Indebted To Lies Plutocracy Is

A vast scandal is unfolding in economics. Its repercussions are horrendous: in conjunction with what i already denounced in “Indebted To Lies” (February 12, 2013), all you read about debt is false. As Paul Krugman puts it cogently in “The Excel Depression“: “Did an Excel coding error destroy the economies of the Western world?”

Krugman is way too nice. There was not just a coding “error”. The deliberate malfeasance I expose below is no error.

(Notice that Krugman seems to be oozing towards admitting that we have (an excel…lent?) depression not just a lesser one; soon he will have to call the unfolding disaster a Greater Depression, just as I do!)

Harvard: We Lie, Therefore We Thrive

Notice the understatement of the Wall Street Journal (“are not as clearly linked“), in their own caption above: there is little relation between growth and debt load. And this, even in the malevolently selected countries of the extremely influential R-R paper (to be trashed below).

Also notice the biased title of the WSJ, which contradicts the essence of what follows it: the WSJ staff knows readers have little time, and, at a glance, will extract from the graph (that they will most probably not carefully examine), that “debt is a burden“. Whereas the graph says the exact opposite: debt is little burden. But the WSJ staff knows what their masters want them to say: in with the austerity, out with the economy, and the People it supports. The WSj staff has to eat and pay rent. Of these little manipulations, little minds are made.

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HARVARD CROOKS LONG GUIDED THE WORLD INTO THE ABYSS:

To destroy plutocracy, one needs to destroy first the Evil League that provides it with respectability.

A famously very connected Harvard graduate and plutocrat, Ernst Sedgwick Hanfstaengl, was one of the early supporters of Hitler. His grandfather had carried Lincoln’s coffin. The Sedgwick family is part of plutocratic central in the USA. To this day (naturally in various forms of acting).

A composer and pianist, ”Putzi” Sedgwick-Hanfstaengl wrote the songs the Nazis used, modifying his own Harvard songs. The scared and wounded Nazi leader took refuge at the home of this very wealthy American, after the failed putsch of Fall 1923. Hitler was in love with Hanfstaengl’s American wife. She prevented Hitler’s suicide, when Bavarian police came to arrest the Nazi “Guide“.

Hanfstaengl was connected by friendship to the Roosevelts, and many other influential plutocrats, themselves connected to everybody who mattered in the USA. Top Nazis came to believe, correctly, that the plutocratically controlled USA would never attack them (and so the Nazis had to declare war to the USA themselves when they found in Moscow that they would lose the war, anyway! When you have got to go, you may as well do so in a blaze of glory!)

This Harvard connection explains why the USA considered the French republic, rather than the Nazi dictatorship, its enemy after 1933. The result was World War Two, Auschwitz, Yalta, the pact with the Wahhabists, etc. As many gifts to those worthies supporting Harvard. Evil: the gift that keeps on giving to plutocrats.

Is the Ivy League resembling the Evil League, more than anything else?

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HARVARD CROOKS STILL GUIDE THE WORLD TO OBLIVION:

I have long insisted that “plutocratic universities” are propaganda outfits for their masters. Harvard University is blatant that way, a cesspool of theoretical justifications for civilizational abuse. For all to see: one of its professors came with the ridiculous “Clash of Civilizations“, an astoundingly uninformed, but highly influential work, a sort of modern justification for “Mein Kampf“. It goes a long way to explain the support of American “neoconservatives” for Fundamentalist Wahhabism.

Larry Summers (Harvard’s president), insisted, as Clinton’s Treasury Sec., that the most valuable investment known to man would be the financial derivative. And the full power of the state was harnessed to make it so. Ever since the economy has become derivative, indeed (size real world economy: 50 trillions, not even a tenth of financial derivatives alone, 80% of it through fiscal havens).

Thanks to the Clintonians (or should I call them Goldmanians?), financiers have been taxed a maximum of 15% ever since.

I am happy to report another deleterious piece of mass mind control from Harvard, with huge consequences. In 2010, Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff (R-R) released a paper, “Growth in a Time of Debt.” Their “main result is that… for countries with public debt over 90 percent of GDP … average (mean) growth rates are several percent lower.” The Harvard guys professed that countries with debt-to-GDP ratios above 90 percent have a slightly negative average growth rate.

The work of the Harvard worthies was used, worldwide, as the main argument to engage austerity programs all over. Just when People had to be put to work, they were told they were furloughed. Never minds if people died from all the austerity (say by arriving at hospitals that had stopped providing care, from lack of funds, as happened in Portugal).

Never mind that the austerity was not applied to the hyper rich and banksters (now both richer than ever).

What else? The Harvard economists cheated. And it was deliberate, because they did so several times, and in different ways.

Indeed, it’s hard to believe that their programming “mistake” was really a mistake, because, independently of that, they also massaged the data in what is obvious academic malfeasance (for example equating 19 years of solid British growth, in spite of debt above 90%, with one year of New Zealand growth, and similar biased monstrosities).

Another tactic: they deliberately misinterpreted facts (when GIs were demobilized, an economic disruption due to this was misinterpreted, by the Harvard profs, as a problem caused by debt; showing they are ignorant, or vicious, or both). 

Second problem? It should have been obvious that the Harvard professors’ work was completely wrong (Paul Krugman wants to “Blame the Pundits Too“; I concur).

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PHILOSOPHICAL METHOD SAYS: OBVIOUSLY WRONG IN ONE CASE IS ENOUGH

To prove a theory is wrong, it’s enough to have ONE spectacular counter-example. Obviously a lot of economies grew tremendously in spite of high debt loads in the past. It happened to the USA after World War Two. Same for most European economies.

This happened in particular during the “thirty glorious years” of unabated economic expansion. Then the ruling theory, all over the West, was that growth in infrastructure, knowledge (CERN, going to the Moon, etc.), social progress (retirement, mandatory vacations), education (GI Bill, free education, all the way to universities, even in California) had primacy over all other economic aims. Inflation and debt were put in the service of these goals.

Thus it was clear that the RR fact finding was actually fact denying.

A further step in proving an old system of thought is wrong is when a simpler, more plausible theory offers itself. It does not matter the details are not in. Not only do we have counter-examples to the debt-is-bad theory, but it’s easy to build a theory of why and when debt is good.

Debt, per se, is not a problem. As long as one can reimburse it. Thus the problem is what the debt is used for. Any debt that comes due, after a very profitable investment it enabled, allows to reimburse it, is obviously an economic positive.

So why the debt phobia? Why is Obama using debt phobia to throw Social Security below the exponential train?

Right now the debt phobia is just a Trojan Horse to divert the debate way from what the plutocrats do not want to talk about. Rising the taxes on those who have most of the money and power.

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STOP FINANCING THE RICH, INVEST IN A SUSTAINABLE ECONOMY FOR THE PEOPLE:

As debt became enormous in World War II, taxes on the wealthy, in the USA, were brought up to 94%. Truman lowered them down a bit, but then president Eisenhower, a republican, brought the top tax margin rate back up to 92.5%. Ike explained he did this to reimburse the debt. Meanwhile Ike launched and financed the Interstate Freeway System. The idea: to build all over the USA a system of autobahn (just like in Germany), free to the public, would improve the economy. That was proved correct a hundred times over.

Raising the tax on the most wealthy to 92.5% would have done wonder. Obama could have financed the construction of highly profitable 250 mph (400 km/h) high speed trains in several place where it would have been profitable to do so (for example the North East and California). Or simply to build power lines out of a few places where cheap sustainable is produced or producible. (In Spring, the North West USA produces potentially more electricity from hydro that it can use and export.)

The case of Europe is similar. Taxes there are higher than in the USA, but the land is poorer and smaller (the population density is  about four times that of the USA, with fewer resources). Thus public spending in Europe ought to be even higher. For example in the matter of energy. The switch to sustainable energy, as it is done today, is proving too costly under existing technology (this is very clear in Britain, where energy costs have doubled since 2006, and in Germany where they threaten to do the same soon).

So considerably more research on new energy should be made by Europe. Instead research and education budgets are coming short of what’s needed.

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GREAT DEPRESSION? PLEASE DEFAULT OUT OF THE OLD STUFF, & BORROW FOR THE FUTURE:

European “conservative” leaders will whine they don’t have the money to sustain their socio-economy. Of course, those neofascists and their plutocratic employers have the money, for themselves. And as far as the states are concerned, to get money, it could not be simpler: borrow. Interest rates are at record lows.

Borrow until what? Until so much economic activity explodes that money is very much in demand, and interest rates perk up. The interest rates will follow the economy. It’s mechanical.

The Netherlands just recognized this, three days ago. Not a coincidence that the great debt paper of the Harvard crooks had just crashed and burned. The Netherlands changed policy on austerity, this week, breaking spectacularly with Germany.

The Low Countries decided to forgo the austerity drive. The center-right government decided to deliberately AUGMENT its deficit by 10%, above what the EMU bylaws require. Instead of bringing their deficit below 3% of GDP (as mandated by European Monetary Union rules), they will keep it at 3.3% by refusing to make some cuts.

On April 5, Portugal’s Constitutional Court said that plans to trim public employee wages and retiree pensions—while not touching the income of other groups—violated the constitutional principle of equality. It also overturned a planned tax on unemployment benefits.

Do you really want to make Europe richer, you the “conservatives” admirers of Wall Street, infeodated to international plutocracy? Crack down on the wealthy. Not just wealthy individuals, but wealthy corporations. In particular, Europe should stop financing the corporations of the USA, the core of the plutocratic system. I am not just talking about having them pay tax (this they don’t do, allowing them to kill and devour small businesses, throughout the West… Although the BRICS do not allow them to play this game!).

On the his last day as president, Hoover signed the “Buy American Act of 1933“. That said that the government of the USA would buy only American. In the service of free trade, it was mandatory that the European governments will keep on buying American. All is fair in exploitation and spoliation. (In case the Europeans could still sell something to the USA, president Reagan (Ray-Gun?) had a reinforcement passed in 1983, the imaginatively, and revealingly named “Buy America Act“.)

That “Buy American Act” outrage to free trade was instituted 80 years ago. Meanwhile American plutocracy has kept on preaching the opposite. The European leaders do not seem to have noticed. Why? Are they paid not to notice, just like Harvard economists Carmen were paid, to bear power into the further destruction of the democracies? Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff were paid, through monies, career, honors, and reputation to claim that one cures depression by starving the economy of money.

Same for their European colleagues: paid through monies, career, honors, and reputation to claim that one cures depression by starving the economy of money, and… not to notice the “Buy America(n)” Acts.

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Patrice Ayme

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Notes: The University of Massachusetts found a more honest version of the Rogoff-Reinhart’s paper would revise the average growth estimate for the highest-debt countries to 2.2%—or a percentage point lower than for countries with a debt-to-GDP ratio of between 60% and 90%.

The head of the German Central Bank used the Rogoff-Reinhart’s claim that countries with more than 90% debt/GDP had negative growth, this pack of lies, as recently as February 2013, to justify curing depression with the hunger strike of austerity.

P/S: A faithful commenter on this site, Dominique Deux, reminded me of  “the “internal error” at the IMF which completely underestimated the negative effects of austerity measures. The IMF has recognized the mistake but its recommendations, and more importantly the policies they supposedly inspire, never wavered. I safely predict this new instance of cooked up “data” will have the same lack of consequences. Dogma trumps reality.”

It’s not just dogma, it’s first impression authored with great authority that imprints the weak minded. weak minded by purpose, of course.

Banksters Saved, Jobs Lost

[Considering my preceding essay on bombing semantics, I was happy to hear Obama pontificating that: "Any time bombs are used to target innocent civilians, it is an act of terror!" Wow, what a change! Does that mean no more drone bombings on civilians? Apparently the White House mood of "targeted killings", "untargeted killings" or "signature strikes" is getting discombobulated by what happened in Boston. More on this White House mystified soul searching, in the future.]

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THEY SAVED THE BANKSTERS, NOT THE JOBS:

Readers who are not fascinated by economists’ debate about the Great Depression of the 1930s (GD30), and  lessons therein, can jump directly to the paragraph: “Banksterism Should Have Been Liquidated”. The plutocrats got their attack dogs, the professional economists and politicians, to blissfully conflate providing a financial system for the People, with sending to the richest of the rich ever more money. Here is the result, a collapse of jobs:

Epic Fail: Banksters Saved, Jobs Lost

Basically, the real economy got starved of money. Notice the tremendous drop under great democrat Obama. All the great economists advising great democrats have to greatly explain this. Obama and his great adviser Larry Summers thoroughly approved the great Goldman Sachs plan to save the Goldman Sachs (and tax free big corporate USA) that had brought the crisis.

Then the banksters’ plan was pursued inexorably. After some hesitation, European parrots duplicated the plan. So here we are.

The red line in the graph above, the EMPLOYMENT RATE, the “Labor Force Participation Rate“, to give it its official title, is now as low as it was at the bottom of the deepest Volcker recession (the worst between GD30 and the present Greater Depression 2008). And we are plunging deeper. Much deeper, trust me.

Why much deeper? Because all those Very Serious People above trust in the great free market god, called Supply-Demand, to pull the economy through. But Supply-Demand is itself an artefact from mind control. So what needs to be controlled is mind control, and only regulations, and debate, democratically imposed, can do this.

Thus the employment situation, disastrous in Europe, is also disastrous in the USA (even though the USA is in full fracking boom, with its resulting, probably ephemeral, abundant oil and gas, that brings back to the USA lots of hydrocarbons dependent industries).

Thatcher and Reagan lowered the taxes of the rich. Now we have gone much further: the rich are outright financed by the poor. (To confuse the victims, that outrageous financing of the rich by the poor is nebulously called “Quantitative easing”, or “The Twist“, or simply “providing liquidity“.)

Far from allowing an exit of the system that caused the 2008 financial crisis, the present strategy, this Transfer of Assets to Rich People (TARP), has only made matters worse for the common economy, and for common people.

