian election of the following year turned out to be a major coup for the intelligence services. A great deal of money was raised in the United States, a massive letter-writing campaign was organized from Italian immigrant neighbourhoods, and Frank Sinatra made a Voice of America broadcast, all designed to browbeat the electorate into voting against the Communists. The campaign's success aided the establishment of the Central Intelligence Agency, legislation supporting it was passed in June 1949, and Angleton joined the organization immediately. He was just thirty-two years old.

Holzman's account of the rest of Angleton's career is unsparing. A special relationship between Angleton and Israel's secret intelligence service, Mossad, gave him a major role in preserving Israel's secrecy in respect of Suez. As the officer in charge of the Israeli "account", he supported the Israeli atomic bomb programme, and he managed to obtain a copy of the "secret speech" in which Khrushchev denounced Stalin. Of course there were reverses. Angleton's most significant defector was Anatoly Golitsyn of the KGB. Golitsyn believed that there were moles in the highest reaches of Western intelligence, and for a time it seemed that the KGB had a disturbingly senior agent in the CIA. The suspect, Peter Karlow, was finally drummed out, only to be vindicated in 1989 and, under the "Mole Relief Act", given half a million dollars and a medal. There were other suspects, most of whom turned out to be innocent. By the end wholesale psychotic zeal reigned as Angleton decided that the entire Soviet division of the CIA had to be "cleaned out", and every single member was removed.

Further low points began to appear. One involved another defector from the KGB called Yuri Nosenko. Nosenko named Golitsyn as a fraud and, in the light of Angleton's prior commitment, this meant that Nosenko was forced to undergo "hostile interrogation". That required solitary confinement, lack of proper heating, no air-conditioning, no books or writing materials and sometimes not even a toothbrush. Under these conditions Nosenko was held by the CIA for nearly five years. The spirit of Guantánamo Bay was clearly alive even then, and the sentence tells us a great deal about the notion of language that the CIA seems to have internalized. When Nosenko was questioned, New Criticism ruled. As Holzman points out, the New Critical methodology indicates that "read with sufficient care, all texts, no matter how thoroughly encoded, would yield at least two messages: the overt meaning and the hidden meaning; the latter inherent in some larger pattern, visible only to the elect". Hence, for Angleton, the evasions and lies of prisoners were bound to be confounded, the ambiguities in which they dealt would be exposed and truth, even after five years, would finally be ferreted out.

Yet this oversimplifies the problem by demanding a response only in the stark terms in which its questioners deal. It offers an American solution, but only to issues the presuppositions of which make it into an American problem. Empson's British reflection that ambiguity is the heart and soul of language offers quite different proposals. Had Angleton misread Empson? Winks's earlier study cites Angleton's animus against "the amateur's tendency to attempt to reconcile conflicting statements, as though both might be true, rather than both being false". But Empson took the amateur's tendency as wholly acceptable. He identified a kind of universal, all-purpose ambiguity in human relations which melted simple-hearted trust and wrought havoc with lame notions of truth and clarity. One kind of dramatic irony may result:

Irony in this subdued sense, as a generous scepticism which can believe at once that people are and are not guilty, is a very normal and essential method . . . . This sort of contradiction is at once understood in literature, because the process of understanding one's friends must always be riddled with such indecisions and the machinery of such hypocrisy; people, often, cannot have done both of two things, but they must have been in some way prepared to have done either; whichever they did, they will have still lingering in their minds the way they would have preserved their self-respect if they had acted differently; they are only to be understood by bearing both possibilities in mind.

It is interesting that this "generous scepticism", which bears "both possibilities in mind", strikes Empson as "very normal and essential" in human life. In short, ambiguity rules. When Angleton expected the fog of ambiguity to clear, as in the case of Nosenko, it pointedly refused. Empson, on the other hand, accepted the persistence of fog as an aspect of the real business of human life. Ambiguity is the air we breathe. Empson's experience of a fractured society in the civil war in China is obviously pertinent, particularly when he talks about the ambiguous fog enveloping his own world at the time. Speaking later of lines in Macbeth which some critics claim to be verging on nonsense, he insists that "no one who had experienced civil war could say it had no sense". Confusion was widespread in those years, but Empson countered it with a peculiarly British conception of ambiguity: "When I was crossing the fighting lines during the siege of Peking, to give my weekly lecture on Macbeth, a generous-minded peasant barred my way and said, pointing ahead: 'That way lies death'". Empson's response was foggy, gnomic but swift: "Not for me, I have a British passport".

The American approach to ambiguity was far less indulgent. By December 1954, a counter-intelligence staff within the Agency was created and Angleton was duly appointed its head: he became counterintelligence's "chief theoretician". It's easy to condemn what followed. The American literary journal Ramparts was enthusiastically suppressed and any criticism of the government was automatically suspect. Huge lists were compiled of teachers and authors of socialist and even feminist persuasion. By 1967, the CIA began operation of the quaintly named CHAOS, which aimed to investigate the anti-Vietnam war press and the peace movement. The attack on universities was especially vigorous. Entire academic disciplines were sometimes shaped to the goals of the intelligence agencies, or were even initiated by them. All the members of Students for a Democratic Society were placed under surveillance, and most black groups were spied on. The end came for Angleton when the New York Times published Seymour Hersh's story about CHAOS on December 22, 1974. It did not mince its words. "The Central Intelligence Agency, directly violating its charter, conducted a massive, illegal domestic intelligence operation during the Nixon Administration against the antiwar movement and other dissident groups in the United States."

This was bound to make a public figure of Angleton, who resigned in the same month. A sort of epitaph was supplied in 1975 by Senator Frank Church, chairman of the Senate Committee on Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities: "Twenty-five years ago, this country had a matchless moral position from which it exercised immense leadership and influence in the world. Anything the United States stood for was automatically endorsed by three quarters of the governments of the world. Now we have had twenty-five years of manipulation by methods that were plainly copied from the KGB". Angleton's replacement downgraded and all but dismantled the whole edifice of counter-intelligence. Moles were still discovered here and there, and the biggest of them all, Aldrich Ames, or Supermole, was arrested in 1994 after a career in espionage that dwarfed all previous suspicions. But Angleton had died on May 11, 1987. (It is also worth recording that Nosenko was later released as innocent, surprisingly "rehabilitated", and then, astonishingly, paid as a CIA consultant. He died at the age of eighty-one in August 2008, having lived under an assumed name in the United States for more than forty years. Just months before, some senior officials of the Agency visited him with a letter from the current Director, thanking him for being so helpful. They presented him with an American flag.)

Back in Westminster, Ryder Street no doubt still has its ghosts. Among them the American James Jesus Angleton might manage an ambiguous glance in the direction of Kim Philby, having spied in the Englishman's nickname an ominous allusion to Kipling's Great Game. And both presences may perhaps be haunted by another figure. As a young man, William Empson was sent down from Magdalene College, Cambridge, for possession of contraceptives. Faced with such unambiguous rectitude, he constructed its ideological opposite, a new idea of criticism seeded with the explosive notion of ambiguity. Did the disgraced Angleton fail to grasp its implications? In an uneasy letter to I. A. Richards, Empson records a visit from Angleton in London in 1944: "The young man Jim Angleton from Yale, of Furioso, turned up here very mysteriously, and I took him to a pub to meet the BBC Features and Drama side, who mocked at him rather". When Angleton left, he "disappeared equally mysteriously but I thought maybe in a huff". Perhaps Angleton's mysterious American disappearance foreshadowed his later zealotry. But Empson carried on, brandishing his British passport and flourishing in our native fog until the end. A Professor of English in Sheffield, an Honorary Fellow of Magdalene College, an Honorary Litt. D of Cambridge University, and a Fellow of the British Academy, he even wrote a masque in praise of the Queen. He was knighted in 1979. Michael Holzman's astute study suggests that Angleton's "huff" remained unappeased.



Michael Holzman
JAMES JESUS ANGLETON, THE CIA, AND THE CRAFT OF COUNTERINTELLIGENCE
399pp. University of Massachusetts Press. Paperback, $29.95; distributed in the UK by Eurospan. £28.95.
978 1 55859 650 7

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/ ... 469054.ece

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"Ezra Pound Speaking"

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Series Foreword

The best reason for publishing Ezra Pound's Italian broadcasts may be the simplest.  Thousands of people have heard about them, scores have been affected by them, yet but a handful has ever heard or read them.  Here they are.

There are other compelling reasons, the first having to do with the magnitude of their author.  No other American—and only a few individuals throughout the world—has left such a strong mark on so many aspects of the twentieth century: from poetry to economics, from theater to philosophy, from politics to pedagogy, from Provençal to Chinese.  If Pound was not always totally accepted, at least he was unavoidably there.

Those traits of mind and character that made Pound so inescapable are not only evident in the broadcasts but also present in ways that make them more fully understandable.  Here is that same fearless plunge toward the heart of the matter—often heedless of consistencies—that marked his study of ancient and exotic languages and cultures.  Here is that same urge to simplify and instruct that marked his unorthodox textbooks: ABC of Economics, ABC of Reading and the rest.  Here is that flair for dramatic hyperbole which peppered the Cantos and produced such deliberately shocking titles as Jefferson and/or Mussolini.  The broadcasts do not always show these traits at their best, but their blatant presence makes them useful clues in putting together the puzzle of that powerful enigma at their center.

