The Phone Hacking Scandal: PC Makes You Corrupt

The Phone-Hacking scandal involving News Corp's News of the World tabloid, where various celebrities, politicians, and ordinary people (murder victims, slain British soldiers in Afghanistan) had their voicemail hacked generates a lot of media attention on News Corp's rather unsavory practices there. The BBC, Guardian, and the rest of the far-left British establishment (but I repeat myself) has gone into an orgiastic overload regarding the scandal. However, a new editorial by the Wall Street Journal's Holman Jenkins likens it to a British Watergate, and points out the big area of corruption: the Police.


The scandals involving the corrupt and unethical means by which tabloids gain information about celebrity targets has been old news for decades. Donald E. Westlake wrote about tabloid seamy excesses in the 1988 novel Trust Me On This. One of the ways tabloids would gin up scandal and protect themselves, was to pay associates of celebrity targets substantial sums of money to speculate on tape about weird/repelling and patently untrue things about the celebrity. If sued, the tabloid would produce the tape. The major plot-point of the novel was a murder and attempted murders related to a ruthless attempt to generate pictures of a celebrity target that resulted in deaths. That tabloids were ugly and ruthless in generating dubious content about celebrity and politician targets was old news even then, in 1988. If people don't like that, they only needed to stop buying tabloids, or now stop reading their websites. TMZ, Radar Online, X17, and other gossip sites online (the Huffington Post arguably belongs in that category as well) are not going away. Because people LIKE their content, even if most of it is generated by interns with cheap video cameras trolling celebrity hotspots looking to generate confrontations that are newsworthy. [Celebrity publicists have trained most of their clients to say nothing, just smile and wave as they leave.]

Seamy as it is, this gossip stuff sells, and if the public wants it shut down, they need only stop patronizing it. All of these organizations are private, not government run, and depend utterly on the goodwill and patronage of their readers and viewers.

No, the scandalous thing is the corruption of the British police. Long thought of in the US as a sort of homey, unarmed and incorruptible if clueless police force, the British police have been mired in corruption scandals since at least the 1970s. They have also been inept, and totally PC. Indeed the corruption has gone hand in hand with the PC desires of their masters, the British elite.

As Jenkins writes:

But the bigger scandal, as the headlines are starting to reveal, is the police scandal. Even top cops were phone-"blagged" and yet apparently complained to editors about it rather than treating it as a crime.

Had police pursued obvious wrongdoing and jailed a few journalists back in 1999, a lot fewer British citizens would have been victims of privacy invasions. Those who've likened the hacking scandal to Britain's Watergate are onto something. After the Watergate break-in, behavior that had been tolerated, routine and abetted by official agencies became, overnight, untolerated and prosecuted. Remember, it was the FBI's No. 2, blowing a whistle on his own agency, who played "Deep Throat" to the press.

We're also struck at how often the subject of cocaine comes up. Jonathan Rees, the private eye accused of bribing police to get information on behalf of several tabloids, was Scotland Yard's suspect in the unsolved 1987 ax murder of his partner, who was believed about to blow the whistle on cocaine trafficking by police in southeast London. Rees himself subsequently went to jail, along with a corrupt police officer, for planting cocaine on a woman involved in a child custody dispute. Sean Hoare, the late News of the World reporter who blew the whistle on widespread phone hacking at the tabloids, spoke of widespread cocaine usage on tabloid news desks. For what it's worth, we're guessing that drugs will be part of the story before it's over.

Police, routinely helped tabloids and other papers, including the Daily Mirror (not a News Corp paper), the Daily Telegraph (not a News Corp paper), and likely the Guardian and BBC (also not News Corp outfits to put it mildly) obtain information on people in a corrupt manner. Cocaine and other drugs are rumored to be rampant among the police, tabloid reporters, editors, "respectable" papers, politicians, judges, and the entire British elite. As is a corrupt and venal attitude.

