Disgraced and Vilified, Indonesia’s Ex-Dictator Suharto Dies Aged 86
January 28th, 2008I’m surprised Suharto’s likeness hasn’t already been added to Mt. Rushmore.
Via: The Canadian Free Press:
Former Indonesian president Suharto, a Cold War ally of the United States whose brutal military regime killed hundreds of thousands of left-wing political opponents, died Sunday. He was 86.
Although he oversaw some of the worst bloodshed of the 20th century, Suharto is credited with developing the economy and will be buried with the highest state honours Monday at the family mausoleum.
President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and others from the country’s political elite prayed over his body. Yudhoyono declared a week of national mourning and called on Indonesians “to pay their last respects to one of Indonesia’s best sons.”
Suharto loyalists, who run the courts, called for forgiveness and a clearing of his name. But survivors want those responsible for atrocities to be held accountable.
“I cannot understand why I have to forgive Suharto because he never admitted his mistakes,” said Putu Oka Sukanta, who spent a decade in prison because of his left-wing sympathies.
Suharto was finally toppled by mass street protests in 1998 at the peak of the 1997-1998 Asian financial crisis.
His departure from office opened the way for democracy in this predominantly Muslim country of 235 million people, and he withdrew from public life, rarely venturing from his comfortable Jakarta villa.
Suharto ruled with a totalitarian dominance that saw soldiers stationed in every village, instilling a deep fear of authority across this Southeast Asian archipelago that stretches across more than 4,800 kilometres.
Since being forced from power, Suharto had been in and out of hospitals after strokes caused brain damage and impaired his speech. He died of multiple-organ failure after more than three weeks on life support at a hospital in the capital, Jakarta.
Poor health – and continuing corruption, critics charge – kept him from court after he was chased from office.
The bulk of killings occurred in 1965-1966 when alleged communists were rounded up and slain during his rise to power. Estimates for the death toll range from a government figure of 78,000 to one million cited by U.S. historians Barbara Harff and Ted Robert Gurr, who have published books on Indonesia’s history.
Over the next three decades, a further 300,000 people were killed, disappeared or starved in the independence-minded regions of East Timor, Aceh and Papua, human rights groups and the United Nations say.
Suharto’s five successors as head of state all vowed to end the graft that took root under his rule, yet it remains endemic at all levels of Indonesian society.
With the court system paralyzed by corruption, the country has not confronted its bloody past. Rather than put on trial those accused of mass murder and multibillion-dollar theft, some members of the political elite consistently called for charges against Suharto to be dropped on humanitarian grounds.
Some noted Suharto also oversaw decades of economic expansion that made Indonesia the envy of the developing world. Today, nearly a quarter of Indonesians live in poverty, and many long for the Suharto era’s stability, when fuel and rice were affordable.
On Sunday, hundreds of mourners – some weeping – flocked to the family home in downtown Jakarta.
“I felt crushed when I heard he had died. We have lost a great man,” said Mamiarti, 43, a housekeeper. “It used to be easy to find jobs. Now it is hard.”
But critics say Suharto squandered Indonesia’s vast natural resources of oil, timber and gold, siphoning the country’s wealth to benefit his cronies, foreign corporations and family like a mafia don.
Jeffrey Winters, associate professor of political economy at Northwestern University, said the graft effectively robbed “Indonesia of some of the most golden decades, and its best opportunity to move from a poor to a middle class country.”
“When Indonesia does finally go back and redo history, (its people) will realize that Suharto is responsible for some of the worst crimes against humanity in the 20th century,” Winters said.
Those who profited from Suharto’s rule made sure he was never portrayed in a harsh light at home, Winters said, so even though he was an “iron-fisted, brutal, cold-blooded dictator,” he was able to stay in his native country.
Like many Indonesians, Suharto used only one name. He was born on June 8, 1921, to a family of rice farmers in the village of Godean in the dominant Indonesian province of Central Java.
When Indonesia gained independence from the Dutch in 1949, Suharto quickly rose through the ranks of the military to become a staff officer.
His career nearly foundered in the late 1950s, when the army’s then-commander, Gen. Abdul Haris Nasution, accused him of corruption in awarding army contracts.