The latest twist being “austerity” programs, in Europe or the USA, supposedly to solve an alleged debt problem. But truly austerity makes it easier not to raise taxes on the hyper rich, be it only by changing the debate from the hyper-rich-are-not-taxed-enough to the poor-abuse-the-rich-with-their poverty (the latter was Thatcher’s line of personal business). 

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FOUR MAIN CAUSES FOR THE GREAT DEPRESSION OF THE 1930S:

A superficially seductive, but greatly erroneous, prescription to avoid another Great Depression was publicized by Milton Friedman, and officially embraced by many, including the present Fed Chairman, and its central bank.  Contrarily to what those worthies affect to believe, throwing money at the problem, or, more exactly, at the same exact banking system that caused the problem, is no panacea. Quite the opposite. A misreading of what happened in the 1930s presides to the present disaster. Basically, Friedman said one could run on one leg. He forgot about the other leg, the one that was on the ground before.

Friedman’s “explanation” of the Great Depression of the 1930s (GD30) is that the Central Bank of the USA (“Fed”) did not provide banks with enough “liquidity” (cash). So the banks went bankrupt by the thousands, people lost their savings, business lost access to money, and the economy of the USA faltered. That’s all entirely correct, as part of the picture. Yet:

One can tell lies, just by focusing exclusively on part of the truth.

Lying by ommission is what Milton Friedman did about GD30. His bit of truth is not an “explanation” but a sample of  observed facts. Clearly bankruptcies of the banks was a disaster. All he said above is true, but does not provide enough of a context for revealing the real truth in its full splendor.

In mathematics local minima do not have to be global minima. Same in the theory of theories: local maximal truth does not a global reality make.

Friedman’s quarter truth has come to be viewed by the economic theory in power in the USA as the be all, cure all (panacea).

A few years back, the head of the “Fed” turned to Friedman sitting in the first row and told him, flippantly, for the ages:”You are right, we did it!“. Bernanke meant that the Fed caused the Great Depression, by being too austere.  (Bernanke did his PhD on GD30, showing that some PhD are provided to reinforce the bankster managed banks.)

Let me quote from Friedman (since I quote Hitler occasionally, I may as well quote Friedman):

 ”at the London School of Economics… the dominant view was that the depression was an inevitable result of the prior boom, that it was deepened by the attempts to prevent prices and wages from falling and firms from going bankrupt, that the monetary authorities had brought on the depression by inflationary policies before the crash and had prolonged it by “easy money” policies thereafter; that the only sound policy was to let the depression run its course, bring down money costs, and eliminate weak and unsound firms.”

Paul Krugman says that Friedman viewed starving the banks as evident nonsense, and advocated instead the (THEN) Chicago view that banks should have been rescued, government should have acted to reflate the economy, and moreover, that there was a strong case, as Friedman wrote: “for the use of large and continuous deficit budgets to combat the mass unemployment and deflation of the times.” I agree with all this… However…

However as many have noticed, the doctrine Friedman considered self-evident nonsense is now more or less the official doctrine of the Republican party, just as it was under republican president Hoover, and of the European Union, as it was under the French governments of the 1930s. Meanwhile the views Friedman advocated from Chicago are now, according to American conservatives, tyrannical socialism, and according to European leaders, not an option.

The wheel of opinion has turned completely… Why? How? Krugman says it’s because they are all idiots, they just don’t know the basics of macroeconomics. Yet, reality is more instructive.

The passage of Friedman above quoted was a quarter of the truth, the fourth quarter of the truth, what became the truth after Roosevelt closed all the banks. That there was excess, and it had to be wrung out of the system, prior to that, that was another quarter of the truth, the third quarter of the truth. Now conservatives are focusing on that third quarter of the truth, in the USA, and in the EU. 

What was the second quarter of the truth? International trade fighting with tariffs (started in September 1929-July1930, by the USA). The modern equivalent of this deleterious international fighting is competitive devaluations, what the honorable dear professor Paul Krugman always advocates. (And which Japan has recently borrowed from the USA, making Washington all yellow in the face.)

Oh, and what got everything launched? A drastic boom in the 1920s, engineered to drown British WWI debt. That led to inflation (real estate, Florida, say) and overproduction (cars). That was the first component of the Great Depression quartet. 

Before I explain the obvious, let me veer towards what’s wrong in the presently attempted method to get out of this unfolding Greater Depression.

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BANKSTERISM SHOULD HAVE BEEN LIQUIDATED, IT WAS NOT:

Saving a bank and saving a bankster are two different things. Two completely opposed things. It’s like confusing saving a victim and saving who murdered the victim. The banksters leveraged the banks they headed, to the max, because the larger the profit, the more money they got. Some built international airports in the middle of nowhere in Spain.

Some made bets with each other, using the fake currency of financial derivatives.

The more they bet with tremendous leverage, the more leveraged the system got, ready to collapse at the smallest loss.

Meanwhile banksters had bought jets, yachts, mansions, islands (Example: Paulson, Bush’s Treasury Secretary, bought himself an island large enough for several villages).

When the banks collapsed the banksters’ properties were outside of the disaster zone. Politicians left them there. Taking care of their own providers.

Example: Lehman Brothers, a bank, an investment bank, was not saved, but its head banksters saved for themselves the billions they made, driving it into the ground. The three top guys, including CEO Fuld, retired with five billions among them.

Starting in 2008, the structures, ways and means of banks, including the derivatives and banksters leading them were saved (see Citigroup, JP Morgan, Goldman). Everything that had caused the disease was saved, thanks to the public (taxpayers, low lives, etc.)

Whereas in truth and full morality, all that should have been saved were the small deposits (as was done in Cyprus below $130K accounts). The entire businesses, the entire bank holding companies, which had failed, should have been left to fail (free market theory).

From the ruins, banks serving the real economy ought to have been founded. Instead,  the exact same holding companies that had failed were refounded, again, same as they were before, and generally around the same imaginary activities, with the same managers. Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, were saved modulo gifts exceeding 50 billion dollars;  JP Morgan got a giant gift (Bear Stern) and got in trouble because of its “London Whale” (highly leveraged government bond derivatives).

Providing liquidity, that is aid and comfort, to a thief, or a system that steals the real economy, does not provide with an optimal outcome, especially if one is poor, because one has already been robbed by the same thief or oppressive system. But such is the business model since 2008.

A financial system that caused such a crisis, should not just be provided with liquidity, but should have been liquidated as a self serving financial entity.

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GREAT DEPRESSION OF 1930S: LIQUIDATION, THEN LIQUIDITY:

So what happened during the Great depression of the 1930s? Was the view that all the excess should have been liquidated, that the depression should have done its job, correct? (The view held first.) Or is the view that the banks should have been saved correct?

Well, both views were correct. What Friedman and Bernanke do not realize is that there was serious liquidation, for four years, before Roosevelt launched his recovery program. And Roosevelt launched recovery by closing all the banks, first, just as was done in Cyprus recently. Banks were then reopened, provided with liquidity, according to their viability.

So Roosevelt’s New Deal provided liquidity… after a tremendous liquidation. (In the preceding 4 years.)

Right now, there is obvious excess, that should be liquidated. All over the West. It spans the whole landscape of spending. From the picturesque but highly symbolic, to the vast and deep.

I will give examples of what needs to be liquidated in another essay. There is just plain too many dimensions of excess, from “poor” Greeks or Italians with secondary residences, driving expensive Porsches although they have no income, to our self glorifying leaders spending on themselves public money like crazy, while sleeping in plutocrats’ beds. and of course transnational corporations paying no taxes so that they can swallow all and any creature or business in their way. Yes, there is much to liquidate.

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Patrice Ayme

Swiss Fight Pluto!

Abstract: The Swiss People, in defiance to the Swiss plutocracy and its attached mob of greedy sycophants, has struck a blow against the extremely wealthy, self perpetuating class of those who rule corporations in defiance of their owners.

Most of these owners are (very) small investors. So this blow for ownership is actually a blow against one of the pillars of plutocracy. That pillar uses corporations to steal other people’s money in a particularly blatant way.

How? By creating what I long called the CEO CLASS the entanglement of corporate boards with executive power in corporations (See the essay of November 2008 on Reforming World Finance). Here is the graph of CEOs compensations versus average salary, USA. (It’s a French translation, because the Berkeley original has magically disappeared from the WWW!)

Rise CEO Class. Jump Under Clinton!

USA CEO salaries are the two top curves, with their logarithmic scale on the left. The (lamentable) average USA salary (not indexed by inflation) crawls on the bottom, with its scale on the right. Source: Anti-Plutocratic French site.

CEO payments climbed up to about 500 times that of the workers in top companies in the USA, but only 15 times in France, 12 times in Germany.

[Interestingly, I searched for days this graph in USA search engines; although of USA origin, Professor Saez, UCB, it is (not so) mysteriously unavailable in USA search engines; a friend suggested I look at Google.France, and there was plenty there! Clearly the USA plutocrats cleaned the World Wide Web carefully, so that their English bound sheeple read only appropriate information! Nothing like the happy bleating of the sheep to fill a sheperd's heart.] 

The entanglement of CEOs and the corporate boards supposed to watch over them, is reminiscent of, and probably inspired by, the entanglement of political and business power in the USA. That public-private entanglement dates from the early 20C: think of JP Morgan intervening in the 1907 crash, or think of the diversion of German property towards USA plutocrats after 1918 (don’t worry, the building were all the giving of seized German property was given to USA plutocrats burned down around 1922, erasing the tracks of grand thievery…).

A behavior that is widely admired in the USA, that of the towering CEO with an astronomical salary bestowed on him or her by a board of co-conspirators, is now criminalized in Switzerland. Such CEO and director thugs will be punished by a mandatory confiscation of 6 years of income, plus three years in prison.

In the USA, CEOs and their boards are immensely admired. The connected ones sit on corporate boards at an early age, to be paid extravagant sums of money, while doing nothing, but allowing CEOs and their minions to steal all the companies profits, from small shareholders, and workers.

Thus, Americans will now know that, by admiring CEO and boards, the American way, they are admiring what Europeans are increasingly viewing as criminals, and criminal boards of directors. OK, as slave masters long admired, I guess they have trained hard, and they will not suffer anguish that way.

Yet, one can hope that this criminalization of a motive of admiration should help with a worldwide readjustments of values.

So far, so good. But there is a twist. Why is it that mutual funds of the USA have supported so much the CEO class and its interlocked boards? Worldwide?

Well, the CEO class part of a larger conspiracy with the financial sector, where the real money is made. It is my pleasure to give some pointers. Those pointers, in turn, will allow to criminalize further said vaster conspiracy.

Meanwhile, all democracies should pass laws similar to the one Swiss representatives are now constitutionally obliged to pass. It is, of course, a consequence of Switzerland having a higher democratic index than any other country that explains that such a popular initiative was taken there. It’s clearly not a case of a country being run by rabid leftists.

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EVIL IN A FEW WORDS, & ITS IMPLEMENTATION BY CORPORATIONS:
Evil triumphs when good people do not fight it. Why? Because the default state of humanity is strife. This is the point rabid pacifists keep on missing, it’s also the point Obama made in Stockholm, when he got his Nobel. It has been well known since there are men, and they think.

Nothing personal: because of its domination, the genus Homo evolved to control itself, quite bit as wolves do, by killing each other. The Romans abstracted this as: Homo Homini Lupo, Man Wolf Of Man (more than 2,000 years ago). Just like wolves, only more so, because we dominate more.

All species need to be kept in check, and the check of man is man.

But how does man fight man? Like all other social animals, by mobbing, or tribal fighting. So tribal effects have to be watched severely. The most famous tribes are the 200 or so nations and territories more or less represented at the United Nations. But there are other tribes, all over. The most ubiquitous being corporations. (What is meant by “corporations” varies in time, nations and space, but the tribal effect is what unifies them.)

The founders, and early presidents of the USA, so called “Founding Fathers” were fully aware of this.

As president and thinker in chief Jefferson wrote: “I hope we shall take warning from the example and crush in it’s [sic] birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws our country.”

The “example” is that of England (as the rest of the text makes clear). This is taken from a letter to George Logan, Nov. 12th, 1816. There’s a PDF file with scanned images of an edition of Jefferson’s works at this address.
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WHY THE SWISS CRACK DOWN ON THE CEO MAFIA:
It is no coincidence that Switzerland, the most democratic country, was the first to ask We The People, in a referendum, what they think about the feudal class that is taking over, armed with neofascist ideology.

The answer, delivered March 3, 2013, is that 68% of the Swiss believes that the conspiracy of thieves that has come to dominate civilization, should be forcefully terminated.

Superficially, Switzerland is doing better than ever. GDP expanded in 2012. GDP per capita is nearly twice that of the USA (at nominal rates, not cheating PPP). But these good numbers and nice surroundings mask the fact that the wealthy have been doing incredibly better, while the plebs has lost ground. Most Swiss cannot afford to own there, to start with. Two-thirds of them rent (whereas 55% of French next door own their homes 100%). That way they are like the inhabitants of most “rich” cities of the West in that they can’t afford to live where they work.

An increasing inflow of tax avoiding and tax mitigating plutocrats makes the Swiss increasingly conscious of a feudalization of the country. For instance, most of the world oil trading is conducted out of Geneva, now that London is proving less tax friendly to the world’s richest sharks. That makes Swiss property values skyrocket, and also make average Swiss, like average Belgians, hold the tax bag.

Yet Switzerland is less subjugated by its elite than other “representative democracies”.

This has to do with history. Other places were typically founded by large imperial machines (France, Britain, Germany, USA, Ex British colonies, Portugal, Spain, Spanish colonies, Italy, Russia, Netherlands), and, or slave societies (Spanish colonies, Brazil, USA, Russia). Some countries may look small now, but degenerated from empires. The Netherlands even conquered England; Denmark, Portugal, and Sweden ran empires (Sweden thought it owned Ukraine and Russia for a millennium). The present Swedish regime was founded by Napoleon, etc…

Instead Switzerland started as a rebellion against the family that would run the “Holly Roman German Empire” for centuries. The birth of Switzerland was fundamentally an anti-plutocratic rebellion. Same in the USA, sure, but only that other revolution minded plutocrat, Louis XVI of France, made in possible (in more ways than one). The Swiss revolt was indigenous.