The British version of the TV series "Life on Mars" addressed the corruption and lack of PC-ness, with the view that while the corrupt antagonist to the hero might be well, corrupt, he at least got results and was not handcuffed by PC. The Sopranos Tony Soprano, and the Shield's Vic Mackey are similar characters. Audiences across the West are sick of the PC, more so than the corruption. The PC, multi-culti, diversity stuff just means subordination of ordinary White citizens into an eternal groveling position relative to non-Whites, nearly all of whom have nothing but hostility to the White majority, the traditions, and values of the country. [See Luc Besson's "Taken" for a fairly good run-down of this, as well as his "From Paris With Love."]

However, as noted in the film "Taken," the corruption comes with PC. They are part and parcel. France's police forces have always been viewed as corrupt, enforcers for whoever holds the political reins (Vichy and Occupying Nazis, Napoleons I and III, the Bourbons, corrupt Third Republic, Fourth Republic, and Fifth Republic officials). But the British Police until the 1970's retained a reputation for being both efficient and free of corruption. The problem with the British police has been the corrupt nature of their political leaders. Who have demanded adherence to a PC line, which is explicitly anti-Majority, anti-White, anti-culture, anti-Tradition, anti-History, and totally alien to everything about Britain and its culture and its people. So the only people who were promoted, on the ability to adhere to PC and parrot its idiot delusions, were corrupt individuals who had nothing but contempt for Britain and its people and its values.

You cannot have it half-way, or "best of both worlds." If you want sexy men, for women, then you must deal with the death of the nuclear family, and single-motherhood as the norm for almost every family. And the dysfunction that single-motherhood brings, the fragility, the chaos. If you want multiculturalism and "diversity' then you must deal with sexual discrimination, and isolation of menstruating girls at public High schools:

It’s the scene every Friday at the cafeteria of Valley Park Middle School in Toronto. That’s not a private academy, it’s a public school funded by taxpayers. And yet, oddly enough, what’s going on is a prayer service – oh, relax, it’s not Anglican or anything improper like that; it’s Muslim Friday prayers, and the Toronto District School Board says don’t worry, it’s just for convenience: They put the cafeteria at the local imams’ disposal because otherwise the kids would have to troop off to the local mosque and then they’d be late for Lesbian History class or whatever subject is scheduled for Friday afternoon.

The picture is taken from the back of the cafeteria. In the distance are the boys. They’re male, so they get to sit up front at prayers. Behind them are the girls. They’re female, so they have to sit behind the boys because they’re second-class citizens – not in the whole of Canada, not formally, not yet, but in the cafeteria of a middle school run by the Toronto District School Board they most certainly are.

And the third row? The ones with their backs to us in the foreground of the picture? Well, let the Star’s caption writer explain:

At Valley Park Middle School, Muslim students participate in the Friday prayer service. Menstruating girls, at the very back, do not take part.

Oh. As Kathy Shaidle says:

Yep, that’s part of the caption of the Toronto Star photo.

Yes, the country is Canada and the year is 2011.

Just so. Not some exotic photojournalism essay from an upcountry village in Krappistan. But a typical Friday at a middle school in the largest city in Canada. I forget which brand of tampon used to advertise itself with the pitch "Now with new [whatever] you can go horse-riding, water-ski-ing, ballet dancing, whatever you want to do", but perhaps they can just add the tag: "But not participate in Friday prayers at an Ontario public school."

As Steyn notes, local Canadian Muslims are discussing how best to kill homosexuals. Canadian laws forbid religious worship in public schools. But that law is ignored in Toronto, where local schools are 80-90% Muslim. Of course the "real enemy" is traditional culture, values and people. Icky White Beta males, traditional values, the two-parent nuclear family as John McWhorter writes, "A neighborhood where every child had two parents would be a little odd and almost ominous. Except if it were a highly traditional religious community, one would suspect strangely stringent notions regarding compatibility and even sexuality." [Translation: two-parent families are icky and bad, except for say, non-White immigrants who are religious. Those people are OK, they're not "the wrong sort of White people" who need to be annihilated.]