Absolute power came in September 1965 when the army’s six top generals were murdered under mysterious circumstances, and their bodies dumped in an abandoned well in an apparent coup attempt against Sukarno, Indonesia’s founding father who helped win independence from the Dutch. Suharto, next in line for command, quickly asserted authority over the armed forces.
What followed was a countrywide purge of suspected leftists, a campaign that stood as the region’s bloodiest event since the Second World War until the Khmer Rouge established its gruesome regime in Cambodia a decade later.
Over the next year, Suharto eased out Sukarno, who died under house arrest in 1970. The legislature rubber-stamped Suharto’s presidency and he was re-elected unopposed six times.
During the Cold War, Suharto was considered a reliable friend of Washington, which did not oppose his violent occupation of Papua in 1969 and the bloody 1974 invasion of East Timor. The latter, a former Portuguese colony, became Asia’s youngest country with a UN-sponsored plebiscite in 1999.
Even Suharto’s critics agree his hardline policies kept a lid on Indonesia’s extremists and held together the ethnically diverse and geographically vast country. He jailed without trial hundreds of suspected Islamic militants, some of whom later carried out deadly suicide bombings with the al-Qaida-linked terror network Jemaah Islamiyah after the attacks on the United States of Sept. 11, 2001.
Meanwhile, the ruling clique that formed around Suharto – nicknamed the “Berkeley mafia” after the U.S. school they attended, the University of California, Berkeley – transformed Indonesia’s economy and attracted billions of dollars in foreign investment.
But the government also became notorious for unfettered nepotism, and Indonesia was regularly ranked as one of the world’s most corrupt countries as Suharto’s inner circle amassed fabulous wealth.
Even today, Suharto’s children and aging associates have considerable sway over the country’s business, politics and courts. Efforts to recover the money have been fruitless.
Suharto’s wife of 49 years, Indonesian royal Siti Hartinah, died in 1996. The couple had three sons and three daughters.
Margaret Thatcher Told Navy to Raid Swedish Coast
January 27th, 2008Via: Times Online:
MARGARET THATCHER ordered the Royal Navy to land Special Boat Service (SBS) frogmen on the coast of Sweden from British submarines pretending to be Soviet vessels, a new book has claimed.
The deception involved numerous incursions by British forces into Swedish territorial waters in the 1980s and early 1990s, designed to heighten the impression around the world of the Soviet Union as an aggressive superpower.
Sometimes the boats landed commandos, but often their job was to fool the Swedes by mimicking the sonar signals given off by the Soviet vessels that stalked the same waters.
The Swedish government, neutral in the cold war, is not believed to have known about the deceptions, which were carried out by the British and American navies.
A Swedish parliamentary inquiry noted evidence found on the seabed of submarine “midgets with bottom-crawling capacity of a hitherto unknown character”.
The cold war under the Baltic is detailed in a book by Ola Tunander, research professor at the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo.
Tunander writes that there were more than 4,000 reported detections of foreign submarines in Swedish waters in 1982-92. The West claimed the vessels were all Soviet, probing the country’s defences. Tunander believes many were part of a CIA-run operation by Britain and America that continued until the collapse of the Soviet Union.
“A lot of cold war intelligence operations were failures, but this one was a real success,” Tunander said.
He reached his conclusions after speaking to former Royal Navy submariners and CIA officials. One British naval captain told him: “Margaret Thatcher signed approval for every single operation.”
One of the boats used was HMS Orpheus, a submarine kitted out for SBS operations.
Tunander said he had once sat next to a British admiral at dinner and questioned him about the operation. He replied that it was “none of my business”, Tunander said. “The admiral then added jokingly, ‘Don’t people fall under buses sometimes?’ ” This weekend Sir Keith Speed, navy minister from 1979 to 1981, was asked if the missions had happened. He replied, “Yes,” but added: “I cannot say any more as I am bound by the Official Secrets Act until the day I die.”
Wall Street Journal Agrees to Print Full-Page Ad from GATA
January 27th, 2008Via: GATA:
This month GATA will place a full-page advertisement in The Wall Street Journal calling attention to the international central bank scheme to suppress the price of gold and to GATA’s conference in Washington in April.
The ad was devised with great care by GATA’s Board of Directors over the last several weeks and The Wall Street Journal today confirmed to GATA that it will publish the ad as submitted. In the belief that this ad can strike a profound blow against the rigging of the gold market and all related markets, GATA has cobbled together assets valued at the more than quarter-million dollars to be charged by the newspaper for printing the ad and expects to convert them to U.S. dollars and make payment to the newspaper next week.