Even if the shadow of Ezra Pound did not so broadly color this century, these broadcasts might still command a clinical respect for the way in which they interrelate so vitally with the rise of fascism in Europe and the accompanying extremes of feelings, with the cause and conduct of World War II as viewed from this special place by this very special commentator.  To the historians who have counted this an almost anti-ideological war, the broad casts offer considerable counterpoint.  Furthermore, they are the starting point for understanding two major cultural events of the postwar years: the trial of Ezra Pound and the literary prize controversies.  The Bollingen Prize debate—by itself the politico-literary cause célèbre of the generation—while once totally preoccupying has to this day refused to lie at rest.  Even this young Greenwood Press series, begun twenty-five years after the fact, offers two fresh and extensive treatments of the issue.  Such insistent unrest shows clearly the need for this essential evidence now at hand.

The broadcasts do not show Pound at his best.  War, bigotry, and totalitarianism are not sunny subjects.  Yet giant figures need their full dimensions, and unpleasant subjects can and should be studied for the best of reasons.  How indeed are we to lessen our chances for future encounters with shrinking horizons if we do not learn from episodes so recent, so strongly cast, and so richly charted ?

We applaud, then, the respect for a complete historic record which has allowed the Pound Literary Trustees to overcome an understandable reluctance toward seeing these scripts in print.  We applaud this same impulse which has motivated the patience and stamina of Leonard Doob.  There are, and there will always be, more motives behind an act like this than one can chronicle.  From our point of view, however, this work provides a singular and extensive collection of data for the pursuit of that most bewildering of cultural equations: the balance between the creative force, the individual personality, and the social context.  Seen in this light, Ezra Pound's texts become a "Contribution in American Studies" at a profound and essential level.

ROBERT H. WALKER
February 1975

INTRODUCTION

The title of this book is the signature Ezra Pound almost always used at the start and sometimes at the end of each broadcast from Radio Rome in World War II.  Pound himself had proposed to publish "300 Radio Speeches," containing also the texts of his "Money Pamphlets," newspaper articles published in Italian, and his translations from the Chinese: Ta Hio (The Great Digest) and Chung Yung (The Unwobbling Pivot).

Pound started to write for radio toward the end of 1940.  The first scripts to be accepted were read in English by regular speakers of Radio Rome.  In January 1941 he was able to record his own speeches, which were broadcast, on an average, twice a week.  He wrote the texts at his home in Rapallo and on occasion in Rome where he traveled to record on discs a batch of 10 to 20 speeches.  He wanted the discs to be transmitted in a particular order, but it is apparent from the discrepancies between his numbering system and the dates on which the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) recorded the speeches that the Italian officials did not always follow his plan, although in general the deviation was not great.  He gathered news and information from Italian newspapers and whatever foreign papers he managed to obtain; from Italian broadcasts and any foreign station (especially the BBC) he could hear on his own radio; from conversations with friends, officials, and travelers; from letters of friends in America and other countries; and from his own library, which included back numbers of periodicals.  He envied the BBC's supply of news and feature materials, since he himself had "not one disc" (July 25, 1943).

After the Fascist government fell in July 1943, Pound left Rome and eventually submitted scripts and ideas to Mussolini's Republic of Saló.  No evidence exists to indicate that any of this material was ever broadcast to America in Pound's name from Radio Milan while that station remained under the regime's control.

The present collection consists of original manuscripts Pound prepared to read on Rome radio, divided into two parts:

Part 1 includes all of the available manuscripts (105) for the broadcasts recorded by the FCC: October 2, 1941, to December 7, 1941; January 29, 1942, to July 26, 1942; February 18, 1943, to July 25, 1943.  These are the speeches that have been quoted by Pound's critics, and they include those selected by American authorities who sought to press the charge of treason against him.  The monitoring unit of the FCC, called the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service, recorded every broadcast from Radio Rome, included among which were Pound's speeches.  There are egregious errors and omissions in these FCC transcripts because recording equipment in those days was crude, because atmospheric conditions interfered with the monitoring, and because, I assume, the transcribers sometimes did not recognize Pound's references.  The FCC versions of Pound's speeches hitherto available, there fore, sometimes give a wrong impression.  Poundians and others have noted that the French novelist Céline was transcribed as "Stalin." Other mistakes can be observed, in many instances probably resulting from the vagaries of shortwave.  One illustration: Pound's sentence, "Even Lenin saw that the easiest way to debauch the capitalist system is to debauch its currency' (April 13, 1943), became "Yet even seven saw that the easiest way to divorce the capitalist system is to divorce its currency." To date, however, it has been impossible to locate five of Pound's original manuscripts; hence the FCC versions in these instances, imperfect though they are, have been substituted in this volume.  In a few instances gaps in the manuscripts themselves have been filled by sections of the FCC transcripts; these substitutions are clearly indicated.

Part 2 includes 10 speeches written before the FCC monitoring unit had been established, some read by Pound and some read by others, as well as speeches either not used or not monitored.  They have been selected by Mary de Rachewiltz because in her opinion they represent a fair sample of Pound's central ideas and themes.

The anonymous and pseudonymous scripts Pound also wrote are not included in this book because they merely repeat ideas already expressed in other speeches.

Most of the speeches in part 1 were intended for an audience in the United States, some for an audience in the United Kingdom, and some for both.  It is known that Pound was heard in the United States by people other than the monitors of the FCC, and eventually in April 1942 the Department of Justice began an investigation through the FBI.  There is no way of estimating how many persons listened to him regularly or how large his audience ever was.  Certainly his broadcasts never attained great popularity.  He himself in the broadcasts occasionally expressed jovial skepticism concerning the size of his audience: "I was wonderin' if anybody listened to what I said on Rome Radio" (February 19, 1943).

After January 29, 1942, Pound was introduced by a statement he had drafted:

Rome Radio, acting in accordance with the fascist policy of intellectual freedom and free expression of opinion by those who are qualified to hold it, has offered Dr. Ezra Pound the use of the microphone twice a week.  It is understood that he will not be asked to say anything whatsoever that goes against his conscience, or anything in compatible with his duties as a citizen of the United States of America.

Pound always referred to himself as an American.

With the exceptions already noted, therefore, the texts of the speeches come from Pound's original manuscripts, which he typed and then often amended in his not always intelligible handwriting.  Editing has been kept to a minimum.  Elementary misspelling has been corrected.  Punctuation and paragraphing have been altered in the interest of intelligibility.  Since the scripts were to be read and heard, abbreviations and initials of persons have been spelled out.  Pound's penchant for achieving emphasis through capitalizing entire words has been retained.  Brackets have been added when my colleagues and I were unsure of a word or phrase after studying the manuscript and after examining the FCC transcript for possible clues.  The five PCC scripts have not been edited or amended.  Words that cannot be de ciphered or are missing from the manuscripts or the FCC scripts are indicated by a 2-em dash.

The following information is provided at the outset of each speech:

1. To the left

a. Part 1 a consecutive numbering system based on the dates recorded by the FCC Part 2 the order is perforce arbitrary since the speeches have been selected for content and since no reliable dating or numbering system has been located.

b. In parentheses Part 1 the FCC date part 2 the estimated year in which the script was written.

2. To the right

a. When available, the target audience indicated by Pound and/or the FCC.

b. Part 1 Pound s own numbering system in parentheses actually he used three separate numbering systems that have been distinguished here by placing the letter A, B, or C before his number.  Part 2: whatever number appears on the original manuscript is provided without relating that number to Pound's different numbering systems.

3. To the left, second line

The title of the speech as given by Pound.

The book has four appendices that attempt, both quantitatively and qualitatively, to provide insight into Pound and his critics.  I would have preferred to provide additional information, but too many facts were obscure to express reliable judgments.  Neither the Italian archives, for ex ample, nor an examination of the papers at the Beinecke Library at Yale University have revealed why Pound ceased broadcasting between July 26, 1942, and February 18, 1943.

The glossary and index to names at the end of the book are as complete as my collaborators and I could make them, but we have not been able to identify every name to which Pound referred.  Admittedly we have often been able to provide only our best guesses.

This volume, in short, seeks to offer the speeches as Pound wrote them.  For the first time all of his monitored speeches and some of his other scripts are brought conveniently together.  No longer will Poundians or historians be dependent upon the FCC transcripts, pirated editions of the speeches, or hit-and-miss citations to learn what Pound said over Radio Rome.

Reproducing Pound's admittedly controversial speeches over 30 years later requires justification.  Why publish this volume ?  Why have I agreed to function as editor ?  Pound wrote these scripts; they are part of his legacy.  He is so important in American and British literature of the twentieth century that whatever he wrote cannot be ignored.  The speeches, more over, are valuable from a historical standpoint: they reveal what one man, broadcasting from an enemy radio station during World War II, believed his countrymen should hear.  On the basis of what he said, moreover, Pound was arrested and accused of treason; he spent 13 years in St. Elizabeth's Hospital (a government institution for the criminally insane in Washington, D.C.) as a result.  Anyone who seeks to understand Pound or to write about him and his times cannot overlook these speeches.  Although Pound's reputation will forever rest on his poetry and other writings, and not upon these scripts, the broadcasts are part of his record.  Actually, the speeches should be of interest of Poundians not only because, according to Mary de Rachewiltz, they reflect his earlier writings but also because they affected his subsequent poetry.

To the second question: why have I personally undertaken this editorial role ?  Admittedly, I am not a Poundian in any sense, and I have read and understood very little of his poetry.  I offer three reasons.  First, Mary de Rachewiltz asked me originally to work with her in preparing a definitive edition because she thought my knowledge of propaganda and World War II would be helpful.  During that war, I was actively engaged in psychological warfare against Italy, Germany, and Japan.  I remember vaguely seeing some of the FCC transcripts of Pound's speeches at the time and dismissing them as irrelevant to my own work.  Then, secondly, I have been interested to see whether the technique of content analysis—which was useful to me during World War II and later in analyzing Goebbel's diaries—would be helpful in comprehending this vast collection of words.  The analysis of the 110 speeches, the reader will note in appendices, is pitched on a modest level and simply seeks to answer a straightforward question: in how many of the broadcasts did Pound make one or more references to particular themes, persons, and countries ?  Finally, although I must add that my own attitudes and feelings have not been one bit changed after working with these speeches, it has been interesting to come to comprehend what Pound was trying to accomplish.  His attack on the profits some men reap from wars reminded me of my experience during the summer of 1934 when I was employed by the Senate Committee then investigating "The Merchants of Death."