Any initiative signed by 100,000 people can be presented as a referendum in Switzerland.

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SWISS CRACK-DOWN ON CEO CLASS:

Initiator of the “Rip-off Initiative” Thomas Minder is an entrepreneur industrialist, and right wing politician, who nearly lost his company when Swissair went bankrupt (from obscure financial maneuvers). In recent years, Mr. Minder observed that the world was put on its knees in the service of financiers. This is exactly the point demonstrators were making in Portugal this week.

As Portuguese demonstrators said, why should they sacrifice because infinitely rich bankers cheated? Or went mad? Or conspired with other rich fat cats to rob common people? Why is it that Portuguese people without money now have to pay to use the public hospital, when those who have caused the disaster keep on flying in private jets, shuttling among their mansions, worldwide?

As I said already more than 5 years ago, there is a CEO class. CEOs sit on each others’ board, and attribute each others’ salaries. OK, they are often more crafty, and use agents: relatives, or protégés. It is particularly clear in the USA, where it’s all about who you know really well: see the Summers-Clinton-Summer-Google-Facebook Ms. Sandberg (just a small example).

And it’s even more than a CEO class.

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CEO CLASS AS A MULTIPLIER:

The CEO Class can be instrumentalized to divest power to talent that will serve plutocracy well.

A lot of people of power are able to transfer quickly and efficiently power to their children, or people they know will serve their children faithfully. It’s happening everywhere, especially in the USA.

Suddenly all powerful young people rise in the USA to seats on corporate boards: thus they are made to integrate the CEO Class, board side. Careful inquests always show connections with the powers that be. See Geithner, head of New York Fed, then tax cheating Treasury secretary, ah, but the son of Geithner (Geithner’s father was a Ford Foundation director who met with Obama’s mother… All and any connection with the painting behind Hitler in his Munich office will not be made, recommended an angel that passed by, dripping with finance…). Geithner was successfully vetted at Kissinger Associates, a plotting organization to connect plutocrats, corrupt politicians and other worldwide tyrants. He was put under the wings of Rubin and Summers (like Facebook’s billionaire woman, the genius feminist Sheryl Sandberg). Geithner was prepared to serve his masters well.

The CEO-boards Class systems enable the plutocratic machine to put large amounts of power to servile critters. This  is how ‘black’ women of the Rice class, such as Rice, Susan and Rice, Condoleezza, were all powerful by the age of 30 (the former a member of the National Security council, thanks to dad, a treasury director, the second on prestigious CEO boards all over, and a supertanker was named after her, because her masters at Stanford had determined she would serve her masters in the Dark Side well… still does: she is a towering member of the CEO class in 2013). Not that I have anything against blacks or “blacks”…

“Are they worth it?” Asked The Economist. While knowing very well the answer was no. One thing the extravagant growth of the CEO Class did not grow is corporate profits:

CEO Class Rising, Everything Else Lagging

***

WANT DEMOCRACY? CUT POWER IN TINY BITS, DISTRIBUTE WIDELY:

Minder’s “Rip-off Initiative” was designed to prevent bosses from receiving huge bonuses by decision of a CEO class. So it makes it harder to congeal a CEO class: board members should serve only a single year.

This, by the way, is something to meditate in a more general way… In the Roman republic, the judicial, military, economic and political executive was incarnated by the Consuls. They served just one year (although they could be elected again: Marius was elected Consul 7 times!). And even in that year, ultimate power switched from one to the other, every month.

Republican Romans knew how fragile the Res (Thing) Publica was. Don’t laugh. The Roman republic, in full, lasted five centuries. Still the world’s record.

Now what we have is, what would have been called in the times of Julius Caesar, (elected) kings. The immense powers the president of the USA are perfectly ridiculous, especially when, as Obama, he does not use them. (An apparent worshipper of Satan, complete with devilish smirks, such as G. W. Bush, did not have such reservations: such a creature never will, by definition!)

Minder’s anti-plutocratic initiative says that companies cannot decide to give their executives “golden parachutes”. Salaries of board members, and companies’ executives will have to be approved by the companies’ owners. That is, by the shareholders. That, by itself, of course, is not enough, because the plutocratic web is entangled in all power structures, and sucks the substantific marrow.

When Novartis gave 71 million Francs ($77 million) to its CEO, Vasella, to the fury of the very numerous small Swiss shareholders of Novartis. The small shareholders could not do anything as most of Novartis’ shares are held by plutocratic institutions, which are part and party to the plutocratic phenomenon.

What plutocratic institutions accomplice to the CEO Class and the financial rip-off sector, am I alluding to? A lot of them are mutual funds in the USA. Or funds for retirement funds. Those used to give rich returns, but, in recent decades, they have faltered. Why? How come? well it’s part and parcel of the worldwide take-over by rich money managers. It may sound strange that they strive towards subpar performance: it’s an apparent violation of the free market principle.
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WHY MUTUAL FUNDS MANAGERS CONSPIRE WITH THE CEO MAFIA:
The naïve free market principle says that, when a mutual fund has subpar performance, the shareholder should move to another fund. Yes, sure, but what if they are all subpar? What if there is a conspiracy? Because, clearly that is what has been systematically going for like 20 years.

The funds are losing money right and left because the function of fund managers has become mostly to transfer money to the financial fat sharks of the plutocratic class. You know the ones they share the caviar toasts with. Thus small shareholders and retirees, present and future, make richer, ever more, the richest people in the world.

There is actually a closed circuit similar to that between Washington and private corporations and partnerships. Individuals operate as public fund managers for a few years, wasting a lot of investors’ money, and then they become “wealth managers”, “private bankers”, “hedge fund managers”, entangle themselves with the CEO class, and politicians, to make the really big bucks, extracting money from the public, including the public mutual funds for little people… or small shareholders of corporations such as Novartis. Don’t ask me for references: plutocratic universities such as Harvard, Stanford, are not too keen to study the subject, as those who profit from it, are their bread and butter.

Conspiracies to distribute People’s money to friends are all over the so called “representative democracies”. Why should not giant government spending be controlled by the People more directly? It can be done in… Switzerland.
***

SWISS DEMOCRACY VERSUS THE GIANT CORRUPTION IN AEROSPACE, F35 STYLE:
Plutocracy is encountering serious difficulties in Switzerland. Besides the “rip-off” initiative above, here is another example.

Some of the Swiss elite, probably paid under the table, had conspired to buy “Grippens“. The Grippen is an excellent plane made in Sweden. But the Swiss Air Force would prefer the superlative, stealthy Rafale, the world’s best omnirole fighter bomber, from the country next door.

The Swiss are going to be asked their opinion… about purchasing the Grippen. It’s pretty clear that, thanks to outfits such as this site, enough of them will know that they are been rolled in the flour, spending billions on underperforming planes (that actually does not exist in the version proposed to Switzerland). So they will vote against the Grippen.

Not so in the USA, And other countries where the people is supposed to pay hundreds of billions to purchase an entirely useless plane, the F35 Lightning II.

The F35 is already the world’s most expensive military project, ever, anywhere. Yet the plane is military incapable, and will stay so. The entire project is flawed (this kind of passive stealth does NOT work, the plane’s range, speed, acceleration, g loads, weapons capacity are puny).

The great peoples of the great democracies such as the USA, Great Britain, etc. are not consulted about whether they want to keep on going with that F35 corruption. The total program cost already more than 400 billion dollars with not one single plane that could go to war. It’s expected to end up costing about a trillion dollars with planes no better performing than the Vietnam war F105… And just as detectable.

But so far, while People go starving in several countries involved in F35 corruption (including in the USA’s Silicon Valley, where hundreds of thousands are on “food stamps”), nobody is exhibiting very much indignation.

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PLUTOCRACY IS A SEVERE PROBLEM, IT SHOULD DEALT WITH SEVERELY:

The Swiss referendum forces the Swiss Parliament to draft a law giving shareholders the right to hold a binding vote on all compensation for company executives and directors. The law will also ban signing and leaving bonuses for senior managers and push greater corporate transparency. As said above, criminals will be punishmed by the confiscation of 6 years of income, and three years jail.

The Swiss have just struck a severe blow at the plutocrats, exposing them for the conspiring, manipulative thieves they are. Other European countries will be encouraged to follow, including Germany and Britain (in both countries laws on executive compensation are being elaborated, the German law may come up for a vote as soon as next week). The French Socialists will come back with a 75% tax law, that will pass muster with the French Constitutional Court…

The European Union in preparing a law cracking down on bankers’ bonuses. Great Britain is desperately trying to block it, as it will apply there, inside the very the den of thieves, too. But Great Britain will be overruled. It just revealing itself to be ruled by money. Plutocracy in fact, not just from crowned celebrities.

To have kings is bad. To have money as king, is worse.

It is high time that countries that call themselves democracies be as democratic as Switzerland. It would be a good start towards a more intelligent civilization.
***
Patrice Ayme

USA Arm-Stronging Planet?

Sustainable countries are sustained, literally, by a type of secular nationalism, imposed by their national institutions, and showing up as local traditions. This peculiarism is akin to a religious structure, and often related to the local superstition(s). Religions have moral systems. Moral systems have very practical consequences: countries behave according to them, according to their own national morality.

The tradition of crooks confessing on national TV (that they were honest crooks, so to speak) is a tradition in the USA. And also, confessing, and that is obvious in the case of the cyclism crook Lance Armstrong, can be itself a manipulation.

American peculiarism is of peculiar interest because of the great influence of the USA, and its pretensions to universalism. It is always inappropriate to masquerade peculiarism as universalism. Yet peculiarism is often there to hide exploitation below red herrings, and other irrelevance.

In the USA, the bigger crooks, the more they visit visit the White House regularly. During the “Chinagate” affair, under Clinton, the chief crook visited the White House no less than 58 (fifty-eight) times (in less than 4 years). He was a major money contributor to the Democratic Party, and also a Chinese government agent. (22 other agents were convicted.)

Aaron Swartz was an Internet genius (having been co-author of the RSS program at age 14). JSTOR is an organization to STORe Journals. It is restricted to those who are viewed favorably by the powers that be (for example I do not have presently access to JSTOR, being an enemy of the established order).
Never mind that the research published in the academic Journals was financed by the public (yes, even arrogant Harvard is financed by the public, the word “private” as in “private university” is a joke).

In plutocracy, the public is made to be stolen, and the great priests (now played by Nobel prize winners and the like in “prestigious” institutions) are there to make that into a religion.
For a very long time, academic journals, or, more generally, academic publishing, have been a good trick to make multi-billion dollar fortunes, so the wealthy have been partial to this system, one more system to divert public funds to their pockets. (In Great Britain alone, several multi-billion dollar fortunes arose from academic publishing.)

Aaron Swartz noticed this, that JSTOR was an organization to steal public property. He downloaded millions of articles of JSTOR, to allow the public to access it own public property. That was an important violation of the plutocratic principle that only the mighty has access to knowledge, because knowledge is power, and power belongs to those who have it.

(The Obama administration uses this plutocratic principle when it uses secret recipes to decide which citizens of the USA will be summarily executed by robots, for whatever those citizens did that crossed the secret red lines.)

Aaron Swartz was relentlessly pursued by the government of the USA, the latter thus proclaiming, for all to see, that the established order had a moral right to steal public property. Swartz risked 35 years in jail, no less (for trying to give back to the public, public property, the primary crime in plutocracies!) He faced a trial, public humiliation, enormous cost in time, worry, money, gigantic injustice, the feeling that he was nothing, and would be crushed by plutocracy, no matter what.

Aaron Swartz committed suicide. When he was still free to do so. At age 26. He was made an example by plutocracy. Morality, plutocratic style, re-established. All plutocrats can rejoice. JSTOR came out with a declaration oozing with haughty hypocrisy.

Notice the analogy between JSTOR and the banking system: banks also use public money, and the full back-up of the public, through the money giving (“printing money”, “monetary base”, “quantitative easing”) of the public’s government.

However, in recent times, after a number of corrupt individuals tweaked the system to their advantage under Clinton, the bankers became convinced they could get away with anything. Now they have got used to confiscate the money, and keep it to themselves, their friends, politicians, and (so called) public servants. That’s why they have the command and control of the red carpet at the White House, and the president calls them “friends”, express his admiration, and go play golf with them.

Banking is another case of stealing public money by an oligarchy. But of course not too many academics will protest about JSTOR, and, thus, banking. Once “top” academics are fed at the trough in Harvard or Stanford, they laud the plutocracy that feed them, as Roman intellectuals used to do, to their great satisfaction, as small thinkers, and great greedsters.

A related case is that of Mr. Assange of WikiLeaks, an Australian. His greatest crime should have seen him decorated by the USA Medal of Freedom. Indeed it showed an attack helicopter destroying like vermin a number of civilians, and rescuers, having mistaken a reporter’s camera with a gun. It demonstrated that the U.S. Army had criterion of engagement inside cities that should be changed. And yet, Assange is pursued with rage, as if he were a danger for civilization.
Instead it is those who are gun happy and those who steal public property are threats to civilization.

In barely more than a week, the Boeing 787 “Dreamliner” experienced a brake failure, a fuel leak, a fire which fire fighters took 40 minutes to extinguish with specialized equipment, on the ground in Boston, a cracked front cockpit window, and finally smoking battery that leaked corrosive fluids, projecting flammable liquids 4 meters away, provoking an emergency descent and landing. The 787 Dreamliner was ordered off the skies, worldwide.

Immediately, propagandists with weasel words implied that this had happened before. But not so, to see a new model of planes with so many problems is an unprecedented event in aviation history.

(The Comet in the early fifties exploded mysteriously four times, and the DC10 also had two very deadly crashes; they got grounded, but these were, essentially mysteries about unforeseeable metal fatigue problems; the 737s also had a mysterious control failure, over several years, but, there again, this was more of mystery, a subtle, unforeseen problem; right now the A380 “Super Jumbo” is the object of a recall of cracking aluminum rib brackets in its wings, 4,000 of them per plane, because a British company made a slight mistake; but that’s no big deal, just a recall, and most companies will wait major revisions to do so.)