PC is corrupt. You cannot get "halfway corruption" with PC. You get it all. You get a disregard for everything that traditional society teaches is right, and correct, including treatment of women, those not in the majority, individual rights, the historic culture and tradition, and trust. Police rummage through phone records, record calls, spy on people, and sell the information to which ever tabloid or newspaper or media outlet wants it. News of the World or the BBC. The Sun or the Guardian. It does not matter. The corruption engendered by PC never just stops like the fantasy of "Sharia Lite" where you can get off any time. Like Sharia, like Multiculturalism, like PC, like Diversity, it means a corrupt and brutal environment where nobody but the very rich and powerful have any rights. None.

The Guardian and the BBC will surely come to regret their jihad against News Corp. While News Corp is surely guilty, the role the police play in supplying not just News Corp with phone details, but the BBC and the Guardian, who surely used them, is bound to come out. As is the rampant and shared drug use, trafficking, and corruption of a shared, PC-bound elite. Who have nothing but contempt for ordinary people and their values.

What, really, does PC have to offer? Obeisance to the powers-that-be, that is all. Perhaps a few patronage scraps not gobbled up by the main players, thin gruel indeed. For most people, its an obvious lie that is ground in their faces every day. As long as the money lasts to pay enough people off, like the Soviet Union, then the game will continue. But as the money is running out, the game is coming up. The scandals are not just that News Corp. UK papers hacked phones of a murdered 13 year old and British soldiers slain in Afghanistan. It is that the police were selling to all comers, with coke and money and favors and all sorts of corrupt stuff involved, likely all the way up to the top of Labor, Tory, and Liberal Democrats. Along with most of the elite, and the top people at the BBC and Guardian. News Corp's people on the spot, James Murdoch, Rebecca Brooks, and others, all know where the bodies are buried. The shared coke, the favor trading, the police flogging secrets of ordinary people thrust into the news and celebrities alike, all for a price. And who got what to get what, including rival organizations. Like the Boss Tweed Ring, this is not an isolated pattern but a national scandal.

Because PC makes you corrupt. And the price of the corruption is sure to come out. Those in the dock of the media frenzy will drag others right along with them. With the result that the British public will realize their police and elites are a bunch of coked-out corrupt cronies, all connected, and all venal and small.


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Sleazy I-Banks and the End of Nationalism Among Elites

The Wall Street Journal is reporting (link through financialbin, WSJ behind the paywall) in their dead tree July 5th edition, that big Wall Street Investment banks and commodity firms are snapping up metals warehouses. In turn, their business practices are driving up indirectly consumer prices. More evidence of the utter corruption of the elites, and the vast social distance and disconnect between elites and ordinary Americans.


The Journal reports that about 25% of London Metal Exchange stocks of Aluminum, are sitting in Goldman-Sachs and other big Investment bank-controlled warehouses. The total rental income is about $171 million (for all the owners, combined). The warehouses in New Orleans, contain about 59% of LME supplies of zinc, netting the owners a rental income of $70 million. Also in New Orleans, about 25% of LME copper nets annual rental income of about $16 million, and 73% of LME nickel supplies nets owners about $13.4 million.

These warehouses used to be independent, until Investment banks like Goldman-Sachs, and commodities firms like Glencore, bought them up in the past few years. Users of the warehouses like Coca-Cola, complain that they were lured in by cheap rental rates, but when they asked to pull their stocks out, were told they had to wait seven months, in some cases. Goldman releases only 1,500 metric tons a day (the minimum requirement by LME) of their stocks. Obviously a short-term play designed to drive up the prices of metals on the spot market (by restricting supply from warehouses) and possibly on the futures market as well.

Further, critics like can-maker Novelis, and Coca-Cola, charge that the I-banks and big commodities firms are using a "birds eye view" of what clients put in and request to be pulled out, to spot trends and trade off customer information in the commodities markets. You might recall, it was exactly this "trading off the customer's information" that was one of the more damning things to come out of the sub-prime meltdown financial crisis investigations, largely bearing out the charges made by Michael Lewis in "the Big Short" and various other critics. Historically Goldman-Sachs has been suspected of using customers as ways to gather an information advantage, and screw everyone in the market. The preponderance of Goldman-Sachs executives in the first Bush Administration, the Clinton Administration, the Bush II Administration, and the Obama Administration only furthers that accusation.