My own conscience is at peace on a mundane level.  Compensation to my research assistants has exhausted, nay exceeded, the funds allocated to me personally in my role as one of the Pound Literary Trustees.  My share of the royalties from this book will not go to me.  I am grateful to the Trustees of Pound's Estate for giving Mary de Rachewiltz and me access to the original manuscripts.  Others who have faithfully cooperated with us are James A. Fishback, who performed the content analysis of the 110 broadcasts; Ellen S. Schell, who worked diligently on the index and glossary; Maryrose Coiner, who prepared the data from the content analysis for the computer and provided us with printouts constituting the basis for the tables; Jane C. Olejarczyk, who heroically managed to prepare typed copies of the manuscripts; and Marjorie A. Sa'Adah, who pitched into the project whenever extra assistance was needed, which was often.  Especially cordial gratitude is expressed to Olga Rudge who originally preserved Pound's manuscripts and who conveyed to me a sensitive feeling for Pound's philosophy and approach.

This volume could not have been prepared without the assistance and persistence of Mary de Rachewiltz.  This is Pound's book, however, and with her help I have simply facilitated its appearance.

Part I
110 FCC–Recorded Scripts

#1 (October 2, 1941) U.S.(A43)
LAST DITCH OF DEMOCRACY

It's a DITCH all right.  Democracy has been LICKED in France.  The frogs were chucked into war AGAINST the Will of the people.  Democracy has been licked to a frazzle in England where it never did get a look in ANY—HOW.  But even pseudo-democracy breaks down when a people is chucked into war against its will, and the Brits.  never VOTED Winston into the premiership.  In fact WHEN DID they have an election ?

Remember it is the government in England that decides WHEN to have an election.  Think where we would be if Mr. Roosevelt could merely POSTPONE elections till he got ready to have one.

Well, democracy is in her last DITCH, and if she ain't saved in America.  NO ONE is going to save her in her parliamentary form.

As to UNITIN' with England—taking on a lot of bad debts and new liabilities—one of the speakers on this radio was kind enough, that is, he showed respect enough for American intelligence (yes, even today, he showed respect for American intelligence) by saying only Britons were rootin' for this FEDERATION.

On close examination the Brits themselves don't seem to be so numerous in the movement toward merger.

Horeb Elisha [Hore-Belisha], well IS he English ?  And Victor Sassoon, ALL for the merger.

Twenty percent capital to be paid by the English.

Twenty percent PAID capital to be paid by the United States of America.  The balance of 60% UNPAID to remain in the hands of the promoters, probably as PREFERRED stock, with board of directors ready to grant special bonuses to their friends at ANY and every moment.

Well, is Vic Sassoon, that Jew pseudo-parsee, head of the Shanghai rackets, opium, brothels in probability and so forth, night life of Shanghai ?  IS he YOUR idea of David Copperfield and Mr. Pickwick ?

And Mr. Streit ?  And of course there are MILLIONS behind it.  Any one of 86 Jew millionaires can start a publishing firm and any one of the 4,000 hired troops in the British Embassy can print all the crap he likes.

I dunno where the rugged American INDIVIDUAL is going to git FUNDS to combat 'em.

BUT, on the other hand, you can annex Canada without taking on liabilities.  You can annex Newfoundland, and Jamaica and all the rest of it without either paying England OR paying Sir Victor.

Why this sixty percent cut to promoters who will do NOTHING for you ?  Yes, I know there is all the Sulgrave Manor association, all the glamour of cousinship; but it WAS cousinship with John Bull, in the old days, not with BULLesha, or Bullstein.

And Bulistein is apparently itchin' to drop off the B and remain simple ULLstein, by means of the merger.

The MILITARY situation ?  Conducing to UNION ?  The number of troops that can be supported, and fed, and supplied by ONE line of railway from ArcAngel—from Vladivostock or via Teheran—is considerably less than the TWELVE Million which the Russians set out with.

That Slavic fatalism which induced these troops to die in large numbers has in this war appeared quite ALIEN to the sensibilities of the fighting force put in the field by Mr. Churchill and Mr. Belisha.

I don't see even Winston inventing an echelon system.  I mean Tommy Atkins won't shoot Tommy Atkins in the back on SYSTEM.  He would feel something after doing it once.

Doubtless Belisha's bright eye, and invigorating etc. will one day suggest that the Aussies could shoot the Sepoys and as the Pathans enjoy shooting anything, and would enjoy shooting Australians especially if invited to do so.  And doubtless there could be found an even super-Slavic fatalism some where among the thousand alien races crushed by the Anglo-Jew empire.  But it mightn't take a very active military form.  It might just sit down with a hand loom in face of the carnage.

But in ANY case it's a question of QUANTITY.  And WHAT support does the United States GET from Anglo-Judaea ?  Just WHOM have the British supported in this so bloody series of swindles ?

They have EVERY reason NOT to waste their forces in enforcing American trade in the Orient.  They have every reason to leave America to pin up the diapers of their baby.

Except of course the feeling that the United States MIGHT take a leaf out of THEIR book, and grab this or that, as they have grabbed French possessions, and shot off the remaining French combatants.

In Persia it becomes a question of QUANTITY.  Walla walla, etc.  Twelve Million Russians did NOT stop Von Rundstedt and Baron Keitel.  They have not stopped ONE German army.

Nor have they reduced the German forces to a figure ANYwhere near the number of troops that England could maintain with SIX railways over the Caucasus.

So THAT is not exactly where the strategists expect YOU to help England win any wars.  Whatever Growler, Mr. McGrump, sez on the B.B.C. liary [lie-ary].

Now when I was a kid Admiral DEWEY ... that sounds like Napoleon at Moscow ?

Yes, that sounds to ME like the story about the "Fifth element MUD, said Napoleon."

There are millions of Chinamen.  Many of them living on very short rations in the INTERIOR and about as much interested in Chiang Kai-Chek as they are in the White Socks and the Phillies.  If there still are any Phillies.  You could get more enthusiasm out of those Chinks for a Hot Dog Championship on the Northside than you could for Chiang's FOREIGN party in China.

A LOT of China is NOT pro-Kai-Chek.  A lot of China is NOT FOR that gang of foreign investors.  Then, of course, you might rescue the de Gaulle interests.  Namely you might go die in the GLORIOUS cause of the Bank of the Paris Union, AGAINST General Pétain, the victor of Verdun.

Do you think the French people would thank you ?  Listen to the FRENCH radio, that is NOT paid by London; and ASK me.

Yes, the Vichy radio is twisty, it is trying to hold onto France, and double cross the Axis, and hold ONTO FRANCE, and hold or get every inch of French soil, and hang onto every French sou it can lay eye or hold on.

BUT it is NOT working for the famille de Gaulle.

AND it knows that Winston wanted Paris razed to the ground, as was Rotterdam, and as Leningrad either is being or has been.

And Pierre Laval was about all that stopped Winston from attaining that so desired result.  Because "we as lenders of money" would be able to intervene and LEND money for reconstruction.

A lovely ambition.  But will any born Frenchman thank you for exercising that at this moment, will any FRENCHMAN thank you for exercising that kind of ambition ?

The French peasant wants his field for himself.  He has a healthy MISTRUST of all mortgages.

As to the DATA whereon the American government bases its "judgment" (I believe they still call it judgment).  Roosevelt is reported in the Herald Tribune of New York on August 17 as being in complete agreement with Churchill and saying Russia could fight all winter.

Mebbe he meant that Siberia could remain outside German protection during that period.  He did go so far as saying that "events in Crete" had delayed his meeting with England's public enemy Number 3. That was some thing but not quite enough to win the Ukraine campaign.

He might have told you that events in Russia had delayed my gettin' the Japan Times.  Copy for June 19th has just come.  I suppose it was sittin' at Kieff to git through.  One lap writer at that time allowed like, as if Franklin was gettin' you folks into the war.  But it didn't look to me as if he thought it was an act of idealism.  He didn't confuse it with savin' democracy.

In the meantime do LOOK at Belisha's Anglo-Saxon face, as reproduced in P.M. and other organs of similar nature.

That is what the American branch of Sulgrave Manor Association is asked to Unite with.

#2 (October 26, 1941) U.S.(A47)
BOOKS AND MUSIC

Mr. Churchill, EVEN Mr. Churchill hasn't had the brass to tell the American people WHY he wants 'em to die to save what.

He is fighting for the gold standard and MONOPOLY.  Namely the power to starve the whole of mankind, and make it pay through the nose before it can eat the fruit of its own labor.

His gang, whether kike, gentile, or hybrid is not fit to govern.  And the English OUGHT to be the only people ass enough, and brute enough to fight for him.

Now as to my personal habits, the few of you who know that I exist know that I have given most of my time to muggin' up kulchur, that I have writ a few books, and spent my spare time trying to learn musical composition, or else playin' tennis and floatin' round the gulf of Tigullio, in which act I make, so far as I know, a nuisance of myself to no one whatever.

And in the mornings I write letters to and read letters from the most intelligent of my contemporaries, and Mr. Churchill and that brute Rosefield, and their kike postal spies and obstructors, kikarian and/or others annoy me by cuttin' off my normal mental intercourse with my colleagues.  But I am NOT going to starve, I am not going to starve mentally.  The culture of the Occident came out of Europe and a LOT of it is still right here in Europe, and I don't mean archeology either.

