June 27, 2013

Marc Rich and the Rape of Russia

The death of metals and oil wheeler-dealer Marc Rich in Switzerland, who was pardoned by Bill Clinton on January 20, 2001, has led to some rather bland notices in the newspapers, such as this one in the Wall Street Journal. The New York Times' version is a little more forthcoming, but fails to mention his sizable role in the Rape of Russia in the 1990s.

Rod Dreher wrote in the New York Post on Feb. 15, 2001:
Overlooked so far is Rich's role in the looting of the disintegrating Soviet Union by Communist Party officials and their associates in the early 1990s. 
You can read about it in "Godfather of the Kremlin," an exhaustively researched book about Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky, which was published last fall. The author is Paul Klebnikov, an expert on Russia and a Forbes magazine senior editor. 
The book details the myriad ways Berezovsky and his minions stole untold sums from the Russian people through international financial schemes. 
According to Klebnikov, Rich came into the picture around 1990, when the Soviet Union began to open up to outsiders. 
"Governmental authority began to crumble. All these local Communist Party bosses got to strike deals on their own," the author tells me. 
Based in Switzerland, with its secretive banking laws, Rich was in a prime position to help Russia's plunderers carry out their dirty work. Klebnikov reported that Rich dealt in oil, aluminum, zinc and other raw commodities. 
"He'd strike a deal with the local party boss, or the director of a state-owned company," explains the author. "He'd say, 'OK, you will sell me the [commodity] at 5 to 10 percent of the world market price. 
"'And in return, I will deposit some of the profit I make by reselling it 10 times higher on the world market, and put the kickback in a Swiss bank account.'" 
For at least two years, as the Soviet Union was in its death throes, Rich was that nation's largest trader of aluminum and oil on a spot basis. 
"He made a complete mint off of Russia," says Klebnikov. 
A former foreign-trade minister told the author that Rich instructed the robber-baron elite how to skirt the law by doing secret deals through shell companies and the like. 
"Marc Rich ended up being a mentor to all these young kids who came out of the Communist Party establishment, and who made billions off these schemes themselves," Klebnikov charges. ...
Rich's profitable relationship with the Russians ended in 1993, when the monster he helped create turned on him. The Russian swindlers became so good at Rich's game that they muscled him out of the action. 
"Applying the lessons they learned from Marc Rich, they bankrupted Russia," Klebnikov alleges. "As a result, you have a ruined economy, bankrupt government, and an impoverished population."

One reason nobody remembers this is because, despite the convenient alliteration, the Rape of Russia isn't a thing, not in the way that, say, the Rape of Nanking is a thing. The plundering of the ex-Soviet Union in the 1990s, which was egged on by the Clinton Administration, Wall Street, Harvard, and other highly respectable American institutions was misreported at the time as a triumph of the free market. And now it's mostly being forgotten. A 15-year-ago PBS Frontline documentary explained: 
The auctions, simply put, were imperfect. ... A series of privatization "auctions"--whose results were determined beforehandówere held by the GKI. (There are books out on this phase, but in essence, they held the firesale of the century. ) The engines of Soviet industry --oil companies, metals plants, utilities-- were sold for a song. Russia is among the world's richest countries in terms of natural resources--(The Natural Resources Minister, Viktor Orlov, can run down the list of gold, nickel, silver, timber, oil and of course natural gas--one-third of the world's reserves--for you.). And in short order, the riches were exported by the shipload east and west.

Ever wonder how Estonia, a country that produces no aluminum, became one of the world's top aluminum exporters?

Aluminum plants are typically gigantic investments built near hydroelectric dams. The Soviet Union churned out gigantic amounts of aluminum for its huge air force. Aluminum is pretty much of a commodity in quality, so the general cruddiness of everything Soviet mattered less in aluminum than in just about anything else: the Russians had hydroelectric power galore in Siberia and they had huge, valuable aluminum plants.
This was the market's main cancer: theft. The greed that motivated it (and still does) was impressive. But the theft will go down in history. Economists now talk about state corruption, and of course graft was a contributing cause of the market's death, but pure and simple robbery played the leading role. The rape of Russia's riches in its first decade of "independence" will doubtless be remembered in a century's time as unprecedented.

Is it remembered even in a decade or two's time? Not if the articles on Rich's death are any indication.

Here's an interesting paragraph from a 1991 BusinessWeek article on Rich:
Rich's lawyers continue to press for his return to the U. S., offering to pay multimillion-dollar fines he still owes. Rich's one condition is that he avoid prison. He may have allies in the State Dept. U. S. marshals have tried several times to trap Rich, most recently in September, when they alerted officials in Finland that he was due to arrive by private plane. But in that instance, as in previous ones, Rich got away. A. Craig Copetas, author of a 1985 book on Rich, says the marshals suspect that someone in State, which must be notified of such operations, is leaking their plans to Rich because they value his high-level contacts around the world. 

From Wikipedia's article on Marc Rich:
Clinton also cited clemency pleas he had received from Israeli government officials, including then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Rich had made substantial donations to Israeli charitable foundations over the years, and many senior Israeli officials, such as Shimon Peres and Ehud Olmert, argued on his behalf behind the scenes.[24] (Speculation about another rationale for Rich's pardon involved his alleged involvement with the Israeli intelligence community.[25][26] Rich reluctantly acknowledged in interviews with his biographer, Daniel Ammann, that he had assisted the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service,[12][4] a claim that Ammann said was confirmed by a former Israeli intelligence officer.[11] According to Ammann, Rich had helped finance the Mossad's operations and had supplied Israel with strategic amounts of Iranian oil through a secret oil pipeline.[4] The aide to Rich who personally traveled to the U.S. from Israel and persuaded Denise Rich to ask President Clinton to review Rich's pardon request was a former chief of the Mossad, Avner Azulay.[20][27])

Sounds rather like Robert Maxwell, another James Bond supervillain-type. Unlike Maxwell, I fortunately didn't have to do business with Rich. Like Maxwell, Rich is being buried in Israel.

