Why I am a Zionist

Land area Gaza strip: 139 square miles

Population Gaza Strip: 1.8 million

13,000 people per square Gaza mile

 Land area Singapore: 276 square miles

Population Singapore: 5.3 million

19,202 people per square Singapore mile

Chief occupation of Gazans; Hating Jews, shooting rockets at Jews

Chief occupation of Singaporeans: trade, business

GDP per capita Gaza: $6,100

GDP per capita Yemen: $2,250

GDP per capita Singapore: $51,709

I had sent this email to Gerald Celente, who considers himself a courageous hero because he's jumped on the anti-Zionist bandwagon.

Much of the anti-Israel narrative is based on the lie that the Israeli land was stolen from Palestinians.  This link offers an alternative perspective.  The land was a barren hellhole, but the Jews bought it from large Arab landowners.  The anti-Israel narrative also omits half of Israeli Jews’ being Sephardic or Mizrahi, i.e., they come from other Arab countries.  In Arab countries Jews are routinely brutalized. People like Gerald Celente omit that history.  The only remaining Middle East country with Jews is Iran, with about 15,000.  Wikipedia says this:

Thirteen Jews have been executed in Iran since the Islamic revolution, most of them for alleged connections to Israel. Among them, one of the most prominent Jews of Iran in the 1970s, Habib Elghanian who was the head of the Iranian Jewish community was executed by a firing squad by the Islamic government shortly after the Islamic Revolution of 1979 on the charge having had contact with Israel, among others. In May 1998, Jewish businessman Ruhollah Kadkhodah-Zadeh was hanged in prison without a public charge or legal proceeding, apparently for assisting Jews to emigrate.^[68] 

Since 1979 about 70-80,000 Jews have left Iran, presumably mostly for Israel.  In the other Arab countries conditions are worse. In Yemen Jews must pay a jizya, a special tax on non-Muslims. I haven’t heard Celente talking about the Yemini jizya; apparently he approves. Almost all Yemini Jews have left for Israel. Did the Yemini Jews steal the Palestinians' land, or did Yemen still the Jews’ land?  The same can be said about the 75,000 Jews who’ve left Iran.  I haven’t heard Celente or his friends comment on them.

Christians and Jews are not allowed to be citizens of Saudi Arabia.  According to Wikipedia

There is virtually no Jewish activity in Saudi Arabia in the beginning of the 21st century. Jewish (as well as Christian and other non-Muslim) religious services are prohibited from being held on Saudi Arabian soil.^[12] When American military personnel were stationed in Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War, permission for small Christian worship services was eventually granted, but Jewish services were only permitted on US warships. Yet, Celente and his friends do not protest American arm sales to Saudi Arabia (from Wikipedia):

On October 20, 2010, U.S. State Department notified Congress of its intention to make the biggest arms sale in American history - an estimated $60.5 billion purchase by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The package represents a considerable improvement in the offensive capability of the Saudi armed forces.

Jews have also fled Syria.  According to Wikipedia, “Syrian Jews derive their origin from two groups: those who inhabited Syria from early times and the Sephardim who fled to Syria after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain (1492 AD).  There were large communities in Aleppo, Damascus, and Qamishli for centuries. In the early twentieth century a large percentage of Syrian Jews emigrated to the U.S., Central and South America and Israel. Today only a few Jews still live in Syria. The largest Syrian-Jewish community is located in Israel, and is estimated at 80,000.”  Much of this immigration has to do with ill treatment. Again, I haven’t heard  protests about this from Celente or the anti-Semites-masquerading-as-anti-Zionists about this treatment:

The Syrian government passed a number of restrictive laws against the Jewish minority. In 1948, the government banned the sale of Jewish property. In 1953, all Jewish bank accounts were frozen. Jewish property was confiscated, and Jewish homes which had been taken from their owners were used to house Palestinian refugees.^[46]

Again, did Syria steal Zionists’ land, or did Zionists steal Palestinians’ land?  My own ancestors came from various places, including the Middle East and Central Asia but predominantly from Europe.  During the postwar period Poles were literally murdering Jews in the street. Hannah Arendt documents this in Eichmann in Jerusalem.  Perhaps out of concern for Celente’s moral opinions the few Jews remaining in Poland should have remained there and been murdered.  Maybe people with morals like that don’t need to be taken seriously.

I too find the warfare and killing of Palestinian children troubling.  At the same time, if someone shot rockets at my home, I don’t think I’d be charitable.  Like Celente, I’ve lived my whole life in a safe environment. 

The Fed Is Responsible for US Jobs Exiting to China

Gerald Celente of Trends Journal and Trends Research Institute just e-mailed with a special report about the exodus of jobs to China.  Celente takes a protectionist tack, with which I profoundly disagree. He writes:

"Libertarians and “free market” economists praise Wal-Mart’s low prices achieved by offshoring, but these prices do not include the costs of the decimated state and local tax bases that are destroying American cities, the costs of the high unemployment and the personal depression, crime, and income support programs. These and other costs are expenses imposed on third parties by the movement of American jobs abroad in order to maximize profits...