So a few weeks ago Monotti sez: ever read Pea's Moscardino So I read it.  and for the first time in your colloquitor's life he wuz tempted to TRANSLATE a novel, and did so.  Ten years ago I had seen Enrico Pea passin' ' along the sea front and Gino [Saviotti] sez: It's a novelist.  Having seen and known POLLON IDEN, some hundreds, or probably thousands I was not interested in its being a novelist.  But the book must be good or I wouldn't be more convinced of the fact AFTER having translated it, than I was before.  Of course, my act was impractical so far as you are concerned.  I haven't the ghost of an idea how I am to get the manuscript to America or get it published.  Pea has never made a cent out of the original.  Well neither had Joyce nor Eliot when I started trying to git someone to print 'em.

What's it like ?  Well if Tom Hardy had been born a lot later, and lived in the hills up back of Lunigiana, which is down along the coast here, and if Hardy hadn't writ what ole Fordie used to call that "sort of small town paper journalese," and if a lot of other things, includin' temperament, had been different, and so forth ... that might have been something like Pea's writin'—which I repeat is good writing—and was back in 1921 when Moscardino was printed.  Moscardino is the name of the kid who is tellin' about his granpop, a nickname, like Buck.

As soon as the barriers are down I shall be sendin' a copy along for the enlightenment of the American public.

In the meantime, if any one wants to learn how to write Italian let 'em read the first chapter of Forastiero, or the couple of pages on the bloke who had been 20 years in jail.  This is just announcin' that Italy has a writer, and it is some time since I told anybody that ANY country on earth had a writer.  Like Confucius, knocked 'round and done all sorts of jobs.  Writes like a man who could make a good piece of mahogany furniture.

I sent in a hurry call from the Siena music week, but I reckon it was too late, not time to get retransmittal, but I wanted the clean and decent Americans to hear the Vivaldi Oratorio Juditha Triumphans; which makes ole pop Handel look like a cold poached egg what somebody dropped on the pavement.

Of course it's not THAT kind of an oratorio, it is a musical whoop in two parts, to celebrate the retaking of Corfu from the Turks in 1715; and it was very timely and suitable as a bicentenary funeral wreath on red-head Vivaldi.

I got it once from the top centre, and once in a box hangin' over the orchestry, once for the whole and once for the details.

And I think it's O.K. brother.  You'd have to hear it alternate with Johnnie Bach, say the Mathias, seven times over, at least I would, before I would think I was ready to say just HOW good it is.

There has been some good Vivaldi done for orchestra over Rome Radio, but I dunno whether it has been short-waved over to Amerika.  There was some good Vivaldi done two years ago, when the Chigi organization had the sense to devote the whole of the Sienese fest to Vivaldi, but the Juditha is one up on that.  Better than the Olympiade, as then presented.  In fact I think it is better built up as a whole, and you don't have to be annoyed by ginks walkin' about and doin' stage actin'.  Well some people like their music with that distraction.  When you stop shootin' and stop pilin' up profit for kikes by conveying their guns to the god damn English who ought to be spanked and put to bed by their nurses, you might be able to come over and HEAR IT.

That would be a saner way of passin' the time than doublin' your taxes and being robbed by the American treasury.  God, my god, you folks are DUMB!!!

Now as to criticism of the Juditha; I affirm that Vivaldi knew more about using the human voice than Johnnie Bach ever discovered.  That may sound like heresy.  Waaal, you decide after you have listened to both of 'em.  And I affirm that Tony Vivaldi knocks the spots off of Handel.  I got no doubt on that point whatsoever.  Very nice bit for viola d'amore and naturally it pleases me on account of a kink I had before I knew Vivaldi had done it.  I have a high opinion of Rossini and Mozart.  I.e., use of mandolin in serious orchestra.  So has everyone who ain't stark ravin' goofy.  But Mozart when he came down to Italy did NOT set the public crazy.  And part of the reason was, as I conjecture, that the Italian had then had an earful of Tony Vivaldi.  That is guess work.  But there are things to set against Bach.  In fact things Bach took hold of and rearranged; without as I think improvin' 'em.

I had a chance to hear both together two years ago in Siena, in a good orchestral concert, one up to Casella, the way that program was built.  Man named Guarnieri conductin', been doing three years now in Siena, at this summer fest.  And I would by god rather hear Guarnieri conductin' Vivaldi than hear Toscanini conductin' Beethoven in Salzburg.  An idea which occurred to me, dunn' the Juditha performance.

I try to tell you that Italy is carryin' ON.  La rivoluzione continua.  This is the kind of thing Italians go on doing, despite that dirty mugged bleeder and betrayer of his allies, Winston babyface Churchill.

And his gangsters.  Those blighters have never done one damn thing for civilization.  They have rotted their country, and should not be allowed to rot anyone elses.  They didn't start the process of corruption, but they have been, everyone of 'em for it, all day and every day, and for the 24 hour period.

Di Marzio is runnin' a paper.  Vicari is runnin' a monthly devoted to the "narrative" nothin' but narrative or careful discussion of narrative, and how one should do it.  Over in Barcelona, they are printin' a series, Poesia en la Mano, bilingual editions of everyone from Villon to Mallarme' and Rilke, and, I am told, your present colloquitor if they can git anyone to translate me.

EUROPE is an organic body, its life continues, its life has components and nearly every damn thing that has made your lives worth livin' up to this moment, has had its ORIGINS right here in Europe.

Yes, we HAD some colonial architecture and 30 pages of Whitman (Walt Whitman, not Whitemann) and then Whistler, and Henry James left the country.  In fact it warn't no bed of roses fer authors and painters.  Though my generation allus thought we ought to plant something or other, and try to git a new crop of somethin' or other.  The idea of the Returnin' Native was prevalent, except possibly to Thomas S. Eliot who saw from the start that you folks weren't episcopal enough to suit his episcopal temperament, and he somewhat looked down on my pagan and evangelical tendencies.  Waaal, frankly, I allus though it would be a good thing to come back and put some sort of a college or university into shape to teach the young something.  Not merely the god damn saw dust and subsitutes for learnin' and literature they git handed.  However, ca hold up the whole course of civilization.  If you wanna line up with bone heads, you will line up with bone heads.

And you will go on having conductors instead of composers and European authors who have resigned.

But don't get that Anglican attitude, of the old story, storm in the channel called by the English, the English channel—the straits between Calais and Dover—and the dirty old Times out with a headline "Continent isolated."

Nobody here is layin' flowers on the tomb of Columbus, not this year.  But don't go and run away with the idea that Europe is no longer here, or that books aren't being written.  I mean bein' WRITTEN, and that we have no painters, or writers, or musicians.

I regret the personal correspondence of a small number of writers, who mostly don't write to each other.  And I would like to see what Hillaire Hiler is paintin', and to git kumrad cumminkz's last set of verses.  Or to go on get tin' Kitasono's Japanese magazine.  But I ain't gittin' weak and pindlin' or goin' into a pronounced and delicate melancholy fer the extinction of all human intercourse.

#3 (November 4, 1941) U.S.(A51)
THE GOLDEN WEDDING

The sight of elderly wedded couples dwelling in mutual devotion sometimes impells one to think of their early loves.  In the present case the spectacle of Mr. Churchill's government wedded to Stalin's, and Mr. Roosevelt's in violable word mixed into it; in short, this triangual Darby and Joan of the three hebraicized governments leads one to look back at the forgotten incidents of their courtship.

In particular, the love feasts between our American Reds and Moscow in vite beautific contemplation.  Our idealists loved Moscow while Mr. Churchill was still playing the bashful Swain.  In fact he was scowling at Stalin, and from the incomprehension of his eternal love for the Moscovites he was being not only sulky, but insulting.  So with true love.  Never, Never, NEVER would he come and kiss the Russian Joan under the sickle and mistletoe.

Our own American Trade Unionists were more oncoming.  They LIKED the bud of Russian promise.  Ref. Worker's Library No. 3 bearing the dim and lavender date: Sept. 9, 1927.

Jay Lovestone (né possibly Liebstein) on the first page of amorous paean inscribes the luminous words "THE establishment of the 7-hour day in Russia." Well that's far off enough and long enough before the Stakhelevites, and Mr. Lovestone is very hard on the American Federation of Labor. "Reactionary trade union bureaucrats" he call's 'em.

And in that memorable day an' year our dewey-eyed workers (trade unionists and idealists) technical advisors they figger in the catalog, Brophy, R.W. [?] Dunn, C.H. Douglas, Rex Tugwell, Stuart Chase, a lot, as you see, of brawny fellows who had used either the hammer or sickle in daily life, went over to visit the Kumrad.  And apart from the general, as op posed to the specific nature of the answers, the kumrad didn't do so bad.  The questions being rather more nebulous and UNspecific than the answers.  How could the debonair murderer get down very near to brass tacks in his answers ?

After all Marx was pretty good at history and diagnosis.  Nobody on the Axis side denies that Marx discovered several genuine faults in the usury system.

All we ask is a way to CURE 'em.  And the torture chambers in most countries where Stalin's power has reached, and in a few embassies where he had been unable to get control of the total police force, rather indicate that the Boishie system never got UNIVERSAL approval from its victims.

However, when next dining with Rabbi Lehman, or Scholem Mosestha and the rest of the international bankers, spring a few pages of the kumrad's answers between the caviar and the pheasant and see if it don't enliven the dinner.

Sure Stalin approves of Marx and Engels wantin' to take ECONOMIC, political, cultural and organizational measures.  And seem' as he put 'em in that order, you would expect me to fall for it ?

ECONOMIC first.  Of course the Bolshies didn't.  Any party that comes into power, probably puts ORGANIZATIONAL measures first, and the economics belong, alas to the almost inaccessible part of culture.  So FEW people seem able to grasp simple economics without, as Senator Bankhead remarked, about three centuries delay.