92 comments:

  1. I look forward to an article on Mandela, hopefully of Takimag length.

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  2. Dr Van Nostrand6/27/13, 2:18 AM

    Like Maxwell, Rich is being buried in Israel."

    Steve could've avoided slipping that little nugget in right at the end and let the commentators do that dirty work for him but these days Steve's benign mask is not so much being slipped away as being pulled off ..by himself

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  3. Dr Van Nostrand wrote:

    "Steve could've avoided slipping that little nugget in right at the end and let the commentators do that dirty work for him but these days Steve's benign mask is not so much being slipped away as being pulled off ..by himself"

    Do you think he should have posted a picture of Marc Rich instead?

    http://www.marcrich.ch/images/galleries/biography/biography_01.jpg

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  4. Steve could've avoided slipping that little nugget in right at the end and let the commentators do that dirty work for him but these days Steve's benign mask is not so much being slipped away as being pulled off ..by himself

    WTF are you droning on about, you imbecile?

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  5. Steve could've avoided slipping that little nugget in right at the end and let the commentators do that dirty work for him but these days Steve's benign mask is not so much being slipped away as being pulled off ..by himself


    Coming after the excerpt from the Wikipedia article it came across as strikingly anti-climactic.

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  6. Read Craig Copetas's book "The Metal Men". This is set in the 1980s (so before the Russian deals you describe) but is an interesting read.

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  7. Anne Williamson had a giant manuscript on the Russian looting performed by Washington, Wall St and Harvard that somehow was never published.

    Later research shows that the early '90s Russian asset sales were designed to benefit the management teams of the state owned firms, but the oligarchs beat them at that game. The later shares programs of the mid '90s were terrible looting aided by Wall St and Harvard's investment corp.

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  8. ...these days Steve's benign mask...

    You can have benign mask or you can have the truth. But not both.

    From the radical left UK paper The Guardian - "And in a country where anti-semitism is still rife and openly expressed, nationalist rabble-rousers have made much of the fact that of the seven oligarchs who controlled 50% of Russia's economy during the 1990s, six were Jewish: Berezovsky, Vladimir Guzinsky, Alexander Smolensky, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Mikhail Friedman and Valery Malkin."

    Be sure not to rouse the rabble with the facts.

    The less they know the better.

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  9. Paul Klebnikov, author of the book Dreher cites, is of course no longer with us, having been fatally shot from a slow-moving car on a street in Moscow in 2004.

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  10. ''Doc Fan Noostraand''

    mimimimi...

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  11. His ex-wife Denise Rich (Eisenberg), described as a 'songwriter', put her 12,000 sq ft Manhattan condo up for sale not long ago for $65 million. She's renounced her US citizenship and become a citizen of Austria in order to save millions in taxes. Wonderful folks and really high class.

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  12. What's interesting to me is that in the 19 century many if not most of the Robber Barons were whites - how come these days few whites seem to be in the game? I don't buy it that Jews are just better than whites at this game, or that Jews are more predisposed to it. History clearly shows that whites are extremely predisposed to all forms of financial brigandage and rapine - just read any history book about the economy in the 19th century or before - and historically whites have always loved raiding, looting, and when times got more sophisticated massively exploring more vulnurable peoples or sections of their own populations.

    Whites are history's greatest pirates and brigands, yet that was going strong till sometime in the early 20th century, when whites turned from brigandage to bourgeous values, and Jews and perhaps Asians took over.

    Nor do I think Jews are just more talented at financial bringandage than whites so they simply muscled whites out of the way once they got on the scene. Sure, Jews are smart, but only on a per capita basis. In absolute terms, there are WAY more smart whites out there.

    If one looks at history, whites seem most predisposed temprentally to engage in all forms of piracy and brigandage, and in terms of talent, there are just way more of them, so why in the 20th century did Jews dominate?

    I do wonder. Am I missing something? Are there really more whites doing this kind of thing just with less attention being paid to them?

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  13. Our host said: The plundering of the ex-Soviet Union in the 1990s, which was egged on by the Clinton Administration, Wall Street, Harvard, and other highly respectable American institutions was misreported at the time as a triumph of the free market. And now it's mostly being forgotten.

    Hunsdon said: Not in Russia. Oh, not in Russia.

    DVN said: Steve's benign mask is not so much being slipped away as being pulled off ..by himself

    Hunsdon quipped: You mad bro?

    More seriously, if any masks are being pulled off, is it really by Steve? Or are (certain) Jews becoming more nakedly triumphalist?

    The "buried in Israel" part isn't the sting, really, is it now? It's more the "clemency pleas" from the President, several past and current PMs and former Mossad superspook.

    The question of benignity and malignity that you raise is also interesting. Although Abe Foxman might call it a vicious anti-Semitic canard, I've heard that one question Jews tend to ask is, "But is it good for the Jews?"

    Our host's philosophy of citizenism would tend to ask a similar yet different question: "But is it good for America?"

    US foreign policy since the collapse of the Soviet Union has not been distinguished by reconciliation or an attempt to heal the deep wounds caused by communism. Rather, there has been a good bit of triumphalism, and a tendency to kick 'em while they were down. I ask you: in the long run, is that good for America?