Why did not this happen before? Because Boeing was an engineering company based in Seattle. It made great planes. Now Boeing is a financial company with headquarters in Chicago, making financial-political plots, worldwide. So the 787 is a shoddy plane.

Meanwhile the F35 Lightning II, another worldwide USA led political-financial plot, is delaminating (the layers of composite material of the tail are separating from each other). Same story at Locckeed-Martin as at Boeing.

There is nothing like sheer violence. To impose oneself, and get to the top. Lance Armstrong (not his true name) made a fortune of more than 100 million dollars, and it’s entangled in his “charity” (“Live Strong”). OK, granted it’s little relative to ex-president Bill Clinton’s fortune, and much less of an ethical breach.

All along Armstrong cheated, and the rumor has it that his cheating was so successful, because it happened with the complicity of some controlling authorities.

The same thing happened with the USA Olympics committee in the times of Marion Jones, and for decades before that. Times magazine made a cover claiming she would get five gold medals. Never mind that Marion Jones was tightly connected, and even married, to notorious drug circles in the San Francisco Bay Area. Unfortunately the Olympic committees of other countries had enough of this American corporate circus, and Ms. Jones got finally busted. She went to jail a bit.

The fact remains that known drug addicts are celebrated as great sport figures, and entire sports are going control free, because they are big business, and the grotesque, steroid exhuding aspect of the athletes is part of the draw.

So Arm Strong confessed, a sort of religious ceremony USA citizens are eager for, in their simplicity. He was questioned by Oprah Winfrey, herself a monument of the system, a billionaire of her own, paid to ask the right questions in the right way on the authorized subjects, as part of the general lobotomization program. One could nearly see the dollars scrolling across the screen. It has always been clear that Armstrong benefited from the highest complicities, and still do.

That way Armstrong (not his true name) is pretty much like USA corporations and plutocrats. No paying their way, but profiting from the system, arm stronging the rest of the cycling world into oblivion, just like the USA corporations and plutocrats are arm stronging the rest of the planet into oblivion. While USA industries were making billions from Armstrong, the rest of the planet, once again, was getting the short stick.

Countries come with their moralities. The USA long enjoyed the moral and judicial system exhibited in “Django Unchained”. But what did work, sort of, exploiting a rich and empty continent, killing millions of slaves and Indians, will not work on a crowded, simmering planet, full of people who are neither slaves, nor Neolithic American natives.
***
Patrice Ayme

Crazy Lie Technique

The Economist, the celebrated British tabloid, teaches economy thus: it siphons its European profits behind a mangy door of a second floor apartment in a poor part of Luxembourg. Would it be economical to pay taxes in the countries where The Economist is sold? Tax havens is where the good life is at, and The Economist just contrived a list to prove that.

Major profiteers and corporations do the same all over the world: they hide profits in tax havens they enabled through subtle conspiracies and deep propaganda. Why is the insanity allowed to go on? Not just because of corrupted politicians. Also because plutocratic agents made common people too confused to realize they are robbed blind. Instilling insanity is the plutocrats’ first barrier against common sense and decency.

Propaganda fabricates the spines of the sheeple (sheep-people). Here is a spectacular example. The ”Economist Intelligence Unit crunched hard numbers” to answer this: “Which country will be the best for a baby born in 2013?” Here is its somewhat deranged answer:

Better Serving Emirs, Without Health Care?
Intelligent To Make Us Crazy & Stupid?

First of all notice that, among the first 15 countries, none is a major military power. In other words, these 15 countries depend upon the military superpowers for their protection. That is nothing to encourage, lest one wants to repeat World War II.

We saw what this kind of parasitism brought in 1939-1940: the pro-Hitlerian antics of Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium and the Netherlands caused the loss of France, enabling 50 million Europeans to die subsequently; as a telling aside, Dutch Jews were killed nearly to the last person. 

Observe that sexist Muslim Fundamentalist regimes, with their subjugation of women, score high in The Economist’s esteem. This sadomasochism theme, unsaid, runs deep.

Among other amusements, Cyprus is one of the better places to live, according to The Economist Intelligence. Cyprus is an island cut in two, a few years ago, when Turkey attacked militarily by sea and in the air, invading it with its army, twice (well named operations Attila). Cyprus survives, without a peace treaty, the butt of Turkish hostility. Another full war, with more atrocities, is entirely possible as Turkey increasingly veers towards Islamism. But, according to the mental retards at The Economist Intelligence, Cyprus ranks higher than Japan, France and Britain, none of which is under foreign occupation. Maybe The Economist Intelligence finds lethal atrocities of the massive type one of the better spices in life?

So? What else? Why to live in a place that could be wracked by war again, just off Syria, with so many who have lost their property and can never again where they were born? Cyprus is a tax haven. Tax avoidance, the meat of life, according to Economist Intelligence!

According to The Economist Intelligence, Singapore is deemed safe, while the acceleration of sea level rise is 60% higher than the most pessimistic official forecasts (countries such as the Belgium or the Netherlands are spending already much to fight the advancing sea). For those unawares, Singapore, a tax haven, is barely built above high tide.

The Economist self glorifies, as it pontificates that “the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), a sister company of The Economist, has this time turned deadly serious. It earnestly attempts to measure which country will provide the best opportunities for a healthy, safe and prosperous life in the years ahead.”

So the other times, The Economist admits that it was not “deadly serious“? It was just seriously deadly, as when it  supported Pinochet? I sent the following to The Economist, and they published it:

The Economist’s biases comes in many guises. The Economist now tells us that tiny Israel, hated on all sides, surrounded by a ghetto like wall, and with the high likelihood to be plunged into five or six horrendous wars, nuclear or not, with impacts all over its minuscule vegetated territory, scores higher for a “healthy, safe and prosperous life” than all major West European countries?

Does The Economist know how to spell C R A Z Y?

And Switzerland, a small enclave stuck between France, Germany and Italy, does particularly well? As if it were on another planet? Whereas, in truth, Swiss schemes are highly dependent upon whether the EU and the USA are going to let them happen, looking forward. 

And Ireland, which lives partly from being an outrageous tax heaven (like Switzerland with its Vereins) will keep on being a tax heaven, thus staying rich, while keeping on getting subsidies from its poorer, but ten to fifteen times larger European neighbors?

And Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan are much safer than Italy? The Chinese plutocrats will not go silly in the next 50 years? The Chinese leaders will not abide by the deep desires of their underground Lord? Just in case The Economist does not know, let it be reminded that the People Republic of China reserves itself the right to recover Taiwan, anytime, by force, and that, should there be problems within the PRC, it will be only natural to distract the sheeple with a good foreign war.

“Crunching numbers” is good, thinking, better.

This incident offers a troubling two dimensional space: along one dimension, The Economist is really stupid, along the other, The Economist is launched into a multi-dimensional propaganda operation, no holds barred. Notice that in The Economist’s classification, tax heavens score high. Notice also that the large countries, which are taking increasing measures against tax cheats, are scoring low. An argument The Economist uses, even against the USA, is that they owe large debts.

What The Economist “forgets” to say is that the large countries, which defend the West, owe large debts, because they pay rent to tax cheats (including, but not limited to tax cheating plutocrats, tax cheating countries such as those glorified by The Economist, and tax cheating corporations, such as the one that owns The Economist).

In passing, The Economist mentions that the Netherlands, a sneaky tax haven, is the only Eurozone country worth living in. Just in case Luxembourg does not work anymore, the Netherlands, which is 30 times larger, should be able to shelter The Economist from big bad Franco-Germano-British taxes. (Netherlands population: 17 million, UK + FRA + DEU = 210 million.)

The Economist’s analysis of the best places in which to be born started with another piece of classical propaganda. That great plutocratic philosopher, Warren Buffet, one of the world’s richest and deepest men (Buffet splurged with various manipulations that turned Greece into a colossal profits him and his associates) was quoted extensively as opining that he was who he was, that splendor of a vulture, because he was born in the right country, as the right time.

The Economist Intelligent Unit is intelligent enough to pose as exemplary the USA in general, and its plutocracy in the 1930s, and in the 2010s, while talking about the good life.

Hitler famously explained in “Mein Kampf” how Big Lies work: “little people use little lies all the time, they do not expect big ones…“By using Big Lies, Hitler succeeded to persuade the Volk of things that were not true, as he pursued what he viewed as higher aims, that he knew the Volk would disagree with, such as preparing for a world war in 1945 or the extermination of the Jews.

If most Germans had learned about either of these secret aims of Hitler, they would have been horrified and would have viewed Hitler as insanely dangerous… So, knowing this, he lied, big time.

However, as time went by, Hitler became a mental investment most Germans believed in, and the more they invested in him, the more they believed. (A phenomenon well known in the stock markets, as all too many people tend to fall in love with their investments… however bad those turn out to be.) In the end complete collective insanity took over, as the book Soldaten, relating secret recordings of German POWs, shows (Soldaten is also in English with same title).

Now we have something new, that even Hitler did not think about: the Crazy Lie. The Crazy Lie technique makes people accepting of modes of apprehending reality that prevent them to think seriously.

The Crazy Lie Technique is, first, emotional. The Economist used to support Pinochet’s dictatorship for its economic prowess (paid in part with around 5,000 killed and 31,947 officially tortured). Some will say: that was then. Indeed. The USA helped or led, and paid terrorists right wingers to make a coup in a democracy that never had any coup (the USA was furious about losing control of Chilean copper).

Chili was, is, a European foundation. What happened to it was horrible, but The Economist applauded, just as Milton Friedman applauded. Many in the Pinochet junta were on CIA pay roll, while heating up their electrical pincers.

By posing the United Arab Emirates as what we need to emulate, The Economist is actually sinking even lower than it did under Pinochet. The UAE has no European foundation. The UAE is a sordid medieval pluto-theocracy. Some emir, son of his father, is chosen by his medieval tyrannical peers to be the chief, just as was the case in Transylvania 8 centuries ago.

Differently from Middle Age France, though, more than 80% of the UAE’s inhabitants are NOT citizens. They are basically salaried slaves. Health spending proportionally to UAE GDP is only 2.8%, the 181th rank in the world (there are only 193 nations in the UN; as Emirati citizens get health care, that means that non Emirati, the slaves, get none). The UAE enjoys four billionaires with worth around ten billion dollars. Out of a million Emirati (among 4.5 million foreign slaves, servants & mercenaries).

The UAE is Sunni Muslim, and it faces hated Shiah Iran just across the sea of the Arabic, I mean, Persian Gulf. The UAE is basically a Western Plutocratic outpost, not exactly what the Iranian theocrats fancy. Fortunately for the thousands of Persian rockets at the ready, the hundreds of huge towers of the UAE (culminating up to half a mile high in Dubai!) offer themselves as ready targets.

To warn Iran off, the French were requested by the UAE to open a sea-air base, with half a brigade of the French Foreign Legion in residence. Thus the Camp de la Paix came to be.

War with Iran is more likely than not. Although crumbling towers and fireworks among great explosions promises a good show, by assimilating this to the good life, the Economist Intelligence Unit apparently advocates massive lethal sadomasochism as the dominant pursuit of our desires.

Not all is dark in the UAE; it is a place that strives very hard, from pretty bad initial conditions (aside from having the world’s 7th highest oil reserves). But here what I target is the cult that Anglo-Saxon plutocratic media such as The Economist, and the Financial Times enjoy.

Both of the much admired tabloids ferry their revenue through Luxembourg for tax avoidance, which, on that scale, surely is satanic.

So why convey the insane idea that the United Arab Emirates provides with a healthier (2.8% of GDP on health, remember) and safer (obvious target for Iranian nukes) life? Just out of love for plutocrats? Not, not just that. What is taught here is insanity itself.

What is taught is an erosion of intelligence. The Economist Intelligence Unit is out to destroy intelligence.

Teaching people that “crunching numbers” leads to the mathematical conclusion that the UAE provides with much nicer prospects than Japan, France, Britain, Italy or Spain, is so crazy that the notion can only be accepted by suspending one’s critical and intellectual capabilities.

And this suspension of rationality and criticism is what The Economist teaches.

So we are supposed to join the plutocratic cult that Singapore is a much better place to be born than the USA. Or that the United Arab Emirates, a rabidly sexist medieval pluto-theocracy where most inhabitants are foreign slaves, just a handful of minutes away for the thousands of missiles of the hated Iranians, is obviously much safer and healthier than… the French Republic (of course!)

After I wrote most of this essay Lord Justice Brian Leveson, mandated by PM Cameron, came up with his report on the UK press. Leveson writes: “Most responsible corporate entities would be appalled that employees were or could be involved in the commission of crime in order to further their business. Not so at the News Of The World” (the now-shuttered tabloid that was owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, owner of the WSJ, Fox news, New York Post, etc., and powerful enough to be a part instigator of the war in Iraq, hence Murdoch’s nickname: Murderoch).

“Lord Justice” observes that the press “did not fullfill its role of guardian of the nation“. (Hey, The Economist spits on the nation!) The ‘Right Honourable Lord Justice’ recommends that the press  should create its own regulator, backed by legislation to make sure it meets certain standards of independence and effectiveness.

What we contemplate in The Economist is a further problem. What to do when crazy lies are created, just to erode reason? The problem is not restricted to the plutocratic cult, but other cults, as the Islamist one.

Egypt’s Muslim Fundamentalist parliament is rushing to pass Islamist legislation, making the Sharia into law. Never mind that Egypt thrived without Islam, a military-industrial superstition, for 4,000 years. Egypt was 100% Christian, for centuries. The word “Copt” itself is the Arabization of the word for Egyptian in Greek. In other words, to use some humor, the Muslims stole Egypt from the Egyptians, and are still at it, because, well, truth is secondary.  There are up to 20 million Copts in Egypt (Islamists will tell you that’s a lie).

Plutocracy and superstition reign best upon decerebrated chickens. So the chicken they decerebrate. Nowadays, though, the tsunami threatening civilization is not a few meters high, but kilometers high. Even the plutocrats and other exploiters will be destroyed by it, with most of the biosphere.