Three centuries, to get people to understand anything about anything havin' to do with money.  An' it is now demonstrated on the corpus vilis of British reformers' hopes that very little economic reform gets into practice without precedent organizational and political measures of an almost earth shaking nature.  A curious phrase about "reconstruct capitalist society" must belong to the translator.  I don't want to pin that on Joseph, tho' mebbe that was part of his muddle.  I am far less concerned with Joe's lacunae than with a few clear positive statements.  Joe said he was aware that "a number of capitalist governments are controlled by big banks," notwithstanding the existence of "democratic" parliaments.

Not bad for a Georgian assassin.  And possibly several decades ahead of the American public and professoriat.  Not a single power in which the Cabinet can be formed in opposition to the will of the big financial magnates.  I wonder: is that why they took Joe for a ride ?

"It is sufficient to exert financial pressure to cause Cabinet Ministers to fall from their posts as if they were stunned."

Joey was talkin' of European cabinets; not of the so very different American DEMocracy (as they call it) etc. where, unless there is absolute surety that financial pressure won't be used, the blighters seldom or never get in.  Joe SAID that the control of government by money-bags is inconceivable and absolutely excluded in the U.S.S.R.  How different from the home life of our own DEMOCRACY (as they call it), etc. and how different from anything any British politician has ever encountered, and how different from any state of things that Churchill's group would desire.

"Narrow circle" said Joe of individuals connected in one way or another with the large banks and because of that they strive to conceal the part they play in this from the people.

What a PERFECT ally for Churchill, Morgenthau, Lehman, and the present Anglo-Jewish regimes !  Well, the starry eyed Mr. Tugwell, and the cautious Mr. Chase and Jim Maurer and Brophy took it all down hook, line and sinker.  Seven hour day and the rest of it.  It was a stirring occasion.  The only thing is that the idealist's ideals have got going so much faster and gone so much further.  The Axis side of the present hard feelings.

Here the TRADE UNIONS, with their syndic. organization, and their recognized legal status whereby they propose, formulate, and GET what they want in Italy is really of so much MORE interest for any member of ANY trade union, or for any leader of labor who cares a hang about the welfare of the led that one only hopes the American trade unionist will someday read Por, or at least read something about Italian organizational measures.

The Stalin interview is a tough piece of reading, very hard to take hold of.  That was probably the secret of his hold—plenty of people who KNOW Russia have been puzzled by the gap between their effective propaganda and their local failure in solving human problems.  I believe the human material they had to work on explains part of the latter.  I mean why they did NOT make a paradise, but mostly a sweat shop—machines before men—men as material.  But the other side, the devilish efficiency of their propaganda, is worth study.

And it seems to be a variant on the old political wheeze of sticking to general statements that each auditor interprets to mean what HE would mean IF he said it.

And now for contrast, close harmony, let us look at a recent emission from Joe's faithful companion, fellow idealist, and pledged ally, Mr. N.M. Butler. On June 3, 1941, year current, as delivered at the commencement of Columbia University, when Ole Nick was awaitin' another Waterloo, and as is common with his kind, he wasn't puttin' it in the first person singular.  Nick wanted Americans to go fight for the British exploiters; so he said "THE WORLD" etc.  In this case THE WORLD (meaning Nick and his pay masters).  The World he sez, awaits another Waterloo.  And on the fifth page it turns out he meant a defeat of Hitler!! Which might be called "metonomy" or takin' a part for the "whole," and not the better whole either.

Now the WORLD, as any college president ought to know, before the trustees pay him his fat annual salary, is spherical in form, and is composed of MORE than one continent, and not wholly and totally enraptured with the big usury central.

However let Nick Butler speak for himself, as he has never failed to do in all his oleaginous lifetime.

Several pages of the old scamp's palaver contain statements by which no right thinking man would be offended.  The slabs of print, the page undivided by paragraph divisions, tends to lull the reader or auditor into security.

Mr. Butler even disapproves (mildly, of course) of the "controlling desire for gain," alias our old enemy the profit motive.  Of course he keeps off the specific MEANS of gain, exercised by his owners.  He then pays a delicate compliment to Lord Holy Fox, without committing himself, in fact nothing could be more downy.

The FIRST Lord Halifax, unaided by his charming and formidable Lady, said there were three hundred years ago many things that riches cannot buy.  Therefore the American boys should bleed for the present Lord Holy Fox.  Now Ole Nick don't go as far back as all that, he stops back in the 17th Century; before Robert Cecil was so vigorous in defense of the British OPIUM interests in Shanghai.

Victory for a moral ideal is not enough, according to Nicholas, because the "gain-seeking interest has control of so vast a proportion of mankind." That is true enough, but it ain't reduced the moral ideal to ABSOLUTE impotence.  This is what was worrying Butler; but he hadn't got down to bed rock.  He said there was a time, back apparently when Mark Hanna was running the United State of America, when the moral ideal was to all appearances gainin' ground.

Of course if by that he means that some empires were GAINING territory, he might have said so, only he didn't.  Ole Nicholas puts the rise of the triumph, real or apparent, the IDEAL, from the McKinley to the Wealsohn administration.

Note of HOpe and progress.

In 1910, the American Congress was unanimous for the moral principle (so long as no questions were asked about the privileges of the usury central).  Nic complains that the moral ideal has disappeared in all that has to do with international relations.

Which shows the state of DEEP ignorance in the WORLD; as distinct from Nicholas Butler's circle or pot.

And lookin' at dates, he must have been blurrin' this blurb the same week that a Chinaman, not of Wang Ching Wei's party, but of Chiang Kai-shek's party, and FAITHFUL to Chiang, saying what Hitler's justice in scuttling international affairs was such that the Chinese of the ANTI-JAP, anti-Wang party might accept Hitler's arbitrage.

Mr. Butler then seems to fall into incoherence.  He talks of a PLEDGE as something to be kept; what price, England, Churchill, and Roosevelt ?  He objects to having the savings of generations swept away; he asks what has become of the influence of and guidance of the great religions; Christian, Mosel, HEBREW, and Buddhist, and begorrah, of Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, leaving out St. Ambrose and St. Antonio da Firenze, and graciously waivin' a hand to the captains of the mind, Spanish, Italian, French, English, German.  And of course Abraham Lincoln, not quoting old Abe on the currency issue.  And then barbarous brutality, without mention of Esthonia, Finland, or places occupied by the— —Bustin of churches and museums.  Wot price Louvain and Cyrenaica ?  And all this "However dark the skies," etc. ends up with a historic parallel; the WORLD waitin' for a new Vaterloo; because Napolean BonypartY went into Russia, and if Hitler ain't licked in Europe, it will come in Asia or Africa.  Well that is a bad slip, because Knox and Stimson, etc. are retching for to rape Africa.  But at any rate you git a picture of Nicholas, and METONOMY or takin' a part for the HOLE.  A figger of Rhetorik sez Sam Johnson, whereby one word is put for another.

Now if Butler, the old goof, wants me to give him a clean bill of health, he can use the enormous power conferred on him by his position, to get Columbia University to issue a series of volumes containing the GIST of the beliefs and knowledge of John Adams, Jefferson, Jackson, Van Buren, and Lincoln.  NOT leaving out every phrase and paragraph which I, and men like me, consider vital to the understanding of American history.

#4 (November 6, 1941) U.S.(56)
THIS WAR ON YOUTH—ON A GENERATION

A consignment of the unpopular American magazines has reached me.  I don't mean doctrinal magazines, but magazines in which a serious article occasionally appears.  Thus I have learned that Professor I.A. Richards, one of England's few respectable high brows in America, is lecturing; yes, naturally, lecturing.

And apparently the normal effort to keep things going, goes on.  Wallace Stevens, J.G. Fletcher, ole Doc Williams, and kumrad kumminkz knowing a bit more about writing than the younger men who haven't quite made up their minds whether they want to do a real job of work, and LEARN how.

And a man with a Scotch front name married a gal who would appear from the nomenclature to be Scotch, Welsh, and British.  And Ted Spencer has got his dancing man into print where it ought to be, and the objections to it are as silly as one would expect them to be and mebbe the young are comin' on, as Mr. Calder Joseph; and Langston Hughes has a book in press; probably out by now, which is allus a good thing and Dr. Gogarty or goGARTY, better known to the outer world as Buck Mulligan, has got to New Jersey, and keeps writin' poems, and is accused of being engaged on a novel.  [He] has written a rather fine ode for the revival of the Tailltean Games, Irish Olympics.  I don't quite know why it is only published now, as the Tailtean Olympics were restored nearly 20 years ago.

Well, that's a human touch, and a relief from the noise of the American papers.  We need more communication between the five continents.

And some of the younger professors appear not to have been WHOLLY hoodwinked by propaganda.  Got tired of Georgian poets and so forth.

And that brings me to the question of AGE.  Can you or can you not see that this war is a war against YOUTH ?  That there is in England a whole generation or two generations ready to vomit at the mention of Churchill, Beaverbrook, Garvin, and Baldwin and these senilities want vengence for the lack of respect.

Back in the other war W.B. Yeats said of the old politicians: War, of course they want war, they want all the young gals for themselves.

And in one way or another—lust for power, lust, jealously of the next generation—pretended anxiety for the world as it will be in the time of their grandchildren. Hurry, for fear they won't be able to kill off the present younger generation before the IDEAS of my generation go into effect.  It is NOT necessary to have the earth ruled by senile bleeders and swindlers.  The youth of Europe has discovered that cardinal fact.

Hence the senile outcry Europa-Delenda.  Europe, according to the Financial News of London, must be wiped OUT, or certain monopolies will disappear.  Men will be able to eat the grain of their own fields, UNLESS Europe is blown to flinders.