    Do you suppose the Russians look back on Marc Rich with some bitterness? Are you aware of the immense human cost of the 1990s in Russia? Do you suppose that Clinton's pardon of Rich (albeit for trading with Iran and anti-Semitic canards of swindling, wire fraud and racketeering, not for the rape of Russia) amplified that bitterness?

    And yet, somehow, it is our host's mask which is slipping.

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  14. What "dirty work"? We admire Mr. Rich's and Mr. Maxwell's loyalty and the loyalty of Jewish people to the Jewish nation and the Jewish state of Israel.

    We hope to follow your moral example in many ways: border fences that work, expulsion of illegal infiltrators, prison camps in the desert, race-based immigration laws, 30 foot high walls around ghettoes, etc.

    We commend you. We follow your example to "heal the world".

    Will you work with us? In exchange for militarily and monetarily supporting Jewish supremacy in Israel will you support our supremacy in America?

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  15. DR VN
    nearly all of the oligarchs and economists involved were scots irish- summers poured $$$$ of harvard money defending them - the adl pressured the FBI, etc etc..

    is it anti-scots-irish to point this out?

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  16. There was a russian china maker founded by katherine the great (the name escapes me) the scots irish tried to buy it, but yeltson refused- even a stooge like he could not sell this national treasure..so AL GORE got on the phone and pressured him "hey this is the free market"
    Eventually , i think the scots irish, which funding from congress, bought the power company and yanked the power on the china factory..

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  17. Something about all those plundering Russians. Something about all those people who were more than happy to steal from their own country -- almost as if they didn't really have any loyalty to it. Almost like they were, you know, just sort of rootless cosmopolitans.

    What is it about all those Russian thieves and Marc Rich and Wall Street and Harvard that somehow unites all these seemingly disparate entities?

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  18. You also have to blame the Friedmanite bullshit that was in vogue at that time (it was the truimph of Thatcher and Reagan after all), the supidity, corruption and weakness of Gorbachev and Yeltsin and various 'leading economists' in paricular one Jeffrey Sachs who was actually in chrage of the whole debacle.
    The Economist magazine cheerleaded for this disaster publishing article after article saying how wonderful German post 1945 policy was with 'fully convertable dollars' and 'abolition of all control' and all.
    The result was you had a bunch of gorillas taking a 'advice' from a bunch of chimps, whilst a host of vampires snuck in during the night and looted the nation's life-blood.

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  19. Thanks for the back story on the Rape of Russia. No wonder our betters don't like Putin much.

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  20. Steve seems to assume that he can write a long essay on Marc Rich and he need not mention the Eric Holder connection because his readership is so sophisticated.

    Probably so,

    Albertosaurus

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  21. Oleg from Magnitogorsk6/27/13, 7:01 AM

    As recent posts have discussed, the Scots-Irish have famously long memories. No slight is ever forgotten, no grudge ever expires.

    Well the Russians play that game too. The rest of the world may forget the Rape of Russia (or more likely never knew about it in the first place), but I suspect the Russians won't.

    Nostrand - so in an article about the death of a fairly prominent person it is verboten to mention where he is being buried?

    Someone's mask is slipping all right, and it's yours. At first I thought you were a common or garden Zionist apologist, but now I'm leaning towards full-on hasbara attack dog.

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  22. If that's where he's being buried, so be it. Why try to hide it and pretend Rich was a "great american".

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  23. Dr Van Nostrand you seem to think that there is "something wrong" with Steve sentence, can you elaborate?

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  24. Mandela would be great, but if it's a choice between Steve doing that or spending the time doing more on the Rich subject, I'll take the latter. Needless to say, I'm linking like mad to this one.
    Aluminumfinger

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  25. Hey, Kramer, I guess that's why Mr. Sailer writes his own blog rather than work as a lackey for big media, where one can never, ever mention that members of the tribe of Israel are capable of doing anything bad.

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  26. "these days Steve's benign mask is not so much being slipped away as being pulled off ..by himself"

    Yeah Steve, give the poor guy a break. He comes from an irrationally envied group called a "market-dominant minority." It's not that they've been bred, on average, for amorality and ruthlessness -- that's just baseless slander.

    You have to forgive them if they go too far in their market-dominant ways. It's just one of those built-in traits of a market-dominant minority.

    Take the Parsis of India, another high-IQ market-dominant minority of foreign origin in a host society. Like, everywhere there's a major financial or economic scandal in India, sure enough there's a bunch of Parsis involved.

    Steve, don't you know that you always have to root for a high-IQ group because they form part of the "cognitive elite"? Machiavellianism must be linked to high IQ, because it's not like there's some high-IQ market-dominant minority that the host society loves rather than loathes.

    So, hey, you just gotta take the good with the bad when it comes to groups like the Ashkenazi and the Chinese. It's not as though we could realistically expect higher conduct of them. The Indians certainly have accepted the curse of the Parsis along with the blessing.

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  27. "Steve could've avoided slipping that little nugget in right at the end and let the commentators do that dirty work for him but these days Steve's benign mask is not so much being slipped away as being pulled off ..by himself"

    The Scots-Irish need to leave us nobodies on isteve.blogspot.com alone. We only remark what our eyes tell us daily. I mean, they get air-brushed treatment everywhere it matters (WSJ, NYTimes, etc.) and still feel compelled to police what us losers are thinking. Wonderful! Damn their spunk, those fiery Scots-Irish.

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  28. Yes, Dr VN, enemies of the human race have a tough time getting good press at iSteve.

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  29. Dr. Van Nostrand said:

    "Steve could've avoided slipping that little nugget in right at the end and let the commentators do that dirty work for him but these days Steve's benign mask is not so much being slipped away as being pulled off ..by himself"

    What a drama queen.

