Posts from — November 2004

It’s finally here!! … Fresh off the press!! … Aaj ki taaza khabar!!

The Diwali edition of Bharateeya Blog Mela is here!!

First things first. This Mela should’ve gone up yesterday. Things got really busy here and as much as I tried to post it, I missed the deadline. What can I say!! … I’m sorry!! (I believe that’s how people say sorry these days!)

Secondly… Before I launch into the Mela, let me take this opportunity to wish everyone a VERY HAPPY DIWALI!!

Finally… this being the festive season, I have kept my editorial scissors in their box. All the nominations that I’ve received, have found a place on the Mela. Cool, eh?!

And before you start wondering if I’m ever gonna present the Mela… here it comes… the best of the best from the Indian Blogosphere!!

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John Perkins is an ‘Economic Hit Man’. His job is simple (well, not really). When the US faces any economic threat, he is called upon to do a job that’s the financial equivalent of carrying out a ‘hit’ on whoever or whatever threatens the economy. In his own words, “It’s almost James Bondish…”

John Perkins has written a book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man in which he talks about how his job involved cheating poorer countries out of trillions of dollars in turn helping build up the American economy. I just came across his interview via a post on Metafilter.

Perkins says in his interview…

Basically what we were trained to do and what our job is to do is to build up the American empire. To bring — to create situations where as many resources as possible flow into this country, to our corporations, and our government, and in fact we’ve been very successful. We’ve built the largest empire in the history of the world. It’s been done over the last 50 years since World War II with very little military might, actually. It’s only in rare instances like Iraq where the military comes in as a last resort. This empire, unlike any other in the history of the world, has been built primarily through economic manipulation, through cheating, through fraud, through seducing people into our way of life, through the economic hit men. I was very much a part of that.

As blunt as it gets, isn’t it?! It gets better still…

Well, the company I worked for was a company named Chas. T. Main in Boston, Massachusetts. We were about 2,000 employees, and I became its chief economist. I ended up having fifty people working for me. But my real job was deal-making. It was giving loans to other countries, huge loans, much bigger than they could possibly repay. One of the conditions of the loan–let’s say a $1 billion to a country like Indonesia or Ecuador–and this country would then have to give ninety percent of that loan back to a U.S. company, or U.S. companies, to build the infrastructure–a Halliburton or a Bechtel. These were big ones. Those companies would then go in and build an electrical system or ports or highways, and these would basically serve just a few of the very wealthiest families in those countries. The poor people in those countries would be stuck ultimately with this amazing debt that they couldn’t possibly repay. A country today like Ecuador owes over fifty percent of its national budget just to pay down its debt. And it really can’t do it. So, we literally have them over a barrel.

Later in the interview Perkins discloses why US invaded Iraq…

We knew Saudi Arabia was the key to dropping our dependency, or to controlling the situation. And we worked out this deal whereby the Royal House of Saud agreed to send most of their petro-dollars back to the United States and invest them in U.S. government securities. The Treasury Department would use the interest from these securities to hire U.S. companies to build Saudi Arabia–new cities, new infrastructure–which we’ve done. And the House of Saud would agree to maintain the price of oil within acceptable limits to us, which they’ve done all of these years, and we would agree to keep the House of Saud in power as long as they did this, which we’ve done, which is one of the reasons we went to war with Iraq in the first place. And in Iraq we tried to implement the same policy that was so successful in Saudi Arabia, but Saddam Hussein didn’t buy. When the economic hit men fail in this scenario, the next step is what we call the jackals. Jackals are C.I.A.-sanctioned people that come in and try to foment a coup or revolution. If that doesn’t work, they perform assassinations. or try to. In the case of Iraq, they weren’t able to get through to Saddam Hussein. He had — His bodyguards were too good. He had doubles. They couldn’t get through to him. So the third line of defense, if the economic hit men and the jackals fail, the next line of defense is our young men and women, who are sent in to die and kill, which is what we’ve obviously done in Iraq.

Hmmm… interesting! … So it WAS oil after all!! ;-)

Check out the rest of the interview… Perkins talks about how a Panamian president was assasinated after he sorta double-crossed one US corporation. It’s very Michael Mooresque! (which actually isn’t saying much!) :-P

Earlier, it used to be the Pakistanis who used to claim that the infiltration levels had gone down while the Indian Government used to refute it by saying that the levels were still quite high. The usual diplomatic wranglings!

But now, it’s the Indian Government itself which claims that the Pakistani infiltration has gone down following the fencing along the border. Interestingly, however, the Indian Army is refuting this claim and saying that, in fact, Pakistan has stepped up its efforts to push terrorists into Jammu & Kashmir.

Came across a LJ post of an American soldier from a post on MetaFilter.

If you voted for Bush, didn’t vote, or voted no on gay marriage, I hope you get drafted.
I hope they stick you in my unit, and you go with me to Iraq when my unit goes back in September. I will laugh when you see what soldiers in that country face on a daily basis. I hope you work with gay soldiers too. I did. One of them saved my life. Think he shouldn’t have the right to get married? Fuck you. He fought just as hard as I did and on most days, did his job better than me. Don’t tell me gays don’t have the same rights you do.
Think the war in Iraq is a good thing? I’ll donate my M-16 to you and you can go in my place.

I respect his emotions. Being a low level soldier in a warzone with body count increasing all around you must definitely not be easy. But being a 19 year old kid, I think his preferences are pretty much in line with the huge number of people in his age group who preferred Kerry. And those would have been his views even if he wasn’t in the Army.

Interestingly, go through this thread of conversation between this guy and another soldier and draw your own conclusions about whether his rant against Bush was a result of his being bored with a ‘tedious’ job. Also, note what the other soldier said about the voting pattern within the army!

Internetizens rejoice! For the first conviction of a spammer has happened and a jail-term served!

Jeremy Jaynes of Raleigh, N.C., one of the Internet’s top 10 spammers, according to watchdogs, was convicted in the first felony spam case — just up the road from Fool HQ in Loudoun County, Va. He and his sister, Jessica DeGroot, were both found guilty by a jury that then recommended a jail term of nine years for Jaynes and a fine of $7,500 for DeGroot.

What’s important here is the nature of the convictions: intentional spamming. Jaynes and DeGroot were convicted not for the alleged fraudulent nature of their millions of email solicitations — Jaynes has amassed a reported fortune of $24 million hawking products like penny-stock pickers — but for sending unsolicited junk and forging IP addresses to cover their tracks.

[emphasis mine]

It really is a significant judgement, because as the emphasized portions of the above excerpt indicate, the conviction is purely for spamming and not for some fraud or scam. This means that spamming is being (rightly) recognized as a felony and is being dealt with accordingly.

But of course this is just the beginning. One long jail-term for a spammer, one snall step in the fight against spam-kind!