"Free trade works, if it works at all, only when capital and technology remain in the domestic economy and find their best use or comparative advantage. Offshoring is the contradiction of free trade. It is the pursuit of lowest factor cost and absolute advantage."


The basic statement of free trade, comparative advantage, is still valid.  There is no reason for an ongoing exodus of jobs under a free market system where there is no paper money system to artificially inflate the dollar at the expense of workers.  This has occurred since 1913, especially since 1970.

The dollar is used as a reserve currency around the world, not just in China. Its reserve currency status elevates its value. There are $10 overseas for every dollar here, with central banks around the world holding trillions in treasury bonds.  If the foreign dollar holdings were to be exchanged and the treasury bonds sold, as happens with bubbles, the dollar would be worth less than its current value. This happened to the pound in the early 20^th century.  Americans would be poorer, but manufacturing would return here. A Faustian bargain.

Under a libertarian system, a metallic standard, overseas investment would depreciate the dollar, eventually forcing overseas investors to repatriate their investments.  The flow of gold or silver would pose a market-based mechanism to limit expatriation of investment. This has not happened in our state-dominated economy because of the paper money system and the limited ability of planners like Bernanke and Geithner to function independently of special interest pressure.  Such pressure would not evaporate under a tighter degree of regulation. New forms of regulatory privilege would emerge. The current system is the result of government intervention and Progressivism.  When the Sherman Anti-trust Act was passed in 1890 and the Fed established in 1913 firms were far smaller, there was less monopoly, there was no possibility of unlimited expatriation of capital, the average real wage was rising (unlike since 1970s, when the gold standard was removed) and although there had been depressions in the Gilded Age, they were milder and briefer than the post-Fed depressions and recessions in 1920, 1930, 1974, 1978 and today.  Where does the investment capital to invest overseas come from? The Fed. It is not a libertarian free market phenomenon.

Celente's suggestion, to impose regulatory limits on where and how capital is deployed, would create impediments to investment and cause a stock market crash because of increased riskiness and regulatory controls. Small as well as large investors would be hurt.  This is what occurred in the early 1930s, with the Smoot Hawley tariff contributing to the Depression. 

Creating paper money with one hand and then imposing regulatory controls with the other disrupts expectations. Investment capital flees. New irrational bubbles form. Rather than expand firms’ investment here, investors would find overseas firms in which to invest.  Many US firms would leave the country. Why stay here? The wonderfully educated work force? A stable government? Low taxes? I don’t think so. Voluntaristic solutions work better than state compulsion by planners with human hence limited mental capacities and motivations.  

Letter to Gerald Celente

Gerald Celente just e-mailed his summer issue of Trends Research Journal. It is full of valuable information that offers an imaginative alternative to the legacy media, and I highly recommend it. In this issue Celente advocates direct democracy, a policy that would be a serious error. I respond in the following e-mail:

Thanks for your recent issue. I agree with much of it but not  with your claim that direct democracy will  end America’s economic and political decline.  Your Swiss example is intriguing, especially with respect to Switzerland’s decentralization, but direct democracy is inapplicable to America because the size, culture, community, and  incentives differ.  You note that a Swiss canton can be as small as 14,000, but the average American congressional district is  about 735,000.  Switzerland’s population is less than New York City’s.   

Today’s problems result from pathological incentives--privileged groups’ benefits from lobbying outweigh their costs.  Included in lobbying are the same groups’ control of information, their ownership of the mass media, and their influence in the education system.  Direct democracy won’t change the incentive structure that benefits special interests and inhibits the public’s ability to think rationally about events. Your own subscription fee of hundreds of dollars, which is beyond most people’s ability to pay, evidences the inability of the public to obtain good information. 

Thus, in a direct democracy special interests will continue to influence politicians; the information needed for the public to make intelligent decisions about complex issues will be bounded by bad and ideologically driven education and Wall Street-influenced media; and, added to the mix will be the gullibility of the public that is easily brought to  an emotional frenzy and lacks information not controlled by the state.  As Madison put it in the Federalist Number 10:

…a pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert result from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths. Theoretic politicians, who have patronized this species of government, have erroneously supposed that by reducing mankind to a perfect equality in their political rights, they would, at the same time, be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions, and their passions.

The current decline in America’s economic and political system began more than a century ago with Progressivism, which introduced the referendum and the recall as part of an overall thrust toward (a) democratization coupled with (b) the installation of expert management of the economy, including the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Reserve Bank.  Regulation reflected the Progressive belief that experts would be free of political pressure while, in areas experts designate,  enhanced democracy would enable the public to express its interests given the structure and options that the experts delineate. The Progressive system has failed—special interests capture experts and mislead the public. The public is not capable of understanding underlying issues, even fairly simple ones like monetary policy.  Environmental issues are complex and I have not met anyone who can explain the details of, for instance, the Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill.  Are you certain that it would not have had perverse effects such as forced evictions of honest home owners?  Hence, policies that harm the average American, such as Keynesian and monetarist economic theories, can be sold through the propaganda of supposed experts that convinces even the most intelligent voters.  Orwell was right about language—freedom is easily painted as slavery and the public cannot figure it out.