    Kai

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  30. DVN, the emerging "east Indian" Whiskey, misses first bitch by a nose.

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  31. "Like Maxwell, Rich is being buried in Israel."

    Is like that how Italian mobsters and Latino communists get big Catholic funerals?

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  32. Laborit! What a fitting name for a lab scientist of rats.

    http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/mon-oncle-damerique-1980

    "Henri Laborit, a physician, philosopher, and expert on evolutionary psychology. Laborit differs from the others in that he isn't fictional. He plays himself, he speaks directly to the camera, he explains his theories about human behavior and how it's often illuminated by tests involving laboratory animals. He had considerable influence on American market research 50 years ago."

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQcC-VB_W-s

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  33. Maybe forgotten in America but not in Russia.

    It doesn't involve NAMs so it would be a 'good' thing in HBD circles.

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  34. Dr Van Nostrand said...
    "Steve could've avoided slipping that little nugget in right at the end and let the commentators do that dirty work for him but these days Steve's benign mask is not so much being slipped away as being pulled off ..by himself"
    Nostrand, so long as it's a true statement (i.e., that Rich is being buried in Israel), why do you object to Steve mentioning it? A little too much truthiness around here for ya?

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  35. Why do you choose to use the 'rape' metaphor to characterize this thing? Are you satirizing extreme Feminist or are you adopting their methodologies?

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  36. Is it remembered even in a decade or two's time? Not if the articles on Rich's death are any indication.

    It's good to be a democrat!

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  37. Steve could've avoided slipping that little nugget in right at the end and let the commentators do that dirty work for him


    It says a lot about you that you consider it "dirty work" to mention well-established facts about Rich. "No more hate facts!"

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  38. This saga reminds me of self-hating Jew Irene Nemirovsky's novel David Golder (1929).

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  39. Well informed friend of mine told me that 'everyone' knew that Denise Rich persuaded Clinton to pardon Marc Rich by sleeping with him. Since the folks in question actually knew Bill personally (not me, them), they might even be right.

    What makes this story remarkable is that Marc and Denise were divorced at this point. Even sadder, Marc let his daughter (Gabrielle) die without seeing her in 1996 so he could stay out of prison.

    Marc Rich was a very big ticket bad guy. At one point, the U.S. government even considered sending special forces into Switzerland to kidnap him back to the U.S. The government of Switzerland made it clear that this would result in an actual war.

    The fact that the U.S. government contemplated military force to get Rich should tell you how evil he really was. It should also tell you how awful Clinton was to pardon him.

    The usual phrase is RIP. Marc Rich should not be allowed to RIP.

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  40. One man's rape is another's opportunistic plundering.

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  41. OT Link tips

    I was reading the comment thread of http://junctrebellion.wordpress.com/2012/08/12/how-the-american-university-was-killed-in-five-easy-steps/ were a Gene Nelson Phd is raging about the unfairness of allowing cheap foreigners to compete with American academics when I came across this video on how HB1 visas work:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCbFEgFajGU

    Seems like something that should be spread more.

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  42. One thing to keep in mind is that the impoverishment of Russia was strategically valuable for the U.S. up to a certain point when it just became overkill. But I've never seen much discussion of this. If you are George H.W. Bush, giving the Soviets bad economic advice might be seen as strategic competition against a superpower military rival. After the failure of the Soviet military coup in August 1991, and subsequent hiving off of Ukraine and Belarus though, when is the tipping point?

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  43. slightly off topic, but what's interesting to me, is right around the same time, bill clinton signed DOMA into law.

    why would the president of the united states knowingly sign an unconstitutional bill into law, and why has nobody asked him about it at all, whatsoever? furthermore, why is he applauding the strike? couldn't he have just, you know, veto'd it right from the start?

    didn't many of the democrats applauding the strike of DOMA yesterday...vote for it? what does this mean? that democrat politicians stand for nothing, have no principles whatsoever, will shift positions with a mere change of the winds? haven't scalia and alito completely nailed this? the democrats will change their mind on any topic at any time, and now even go so far to simply declare those in opposition are just plain enemies of humanity. there isn't the slightest shred of legal standing here, the liberal justices say. wut? just 20 years ago they weren't even TALKING about this stuff.

    people outside russia don't recall the rape of russia - people in the US don't even recall things american presidents did even more recently.

    it's sickening how quickly "the pentagon" (just a bunch of losers chasing their government pensions now, i think, and not worth of some big respectable grandiose title like THE PENTAGON!) said they would move to give homosexual partners military benefits. this, of course, after swearing up and down for several years after the repeal of don't ask don't tell, that homosexual partners and spouses in the military would never get the benefits that bigot couples, i mean, normal couples, receive.

    the pentagon never does anything quickly - it's having trouble getting rid of a 50 year old RIFLE - yet they were blindingly fast to tell us homosexual spouses will get full benefits, and even be buried in military graveyards next to their partners. chuck hagel practically tripped over his own feet he leapt to tell us that so fast.

    what in the actual F? this, while the obama administration is deliberately propagandizing the sequester to the point where front line troops are now denied hot chow because "that costs too much." so army and marine units in the line of fire cannot get hot food, but the pentagon has money for homos. chuck hagel made that extremely clear.

    futhermore, i wonder how much marriage fraud this opens up. homosexual marriage fraud. now we gotta deal with that, in addition to thousands of male troops raping female troops, who shouldn't even be there in the first place.