HAVE you read the DETAILS of British blackmail on Chile, on the men in Chile who want to trade with the outer world ?  Details of Roosenstein's "freedom of the seas," NAVICERT, that was what they tried on Italy and Italy came in on the German side.

If Chile don't, that merely means that every man in Chile who is black mailed into signing those papers will store up a silent hate against every thing English, and against any nation that participates in such a policy.

STARVE 'em out.  Will YOU separate the starvers from the producers, the growers, the makers ?

Look at Hank Wallace, good guy, nice presence, led down one garden path after another.  Perfect Hampton Court maze, Lord Halifax.  First you are asked to reduce production, plow under, then after a few years you are threatened with rationing.

RATIONING!

In the United States of America, the land of abundance, the land the Loeb chart showed beyond any possible shadow of doubt whatsoever to be the land of abundance.  Every family of four COULD have had then a standard of living equal to what then cost 4000 dollar a year.  Needed monetary reform, of course, had to have honest national money to get it.

The United States of America needed INTERNAL reform, not a war in Africa or in Asia.  Not a war for the mine owners AGAINST the farmers of Rhodesia, not a war for the opium of Shanghai and Singapore.  From IN TERNAL reform could have come collaboration with the other four continents.  AND freedom of the seas, the KIND that will permit Chile and the Argentine to trade with France, Spain, and Sweden, and Switzerland and will let ole Hoover tote food into Belgium.

Will you look at the AGE of the chief war pimps ?  Roosevelt now says he saw war coming in 1937.  In 1937 there was NO necessity of War.  Roosevelt did all he could to make it inevitable.  There is no record of any single act of Roosevelt aimed sincerely at staving off war.  Ignorance of Europe, government in charge of hicks, all the outer world thinks Roosevelt took orders from the worst gang in Europe.

Don't say I affirm that he did, what I affirm is that he never showed the faintest inclination to learn the facts and come out for a JUST solution.  That is a fairly conservative statement.  He has NEVER been neutral.  But get down to this one point of AGE How old are these blokes who are trying to throw America into the conflict ?  What is their business ?  What is their civic record ?  What is, or ever has been, their desire to let YOU get the facts ?

Have any of 'em ever come out for the JUST PRICE ?  Which is basic in all economics.

Even the old laissez-faire or Whig economics believed at the start that free competition led to the just price.

The wheeze against it was worked partly by faking the FREEDOM of that competition.

If you start a ten years war ?  Yes, IF you start a ten years war.  None of these old swine will be there at the end of it.  It won't be their world, it may be your ruin.

As to RUIN.  What about Petrograd ?  No military purpose in its destruction.

Laval saved Paris.  Churchill would have had 'em lay Paris flat, to gain three days time that would have had NO effect whatsoever on the result of the German campaign in France.  What causes that ?  Criminality ?  Imbecility ?  Or what Napoleon would have called lack of imagination, meaning incapacity to form a picture in the mind's eye of what the TOTAL destruction of Paris would mean.

Those of you who want to see Paris again will owe it to Pierre Laval whom the British tried to have murdered.

Those of you who ever do see Paris either for the first time or again will not owe it to Mr. Churchill.  Had that criminal ape got his way, there would have been absolutely NO PARIS there.

Yes, we were once young or younger, and many of us fell for the Russian Red Revolution.  Because the Marxist diagnosis was pretty near right.  The remedy did NOT work.  AND the revolution was betrayed.  Another revolution, a youth, has NOT been betrayed.  It is moving, it is moving toward what the decent Reds wanted.

A lot of 'em saw no further, wanted no more than the end of certain abuses.  The fools got control.  Now YOU are NOT communists.  The United States of America and France and every other nation East of the Volga WANTS the homestead.  The French peasant wants his own bit of land, without the dead hand over him; without mortgage.  The working man does NOT want to govern; he wants good government.

You Americans and the English want government to be good without ANY effort on your part whatsoever.  You don't even look at what is done by your governments.  Takes an awful heave to get ANY of your attention turned onto the vital facts of a government policy.  Most men want certain things IN their own lives, largely in or inside the sphere of their own trade or business.  Very few analyze that want or carry their thought thru into the realization of what they want with a practical system of government.

Our system was O.K. for the open and unsettled continent, etc.  The frontier, individualism in a state of things where man who couldn't stand on his own feet in the forest and live on the plain and live, possibly on horseback, merely died off.

First intellectual reaction to mere approach of industrialization Thoreau tried to see how little he need bother about other humanity

Amateur move.

COHABITATION with other men.  POLIS, a city, politics, right way for people to live together in a city.  Greek cities very small; Aristotle bothering about a system for 5000 citizens, etc.

Five million, 130 million, bit more of a job; better regulations needed.

Great swindle, money issue, the exchangeable measured titles to goods.

AS our Constitution got well out in front, was for more than a century, in fact for 130 years, far and away the BEST on earth.  I had allus thought we could get all the social justice we need, by a few sane reforms of money, such as Adams and Lincoln would have thought honest AND CONSTITUTIONAL The grafters would rather throw you into a ten years war and kill off five or ten million YOUNG men than even let the discussion of monetary reform flower on the front pages of the American papers

What causes that ?  Dirtiness causes it; greed, lust, avarice, petty vindictiveness and senile swank cause it

Europe with systems of government less modern than ours, Germany and Italy with the leftovers of earlier centuries especially Germany saw revolutions Worked out a new system suited to EUROPE It is NOT our American affair.  We could with honor advocate freedom of the seas.  For EUROPE as well as for a few Jew controlled shipping firms.  We could, with honor advocate NATURAL commerce; that is, a commerce wherein each nation would exchange what it has, what is has in superfluity or abundance, with what other nations can or will spare.

We could stand for that sort of commerce instead of trying to throttle it

Why do we NOT ?

Why should all men under forty be expected to die or be maimed in sup port of flagrant injustice, monopoly and a dirty attempt to strangle and starve out 30 nations ?

For whom ?

It is NOT even for the people of England, to whom a ten years war means death by starvation.

#5 (December 7, 1941) U.S. & U.K.(A66)
THOSE PARENTHESES

Europe callin', Pound speakin'.  Ezry Pound speakin'.  And I think I am perhaps still speakin' a bit more TO England than to the United States of America but you folks may as well hear it.  They say an Englishman's head's made of wood, and the American head made of watermelon.  Easier to git something INTO the American head, but nigh impossible to make it stick there for ten minutes.

Of course I don't know what GOOD I am doin', I mean what IMME DIATE good.  But something you folks on both side of the wretched ocean will have to learn, war or no war, sooner or later.

Now what I had to say about the state of MIND in England in 1919, I said in my Cantos (14 and 15).  Some of your theosophists and fancy thinkers would have called it the spiritual state of England.  I am content to say state of mind.

I can't say my remarks were heeded.  I thought I had got 'em simple enough.  Words short and simple enough.  In fact some people complained that several of 'em contained no more than 4 or 5 letters (some less).

Now I hold NO Catholic has ever been or ever will be puzzled by what I said in those Cantos.  I have, however, never asked for sympathy when misunderstood.  I go on trying to make my meanin' clear and then clearer.  And in the LONG run people who listen to me (very few do, but members of that small and SElect minority) do know more in the long run, than those who listen to Mr. H.G. chubby Wells and the liberal stooges.

What I am gitting at is, a friend said to me the other day that he was glad I had the politics I have got, but that HE didn't understand how I, as a North American, United Stateser could have it.

Well that looks simple to me.  Things OFTEN DO look simple to me.  On the CONfucian system that if you start right, and then go on, start at the root and move upward, the pattern often is simple, whereas if you start constructin' from the twig downward, you get into a muddle.

My politics seem to me SIMPLE.  My idea of a state OR an empire is more like a hedge hog or porcupine, chunky and well defended.  I don't cotton to the idea of my country being an octopus WEAK in the tentacles and sufferin' from stomach ulcers and chronic gastritis.

I wish Brother Hoover had spilled his facts about the stinking and rotten Treaty of Versailles while he was still in the White House.  But I am glad he has done so now.  Tho' he could also confess his OWN errors and aid even now to acceleratin' the United States of America welfare.

Anyhow, I have, in principle, NO objection to the U.S. absorbin' Canada and the whole NORTH American continent.

The rot of the British Empire is from inside, and if the whole of that syphilitic organization, headed by Montagu Skinner Norman, makes war on Canada, or Alberta, I see no reason for Canada not making war on the Jews in London.  Whether they are born Jews, or have taken to Jewry by predilection.

What I am ready to fight AGAINST is havin' ex-European Jews making another peace worse than Versailles, with a new two dozen Danzigs.  Namely the United States bein' left with war baby bases in Aberdeen, Singapore, Dakar, South Africa, and the Indian Ocean! All draggin' the tail of their coat, and making dead mathematically sure of another war for Dupont, Vickers, Mond, Melchett, Beit, Ellermann in ten or fifteen years after the present one (present war).  And to that end Roosevelt, Morgenthau, Lehman are working, day and night, not to mention the Warburgs.  And precisely on the subject of Warburgs, I wish Herb Hoover would say MORE about the stink of Versailles.

God knows I have loathed Woodie Wilson, and I don't want to see more evil done to humanity than was done by Woodrow codface.  And the sooner all America and ALL England wake up to what the Warburgs and Roosevelt are up to, the better for the next generation and this one.

And as an American I do NOT want to see my country annihilatin' the population of Iceland, as the British annihilated the Maoris.  And as for the Australians, they deserve a Nippo-Chinese invasion.  Criminals were their granddads, and their contribution to civilization is not such as to merit even a Jewish medal.  Why the heck the Chinese and laps don't combine and drive that dirt out of Australia, and set up a bit of civilization in those parts, is for me part of the mystery of the orient.