You can see the advertisement here:
http://www.gata.org/files/GATA-AD-01-14-2008.pdf
Please distribute the ad to anyone who might be interested in it.
Research Credit: Scott, PH
Cryptogon Readers Send Contributions
January 27th, 2008Pookie sent $77. TM sent $28.50. Thank you.
Technical Analysis: Books and Tools
January 27th, 2008WARNING: This is not a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any financial instrument.
In the wake of a pretty good live call on gold, several emails came in that were related to technical analysis. How did I learn technical analysis? What tools do I use? What books do I recommend?
Before continuing, I want to clarify something: As of right now, I’m not using any set of indicators, tools or techniques that actually work in a statistically significant way. As far as I can tell, I’m not doing anything that would hold up against rigorous back testing. My success in the market is, unfortunately, akin to a winning streak at a black jack table. While it’s nice to be winning, I’m only playing with what I can afford to lose, which is not much. (Actually, working systems for black jack are well known. Casinos simply won’t let you get away with implementing them. See: The classic, Beat the Dealer: A Winning Strategy for the Game of Twenty-One by Edward O. Thorp, and more recently, Fortune’s Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street by William Poundstone.)
The tone of some of the emails I’m reading leads me to believe that some of you are getting the wrong idea about my capabilities. One person even asked me to explain my “system” in greater detail.
Gather round’, folks: I don’t have a system.
While profitable systems do exist, I don’t have one. After 12 years of doing this, on and off, I wish I could report otherwise, but I can’t. When you see me refer to my technical analysis as: trying to eat soup with a knife, my Magic 8-Ball, flinging chicken entrails against the wall and Cryptogon’s Reckless Speculation and Pachinko Lounge, there’s a damn good reason for all of that skepticism:
I am trying to make sense out of phenomena—that I have no chance of understanding—by applying mathematical and interpretive models of dubious statistical value.
That is the brutal reality of technical analysis.
The fact that I’ve been right so often might seem impressive, but I’ve seen red come up 33 times in a row on roulette. (See: Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.)
That’s why I harp on endlessly about diversification and risk management. Put too many eggs in too few baskets and rely too heavily on technical analysis and you’re almost certainly going to get wiped out, or wind up walking funny. The point is, you don’t need to have a statistically valid system in order to be a decent trader as long as you manage risk properly and diversify.
Now, none of my cynicism about my own failure to devise a working system should discourage any of you for looking for something that works! The answer is out there. People have working systems. I’d say that, given enough time with the tools, there’s a solid 53% chance that I could do it! HA.
The analytical tools available to the technician are like a Lego set with about 10 billion pieces. There are endless approaches to take. I find it fun and interesting to work on this challenging puzzle. Indeed, I see it as an adult version of Legos. I’d say that if you’re interested and have a playful attitude about it, go for it. Learn the basics of technical analysis and start building stuff with the tools. I strongly encourage backtesting, so you’ll get an idea of whether or not your just pissing into the wind, or if you actually have something. (See: Evidence-Based Technical Analysis: Applying the Scientific Method and Statistical Inference to Trading Signals by David R Aronson.)
On the other hand, if you’re looking to make a quick and easy buck, you’re in for the shock of your life if you think trading presents that opportunity. That’s simply not the case.
A note on getting lost in the machine: Watch Pi and A Beautiful Mind. If your research along these lines starts to resemble what you see in either of those films, you’ve got a problem. For me, part of keeping the work “playful” is: A) Knowing that I don’t need it to succeed; and B) accepting the strong possibility that I simply might not be able to accomplish what I’m trying to do.
Ok, books and tools.
Books on Technical Analysis
I learned the basics of technical analysis by reading, Technical Analysis of the Financial Markets: A Comprehensive Guide to Trading Methods and Applications by John J. Murphy. If there’s a better book on technical analysis, I don’t know about it.
The Encyclopedia Of Technical Market Indicators, by Robert W. Colby is also very good. I don’t own it, but I’ve looked through it several times.