Direct democracy will be subject  to greater manipulation than the current system. Rather, a reinvention of republicanism, the less obvious solution that Hamilton and Madison proposed, and a sharp Jeffersonian  limitation of government power across the board are needed. Democracy has failed. Its enhancement will be worse.  

Pakistan Dumps US---Beginning of World War III?

In his recent Trends Journal Gerald Celente and Paul Craig Roberts argue that Obama's recent military adventure in Libya under UN cover is about Chinese oil. That is, the Chinese had invested in oil in eastern Libya, and America is now supporting a military intervention that would wrest oil from the Chinese and potentially put it in the West's hands. Pakistan is allied with China because they share an enemy: India. Both countries have fought wars with India in the past 50 years. The Sino-Indian War was in 1962, and Pakistan fought India in 1965 and 1971.

Today, The Wall Street Journal carried a front page story that Pakistani Prime Minister Yosuf Raza Gilani has told Afghan President Hamid Karzai that he should dump the US. I guess that's a logical move after the billions that we've bestowed on both Pakistan and Afghanistan. According to Newsweek, we have given Pakistan tens of billions of dollars over the past 50 years. We have given Afghanistan in the range of $50 billion including military spending and aid.

In August 2008 Bill and Hillary Clinton spent a weekend at the Emerson Resort, where I work out. Clinton was about to enter the gym, but spotting me (I was there after closing) he called a secret service guy who inspected the gym and asked me some questions. Like Travis Bickle, I'm a suspicious guy. When I went home I asked myself what I would have said to Clinton had we had the chance to talk. I concluded that it would have been to urge him to work against a potential war with China.

Trends Journal is suggesting that the Chinese may be drawn into the Libyan war on Gaddafi's side, and that the Libyan war could erupt into an international conflict over oil. The Pakistani thumb nosing, which occurs just days after Celente released Trends Journal's spring issue, seems to confirm his scenario. Might Pakistan be responding to China in urging Afghanistan to reject the US? Might Libya be connected to this response?

The Federal Reseve Bank Has Driven Innovation to China

I recently subscribed to Gerald Celente's Trends Journal. In the winter issue Celente makes the following point:

Innovation, once the province of the developed West, and especially the USA, is now too “Made in China.” In 2009, the Chinese processed some 600,000 patents, compared to 480,000 in the US. China plans to raise that figure to one million by 2015 and double the number of its patent examiners to 9,000, while currently in the US there are only 6,300 such examiners.

The reason innovation is now made in China is monetary. Under a market-driven monetary regime, as existed prior to 1913, if excessive numbers of manufacturing jobs were to move to China, its currency, the yuan, would rise in price. This would cause demand for Chinese goods to slow. Manufacturing would stop moving there, and move back. But the Federal Reserve Bank has not allowed that to happen. Because the dollar serves as the reserve currency around the world, the Fed has been given carte blanche to inflate the money supply without short-term consequence. This has fueled the federal deficit, consumer debt and real estate and stock speculation on Wall Street. The dollar remains firm despite the Fed's profligate monetary policy because the Chinese and other central banks hold treasury bonds as reserves. It seems cheap to manufacturers to move to China.

Thus, by voting for the Democrats and Republicans, Americans have voted to disemploy themselves. They have voted for politicians who have empowered the Fed to inflate while holding the dollar at excessive levels. Consumers have benefited, but when those consumers put on a hard hat or a white collar they have been harmed. Younger Americans have been increasingly harmed. The post-war generation consumed at the expense of boomers' jobs, and boomers consumed at the expense of gen-x's and gen-y's jobs. One of the offshoots of unlimited monetary expansion has been the expansion of government education programs, which churn out ever greater numbers of unemployed graduates who lack skills necessary to compete.

One of the offshoots of de-industrializing America is loss of innovation. Creativity results from familiarity with processes. Most advances are made by engineers and laborers familiar with specific production processes and problems who attempt to build on the status quo with respect to a particular process. Innovation is particularistic, it is not theoretical. Einstein's science, while broad, imaginative and impressive, has done little for important innovation. Tesla, who lacked theoretical breadth, had an enormous impact on human standards of living. Innovation does not generally come from theory. It comes from creative thinking about specific practice. So if practical activity moves to China, then innovation will move to China as well.

The loss of manufacturing, therefore, has graver implications than loss of jobs. It implies the loss of America's future as the Chinese replace the Americans as the world's innovators. How long will it be after that until the Chinese grow weary of holding treasury bonds that steadily decline in value? The final step in America's turning itself into a Third World nation will occur when the Chinese and other nations sell, and the dollar crashes. Then consumers will find prices increasing just as producers they have been able to find only low-wage retail jobs.

Gerald Celente Sees Major Crash Coming

Mike Marnell, publisher of the Lincoln Eagle in Kingston, NY, forwarded this  Alex Jones interview of Gerald Celente.  Gerald is Mike's friend and lives in Kingston, NY.  He references neighboring Rhinebeck during the talk. I don't agree with Celente on every point (I'm not a fan of Ralph Nader, for instance) but found this interview to be quite interesting.  Maybe Mike can take us out to Le Canard Enchaine.