And in any case I do NOT want my compatriots from the ages of 20 to 40 to go git slaughtered to keep up the Sassoon and other British Jew rackets in Singapore and in Shanghai.  That is not my idea of American patriotism.  We are gittin' on for the centenary of the opium war, that never did any good to the lads of Lancashire or of Sussex, and that brought no prosperity in Dorset or Gloucester.

Hardy's England, aye, aye sir, where is it ?  Did Rothschild save it ?  He did not.  Did the Goldsmid save it ?  He did not.  Does Churchill endeavor to save it ?  He does NOT.  I repeat the rot and stink of England, and the danger to her empire is inside, and has been: from the time of Cobbett.

And NO number of Rabbis and bank touts in Wall Street and in Washington can do one damn thing for England, save let her alone.  And a damn pity they didn't start doin' sooner.  That is a pity for England.

And a peace with American war bases all over the whole of the planet would be no more a real peace than Versailles was.  And as to all visible signs Roosevelt is MORE in the Jew's hands than Wilson was in 1919.  I am against havin' him mixin' into ANY post-war matters whatever.  This objectin' being academic.

An' I think it would be well for ALL men, from China to Capetown to SEE as soon as possible what Franklin is up to.  Let him keep his paws on the North American continent.  Even if it means DIMinished gun sales for all his pals, and for all gold-bugs.

Eight years ago he was sayin' "nothin to fear but fear." Well what has become of THAT Roosevelt ?  What has he done for three years but try to work up a hysteria on that basis ?  He got his face into a paper called Life, eight or ten photographs.  Jim Farley would have been less nuisance in the White House than snob Delano, who objected to Farley NOT on moral or ethical grounds, but PURELY as snobism; didn't want a mere henchman to succeed him.

And as to American labor.  When will American labor start lookin' into the currency question ?  "Question," of course there ought not to be any INTERROGATIVE element in it.  Even a hod carrier OUGHT to be able to learn why interest payin' debt is NOT so good a basis for money as is productive labor.

But will they ?  Will the American hod carrier and skilled engineer (includin' Mr. Hoover) ever git round to the currency issue ?  (I call it issue, not question.)

And will the American big employer or financier, except Baruch, ever start studyin' the solution of HIS problem, which is a corporate solution, in the sense of that word now current in Europe ?

A CORPORATE problem, or issue, which does NOT mean starving the workman, or breakin' him up by scab mobs.

Lord knows I don't SEE how America can have fascism without years of previous trainin'.  Looks to me, even now as if the currency problem was the place to start savin' America.  As I have been sayin' for some time back, call it ten years or call it twenty.  At this moment it looks like as if John Lewis would take just as long to git round about feedin' my books to his troops, as it would take the Harvard faculty to git Mr. William G. Morse's permission to use 'em in Harvard (Economics Department).

Both sides will have to come to it.


#6 (January 29, 1942) U.S.(A1)
ON RESUMING

On Arbour Day, Pearl Arbour Day, at 12 o'clock noon I retired from the capital of the old Roman Empire to Rapallo to seek wisdom from the ancients.

I wanted to figure things out.  I had a perfectly good alibi, if I wanted to play things safe.  I was and am officially occupied with a new translation of the Ta S'eu of Confucius.  I have in Rapallo the text of Confucius, and of Mencius, the text of the world's finest anthology, namely that which Confucius compiled from earlier authors, and I have in reach the text of a book which bears on its front page the title Li Ki (which the head of the Chinese Department in our Congressional Library tells me proper minded Chi Sinologues now think is pronounced Lee Gee).  And I have six volumes of the late Dr. Morrison's Dictionary, not the most up to date dictionary of Chinese Ideograms, but nevertheless good enough.

That is, I have WORK thaaar for some years, if I don't die before I git to the middle.

The Odes are to me very difficult.  They are of extreme beauty.  Thousands of poets have looked at those odes and despaired.  There are points at which some simple ideogram (that is, Chinese picture word) is so used as to be eternal, insofar as our human sense of eternity can reach.  There is one of the sunrise that I despair of ever getting translated.

There was to face this, the SITUATION.  That is to say the United States had been for months ILLEGALLY at war, through what I considered to be the criminal acts of a President whose mental condition was NOT, as far as I could see, all that could or should be desired of a man in so responsible a position or office.

He had, so far as evidence available to me showed, broken his promises to the electorate; he had to my mind violated his oath of office.  He had to my mind violated the

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

#118 (1941) U.S.[?]
QUISLING

Mr. Roosevelt seems determined that England shall not get out of this war alive, and that there shall be no
end to the war until the English have been Dunkirk'd out of Cape Town and the Americans had a try at
Dakar and the Azores.
It's a hard life, but we have an Italian proverb "chi la dura la vince" [he who holds out longest, wins].
Similar proverbs doubtless exist in other languages. But on the supposition that the war may end sometime,
either before or after the collapse of Western civilization, in either case it will be necessary either to
continue civilization or to start another, and Mis-INFOR MATION or policy based on ignorance is not
recommendable for either purpose.
Several American publications have mentioned the UNWILLINGNESS of their political bigwigs to
learn facts about Europe. If their editors are sincere in these expressions, it might be well to start on the
case of Quisling. No man has had more mud and slime flung at him from the sewers of British newsprint.
Mr. Roosevelt used up about ten pages of his twelve-page speech of May 27 with what might have
been questions from the particularly low London Daily Mirror, from any issue printed during the past six
or eight years. But at one point it appeared that he spoke not merely from prejudice (unconscious or other)
but from plain ignorance. We ask what does he know of Quisling.
Norway, like other countries in 1936, had at least varieties of inhabitants. The lowest and vilest of
human types represented by the international, and possibly non-aryan financier Hambro, an exploiter of the
people, a money lender, who in time of crisis quite naturally fled the country, taking his bonds with him.
This is to be expected whether these leeches are Jew or Gentile, whether they are millionaire socialists like
Blum and Bullitt, or puppets or larger financiers.
And Norway had also men who wanted a better Europe. Now Italy has no debt to Mr. Quisling, but in
the interests of truth and fair reporting we suggest that before America accepts an estimate of Mr. Quisling
based wholly on reports from what might be called Harnbro sources and sources allied to Hambro, namely
London Jewish and Aryan papers, controlled by Ellerman, Mend alias Melchett, Eden's friends, the Astors,
et cetera, some one should go back and look at Quisling's plan for a north European federation, and then
decide whether or not the real Quisling corresponds with the London distortion of Quisling. Quisling based
his position on the belief that "an old world falls, a new is being born." This is anathema to the unholy
trinity Baruch-Roosevelt and Moses Sieff. NO conclusions drawn for a belief in or a desire for a better
social order could bring favor from the Jew-Beaverbrook-Astor press.
Quisling not being in England, and not being dependent on British editors could not be starved
directly, starvation being the financiers' FIRST and main mode of attack. There remained only vilification,
and President Roosevelt is merely the last recruit to dirt-slingers emergency corps.
SECONDLY: Quisling observed that the Jewish international had had some effect on the affairs of
Soviet Russia. How unfortunate! What an error this would have been had Mr. Quisling wanted favorable
publicity in the Sieff-Mond Guardian-Eflerman papers!!
THIRDLY: Quisling regarded the League of Nations with suspicion, thereby forfeiting the support of
the Keyneses, Welleses, Streits, and other bootlicking agents of the Bank of International Settlements and
its then Paris, and still London affiliates; in short by all these three positions, he dissociated himself from
the Mandels, Blums and Stavitskys.
Quisling's position against Bolshevism was to him a position against "universal materialist republic
under Jewish dictatorship," a position analogous to that taken by Finland. But Quisling owned, so far as it
appears, no nickel mines, and therefore the publicity controlled by "Anglo-Canadian nickel (alias,
Melchett, etc.) would hardly give him a "build up" in "Time" or other Jewish-owned American organs. At
the time of Sanctions, Quisling's party was for Norwegian neutrality. This of course showed the clovenhoof
from the Morgenthau point of view. Quisling was and is, however a Norwegian and judged the matter
in its relation to Norway's interest. His movement however took NO sides. He was worried by the Soviet
participation in the League of Nations and by the Jewish factor in Russian politics. It annoyed him that the
lives of people IN NORWAY were dominated by foreign policy and not by home politics.
The idea that the citizens of a country should consider their INTERNAL affairs does, of course, render
Quisling incompatible with the Roosevelt way of life; but even so it was scarcely high treason on
Quisling's part to observe the 1936 situation IN Norway. Quisling was capable of the magnificent axiom:
"The influence of a state in foreign politics always corresponds to the degree of development of its
INTERNAL strength."
How unlike the Roosevelt technique of raising hysteria, both for personal and national use. In fact
Quisling advocated autarchy, rather than GRABarchy. Autarchy for Norway, and co-operation BY Norway
and foreign states. He saw Czechoslovakia bucked by international Jews. He saw the Brito-yitto attempt to
encircle Germany was provocative of unpleasant tension. AND he observed the GE-O-GRaphic position of
his own country in case of Germano-Russian unpleasantness. "Norway, the cross-roads between Russia,
Germany and England."
BUT he did NOT turn against England, as the British Jews would have wished him to. He saw a
RUSSIAN attempt to use Norway in a flank attack on Germany AND on England, and advocated a union
of Norway with ENGLAND and Germany. A nordic world federation. Why do WE in Italy mention this?
Quisling was not pro-Mussolini, the Axis was not yet in being. Contrary to the Edens and Churchills
WE in ITALY do not believe that continual lies about everyone will help to a new and better world order.
QUISLING considered that peace between England and Germany was vital to Norway. Therefore the
Beaverbrook and hog press have for the past four years denounced him as a traitor to Norway. Which is
what we expect from Lord Beaverbrook, Sieff, and the Astors, and why the prestige of the British press has
during the past years notably declined on the continent of Europe, in Asia and in South America, though
apparently NOT in the Morgenthau circle.
To Quisling, "peace and conciliation between Germany and England" was the one way in which
Norway could escape from war and chaos. With no tenderness for the Latins, Quisling went beyond this
conciliation of Germany and England and wanted a Nordic federation containing these two great powers,
plus the Scandinavian countries, plus Holland and Flanders.
OBVIOUSLY such a union would not have been as advantageous to Italy as the Axis. However it is
not the Rome end of the Axis which is demanding Quisling's head. It is our opponents who have done their
utmost to turn his name into a common verb and make him a synonym for anti-national activity whenever
and wherever.
OBVIOUSLY Quisling's plan would have been to the benefit of the English. They would not have
lost so many American bases, nor would our position in the Mediterranean have been, by that plan, at all
improved. We might still be where we were in 1937. What is absolutely and uncontestably apparent is that
Mr. QUISLING'S OWN country would not have suffered invasion, and this from the patriot's view is of
chief importance. The present war would probably not have occurred. At any rate it could not have started
as an Anglo-German conflagration.
In any case, what is ABSOLUTELY incontestable is that Norway would not have been invaded; and
this from Mr. Quisling's point of view, that is from the patriot view, must be considered as important.
History will possibly decide whether Quisling's attempts to avert war or the efforts of Kuhn-Loeb and
Co., and the yitto-brito financial agents IN the United States to get the war started, and of their American
colleagues, half-breeds Bullitts, et cetera to GET the war started, that the American effort to START war in
Europe, in order to pick Europe's pocket, and ultimate[ly] to drive the American people into the shambles
will have proved to the advantage of England.
At any rate, as indicated in our brief earlier comment on the Quisling paragraph in Roosevelt's speech
of May 27th, we believe Roosevelt's allusion to Quisling was due, as are so many of the President's
outbursts, to his reading the positively, the WORST type of newsprint, until it obscures his world outlook.
To sum up, Quisling's plan might have averted war. It would in any case have kept war out of
Norway. Hence the abuse of Quisling in the usurocrat, monopolistic, mercantilist press both Jew and
Gentile. But the heads of states should not be wholly subservient to the lowest and yellowest papers.