Options
A few people are asking me for help with options. I encourage you to learn more about options, as they can be useful and rewarding. It would, however, be irresponsible of me to try to explain options strategies. I’ve been familiar with how options worked for years, in general, but I only started using them in my own trading recently, and as a compliment to the technical analysis I was already doing on stocks. I’m encouraged by the possibilities. Truth be known: I use options mainly for speculation because I’m not willing to allocate the capital necessary to buy or short stocks at face value.
Books on options:
Options Made Easy: Your Guide to Profitable Trading by Guy Cohen
The Bible of Options Strategies: The Definitive Guide for Practical Trading Strategies by Guy Cohen (Exhaustive reference on strategies.)
The Options Playbook by Brian Overby (Quick reference on strategies, but I could do without the humor.)
Tools
—TradeStation
The best tool available to the technician is TradeStation. I have used it in the past and it is the ultimate platform.
TradeStation is the default environment for the development and backtesting of custom strategies and automated trading systems. If you work intraday setups I don’t even know of anything that compares to their radar screen. If you can think it up, TradeStation can do it. (Whether or not you can do the programming is another issue.)
—MultiCharts
MultiCharts is a bargain. It has TradeStation-like powers, but you can own the software outright for $899. It includes an EasyLanguage interpreter, so you can program custom indicators and strategies, just like in TradeStation. (It doesn’t have a TradeStation Radar-like system, though.) I used the MultiCharts demo for a month and it was excellent. I shelled out for MCFXPro (a Forex only version of MultiCharts) when I was investigating automated Forex systems recently. I was impressed. It’s not TradeStation, but when you look at the costs involved, MultiCharts offers a lot of value for the money.
I happen to be an affiliate with TS Support, the company that sells MultiCharts and MCFXPro. I decided not to try to promote the products because they are so arcane. But this is that type of post. So… If you decide to purchase or lease any of their products and would like me to get a commission, these are the links to use:
MultiCharts Semiannual License
MCFX Basic – monthly lease plan
—Stochcharts.com
Since I’m not working on stocks intraday anymore, I’ve been getting away with using stockcharts.com. Of course, once you’ve used a professional platform, having to use a web based tool flat out sucks. But the price is right… It’s free.
The stock and etf charts that I’ve been posting on Cryptogon recently have been from stockcharts.com. If you know of a better source for free and good charts, send it over. Also, if you know of a decent chart application that doesn’t cost a fortune, send that over too. I’d buy MultiCharts, but I’m too cheap.
—Netdania’s FinanceChart
Netdania’s FinanceChart is where I get all of my realtime gold and Forex charts. It is remarkably good for a tool that’s free to use.
—Stockfetcher
Wow, Stockfetcher is a great screening tool for stocks! They offer strategy backtesting too. It’s end of day data only, but that’s ok for what I’m doing. I signed up for their premium service, which allows longer backtesting periods. I’m getting up to my old voodoo antics of bottom fishing and this tool is perfect.
The Stockfetcher language is really, really simple and there are lots of examples for you to use in your own screens. Again, this isn’t TradeStation, but the price is definitely right.
—Yahoo Finance
I mostly use Yahoo Finance to look at the global stock indices, but I also use it to look up company information.
Well, I hope that answers some of your questions along these lines.
Court Says You Can Copyright A Cease-And-Desist Letter
January 26th, 2008Via: TechDirt:
Back in October, we wrote about a law firm that was claiming a copyright on the cease-and-desist letters it sent out, and insisting that it was a violation to repost them. It’s long been believed that cease-and-desist letters that have no new creative expression and are merely boilerplates are likely not covered by copyright. On top of that, preventing someone from copying a cease-and-desist letter or posting it on their own website seems like a pretty severe First Amendment violation. The group Public Citizen hit back against this law firm’s claims, but surprisingly, a judge has now agreed that you can copyright cease-and-desist letters. The news was announced in a press release by the lawyer in question, who claims this means he can now sue anytime someone posts one of his cease-and-desist letters. He also goes on to slam those who believe free speech means being able to talk about the fact that a company is bullying them:
“The publication of cease and desist letters is an easy way for scofflaws to generate online ‘mobosphere’ support for illegal activity and, until today, many businesses have been hesitant to take action to address some of the lawlessness online because of possible retaliation and attacks.”
Stop Paying Mortgage, Live in House for Free While Bank Forecloses: Company Offers Screwed Home Buyers “Walk Away Kit”
January 26th, 2008“Uncontrolled words are consistently more dangerous to established authority than armed forces.”