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  44. "The fact that the U.S. government contemplated military force to get Rich should tell you how evil he really was. It should also tell you how awful Clinton was to pardon him."

    that's sloppy. why would you ever let them know you were planning a raid. those should be secret and just BAM it happened. not that i think action made any sense there, but yeah. it's retarded switzerland would know for sure the US was thinking about it. suspect it, consider it a possibility? always. know for sure? full retard.

    similar to how the US had to risk military conflict with pakistan to get bid laden. there, it's maybe worth some military conflict to get him, but the people in charge kept the mission secret. the president, however, kept turning the mission down over and over and over, to the point where somebody had to just take over for him, green light the mission, and pull him off the golf course when it was going down.

    i wonder how much consideration non-obama people in the government are giving right now with regard to snowden, since obama has made it clear he has zero interest in causing any conflict to get snowden back. actually i doubt he cares about anything of that nature now. he'll never face an election again and hates america, so it's extremely unlikely he'll ever do the right thing just for the sake of doing the right thing from this point forward for a non-cultural marxist agenda issue. i find it amusing the media even tracks his popularity rating anymore. that's totally, completely irrelevant now. he's dictator obama. he doesn't have to worry about voters ever again.

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  45. The fall of Soviet Empire wasn't a case of people overthrowing the system but of the system throwing off the people so that insiders within the system would grab everything for themselves.

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  46. "The fact that the U.S. government contemplated military force to get Rich should tell you how evil he really was. It should also tell you how awful Clinton was to pardon him."

    Since my earlier comment seems to have fallen flat, lemme spell out my meaning in light of Skeptical Economist's point: the same fact should also prompt you to wonder whether it was perhaps Marc Rich who had Paul Klebnikov murdered in 2004.

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  47. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/jun/27/immigration-bill-clears-senate/

    Fool me once, fool me twice..

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  48. http://forward.com/articles/179296/jews-unite-behind-push-for-immigration-reform/

    Jews Unite Behind Push for Immigration Reform
    Ethics and Self-Interest Drive Unusual Nationwide Effort

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  49. Dr Van Nostrand6/27/13, 2:00 PM


    Lets see 15 of the 44 comments were about me being a big mean meanie for criticizing Steve mentioning burial in Israel! Most of them ad hominem attacks(and not very good ones I might add Svigor: the East Indian whiskey thing was first suggested by a rambling Anglo Indian idiot troll who makes you sound like Bertrand Russel by comparison,just FYI! Hundson: "you mad bro" had lost its sting in 2009.come up with some fresh material.anon at 5:30 -pretty lame)


    All of you lot who have a hard on for Putin because he against the Zionists or the central bankers or whatever are just fools .And he is playing you for fools, Putin is looking out for Putin and for a brief glorious time his self interests and Russia's interests seem to be harmony.He had dealt the "Scots Irish" Russians a (well deserved) beating because he wants the spoils for himself and his cronies with a few scraps thrown to the Russian people.And it will end when it will end and Russians will be thrown to the wolves again this time probably of the Mandarin variety.
    Just FYI ,inspite of his relations with Syria and Iran, Netanyahu's relations with Putin are better than Obama
    Now go back to weeping(or biting) in your pillows.

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  50. Pat nails it. Typical TAC shout Jews so no one notices you aren't mentioning the Democrat malefactors.

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  51. In the US we are used to reading about foreign politicians having Swiss accounts for their kickbacks.

    It would really be refreshing to read about the discovery of a Swiss account tied to Holder or Clinton on one side and Rich on the other.

    I'm not holoding my breath though.

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  52. I'm disappointed you haven't disclosed Putin's words the last week about the percentage(according to Putin, 85%) of the Scotch-Irish in the 1st soviet government.

    Of course he's slightly off, the government itself was less, much less, Scotch-Irish than that. But power resided within the party structure, which was seperate from the government and there his numbers were closer.

    But yeah, it's amazing how these criminals get away with these things. Nobody wants to write about it.

    And if nobody will, nobody will ever know.

    The who were these men who learned from Rich? It's easy to see why Putin is popular within Russia, but of course the U.S. media will always, always cover for a Rich over an ethnic Russian like Putin.

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  53. Sergei from Novocheboksarsk6/27/13, 2:28 PM

    That Girl - "rape" is actually the exact word to describe the forceful theft of Russia's national assets. Look up the etymology of the word.

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  54. "The Scots-Irish need to leave us nobodies on isteve.blogspot.com alone. We only remark what our eyes tell us daily. I mean, they get air-brushed treatment everywhere it matters (WSJ, NYTimes, etc.) and still feel compelled to police what us losers are thinking. Wonderful! Damn their spunk, those fiery Scots-Irish."


    Rarely have I read a more pathetic, masochistic drag of text reeking of battered wife syndrome.

    Hurry up and die already.
    Let us who want to live take your place.

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  55. The beauty of Harvard is that the two guys who engineered the Russia Swindle, Jeffrey Sachs and Andrei Shleifer, aided by Shleifer's wife, Nancy Zimmerman and Shleifer's assistant, Jonathan Hay, cost Harvard a $31 million fine, but Sachs and Shleifer are still Ivy Professors.

    DVN, it's never pointed out enough how hard the Israelis fought for Rich's pardon.

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  56. The NY Times obituary describes the criminal robber as a shrew swashbuckling trader.

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  57. "Is like that how Italian mobsters and Latino communists get big Catholic funerals?"

    Remember in the Godfather, how a baptism was used to show the hypocrisy of the mob, some groups are never depicted as acting in conflict with their religious beliefs.

    DVN wins this month's Jon Stewart Veiled Threat Award.

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  58. why would the president of the united states knowingly sign an unconstitutional bill into law.

    Jody, if there was one area of constitutional law in 1996 that seemed settled, it was that "federalism" was a dead concept. DOMA was killed the other day based on supposed federalism concerns, and Clinton had no way of knowing that the principle would be revived.