#119 (1943) U.S.(14)
PHILOLOGY

I have mentioned Brooks Adams in these talks? I hope I have mentioned his name often enough for it to
have sunk in. I know of no better introduction to American history or the understanding of the historical
process than Brook Adams' two volumes, Law of Civilization and Decay and The New Empire.
Of course you need collateral readin', other history books, general history of the U.S. No better
introduction than Woodward's. Can't trust it at all points but will give you an outline. Unjust to Van Buren
and the Adamses but clearly intended to be fair and not a mere smoke screen.
D.R. Dewey's Financial History. Lot of facts, doubt if student ever remembers any of 'em. No key, no
clue, nothing in the whole book to help the reader understand "what it is all about." Nacherly it is THE
standard work in the universities. Universities for the past 80 years, increasingly for past 50 or 40, have
inculcated respect for lucre. Adoration of money grabbing, bred taste for luxury, called standard of livin',
above what student is likely to attain, and told him the great man was the man who got MONEY, no matter
how. Religion fadin'; religion, church buildin', a branch of the real estate business. All churches
mortgaged. Church buildin', a means to get community groups to borrow money.
Pete Larranaga, Gold Glut and Government, tells you something. Kitson a bad writer in many ways,
piles up obstacles for the reader, possibly knew more than any of 'em. Even Woodward does NOT give the
clue. He gives some clues but not the debt clue. In course of long desultory readin', the FIRST book I ever
struck that would lead the student to an understandin' of the whole historical process in the U.S. was
Overholser, in 64 pages, published by Honest Money Founders of Chicago, now I hear; at least they would
know where to find it.
Doc. Ames, H.V., at University of Pennsylvania, in 1902 was already gettin' interested in
reconstruction. The "Tragic Era" as C. Bowers calls it, period after the Civil War. But he hadn't got down
to the debt component. And without study of debt and usury NO history of the U.S. can be written save as
a smoke screen, consciously or unconsciously. I don't mean that historians haven't written with intention
of tellin' the story, of writing true history, but those that did mainly had NOT found the clue, the pattern in
the carpet. And don't run away with the idea that I told you Brooks Adams was the last will and testament
of God Almighty. His books are merely, as far as I know, the best introduction. It is written from a
mercantile position, with amazin' lucidity and power of synthesis, as you can see if you compare 'em with
some of his very rare followers who have written BEFORE having so thoroughly digested their data.
I doubt if you will understand the full imbecility, the absolute squalor of the Knox-Roosevelt (F.D.
Roosevelt) Baruch administration till you have read Brooks Adams. He writes about trade routes, the
dislocation of trade routes, the FLOP of empires consequent on the dislocation or loss of trade routes. What
Frankie and kikie have DONE to you NOW. No author can get the whole history of mankind into one
book, or two books. The spectacular drama of history has, let us say, been consequent on the shift of the
trade routes, caused by new discoveries of minerals, caused by magnetic compass, or new modes of
transport, sometimes ruined by excess charges of administration, such as usury, and false accountancy,
false accountancy having corroded all Mr. Adams' nice mercantile systems, though he don't put his main
emphasis on that component. Wars rise from commercial competition, BUT to have that competition, down
under it is the production, production system.
That is what Brooks Adams was not writing about. God knows he had enough to write about. Enough
history that hadn't been sorted out in men's minds, in ANY man's mind. Over and above the books I have
mentioned at the start of this talk are the actual papers of statesmen. John Adams and Van Buren and so on.
Woodward suggests that the explanation of the Adams family is to be found in glandular secretions. I
would say mebbe it was due to John Adams, the founder of the line, gettin' spliced to Abigail Quincy, that
might explain some of that problem. However, one point that Brooks Adams more or less passes by is
noted by Woodward and will do to fill in the chink of the story. Just to keep from introducin' Europe, and
foreign systems, topics on which you run ravin' mad out of prejudice. Will you note that John Quincy
Adams and Henry Clay worked out in theory what was called the AMERICAN system? Meaning that the
U S was to be self supportin'. At a time when there was one party, [the] idea was broached that all sections
of the country were to be harmonized, North East to develop manufacturing, supported by protective tariff
to keep out European competition; and that the industrial towns would provide a market for the agricultural
products of the West and South; and the rural sections would provide customers for goods produced by the
factories. Nothing in it that is not plain commonsense. Of course most American prosperity rose from the
application of those ideas, partial application. But still the good life in America has been due to 'em.
Well now Europe has GOT that idea. There is nothing fancy or new about THAT idea. It is just horse
sense and intelligence. BUT it don't produce war. It don't produce gallopin' usury. It is not romantic
enough for the sheenies. And you will never understand American history or the history of the Occident
durin' the past 2000 years unless you look at one or two problems; namely, sheenies and usury. One or the
other or BOTH, I should say, both.
And dear ole Bill Woodward does NOT give you clearly the answer. He is not stallin', at least I don't
think so, but some things escape him, or remain in penumbra, probably his own penumbra. For example, he
notices that in the Quincy Adams-Jackson campaign a change came over American political method. For
the first time there was a wild outbreak of vituperation in the press: wild slanders against both of the
candidates— —.
Shall we say that something had bust? TWO candidates, Quincy Adams and Jackson, who did not
belong to the banks. Of course John Quincy Adams might not have disturbed 'em, but he was so gol'
thunderin' honest, and his father had SO seen thru the bank swindle.
I don't mean that that is all of the story. And let's not get lost in retrospect. I tell you. FIRST, you can
not understand American history without digging down into the problem of debt and usury. Up to now no
American history has been written. Takin' due count of the personnel and the component of Jewry. Brooks
Adams seeing that the Kike triumphed in England, after Waterloo, and Overholser givin' you the clue
(along with Col. Lindbergh's papa)—the CLUE to the betrayal of the American nation, the American
Government, the American system in 1863, the sellout to Rothschild.
But Brooks Adams havin' his limitation, at least the exposition in the two volumes mentioned, has the
limitation of dealing with wars and the decline of empires—wars from economic competition. BUT down
under that, if the thing for you to study if you be lookin' forward, is the production system. Possibly about
to be reinforced ON the U.S.A., as consequence of the squalor of Knox, the ignorance of the governing
oligarchy. You may be too dumb to do it until you are forced. Seiff's embargo was a protective measure.
On a basis of autarchy and collaboration a peaceful world can arise. And on NO other basis. The
mercantilist system, mercantilist disposition, or an Anschauung, never brought peace. Monopoly,
megalomania, reading the Jewbrew texts never brought peace honor or decency, or the good life, neither
did neglect of the Latin classics.
America declined. The whole tone of American life went down, slopped, grew foetid, step by step as
the Latin classics went into the discard, and the reading of the Hebrew superstitions continued to be
tolerated in the American colleges. Out of Sallust and Cicero a man might LEARN something useful. Out
of Demosthenes he might git a line of the habitual human swindles that would help him understand the
second bank of the United States, oh, ably described by Woodward, as to its personal habits, BUT not
exposed in its perspective as it is exposed in the autobiography of Martin Van Buren.
Go on, read the Brooks Adams and then go on to the study of contemporary Europe. In the light of the
Clay Quincy Adams project. Don't die like a beast, I mean if you are dead set to be sunk in the mid-
Atlantic or Pacific or scorched in the desert, at least KNOW why it is done to you.
To die not knowin' why is to die like an animal. What the kike calls you: goyim or cattle. To die like a
human being you have at least got to know why it is done to you.

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