What we need is legislating for more truth. I proposed to make TRUTH as a new branch of government. After all, experiments show that equity, thus justice, is fundamental to primates. But what is equity without truth? What is a primate without truth? TRUTH & REASON ARE ESSENTIAL TO HUMAN RIGHTS.

What is essential ought to be legislated, thus civilization is enabled.

***

Patrice Ayme

***

P/S: Last, but not least, morality, at the scale of nations, makes happy (at variable scales of time). And safe. Thus morality is a crucial component for tomorrow’s health and happiness (although what ‘morrow’ means will vary considerably: Germany was punished on the scale of generations, Sweden never was, the USA already self punished, in part, with the Secession War, but more works need to be done).

Notice that I excluded not just the medievalists countries, or those waiting for heavy military action, but also the tax cheats from the list: Switzerland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Singapore, Hong Kong (also disqualified as owned by a dictatorship). Others have also to disqualified on even worse moral grounds.

I do not contest that Australia and Canada are good countries to be born. If one’s aim is wealth and comfort, in the next few years. However the ecological policies of these countries are so greedy as to endanger the planet’s ecology. They contribute massively to fossil fuel burning. One wants to keep in mind that the unfolding catastrophe of heat trapping gases pollution will be terminated by a massive world war, not just flooding, droughts, hurricanes, mass extinctions, rising heat, and collapse of oxygen production.

Being born in countries where one’s moral system will be tweaked towards tolerance for mass criminality is not, regrettably a criterion that The Economist put as an input. But it is neither willing, nor able, to do so.

“Greatest Nation On Earth”? Really?

YES WE CAN, MURDER WHOEVER WE WANT:

What Else? Not Much. 

The Higher The Assassin Climbs, The More It Shows Its Bottom.

***

[Those who spurn critical thinking can take the blue pill offered by Krugman, trying desperately to mumble vaguely positive about who history may abstract as the assassin in chief! Uncritical thinking: what mussels do.]

***

“We work harder and smarter than anyone else.” 

Thus boasted Obama at the democratic convention. If a politician in France proffered such a lie, voters would think he was not just deranged, but nationalistically crazed. What’s true instead? We are much less employed:

Employment Ratio Prime Age Population

If one had an ethical graph, it would crash through the floor. Obama stood on its head 25 centuries of Ius Belli (see below). Assassination without due process is the only category where Obama unquestionably surpassed G. W. Bush (Bush had implemented free drugs for seniors, effective immediately, so, in a sense, Bush beat up Obama at the health care game: Bush really did something major, and positive, while president).

The naive may object that the collapse of employment was not Obama’s making. But the opposite is pretty much true. Obama approved, with the republican presidential candidate, John McCain, in a showy way, the decisions of the Bush administration. Obama even left the main engineer in charge, tax avoiding New York Fed chief Tim Geithner. Geithner is still in place, having presided over a collapse of employment.

Plutocrats, starting in ancient Rome, have always loved unemployment, because it transforms the People into hungry pigeons who eat in their hands, humbly. Nothing makes Pluto happier that this daily humiliation.

Moreover Obama resurrected Larry Summers, and took him as economic guru, starting in August 2008. This is exactly when unemployment rolled over, big time. The obvious causal relationship is that, at the time Summers gave a presentation to Obama about the importance to save the criminals, the banksters, and re-establish their wealth. that, in turn, gave the Bush administration a green light to do just that. So, instead of playing FDR, that means, stimulator to the economy, Obama played stimulator to banks.

A the time Bush was lost, his dreams smouldering, and checked out (and not just out of Iraq). Geithner, Summers, and the Mc Cain advisers were all in agreement to save the banksters, and damn the real economy. So here we are. Worldwide.  

Instead what had to be done, ALL OVER, was what was done to save the car industry. Obama did it, but just for the car industry (I gave explicit recommendations on how to do it in other industries, so it was possible to do so, obviously… Trillions were spent on the banks, for the banks, by the taxpayers, order of Obabush.)

Mr. Summers was the architect of the sustainable crushing of the economy by an unregulated bubble of financial derivatives and activities, under money hungry resident Clinton. It made the economy red hot under Clinton, and after that, it imploded. For this, people are much grateful to Clinton.

People are mesmerized by Clinton, like birds by a mamba. Something about bird brains, that even mambas understand.

Verily, the much despised Greeks work 2,100 hours a year (that’s because Greece is the country with the most family owned businesses). Koreans work 2,200 hours, and USA citizens work “only” 1778 hours. At least 15 nations work more per hour than the USA… In the OECD alone.

These numbers are known by all serious people. So why is Obama seriously lying to the thunderously applauding multitude? Why is the pseudo left multitude applauding those serious lies? So that they can better forget that their great leader is busy reverting 25 centuries of civilization, replacing justice by assassinations, in the best tyrant style?

It is revealing to compare the French and USA presidential elections. Raw nationalism is very strong, all too strong, in the USA. Nationalism is even viewed as a moral duty, in the USA. In France, among other European countries, nationalism is viewed with intense suspicion, so one does NOT go shrill that way, there. In France, nationalism reeks of insufferable bad manners (except in the despised National Front, despised precisely because of its nationalist rhetoric). 

After all, when the Nazi tanks rolled in, the most important mental force in plain view was nationalism. Nationalism is the “Na” in Nazism.

So no wonder nationalism is not hot in Germany anymore, either. And that’s very gut.

Civilization is not made just of things one does, but also of things one does not do anymore. Lying about other countries is a very bad habit to have. Just as it is a rather bad habit not to reveal that the USA attacked the Republic of Afghanistan, with the help of its henchmen in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, more than 35 years ago. Attacking people, killing millions, for no good reasons, has consequences. In the fullness of time.

True, Rome killed and enslaved millions in Gaul; but there were good reasons, said Caesar, although the Senate stridently disagreed. The judgement of history, and of most of the Celts themselves, at the time, and even more afterwards, was that Caesar was right. So killing millions is not necessarily bad. (Anyway, conflicts cascaded in Celto-Germania, and Caesar did not start the war, the Helvetes did.)

Killing more than ten million Germans was the price to get rid of Nazism; there was an excellent reason. In Afghanistan, all the reasons of the USA, to sow religious war there in the 1970s, were terrible, anti-civilizational, and part of the price is the unravelling of the constitution of the American Anglo Republic into an unprincipled Principate.

The official story about how 9/11 came about, is an enormous lie. In truth, the USA attacked civilians on the other side of the Earth, and that was followed by a counter-attack, more than a quarter of a century later, after the primeval action of the USA led to the death of several millions in Afghanistan.

The truth is mean, but it is the truth. And even so called “god” cannot do anything about it.

“We are endowed by our creator… we are the greatest engine of growth and prosperity that the world has ever known…” We we we we… Is that a mutation of the self satisfied he he  he he of G. W. Bush?

We, we, we, we have a president who is personally acquainted with his “creator“. Was that creator UBS, or Wall Street? Those were the only creators in plain sight, for the objective observers (except for the millions of suckers like me, all the little tini tiny creators who helped decisively Obama come to power, last time, of course. But then he forgot us all, because we were not banksters!).

Speaking of that great other USA president, G. W. Bush, his CIA tortured those it captured for Qaddafi first. Hey, what are friends for? “We work harder and smarter than anyone else.” Indeed, some world records may have been shattered. Torture records and cover-ups records are piling up. For the whole world to contemplate.

Some victims were left dangling from manacles around their wrists and feet for four months straight (interview on French TV from a famous survivor captured in Asia by the CIA). This assuredly demonstrates that USA torturers can get lazy: leaving a guy to hang around for four months does not smack of hard work. Besides those CIA goons are not that smart, because they forgot to kill all those they tortured, so now they speak (at least to non USA media).

People will say: “Oh, that was Bush, that was before”. Right. Things have become much worse, as a policy of systematic assassination by robots is being conducted worldwide, even on USA citizens, even on some of those who are still children. People should meditate this carefully: do they want a world where a so called “commander in chief” selected by some tribe with 4% of mankind go around the world, assassinating people without judicial process?

The Roman Republic leaders, 25 centuries ago, found such a notion atrocious, repulsive, uncivilized. Some of Rome worse terrorist adversaries received a sort of legal process (for example, Jugurtha, Vercingetorix, Simon bar Giora and John of Giscala; the former three were judged and executed, the latter, condemned to life imprisonment). These events were, in order of people killed, relative to the population then, and the danger they represented to Rome, greater, by orders of magnitude, to relatively puny 9/11. Still the Romans kept their constitutional cool, they applied due process to the criminals.

Formidable adversaries such as Josephus, the top Jewish general in the (treacherous Judea war) in the end was adopted by emperor Vespasian, and inherited his mansion, in Rome.

And the Romans kept their constitution intact, whereas Obama considers he has right of life and death on anybody, worldwide, without a semblance of due process. Definitively a violation of Ius Belli and international law. Say the millennia.

The Romans knew that “Ius Belli“, the Law of War, killing the adversary philosophically, was more important than killing the adversary physically. Obama confuses looking cool as a chap, and cold blooded assassination. Worse: goose stepping behind, cheering and applauding Obama’s exhibitionist love for his family, a circus for little children, USA citizens are carefully arranging their forgetfullness about what the Romans knew, 25 centuries ago. Namely that it matters when one goes and kill people, that everybody understand why, and that the cause be just.

The main axis of France’s foreign policy, since May 8, 1945, has been to re-educate the Germans in the way of peace and love. Franco-German reconciliation has been number one top priority. This was not compatible with nationalism, and that is why France did not seize one square kilometer of German territory after the Nazi defeat.

I turned the TV on, to watch the democratic convention, and here were sexy girls speaking like they knew it all, telling the USA what to think. They were movie actresses, and the crowd just loved them. With a teleprompter, any mental retard who knows how to read can work harder and smarter than anyone else.

Talking about plastic surgery, here was Vice President Jo Biden. All excited, and delivering a pretty good speech. He celebrated, (for want of a better word),  the death of more than 6,000 soldiers, and 50,000 wounded some so very severely, he marvelled with exorbited eyes. The RESOURCE WAR, aka “war against terrorism“, brought a tear eyed evocation. Biden finished on :”God bless you, God bless you!“

God bless you for what? Destroying Afghanistan since 1978, just because “yes, we can“

What struck me, beyond Joe’s predictable rhetoric, was how Biden had suffered from plastic surgery. His eyebrows were angling up, then came down hard on the side. His eyelids were wide open, as if he had been immensely struck by the incongruity of it all, after been hit on the head. What did that creature remind me of? It felt familiar. Yes. Those Batman movies, with the Joker. OK, I am not a specialist of Batman, and I have not really seen the movie, just extracts, so I cannot explore further what Biden has been trying to say by being a real life imitation of the joker incarnated by Jack Nicholson. Is it all a joke? Is that what he wants to say?

Another contrast with France was the so called “First Lady” that introduced “the love of my life“. Nobody of importance in the USA is aware that the “First Man” semantics was invented by Augustus, Rome’s first life long tyrant. But, even Augustus, did not introduce the ridiculous notion of “First Lady“. Who are the Last Ladies?

And why is the First Lady’s sex life so important? Sorry, I meant romantic. Hey, go easy on the steroids, by the way, those shoulders… And why does the resident instrumentalize his daughters? “Malia, Sasha, we are so proud of you… and tomorrow you have to go to school.” Why is that national news? Why does the president’s official business includes telling his daughters he is proud of them? It’s not obvious? He did not think of it before? He needs a teleprompter to communicate with his family? 

And why are taxpayers paying 100 million dollars for this pathetic, clownish circus?

Are USA citizens so deprived of these things they need to see them on TV? I was amused when Michelle made a huge smile off sync while telling the story of someone who could not afford health care. It was meant to express compassion, but the timing and intensity were off. With these little things sincerity, or lack thereof, shines through. Can one work the appearance of a heart harder and smarter than anyone else? A question much of the world has for the USA.

“Michelle…I love you so much” Thus Obama does not just love to coolly assassinate citizens, worldwide. His love is all encompassing. And the other clown who smiles, immensely touched by this apparent revelation, just made to her, watched by hundreds of millions. And they embrace, and embrace… Why don’t they go all the way? Would not that augment the audience? Worldwide exhibitionism. What happens when it turns out that the president was sleeping around with the hordes, as happened so many times in the past, with many other presidents? Maybe all these drugs they are given to perform 24/7, like circus animals who would never, ever, rest in a cage.

For that matter, how come ex-resident Clinton, now filthy rich, is immensely popular while everybody should know, by now, that he planted, with his gardener, Larry Summers, the seeds of the financial disaster? Namely plutocratically engineered derivatives to the horizon, devouring the world economy? Is WE THE PEOPLE dominated by masochism?

So why the exhibitionism? Because when there is enough style, it can displace substance. And when the substance is banksterism as far as the eye can see, it’s best hidden in plain sight.

The best joke was Obama’s content empty discourse. He even forgot to mention “Obamacare” also known as the “Affordable Care Act”. His sycophants used to call that monstrosity his “signature achievement“. And here he was, refusing to sign his achievement again! Tell us it’s not true, Barry-Barack, tell us that you do not just say what the polls tell you to say.

Health care is much improved, just wait for the bill. Apparently Obamacare has become better not talked about. (True the ACA is supposed to increase how much most people are supposed to spend in health care: the act may be affordable, but is it care? The Republicans have noticed that Obama proposed to reduce the funding of Medicare by $750 billion… So naturally they pounced on that, while proposing to transform Medicare into Vouchercare. Democrats are screaming it ain’t fair, as if that were not predictable. Either they are lying, or they really have puny brains)

In truth, Obama and his Pelosi plutocrat carefully wasted time when they had total control with a health care plan that will not work (because it does not have a sustainable mechanism for cost control). They agitated the ACA as the red flag it was, thus distracting the attention of the People away from the banksters (neither jailed nor even prosecuted), and from Quantitative Easing (print money for the banks that caused the crisis), and from allowing banks to use loans as rents for over-valued properties (over-valued by the banks themselves), while they, those Pelosi plutocrats, were keeping the taxes on the hyper rich at rock bottom, more than ever, and closing their eyes on giant loopholes in taxation (such as billionaires borrowing instead of spending).