That accusation seems spot-on with the purchase of the metals warehouses. Formerly a "backwater" the warehouses don't earn much profit. Capital expenses are large (warehouses, guards, security, people to move the metal in and out, contracts with barges and trucking firms, it is no accident these warehouses are located in major ports or on industrial traffic rivers). The expertise in running large warehouses and synergy with what amounts to trading firms are nil. But ... the information to be gathered on what customers are doing with metals (storing them, or asking to take them out) can provide a key edge in trading the metals. With deals like sub-prime a thing of the past, basically Goldman-Sachs is looking for new people to screw over.

The ABCD firms that dominate basic commodity trading (Archer-Daniels Midland, Bunge, Cargill, and Dreyfuss) do so by having a huge network of spotters, counters, and other information/intelligence operatives in places like say, Abidjan, Ivory Coast, counting how much cocoa is actually being loaded into warehouses or shipped abroad. In many cases these networks providing intelligence took decades to construct (and are often highly illegal in the countries they operate in, many of them providing basic economic/commodity information that are state secrets). Agriculture is a tricky business, because sudden weather events can change almost every prediction, and often in the Third World expected harvests come in radically different due to rampant cheating one way or another.

For now, the big I-banks are seeking profits by ... well blatant manipulation of the metals spot and likely futures markets. Naturally this benefits metals producers, basically big mining companies like Xstrata or BHP Billiton. They get higher prices by restricting the supply sitting in warehouses. Of course, eventually the major users of metals will simply build warehouses themselves. And keep their data (what they put in and pull out) as private as possible. But if Coca-Cola or Novelis must build and staff their own warehouses (and nothing of course prevents them from doing so) their overhead becomes larger. Thus the prices they charge the customer in the end becomes higher.

What should have remained a staid, sedate business serving the specialized needs of big metals consumers in the US and elsewhere, has been turned upside down by what amounts to a set of elites with no boundaries or national feelings. Even Gilded Age Robber Barons had some sense of propriety, a shared nationalism that moderated the urge to gouge every last penny out of the average person. Even Standard Oil's John D. Rockefeller had limits:

 In spite of the formation of the trust and its perceived immunity from all competition, by the 1880s Standard Oil had passed its peak of power over the world oil market. Rockefeller finally gave up his dream of controlling all the world’s oil refining, he admitted later, “We realized that public sentiment would be against us if we actually refined all the oil.”

What we can expect is far higher prices, for consumers, in almost every product using metals: every can of soda, every bit of consumer goods containing copper (such as blue jeans with copper rivets or a laptop), or zinc, or nickel, will cost more. Eventually, trust-busting such as brought Standard Oil to heel will be needed. But laws themselves will not be enough. The "smart guys" at Goldman-Sachs will always be searching for a new customer to screw, with the end "screwee" being the average American. The same is true of the other I-banks: JP Morgan, in particular, comes to mind. So too the massive firms like Glencore, incorporated outside the US (and trivia time, formed by a buyout of Marc Rich, yes THAT Marc Rich).

The US has always had people trying to say, corner the silver market. These individuals usually came a cropper because there was always the possibility of new supply over the horizon. Mining companies could mine more silver. Politicians could bust up trusts and force supply onto the market. No one individual no matter how wealthy could stand up to the government that had to act at least sometimes to avoid massive pain on the part of voters. But the problem today has gone far beyond individuals into institutions, with the institutions themselves becoming rotten to the core.

The rot is the result of an elite that fundamentally lacks any identification with, or even understanding, of the ordinary people in the nations in which they live and work. The folks at Goldman-Sachs are not only from all over the world, the ones born in the US feel little loyalty to their fellow citizens. In a word, they lack nationalism. A tie that binds the highest of the elite, the King or the Prime Minister or the President, and the lowly private, janitor, and factory worker.

While an excess of nationalism in its worst form can result in folks goose-stepping down the Champs Elysee, that's akin to saying since food can make some people grossly obese, no one should ever, ever eat anything. That strategy is only viable for supermodels (who have apparently the super power of not eating anything, ever, and existing on cocaine and smokes). For everyone else, eating is essential. So too for nations, nationalism is essential. Like everything good in life, all is well as long as no one goes overboard.