—John Ralston Saul, Voltaire’s Bastards
Via: You Walk Away:
If you are facing or considering foreclosure, you’re not alone.
—Are you stressed out about your mortgage payments?
—Do you have little or no equity in your home?
—Have you had trouble trying to sell your house?
—Is your home sinking under the waves of the real estate crash?
—What if you could live payment free for up to 8 months or more and walk away without owing a penny?
Unshackle yourself today from a losing investment and use our proven method to Walk Away.
Research Credit: Brad
New Hampshire Primary — Sham Chain of Custody
January 26th, 2008I really, really promise: No more election nonsense posts, but this one is a keeper.
Via: Black Box Voting:
Immigration Officials Detaining, Deporting American Citizens
January 26th, 2008Over Christmas, I was speaking with Becky’s uncle, who lives in Auckland. He said, “The guy who mows my lawn is an American. He considers himself to be a political refugee. He’s so grateful to be here.”
Of course, you can imagine my shock…
Via: McClatchy:
Thomas Warziniack was born in Minnesota and grew up in Georgia, but immigration authorities pronounced him an illegal immigrant from Russia.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement has held Warziniack for weeks in an Arizona detention facility with the aim of deporting him to a country he’s never seen. His jailers shrugged off Warziniack’s claims that he was an American citizen, even though they could have retrieved his Minnesota birth certificate in minutes and even though a Colorado court had concluded that he was a U.S. citizen a year before it shipped him to Arizona.
On Thursday, Warziniack finally became a free man. Immigration officials released him after his family, who learned about his predicament from McClatchy, produced a birth certificate and after a U.S. senator demanded his release.
“The immigration agents told me they never make mistakes,” Warziniack said in an earlier phone interview from jail. “All I know is that somebody dropped the ball.”
The story of how immigration officials decided that a small-town drifter with a Southern accent was an illegal Russian immigrant illustrates how the federal government mistakenly detains and sometimes deports American citizens.
U.S. citizens who are mistakenly jailed by immigration authorities can get caught up in a nightmarish bureaucratic tangle in which they’re simply not believed.
An unpublished study by the Vera Institute of Justice, a New York nonprofit organization, in 2006 identified 125 people in immigration detention centers across the nation who immigration lawyers believed had valid U.S. citizenship claims.
Research Credit: PD
U.S. Slides Into Dangerous 1930s ‘Liquidity Trap’
January 26th, 2008Via: Telegraph:
The United States is sliding towards a dangerous 1930s-style “liquidity trap” that cannot easily be stopped by drastic cuts in interest rates, Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz has warned.
“The biggest fear is that long-term bond rates won’t come down in line with short-term rates. We’ll have the reverse of what we’ve seen in recent years, and that is what is frightening the markets,” he told the Daily Telegraph, while trudging through ice and snow in Davos.
“The mechanism of monetary policy is ineffective in these circumstances. I’m not saying it won’t work at all: it will help the banking system but the credit squeeze is going to go on because nobody trusts anybody else. The Fed is pushing on a string,” he said.
The grim comments came as markets continued to suffer wild gyrations, reacting to every sign of contagion spreading to Europe, Asia, and emerging markets.
Wall Street has begun to stabilize on talk of a rescue for the embattled bond insurers, MBIA and Ambac.
The Fed’s 75 basis point rate cut allows the banks to replenish their balance sheet by borrowing at short-term rates and lending longer term, playing the credit ‘carry trade’, hence the 9pc rise in the US financials index yesterday. But confidence remains fragile.
Professor Stiglitz, former chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said it takes far too long for monetary policy to work its magic. This will not gain much traction in the midst of a housing crash.
“People have been drawing home equity out of the houses at a rate of $700bn or $800bn a year. It’s been a huge boost to consumption, but that game is now up. House prices are going to continue falling, and lower rates won’t stop that this point,” he said.
“As a Keynesian, I’d say the biggest back for the buck in terms of immediate stimulus would be unemployment assistance and tax rebates for the poor. That will feed through quickly, but set against the magnitude of the problem, even a fiscal stimulus package of $150bn is not going to be enough,” he said
“The distress is going to be very severe. Around 2m people have lost all their savings,” he did.
Research Credit: PD