Did I mention the tripling of troops in Afghanistan? (The Iraq withdrawal was pre-set by Bush the torturer, but that did not prevent Obarack to claim success for it, whereas, in truth, he was kicked out by the Iraqis, after trying to stay.)

The Pelosi plutocrat has long posed as a leftist, while owning Sugar Bowl, among other things. Never mind that Sugar Bowl had plotted with Royal Gorge LLC to destroy a huge amount of wilderness to extent both resorts (now an ad hoc conservation group has saved the wilderness from the claws of Pelosi plutocrat and her kind).

“Hope has been tested“. Obama has switched from being the candidate of hope to the candidate of “hopeful“. So cars will go twice further “in the middle of next decade” (news: they already do, in Europe, and they will anyway, even in the USA, when oil hits $200 a barrel). OK, could have been worse: Obama could have passed a law to improve cars in the middle of next century, and improve health care by selling body parts. Small favors are better than no favors. Four more years of empty promises, and love of my life celebrations. In the Roman Republic the two Consuls were elected for a year, and rotated supreme authority every month. OK, Romans did not have plastic surgery honey babies to tell them what to think.

Obama finally left the stage, after bellowing about the “greatest nation on earth“. A god nut, Timothy Cardinal Dolan, archbishop of New York, took the stage to deliver a general blessing. May this land of the free never lack those willing to grab guns, and kill others, said the holly man in substance, as he circled several times around the notions pertaining to “men in uniform“.

‘One nation under god, so dear god, bless the USA.’

The old fat man of god was a nice contrast with the young sexy actresses who had warmed up the scene before. Sex and the City of God. Even more weird was the gun fanatic who got shot in the head (with many others) and came to be rolled out as a great hero, whereas all she proves is that, even before being pierced by a bullet, she did not think right.

But 73% of USA citizens attach the greatest importance to shooting other USA citizens. A problem when crazies get crazier: craziness is viewed as heroism (for further reference, see our historical guinea pigs, the Nazis: the deeper they got in their madness, the madder they got).

So what is Obama proposing to do, by the way? Change you can’t believe in! Obama is mostly proposing to do what he did not do when he was in total control, namely rising taxes on the rich, and imposing a minimum tax of 30% on the hyper rich. It’s safe to propose it now, his masters have determined: he is not in control anymore (the Republicans are). So his masters told him: OK, go ahead, tell them what they want to hear, the Dream, the American Dream.

We work harder and smarter than anyone else. Who is that “we” who haunts us? The plutocrats?

Raising taxes on the rich is also insufficient, in any case: it won’t solve the deficit, right now augmenting at one trillion a year, for a grand total of 16 trillion dollars, nearly as much as the 17,6 trillion GDP of the European Union.. . And certainly higher than the 15 trillion dollars USA GDP. (European countries have an Added Value Tax of at least 15%, by law, 17.5% in France and Germany, up to 20% in Great Britain, 23% in Greece. That reduces deficits, but Obama does not know what it is, although I wrote extensively about it, and offered him a book, where it is, black on white.)

Partisans such as Krugman speak only of a USA deficit of around 10 trillion dollars, allowing the USA to look slightly better than France or Germany. How do they do it? How do they cheat? Partisans of USA greatness omit what the USA government borrowed from USA government funds whose spending in the future is mandated by law.

By the way, recent graphs show the USA GDP going up by leaps and bounds, whereas the EU’s stagnates (with Germany not enough to compensate Britain rolling over, lower, while Italy and Spain sink, and France is going nowhere). This looks good, for the USA, but it means nothing. Inefficiencies, waste, jams, and the intrusion of pay services in what ought to be free (like school and care) augment GDP artificially, or, let’s say in ways that cannot be compared!

Obama crowed that he had signed free trade agreements that allowed to sell lots of products stamped “Made in America”. Never mind that “America” is not an official country.

Never mind that the free trade agreements with Panama, Columbia, South Korea, were long stalled, because of the fear for USA jobs, and passed… by the Republican Congress in October 2011. The democratic crowd roared its approval, of the great Obama victory, grabbing his pen to sign on Republican policy, I guess. I am also for free trade… But only if and when everything else been equal. Actually the USA administration (and also Europe) are claiming that China dumps solar panels. Among other things.

Obama forgot to put a carbon tax, so his ‘5 millions‘ renewable energy jobs did not materialize. (By comparison Sweden passed a carbon tax in 1990, to great success for employment and CO2, let alone energy independence.)

Nationalist frenzy, and plutocratization, are hard to reverse. Citizens of the USA view as a self evident truth that they got attacked on 9/11 by a country they had nothing to do with, as they were careful, and still are careful, to NOT learn what really happen. Namely they do not want to read that the USA was engaged in a war of aggression in Afghanistan as early as 1978. (Shortly after three government sponsored Franco-Afghan geological missions under Dr. Laparent, found great mineral wealth. Is the Afghan war just a Franco-american conflict?)     

Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s National Security Adviser, stated in 1998, to the French “According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujaheddin began… after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan… But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise:

Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.… We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.” [Le Nouvel Observateur (Paris), 1/15/1998] After Brzezinski’s confession, other US officials who denied US involvement prior to the Soviet invasion, also changed their story. (For instance, Charles Cogan, head of the CIA covert aid program to Afghanistan at this time.)

For a fuller quote and a more comprehensive story see: http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2010/09/17/obama-commemorates-911-his-way/

By the way, it’s really hard to search the web, in the USA, only in the USA, about the Pelosi plutocrat‘s plutocracy, or Carter’s henchmen terrorizing Afghanistan. It’s not just the People Republic of China which manipulates the search engines.

But it works: the professional killer who was leader of the section who killed Bin Laden, although increasingly cynical in all sorts of ways, really believed that the USA was treacherously attacked on 9/11. Attacked, sure. Treacherous? Not so fast. That soldier had no idea that USA henchmen instructed the Islamist Fundamentalists to attack civilian objectives in Afghanistan, and, preferably school for little girls, a full generation earlier. (No, I will not bother to make a search for this from the USA; I would come empty. But, overseas, the documentation is plentiful.) 

Obama also strokes the dream of the unprovoked 9/11 attack.

Whatever happens, plutocracy will soon elect its next USA president. It would be funnier, if it were Biden. With his distorted face, he looks the part. Joker.

Obama has accomplished his role, that of a vaccine against change. You can read through his face his great interrogation: are they, my rich friends, replacing me with one that they would like more? So he mouthed the change-y thing unconvincingly. He took the left for granted, giving it only pittance. All the horrors inaugurated by G W Bush were left in place, more, even more terrible, were added. Worst: the left took Obama for granted Brown skin, lofty rhetoric, what could go wrong?

Fact is, although the assassination program and its death panel is going strong, the economy is going, at best, nowhere (in France, EU, or the USA) once population change is factored out. See the fawning Krugman, September 7, admitting in a burp of honesty, speaking of employment:“A plunge and a stabilization at a depressed level, which has now gone on for almost three years. Everything else is just noise.” (By the way, Krugman is now looking at the employment ratio, which I long advocated as more pertinent than the U numbers.)

Systems of minds are dynamic. As they go on, they become their own initial conditions. Plutocratization is hard to stop. In Rome it got unfettered after Hannibal’s forever wandering cataclysm. The situation got ever worse. 160 years later, the Republic had fallen. Augustus, of course re-established the Republic, formally speaking, so he claimed. With a caveat: he was to be known as the “First Man In Rome.” Princeps. Or as the French, always inclined to abstraction, put it: prince.

Whatever that was, whatever that is, it’s not democracy. Certainly not democracy as the Greeks understood it, and not even democracy as the Romans understood it. An abomination looking for a catastrophe is more like it. In the fullness of time, sometimes the present itself turns into a golden legend, as the floor disappears below a civilization.

Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Chanted Obama and his helpers four years ago (me among them). Yes, he could. Asssasinate whoever the death panel Obama instituted at the White House wants. This has been Obama’s presidency greatest breakthrough, its true signature achievement. Not fighting climate change. Not bringing jobs. Not rolling back metastatic kleptocratic finance. No. It’s all the way back to the jungle. Yes We Can! Assassinate. Whoever we want. For whatever they do.

And yet ethics was invented for economics, not just survival. When the god fearing Carter sent his assassins to Afghanistan, he set the groundwork for 9/11… And probably much worse to come (the USA has helped Pakistan’s Islamist regime make thermonuclear weapons, thus enabling a potential thermonuclear 9/11).

Nastiness does not just propagates, it feeds on itself. Not that the plutocrats mind. In hell, all fired up, ready to go, their lord dwell. When plutocracy turns into an avalanche, civilization is swept away.

***

Patrice Ayme

IMMORAL CO2 Curve

CO2: A NON LINEAR PATHOGENIC IMMORALITY: CRUSH THE INFAMY!

The Other Side Of God.

Abstract: Both the financial plutocracy and the biosphere catastrophe from CO2 poisoning are self feeding exponential phenomena (as Nazism was). CO2 poisoning is with no historical precedent since there were dinosaurs, and they died.

Any exponential phenomena affecting humanity is, by definition, immoral (I explain why, and what it means). The CO2 curve is not just immoral but also pathological. Only extreme force can be called upon crushing such spiralling towards destruction. In such cases,  violence, the usage of extreme force, has to rise to the ultimate occasion. That is moral. Appeasement is immoral.

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Introduction: Most of the worst civilization destroying calamities are self feeding, vicious spirals down the abyss. Rarely, the disaster is purely launched by nature.

This happened with Crete, which was devastated by the eruption of Thera (Santorini) volcano. The generated huge tsunamis, formidable ash fall, and devastation of the economy of the Orient. Crete did not recover. A more subtle case was Sumerian civilization, even earlier, destroyed by man-made salination and, supernatural flooding. The latter, I would venture to suggest, may have been caused by ecological man-made devastation, upstream.

Famous examples of man induced calamities are tied to the plutocratic phenomenon as happened in Rome and for the Mayas (the Yucatan drought was probably human engineered, and massive wars failed to improve the situation, until the population crashed, and stayed crashed, just as happened with the collapse of Rome, but even worse). “Pluto” is pretty much synonymous to “Dark Side” and “evil”. In all cases the inclination to view elimination as the ultimate solution.

In my view of meta morality, the Dark Side pretty much arose as the ultimate safety mechanism, the one that sacrifices Homo to save Gaia.

Voltaire recommended to “crush infamy“: he was talking about crushing the most outrageous aspects of plutocracy (the doubled headed hydra of the aristocracy and the theocracy). He was certainly not talking about crushing nascent international finance (because the roue’ Arouet was an extremely rich, not to say dishonest, international financial speculator himself).

Now the many headed calamity hydra is clearly graced with a globalized financial front (with a picturesque touch, we just learned that Bank of America was used massively by Mexican drug cartels for laundering), but also, worst of all, it sports the greatest disaster in dozens of millions of years: a man made CO2 rampage. We must speak more harshly than Voltaire to save civilization and its supporting biosphere (that’s why I call on the powers of the son of his friend Sade: only Pluto can fight Pluto). 

***

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A TALE OF TWO MORALITIES: Reality Versus Superstition (Plutocracy):

Dostoyevsky has one of his characters proclaims that:“If God does not exist, everything is permitted.”

Now, of course, God cannot be defined, so it does not exist, thus everything is permitted to the members of the plutocracy. This is, so to speak, the other side of god, the one rarely talked about (although obsessing about this is one of Nietzsche’s fortés).

The other side of God was the huge reality of the Middle Ages. The top members of the plutocracy at the time believed fervently in God, especially when it was highly convenient to them. Otherwise, they made fun of god, sometimes in the cruelest manner, as when they went to the Middle East, supposedly to free the house of Christ, while eating and roasting the local children (when it was expedient to do so).

Faced with thousands of prisoners, only some of them heretics, the following declaration was attributed to the Pope’s legate: “Cædite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius:”  (“Tuez les tous, Dieu reconnaitra les siens!”, “Kill them all, Dominator will recognize who is his own.” The same concept, and word, dominate, was used for emperor, and god…)

Although the attribution is dubious in that particular case, it symbolizes well the mentality of the Middle Age plutocracy while it reigned. Amaury, the legate, had trespassed the Pope’s instructions by invading the giant, republican minded Toulouse County (this hints that Amaury was conspiring with the secular plutocrats in Paris, led by the king there, and the heresy was just a pretext, so what they were after was truly finding cause to kill as many citizens of the county as possible: no plutocrats love a republic, when they can kill it.)

Augustine famously said that there were two cities, one built by greed (civilization), the other by love (for god, the elusive notion nobody sane can define). Instead what Augustine made possible was a tale of two moralities. That of the slave (Christianism), and that of the masters. This is what Nietzsche found while analyzing scripture, and what the historical record makes plain. I would add it made possible a tale of two mentalities: those who care about reality, and those who hate it. Unsurprisingly, at least in the USA, those who love CO2, love Augustine, that is, fundamentalist Christianity, and hate reality. The reality being that, with what they want not to do, Florida will soon be underwater.

***

WHEN CIVILIZATION EXISTS, FEW THINGS ARE PERMITTED:

Sartre said that all of French existentialism held in ‘If God does not exist, everything is permitted.’ That of course makes existentialism into a big nothing, because only Nazis and the like believed in such a thing, that “everything is permitted“. It is precisely because Nazis felt thus, that everything was permitted, that they did what they did.

As Nietzsche had guessed, nihilism was a rising scourge. So, the same mood that infected the Nazis, that everything was permitted extended much further, including in places which opposed the Nazis. Nowadays, many of the Internet stupid out there have erected as a nihilistic moral principle, at the grass root level of their subjection, that one has lost the argument, each time one mentions Hitler and company.

In other words, every time one rises an objection to “everything is permitted”, their minds leave the room, and, moreover, they insult you.