The modern globalized world is very very good at putting some of the smartest people, and some of the most privileged and hereditary privileged people, in powerful groups and letting them run amok in screwing over their ordinary peers in nations powerful and weak alike. Blogger Half Sigma has done outstanding work noting the privileged, rich background of most of the New York Times reporters and editors. The same people essentially make up Goldman-Sachs, or Glencore, or JP Morgan's executives. Plus of course elites from India, China, and other places. Their loyalty is to themselves, their own institutions, and their own hereditary interests. Like mini-royal families in Medieval Europe, they lack even the notion of a nation-state, and national interests, and shared ties with fellow countrymen. They deny even the notion of a country, instead seeing peasants, serfs, a few middling tradesmen, all interchangeable with others in other places. The modern, international corporate world is very good at producing people like this.

Indra Nooyi may be CEO of Pepsico, but how much loyalty does she possess towards Pepsi's American workers? To Americans as a whole? Her career encapsulates the modern elites lack of nationalism. Positions at Johnson and Johnson in India, then a textile firm, then consulting with Boston Consulting Group and strategy positions with Motorola and Asea Brown Boveri. Although a naturalized US Citizen, her main appeal as CEO is her extensive ties to India's elite. I am quite sure Nooyi is a fine person, but Pepsico could not find a more qualified CEO? The results of her leadership have not been good, with Pepsi sliding to #3 among US sodas, trailing both Coke and Diet Coke. Nooyi is quoted as saying she took steps to push "healthy foods" like Quaker Oats and Gatorade and such, and not sell "flavored sugar water." Pepsi has been neglected, lacking promotion compared to Coke, and the stuff Nooyi likes (an elite taste) account for only 20% of the US Pepsico revenues.

PC makes you stupid. So does pushing trans-national elites at a company where most revenues come from US sales. An Indian born Hindu understands US consumer tastes? When her entire career has been from one "strategy" posting to another? Nothing selling, well flavored and colored sugar water? That is what Pepsico is. But the pressure and power of the elites is frightening. [Trivia time, in the CW show "Gossip Girl," one of the characters, herself a "rich girl" plans to get an internship under Nooyi.] Reasoned Sceptic notes that the business press has been light on Nooyi despite her failures to match Coca-Cola because she is both Indian and a woman. Muhtar Kent, Coke's CEO, is of course also foreign born (a Turk) but is a Coke lifer, having started selling Coke out of trucks across the US. If I wanted someone to sell flavored colored sugar water, I'd pick Kent over Nooyi. The former seems to understand (having spent most of his life doing it) how to sell that stuff, and the other doesn't. Both are elites of course, having spoken at Davos (one is always an elite if one speaks at Davos).

Any nation can withstand some corruption and greed on the part of its elites. Those flaws are part of human nature, and can at best be only curbed, not eliminated. But in the end, it is not laws (nearly always evaded in one form or another) that curbs the greed, ambition, and power of the elites. It is, or at least has been since the late 1500s and the rise of the nation-state, nationalism that has curbed the worst excesses. By instilling among even the most greedy, ruthless, and powerful of the elites, a sense that there are lines better left uncrossed. That squeezing every spare penny out of the populace was a bad job, and better go across the ocean and squeeze it out of some other poor person from another country. Nationalism, and nationalism alone, promises a small shelter, perhaps poor, but the only one the ordinary person has got, from greed and cruelty and abuse by the elites.

Goldman-Sachs, JP Morgan, and Glencore will always seek advantage. They will always be looking for an edge. As long as there remain limits to what they will do, limits instilled by national feeling and solidarity, then while not perfect, the situation is tolerable for most people, most of the time. Good enough. But without those internal limits, no laws, no regulatory agency, no "perfect administration by perfect people" (not the least because no human being yet born has been perfect) will suffice. Making the urgent task not regulatory reform but the return of ...

Nationalism.

Only that promises to restrain the otherwise un-alloyed greed and shadiness of institutions run by elites like Goldman-Sachs.
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