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  59. John:"What's interesting to me is that in the 19 century many if not most of the Robber Barons were whites - how come these days few whites seem to be in the game?"

    Plenty of modern-day robber barons are White. Just look at Marc Rich. He was both a robber baron and a White man.

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  60. "All of you lot who have a hard on for Putin"- doesn't this mean we want to "screw him over" rather than "screw" him?

    Or is this an auto-antonymic expression meaning both one thing and its exact opposite?

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  61. Our host said: One thing to keep in mind is that the impoverishment of Russia was strategically valuable for the U.S. up to a certain point when it just became overkill.

    Hunsdon said: The most strategically valuable accomplishment of G.H.W. Bush's term was the repatriation of SS20s from Ukraine and Kazakhstan to Russia, accomplished primarily by Jimmy the Fix Baker (which does not rate even a mention on his wikipedia page).

    Russia was mostly impoverished already; indeed, the Soviet Union had been impoverished through a combination of military spending and (pace Rothbard) the impossibility of centralized price management.

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  62. I like Putin, because, if he moves here tomorrow, he'll be eligible for zero spoils because of his race, religion or ethnicity.

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  63. DVN said: Hundson: "you mad bro" had lost its sting in 2009.come up with some fresh material.

    Hunsdon replied: I have in the past been accused of a certain archaism of style.

    One can only hope that in 2013 "anti-Semitism" is losing its sting as well.

    I also somehow notice that you respond to an initial quip, without responding to the actual meat and potatoes of my argument.

    As for the accusation of pillow-biting, that is, sir, beneath even you. Combined with the accusation of having a hard on for Putin, one must begin to wonder: do you project much, sir?

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  64. Some data on Rich's pre-Russian career:

    "His tutelage under Philipp Brothers afforded Rich the opportunity to develop relationships with various dictatorial régimes and embargoed nations. Rich would later tell biographer Daniel Ammann that he had made his "most important and most profitable" business deals by violating international trade embargoes and doing business with the apartheid regime of South Africa.[13] He also counted Fidel Castro's Cuba, Marxist Angola, the Nicaraguan Sandinistas, Muammar Gaddafi's Libya, Nicolae Ceausescu's Romania, and Augusto Pinochet's Chile among the clients he serviced.[11][14] According to Ammann, "he had no regrets whatsoever.... He used to say 'I deliver a service. People want to sell oil to me and other people wanted to buy oil from me. I am a businessman, not a politician."[13]"

    Well, one has to give him credit for being eclectic in terms of the political beliefs of the states with which he dealt: Apartheid South Africa, Pinochet's Chile, Ceausescu's Romania, etc.


    "One of his biggest market coups came during the 1973-1974 Arab oil embargo, when he used his Middle Eastern contacts to circumvent the embargo and buy crude oil from Iran and Iraq. After purchasing the crude for roughly US$12 per barrel, Rich doubled the price and sold it to supply-starved U.S. oil companies. Later, following the overthrow of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, during the Iranian Revolution in 1979, Rich used his special relationship with Ayatollah Khomeini, the leader of the revolution, to buy oil from Iran despite the American embargo. Iran would become Rich's most important supplier of crude oil for more than 15 years.[15]" (via WIKIPEDIA)

    Interesting info on his "special relationship" with the Ayatollah Khomeini...

    SYON

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  65. Jody,

    I understand that it makes no sense for the U.S. government to announce a special forces raid in advance. The only possible explanation is as a test to see if the Switzerland was prepared to use force to defend Rich (apparently they were).

    My comments were based on what I saw in the papers back then. Rich was a world class bad guy and plenty of people in the government flat out hated him. The fact that they contemplated military action is evidence.

    He never saw his daughter as she died of leukaemia or attended the funeral.

    An extremely vile person.

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  66. Yeah, rape isn't too strong a term for what happened, IMHO. Perhaps a date rape, with a creepy Clinton-steered Uncle Sam slipping some drug into a vulnerable, staggering Russia's drink. Stupido Summers and the rest. To say that we took advantage is an understatement. Our "democracy"-proselytizing geniuses wanted to salt Russia's economic earth. To beat her down, and to hell with her people. Sure, some of our hurtful actions weren't intentional, but the West in general was drunk with an unexpected victory, while the ex-Sov states were reeling, trying to make sense of the new realities.

    Many post-Soviet ministers, politicians and bureaucrats wanted good, legal and beneficial outcomes. But again, it was all so new, there was chaos, and naked, unabashed avarice often triumphed. Towards the end of the Sovs, and early into the Yeltsin times, Russia did actively send reps to the US with the message: "We are open for business." I was at a provincial trade thingy and sighed when their guy said that.

    From the US side, many businesses scrambled to take advantage of this new opportunity.

    Lots of Soros-backed NGOs appeared and offered to provide help, in every ex-republic/-nation. Many naiive, English-only American grad students were dispatched to evangelize the big D-is-for-democracy and share the love, etc. Result: suffering on a massive scale. Shockingly, teachers, cops, bureaucrats, profs, nuclear physicists, local-level managers, etc., no longer received their pay from the looted coffers. Collapse and chaos ensued.

    The Marshall Plan helped to rebuild our former enemies after WW2 and it worked. We really fumbled the end of the Soviet Union.

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  67. I don't know whether or not I've mentioned it, but PAUL KLEBNIKOV was MURDERED in Moscow a few years after the book Dreher cites was published. IN A DRIVE-BY SHOOTING.

    Is this really of no interest to anyone else? It was actually a really big deal at the time, although it's understandable that nobody now remembers it.