In any case, if “everything is permitted” is the definition of French existentialism, one arrives to the apparently paradoxical conclusion that the Nazis were actually French existentialists… It’s paradoxical until one realizes that many of the French existentialists were partial to Nazi like theories… Before, during, and well after the occupation of France by the Nazis.

Some of these Nazi fellow travellers, such as Beauvoir, deliberately collaborated with the Nazis! Sartre proved that aplenty later, with his hysterical support for various Nazi like movements (“of liberation“, instead of deliberation), all the way to Mao’s senile “Cultural Revolution”.

But maybe all what Sartre meant was that everything was permitted to Sartre…

Contrarily to what Sartre and company affected to believe, ever since there are civilizations, there has been interdictions springing out of morality.

An army is crucial for establishing a civilization, as is a treasury and a government (learn Europa, learn…). But morality holds all of it together. “Civilization is repression.” As Freud more or less said, in his Civilization and Its Discontents.

More generally civilization provides the context that individual human logics need to operate. In other words, civilization, all civilizations, determine what minds are going to be, and decree that, out of this arena, immorality reigns.

This fundamental precondition, a common experience, in that case, of (fascist) disaster, all of Europe (more or less) shares. That is why it was part of a healthy debate for the Greeks to remind the Germans what the old reigning German mentality, circa 1941 did to them, and that one should take a wide berth from a repeat performance.

And that is why there is good hope for Europe, and, why, paradoxically, any hard times presently encountered ought to forge some more, with fire and beating, of that common hard steel of moral resolve which forges the hardest, and hardiest civilization.

***

CO2 DENIERS ARE DELIBERATELY TEACHING INSANITY:

The Nazis’ teachings were deliberately insane, they thought that was very smart. They despised those who could not be as insane as them, such as democracies (the fly in the ointment was that the French republic was much crazier than the Nazis had anticipated, and went right ahead to make war to the Great 1,000 years Reich).

The theory behind this was explained thoroughly by Hitler. Stalin made similar declarations.

The general idea was: “Nobody is as crazy as us, so we will win” and… Stalin was right, as its Soviet organization proved even more ready to kill anybody in the way than the Nazis themselves…. Nazis never had “blocking sections“, killing any soldier seen retreating. The Nazis found that method inhuman, and were unwilling to apply it to their Alte Kameraden!

In 2003, as the USA invaded Iraq, clever conservative commentators argued that none of the reasons for invading Iraq made much sense, but for one, that was in no way official. That was that, if the USA invaded Iraq, other countries would believe the USA was crazy, drunk on its power, thus dangerously unpredictable, hence to be left alone, and treated with the respect extended to an unpredictable predator, such as a grizzly bear.

The same ones are now supporting the CO2 built up in the atmosphere. One can see their crafty reasoning from here: climate catastrophe will bring a world war, so we will win the big enchilada (again). As happened in 1945, when the American plutocratic support for the fascists (mostly pre-1942) was determinant to destroy the supremacy of European democracies and other (not so democratic) states.

That strategy of insanity is, of course, nothing new: besides Hitler and Stalin, many brutes, throughout the ages, have argued just the same. If we act really crazy, people will make way.

***

WHEN THE HELVETES WENT DELIBERATELY CRAZY:

A famous example: when the Swiss, the 380,000 Helvetii, a race of Celts, surrounded as they were, by mountains, decided that they would prefer to control a greater territory than Switzerland, they marched West, something they had long planned. They had defeated the Romans two generations earlier, they were unafraid.

So that everybody would understand that the Helvetii meant business, they destroyed all their grain, but for what they could carry, and burned all their cities, villages and houses. There was no going back. That was crazy. That craziness was the point, entirely. Caesar, who knew how to think, was impressed enough to do what it took to stop them. (After Caesar killed all of them but for 110,000, mostly in one tremendous battle, the imperator forced the survivors to rebuild their nation, lest the Germans invade Helvetia, and he obliged the Allobroges to the south to feed the dishevelled tribe.) 

***

EXPECTING REASON FROM BRUTES IS UNCIVILIZED: 

Thus, how can one argue intelligently and politely with Nazis, and the like, when they are often using insanity as a tool, or weapon? This is the question exquisitely civilized people had in 1930s. Following the letter, but not the practice, of great Christian monarchs (the archetypes being Constantine, Justinian, Charlemagne) they embraced a sort of policy of “turning the other cheek, until brutes are ashamed, or their hands tired”. Those naive critters felt they would solve, if not dissolve, the brutes, by being ever more refined. Hence the strategy of “appeasement”. (To call off appeasement, the French republic overwhelmed her distaste, and pushed for a military alliance with the Polish colonels, dragging Britain in the small letters of the appendix; Hitler reacted by making official his long military alliance with Stalin, in the hope of scaring away the French… But France declared war nevertheless, to Hitler, Stalin, and their American plutocrats in attendance… and their snivelling allies in the U.S. congress.)

When facing real brutes, and humoring them, one may as well go to a swamp and read Homer to hungry crocodiles. Ultimately, the only civilized way to handle crocs or crooks basking in the greatest physical violence is according to what they are the most competent at: brute force. It is actually immoral for moral people to expect angry crocodiles to behave. Being moral does not mean to just turn the other cheek, but to know how to draw a line.

Some will notice that my drift tends to justify Obama’s execution policy. Sort of. What I contest with the execution policy is the details of how it is carried out (in particular targeting for death innocent families is not acceptable to me, although carpet bombing was in WWII. Why? Because Obama has other means at his disposal, patience being one of them; that was not available in WWII; in the present case, legal precedent is more important than just winning on the ground, because the battle is all in the minds now (forgetting 9/11), and has already been won on the ground).

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WHEN CROCS & CROOKS LIVE FROM OTHERS’ DEATHS:

Which brings us to those who deny the immorality of the steep CO2 curve. CO2 and associated, even worse, man-made industrial gases, cannot be denied. However, some still deny them, called them insignificant, or even life giving. Those self fascinated crooks are denying the significance of the steep rise in these atmospheric poisons. They are having martinis, and the good life (because they get paid for broadcasting their absurdities) while the biosphere tumbles towards catastrophe.

The phenomenon is exactly the same as with the crooked financiers. They get paid for their criminal absurdities, and the more absurd, the more criminal, the more money they get, a form of compensation for being immoral fools for all to see. Only brute force, jailing them, will solve the …. exponentiating problem they are creating. If one does nothing, just as with Hitler, the situation becomes quickly worse, and for the same reason: it’s self feeding.

***

CO2 & GREED ARE EXPONENTIAL:

Both financial destruction of the economy and greenhouse heating of the planet are self feeding mechanisms. The evil blooming of the financial plutocracy and of the biosphere catastrophe are two illustrations of the exponential. Below the incapacity to do anything about both, lays a deep ignorance of the mathematical nature of that most important piece of mathematics, the exponential.

As Martin Lack, from “Lack Of Environment“ points out: “Hi Patrice. You talk of the “immorality of the steep CO2 curve”, which reminds me of a point… If people look at the graph of atmospheric CO2 (with its annual peaks and troughs reflecting variations in photosynthesis by plants) they may notice that the long term-trend is not linear – it is accelerating slowly. However, what many fail to appreciate is that, if you look at the data in the context of CO2 levels over the last few hundred years, we are now in the near vertical part of a J-curve. As someone once said, the main reason Hockey Stick graphs seem to appear whenever you look at climate-related data is because they are there; and we are causing them:
See page 6 of the Introduction to David Mackay’s book Sustainable Energy – Without Hot Air.”

One would expect the CO2 curve to be non linear, because heating the planet is highly non linear. When there is such a thing as no more snow in August, the ground starts to warm up, the CO2 and methane in the permafrost bubble up, the dark ocean absorbs more heat, the tropical ocean makes more haze, steam (itself a most efficient greenhouse gas)… then there is no going back, and the climate will yo-yo, as happened many times in the past. Simply, this time, if we do not do something dramatic, we know that the yo-yo will beat anything viewed in at least 20 million years. And that means the yo-yo will break: no more glaciers. At all. (Smarty pants will point out that we will be able to put a planetary sized sunshade in orbit, someday. Maybe, but not before several billions dead, and not before we design safe and reliable nuclear rockets, or something like that!)

Thus I employ the adjective “immoral” deliberately, when referring to the CO2 curve, knowing full well that it is provocative. But it’s much more than that; it is correct. Morally correct. It goes at the heart of my theory of morality. It’s very simple: morality comes from “mores” the long term , thus sustainable, habits a civilization has.

That exponentiating CO2 curve is obviously not sustainable, thus it is immoral. And it is lethally immoral: CO2 is not just innocuous, life sustaining, growing big trees. It’s also lethal at very low concentrations: it became the major problem for the survival of the crew of Apollo XIII, after their fuel cell exploded.

Greed, itself exponential, feeds the CO2 curve. Exponentials feeding other exponential: a gory mathematical spectacle.

***

EVIL ARTS BRING THE DEMON OUT:

And why is greed exponential? Because the more greed brings, the more one wants more, from a phenomenon of habituation, the same one which makes addicts augment the dose. The exact same brain phenomenon is at play: desensitization, and thus frantic augmentation of the stimulation. That is why Larry Ellison, after refusing to pay tax to schools, and buying huge properties everywhere, has now bought an entire Hawaiian island. He was getting habituated to all these outrages: he needed more, to get the same spice, with spitting into civilization’s face.

And that is why the balanced life, long sung by ancient philosophers, is so important, and, ultimately moral: it prevents this neurological desensitization, from an overuse of some peculiar neuronal circuitry. It is also why to be ruled by wealth, by greed, Pluto, is to be ruled by addicts. 

One may also wonder if the same effect is not at work among those who are obsessed by power (on others). it is already known that animals who are dominant, or dominated, suffer important neurohormonal changes. In some fishes, the need for an all fascist, all dominant leader brings enormous physiological changes, from male to super male, and if, there is no male left, from female, to super male.

Thus representative democracy, by its need for super leaders, may lead not just to select for the rather psychopathic, but even to turn the mild ones into physiological psychopaths.

As the astoundingly naïve Obama recently declared:“I did not know that my job’s description required to kill people.” Well, I have other news for him: his job is changing him neurohormonally, transforming him indeed, into a super killer (if not a super leader)… supposing he did not have it in him all along.

Gandhi called Hitler “his friend“, and tried to prevent India to declare war to “his friend“. What Gandhi did not understand is that utmost morality requires using maximal force against maximal calamities. There are no ifs and buts, and appeals to pacifism when facing a lion’s jaw (the morality Obama has been all too enthusiastic to use against Muslim terrorists, perhaps to compensate not using it against banksters!)

Let me truncate and add some sting to a quote of Sade:“Nature put us all to be equal born; if fate is pleased to intervene, and upset the primary order of things, it is up to us to correct its caprices and, through our own skill, to repair the usurpations of the strongest… So long as our good faith and patience serve only to double the weight of our chains…” Our virtues will be as crimes. (What Sade said at this point was the obverse: “our crimes would be as virtues“, also a valid point, sometimes, such as when Obama feels virtuous when killing innocent families of dedicated terrorists…)

As long as we sit quietly in our corner as the CO2 keeps on climbing, our virtues are as crimes.

What to do right away, besides getting more informed? Well the USA should follow Europe, and put heavy taxes on energy and carbon (it would also help the deficit while broadening the tax base). Even Australia just did this (more exactly on mining and carbon, to the applause of even “The Economist“).

Next the EU and USA could plot together, and squeeze the rest of the planet into clean energy. If Obama were re-elected, and not just listening to clever crocs such as Messieurs Summers, Rubin, Dimon, and countless others, he could put such a plan in action within days. It would even bolster employment (see Germany, which has created 300,000 jobs in clean energies).

The statu quo has become immoral. Time to do triage among the mores, and move on boldly where no minds have been before, same as ever was.

***

Patrice Ayme

Microbes Also Make History

BAD LEADERS CAN RUIN A CIVILIZATION.

Sarkozy Made Merkel Crucially Bad. Most Big Powers Despise The Biosphere Officially. Obama Loves Fire.

***

Abstract: Three Italians named Marios have put Merkel on the ropes. It turns out, as the head of the German Socialists pointed out in parliament, six weeks after the presidency went to a socialist in France, conservative Merkel changed her music completely. She signed on measures she had insisted were against the German constitution. Such as the mutualization of the cost of defaulting banks (why should that be will be made clear below).

Not just that, but, having fallen in a trap the French socialists set for her, Merkel has already modified the German CONSTITUTION, to please them. Overnight, literally. (As I had predicted would happen.)

Americans don’t even remember when their constitution was changed last. Actually the USA does not change its constitution, just details, by “amending” it. The lack of change is built-in as the USA has NO constitutional court (strictly speaking, thus explaining SCOTUS‘ fear to be seen playing with the constitution). France and Germany, having learned from the past, have constitutional courts, and that is helpful as European construction requires continual constitutional changes.

There are broader lessons in this. If just one man, a small man who ran all the time, after his own legs, the French Nicholas Sarkozy, could, all by himself, put Europe and even the world, in a huge financial crisis, how many of these dangerous mongrels are out there?

If one lover of private bankers, Sarkozy, arrogant in his rabid stupidity, could, all by himself, keep hundreds of millions oppressed throughout Europe, how come more people are not waking up to throw similar rascals out?

It is interesting to observe that the dividing line is not so much between left and right, but between those who think the state should serve the richest folks for all to see, and those who aspire to more subtlety. The fact that the French socialists conspired instantaneously with the conservatives in Spain and Italy shows this.

What Sarkozy and Merkel did, was to enable further ruin of national states in Europe. As there is no European Federal state, that came down to transferring ever more power to those who manage the globally corrupt financial system and those who profit from it, the global plutocracy and its servants.

Similarly, the contempt of the most influential leaders for the biosphere, evident from their absence at the Rio United Nations Conference On Sustainable Development, is exemplary of their contempt for life. So what do they admire? As my essay “Sage of Obama” demonstrated, they admire the creatures who have sustainable power, even if based on criminal practice, upon most of the People (see also PM Cameron below for insufferable hypocrisy). This is another drawback of representative “democracy”: it selects the leadership of those who crave for power, amutually admiring society. 