    But isn't it interesting in this context? Isn't it? HAS THE WHOLE WORLD GONE CRAZY??!!!

    That's the last I'll say about that. In case I haven't already said anything about it, that is.

    Never mind.

    Sorry for the caps.

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  68. OT: Woody Allen's 48th feature, Blue Jasmine, starring Cate Blanchett and Alec Baldwin, opens in July. It's based on a story Allen's wife, Soon-Yi, told him about a woman she knew whose lifestyle became suddenly downsized after a financial disaster. Blanchett plays a pill-popping, vodka-swigging East Side sophisticate married to a WASPY version of Bernie Madoff (Baldwin).

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  69. Okay, I lied, but only slightly. I'll add one more thing:

    http://www.paulklebnikovfund.org/

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  70. Hello slumber_j,

    The world is a big place. Everything in objective perspective.

    I remain,
    Kibernetika



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  71. Hello, Kibernetika,

    You sound Russian. Did you know Marc Rich?

    I'm kidding. As I was before, in a way.

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  72. a Newsreader6/27/13, 7:14 PM

    Blaming the Jews for something in a blog post is akin to punching yourself in the nuts before a fistfight.

    That said, pointing out Israel's involvement in world affairs can be interesting. But it is difficult to grok since Israel is one of the few world powers that acts like an independent state. Most* other states seem to follow the UN/USG model of statecraft.

    *exceptions being PRC, Russia, ?

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  73. "Steve could've avoided slipping that little nugget in right at the end and let the commentators do that dirty work for him"

    Jewish behavior is anti-semitic.

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  74. slumber_j said: I don't know whether or not I've mentioned it, but PAUL KLEBNIKOV was MURDERED in Moscow a few years after the book Dreher cites was published. IN A DRIVE-BY SHOOTING.

    Hunsdon said: I paid a fair amount of attention to the Russian aluminium wars in the 90s. That happened to a whole lot of people. Drive by shootings, cars that go boom. "The wild wild East" and all that. Klebnikov was just a late outlier.

    Yes, my heart bled. The third Rome, and all that (pointless) violence and tawdriness.

    It's not how the world should be. I wish it was different.

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  75. "jody said...

    ""The fact that the U.S. government contemplated military force to get Rich should tell you how evil he really was. It should also tell you how awful Clinton was to pardon him.""

    that's sloppy. why would you ever let them know you were planning a raid. those should be secret and just BAM it happened. not that i think action made any sense there, but yeah."

    Perhaps Israel tipped them off. Rich obviously had no shortage of friends there.

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  76. "jody said...

    slightly off topic, but what's interesting to me, is right around the same time, bill clinton signed DOMA into law.

    why would the president of the united states knowingly sign an unconstitutional bill into law, and why has nobody asked him about it at all, whatsoever? furthermore, why is he applauding the strike? couldn't he have just, you know, veto'd it right from the start?"

    As I remember it, Clinton signed it late at night, in an attempt to avoid publicity for the act. What I do clearly remember was that he denounced the law even as he signed it - saying that it was a divisive, bigoted law - while he signed it. He wanted to have signed it, because he was going into the 1996 reelection as a centrist "New Democrat", and a lot of rank-and-file Democratic voters were still leery of the homosexual agenda. At the same time, he wanted to distance himself from it, so as not to piss off his wealthy homosexual contributors and the powerful gay lobby (Big Homo) that supported him. That must have been one of the single most blatant, hypocritical, two-faced acts ever committed by a President. Clinton could pull it off because he is a swine, a heel, and a creep. As George Will said of him: Clinton isn't the worst President we've ever had, but he is the worst man who was ever President.

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  77. "Dr Van Nostrand said...

    ""Like Maxwell, Rich is being buried in Israel.""

    Steve could've avoided slipping that little nugget in right at the end..."

    You mean that little fact? Yeah, Steve likes facts - he's funny that way. I take it you don't like facts, Cosmo? At least, when they are inconvenient?

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  78. Dr Van Nostran6/27/13, 10:00 PM


    One can only hope that in 2013 "anti-Semitism" is losing its sting as well.

    I also somehow notice that you respond to an initial quip, without responding to the actual meat and potatoes of my argument.

    As for the accusation of pillow-biting, that is, sir, beneath even you. Combined with the accusation of having a hard on for Putin, one must begin to wonder: do you project much, sir?"

    Admittedly pillow bititng was a cheap shot . A hat tip to Justin Raimondo and the prevalence of gays in fascist movements including Hindu nationalists(to be fair)

    There is good deal of admiration for Putin amongst paleos for standing up for against the neocons.
    I also admire him with reservations.

    As for your argument, I never denied that Russian Jewish oligarchs were aholes. I dont see how you concluded that I am defending Rich and those other glorified theieves. The Snowden fiasco may well be Russia's revenge.

    How can Jews be triumphalist when they are assimilating in America and Europe at light speed?They are less and less likely to identify with Israel than before.Indeed most American Jews posit some sort of two state solution not some imperialism via settlers!

    If indeed secular Jews are obnoxious, its because they are desperate, they are desperate because they are disappearing. Their birth rates are below replacement level and increasingly show less enthusiasm for their tribe except for the occasional ethnic flavor which comes handy for victim status and religious occasions such as birth,bar mitzvah,marriage ,deaths which give meaning to life.Not unlike the average Anglican approach to their institutions!

    Israel made an error in judgement by helping these criminals. It should have shown the same resolve and character when they refused Meyer Lansky's application for aliyah.

    Having said all that, its crimes are not unique in the history of the world.It may not be the most righteous of nations but neither is it the most demonic as this lot here imagines.


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  79. A hat tip to Justin Raimondo and the prevalence of gays in fascist movements including Hindu nationalists(to be fair)

    Any examples of the latter or is this another example of your pseudo-intellectual Freudian theories?

    Steve could've avoided slipping that little nugget in right at the end and let the commentators do that dirty work for him but these days Steve's benign mask is not so much being slipped away as being pulled off ..by himself

    Not sure why this is a problem. Marc Rich was Jewish and he never tried to hide it. I am not even sure that he is a "typical" example of a Jewish businessman. I would even disagree that he was "like" Maxwell. Rich was actually very different from Maxwell in that he never screwed the people that loyally worked with or for him (whether Jewish or not). Many of them are now billionaires in their own right (some are wealthier than Rich himself). Also, he was hounded by Sandy Weinberg and Rudy Giuliani for his various "offences" (the former being obviously Jewish).

    Reality is a lot more complicated than anything that anti-semites and anti-anti-semites make it out to be (and I don't think the majority of commentators on this site fit into either category).





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  80. some are wealthier than Rich himself

    Many of the people that worked with Rich were not Jewish themselves (they were actually a very diverse bunch - Greeks, Germans, Swiss, Italians etc etc).

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  81. >Putin's words the last week about the percentage (according to Putin, 85%) of the Scotch-Irish in the 1st soviet government.

    >Of course he's slightly off, the government itself was less, much less, Scotch-Irish than that. But power resided within the party structure, which was seperate from the government and there his numbers were closer.<

    I love how a fellow anonymous commenter knows more about the Soviet power structure than does the former head of the KGB. (Esp that fascinating bit about how the Party and the govt were separate.) We have some real good experts here, man.

    >How can Jews be triumphalist when they are assimilating in America and Europe at light speed? [...] they are disappearing<

    An East Indian worrying about the Silent Holocaust. That's something you don't see every day.

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  82. Dr Van Nostrand6/28/13, 12:07 PM

    3333
    An East Indian worrying about the Silent Holocaust. That's something you don't see every day."

    You dont seem to be very sharp.Im not worried about it because I see secular Jews as aholes. Indeed there is some schadenfreude

    That said, we like Jews and Jews like us, make what you will out of that.

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  83. DVN said: How can Jews be triumphalist when they are assimilating in America and Europe at light speed?

    Hunsdon said: it's our foreign policy in relation to the FSU I described as triumphalist, and our foreign policy is disproportionately driven by Jews. (As I've said in the past, Jews would have to be superhuman not to carry a grudge against Slavic Europe, and they ain't Superman.)

    DVN said: Israel made an error in judgement by helping these criminals. It should have shown the same resolve and character when they refused Meyer Lansky's application for aliyah.

    Hunsdon said: Word. Then again, most of my complaints aren't about Israel per se, but (and here particularly in the context of foreign affairs) about American Jews who influence foreign policy in ways that favor Israel, then clutch their skirts and shriek when someone points this out.

    DVN: I dont see how you concluded that I am defending Rich and those other glorified theieves. The Snowden fiasco may well be Russia's revenge.

    Hunsdon said: They were aided and abetted by Summers, Sachs, Schliefer, et al. And these guys got, and still get, a pass on it.

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  84. "...Jews would have to be superhuman not to carry a grudge against Slavic Europe..."

    Because Slavic people migrated to Israel to oppress Jews for profit?

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  85. and not very good ones I might add Svigor

    You didn't even like the nose part? *Sobs*

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  86. "Dr Van Nostrand said...

    That said, we like Jews and Jews like us, make what you will out of that."

    I used to like Indians, until a lot of them started emigrating to America, and acting like they were entitled to something. Now.....not so much.

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  87. Dr Van Nostrand6/29/13, 4:57 AM


    I used to like Indians, until a lot of them started emigrating to America, and acting like they were entitled to something. Now.....not so much."

    You and me both

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  88. How much did Jeffrey Sachs reap from the rape of Russia? It must have been a bundle judging from his current insufferable "savior of Africa" part he is playing in American public life.

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  89. Nothing worse than a botched link:

    Hell, they don't even like themselves.

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  90. >> Will you work with us? In exchange for militarily and monetarily supporting Jewish supremacy in Israel will you support our supremacy in America?

    I believe you will not be able to quote a Hebrew-language publication nor speech, which opposes your supremacy in America.

    There's an magazine published in LA in Hebrew; "Anachnu b'America". ("We are in America").

    Hebrew isn't as difficult to learn to read as you might fear - I urge to you to gain basic proficiency and read the mag. And then you can read Israeli newspapers on the Internet.

    all those who claim to be concerned about us "Scots-Irish"..... if they really were, they'd be learning to read Hebrew so as to strengthen their defenses.

    Curiously, they never do. One is reminded of the un-washed Islamist masses in Egypt - who, having chased all the Jews out several decades ago - are now reduced to doing murderous pogroms against the Coptic Christians (who are the actual indigenous population of the land!)

    Believe me, if I was afraid of the (say for example) Filipinos becoming an parasitic presence in the midst of my country, my ethnos - I'd learn Tagalog - right quick.

    PS: American Jews are merely our distant distant cousins. They are not Hebrew people. As far as I'm concerned, you may herd them into gas chambers.

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  91. Same as it ever was. Whether the looting or Russia or the Savings and Loan scandal, the Opium Trade or the Slave Trade, mining silver and gold in the Spanish Main or the Medieval luxury trade: capital is the accumulated crime and sacrifice of centuries, plus interest. (It's the plus interest part by the way that distinguishes the West from all the other civilizations in history. They squandered their ill-gotten gains in unproductive ways.)

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