***

THOSE WHO ADMIRE CRIME SHALL LIVE AS SERFS:

As long as one insists that mafiosi are good fellows, one will not get rid of the Mafia. So it was in the USA: the mafia was flourishing, until a  number of movies (Including the aptly named “The Godfather“, and “Good Fellows“) demonstrated to the vast public that mafiosi, although charming in many ways, and craving for honor, were not just pillars of society, but disgusting criminals perverting all of society.

That new found revulsion gave justice and law enforcement the necessary context and encouraging mood to treat the criminals, as the criminals they were.

The same job remains to be done in global finance. As long as one insists that global finance mafiosi are good fellows, one will not get rid of the global finance Mafia. Justice will come, only after a mood of revulsion will set in.

The criminal problem posed by global finance is of course not of the same order of magnitude as the Mafia. The Mafia never brought the entire world economy to a halt, and never threatened the biosphere as we know it, with extinction. Global finance and its allies do. The danger they present is immensely greater. (I have also argued forcefully that global plutocracy was behind the various fascisms of the 1930s, including Stalinism, as Lenin himself foresaw!)

Some have made the additions, and found that the 2008 banking crash (which is still unfolding) was 100 times greater than the Savings and Loans banking crash in the USA under Reagan and Bush I. However in the latter case, more than 10,000 prosecutions and 1,000 condemnations against bank managers were obtained.

Under Obama, so far, none. Where there is a will, there is a way. However, microbes don’t even need a will to find a way.

Just watch most of the global finance loving leaders: they did not even bother to go to the Rio de Janeiro world ecological summit. Of the important world leaders, only the French socialist president Hollande showed up. The other permanent members of the UN Security Council do not worry about the security threat presented by the rising of the seas. Germany’s Merkel, anxious to build another 26 new coal plants, of course did not show up either. Fossil fuel Merkel will be fondly remember when Hamburg fights the rising ocean.

Thousands of the most important men in global finance should not be lionized as Obama did with Warren Buffet, or Dimon, or Rubin, Summers (See “Sage of Obama”). The mood of blind admiration for financial pirates has to be changed. By the way, such  a change of mood happened with piracy, four or three centuries ago.

Piracy had started honorably (lettres de marque, corsairs). Francis Drake, who discovered the San Francisco Bay and beat off the Spanish Armada, was, with his colleagues, a corsair, a type of pirate. 150 years later the mood changed, because the pirates had gone too far, taking over entire island, making trade difficult for everybody. Then the states actively suppressed piracy. It did not take long, once Britain and France took the decision to do so: pirates were found, and hanged, from the Carribean, to the Indian ocean.

We are in a similar situation with financial piracy today: if the states cracked down, it would be over in a matter of weeks.

Actually, come to think of it, there was an even more spectacular precedent. Under the late Roman republic, preoccupied by civil war between the Populares and the plutocrats, piracy grew in the Mediterranean, to the point that there were pirate cities, pirate islands, and trade was being extinguished. When finally the distracted Roman government was forced to focus on the problem, it gave full powers to a young Pompeius Magnus to clean the Mediterranean of the pirates. It took him only three months, to everybody’s amazement.

Something similar happened in the Mediterranean, again, when France and Britain, shamed by the Navy of the USA, also took action against the pirates in Algiers and Tripoli. It is important to remember that what the naive and ignorant describe as simple colonial adventures did not start that way at all, but instead as military operations against imperialism (Napoleon in Egypt!), or against piracy (US Navy against Libya, then, decades later, Royal Navy against Algiers’pirates, followed, finally, another decade later, by French invasion… Or counter-invasion, as the French argued they represented Rome, which had been chased out by the Arab invasion of the late 7C). 

So mankind has to learn to view financial plutocrats as the criminals they are. Common people do not know that global finance has set-up a machine to divert all of the world money to itself. Instead, in their naivety, they attribute what is criminal to a form of genius. One is reminded of the Bible, where the people chose to save the king of the bandits rather than the righteous Christ.

Common folks are mystified by global finance, as practiced today. They cannot know that it is just organized crime, because the machine is hidden behind non linear mathematics, and common people don’t know mathematics, even much simpler than that.

The Godfather, as incarnated by Marlon Brando or Warren Buffet has undeniable charm, the fascist instinct in man wants such a grandfatherly leader, but that’s exactly what the state of law is not.

The huge and prestigious banks Barclays, which has its own skyscraper in London, was found to have manipulated interest rates to its own interest, illegally. It was condemned to a fine of more than 360 million Euros. But its chairman stayed in place.  

Curiously the daemons at the head of JP Morgan and Barclays, are named Dimon and Diamond. The former went to the USA House and Senate with giant presidential cuff links. The questions were polite: the senators and Congresspersons are on his payroll. And the other daemon, Diamond, in Britain, made sure to give to charity, for schools, millions.

They steal billions from taxpayers, and then give millions, and get to be called “philanthropists”. Singer Bono, for example, is a philanthropist; he makes billions from facebook, while singing about the poor, to enrich himself, and showing off with the president and other friendly plutocrats and their obsequious servants.

***

WITHOUT SARKOZY THE DISSEMBLER, MERKEL CRUMBLES:

Meanwhile the plutophile Merkel suffered a heavy defeat at the hands of the coalition led by Socialist France. Let me explain.

Mario Draghi was for six years a partner at Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs has been in the habit of making partners in its lucrative organization Europeans with high responsibilities (such as EC commissioners, some German, or central bankers, such as Draghi). This way they can be paid, for their attention while serving Goldman as apparently independent agents. Goldman thus rewards those who had its interests at heart.

The drawback for global finance, is that such officials, should they betray the criminals, know the method of the global financial Mafia, and where some the bodies are buried.

Draghi is now head of the ECB, the European Central Bank, and he suggested in June 2012 that a European Banking Union was needed. As it is now, when a bank fails the state the bank nominally belongs to, is supposed to step in. This is unrealistic, as the banks in Europe straddle borders heavily.

For example Italian banks owe more than 310 billion euros to French banks. German banks owe more than 200 billions to French banks, about what British banks owe to French banks, and French banks owe more than 125 billion euros to German banks. meanwhile British banks owe nearly 400 billions euros to German banks. Those who want to amuse themselves with these numbers can consult the BBC website (with its apparently misleading title, “Eurozone debt“, or is it a Freudian slip that, after all, to tell the real truth, Britain is in the Eurozone?).

Financial markets responded favorably to the June 28-29 maneuver, with Irish borrowing costs for 10 years dropping to their lowest level since the month before the November 2010 EU-IMF bailout.

The maneuver consisted into creating, soon, a European equivalent of TARP. So in the future, when a bank will fail, a common European fund will europeanize it (in contrast with nationalizing it).

“It is a first step to break the vicious circle between banks and sovereigns,” said European Council president Herman Van Rompuy.

Verily this circle is worldwide, even the Chinese Premier admitted that much… About supposedly communist China: he explained banks too big to fail, even in China, got their way, and that had to change.

***

MERKEL’S HUMILIATION:

The evening started badly for Merkel, who had hysterically celebrated the victory of Germany over Greece the week before (in the soccer cup). An Italian named Mario, black like charcoal, scored twice against Germany. Then he rushed to kiss his (white) mama, who had adopted him from Ghana at age two. Very touching.

Under Hitler, Germans whose fathers had been black French army soldiers, were forcibly sterilized to the German population’s rabid applause, characteristic of scared rodents. There were several thousands of those unfortunate mixed race Germans (as manly French soldiers occupied Germany a bit after the later refused to pay for its wanton and deliberate destruction of France and Belgium in 1914-1918).

Many Germans will say;”Oh, this was then, this is now, we Germans don’t revisit the past, and think guilt is passe’”. Well, now came from then. Some of what German officials said in recent weeks proved this again. Bundesbank official talked about the Greeks as if they were dogs. Just like then. Germans do not own the Greek currency anymore in 2012 than they did in 1941.

1941 was the year when Germany invaded Greece to extricate the army of the fascist Mussolini from its invasion of Greece in 1940, which had backfired. The Greeks were defeated by Hitler, but, just as the Battle of France a year earlier, the Battle of Greece caused enormous losses to the German armed forces. So, a few weeks later, it was a much diminished German army that attacked the USSR. For example the German paratroop corps was eliminated while taking over Crete, and would reappear, much diminished, only during the Vercors Battle of Spring 1944, the diversion insurrection that allowed D Day in Normandy to proceed (by diverting 20,000 elite German troops, including SS paratroopers).

There are human rights abuses in Germany now, some major ones, such as no minimum wage. One cannot claim to be superior when one uses slave labor, same as then. Does our children ever learn, as G.W. Bush, grandson of one of Hitler’s most famous collaborator, Prescott Bush, would say.

So back to Merkel. After the terrible black Mario had scored twice against the Mannschaft (“the team”), there she was meeting with the 26 other leaders of Europe. What an evening!

Suddenly, the conservatives in Spain and Italy made a united front. At 11pm, they said they were not signing the document they had in front of them. For all the talk of Germany’s crushing superiority, Spain’s Rajoy and Italy’s Mario Monti represent more than 100 million people, and more GDP than Germany.

At that point, unheard of in a European Union summit, ever, a leader rose and left. French president Hollande stepped out, in an implicit support to Spain and Italy. Merkel could not call on her mighty ally. She was all alone. where was Sarkozy the plutophile, when she needed him?

Several hours later, Merkel, and the plutocrats she represents, capitulated. Banks in need will henceforth be Europeanized, getting money directly from the ECB (thus not increasing the debts of states such as Italy or Spain anymore). Hollande came back, and signed. Merkel looked haggard. Two defeat at the hands of “super Marios” in 12 hours…

When Merkel went back to her Parliament to get the two thirds majority she needs to change the German Constitution, the (physically large) chief of the Socialists (she needed to sign on) ironically observed that what she declared, two weeks earlier, to be anti-Constitutional, now that the French socialist controlled the National Assembly, she pushed to make it into law.

Evil men can hide behind regulations, or lack thereof, but they can’t escape the justice of history.

To tell us there are no banksters does not help. One cannot stop the Mafia, if one call Mafiosi, good fellows.

***

WE CONSPIRE & HATE THE BIOSPHERE, What’s Your Problem?

If just Sarkozy could prevent progress on a banking union, what can a conspiracy of anti-ecological leaders do? At the Rio ecological summit, where the subject was saving the biosphere, none of the most major leaders were present, except, once again, France’s socialist president Hollande.

Dr. Merkel went back to Germany, busy, as she is, to build 26 new giant coal plants. Australian leaders did not show up: after all Australia lives off coal sold to Asia. Putin runs a petro-gas state. China breathes coal and the mercury vapor burning coal provides with, perfumes the atmosphere, forgive our mental retardation. Obama beams from fracking and the plutocrats he feeds, just as they feed him.

British PM Cameron is beyond any decent description: he now fights what he calls a “culture of entitlement“, by removing subsidies to those who cannot afford lodging. I guess, he fights himself, as he was born with ten gold spoon in his mouth. PM Cameron inherited a considerable entitlement, he is in the know. And see: he does not need help, this is the proper culture of entitlement.

Cameron’s father was a stock broker and then an off shore fund manager, presumably not to pay more taxes; an ancestor was king; the Sunday Times Rich List compiler Philip Beresford, said: “I put the combined family wealth of David and Samantha Cameron at £30 million plus. Both sides of the family are extremely wealthy.” Yes, let’s fight the entitled, Camie boy!

Meanwhile the USA is experiencing record high temperatures, fires are burning, Obama shows off with the muscular firefighters among the smoldering ruins. No need for a carbon tax, we are already burning. Pathogens make history. The Arctic icepack is tracking at record lows. The poles are melting, the plutocrats are reigning, what could go wrong?

***

Patrice Ayme

King Wastes Euros, Elephants; CO2 Denier Blames Cows!

THOSE WHO TEACH WASTE OUGHT TO BE TAUGHT A LESSON.

Five millions Spaniards are unemployed (out of 40 million). And now the king broke his hip. How? He was in a safari. It turns out that the good king loves to assassinate elephants in Bostwana. Each time the king reaches ecstasy by killing one single elephant it costs 37,000 euros ($50,000) to European taxpayers (and even to the American ones: globalization, remember?) But there is no money for the 35% of Spanish youth who are unemployed. Each time the king presses the trigger, it’s more than two median family incomes in Spain, which go to pierce flesh. It’s highly symbolic: you earn it not, while the king penetrates a terrorized victim with it.

King Juan Carlos loves to pose with elephants he perforated with bullets. It makes him feel mighty, he has got to feel completely empty inside.

The truth is that this assassin of elephants was put in power by a fascist, the treacherous general, Franco, who killed more than a million Spaniards, while overthrowing the republic, and even more for years after that. With the crucial help of Texaco, and other American plutocrats, Mussolini and Hitler. Franco and his subalterns were even engaged in child trafficking (killing the parents to get the children; no wonder the Catholic church who has had an obsession with abusing children ever since Abraham, was all behind Franco: Opus Dei!)

The latter two, Mussolini and Hitler, were punished, but they were only the puppets of the former, a worldwide conspiracy of plutocrats, whose heirs are doing better than ever, thank you. We are moving in a new phase, where their role and tastes are becoming obvious, in part for an extremely sinister reason: they don’t feel they have to hide anymore.

Starve millions of Spaniards, kill the elephants. Hopefully they all suffer very much, pleasing Juan Carlos to no end.

After one more scandal too many, should one want to improve matters for the commons, Juan Carlos and his family ought to be removed from their influential position. We have seen enough of his kind. Juan Carlos, a Bourbon, that is a descendant of a family that made France suffer so much, is there because his ancestor, the sectarian criminal, Louis XIV of France, put him there. OK, first France had to win a war, the War of the Succession of Spain, an enormous world war that lasted more than 13 years, devastating all of Europe, and even America, but especially Spain, France and Germany.

The main reason why Spain could be democratized is that admiral Duke Carrero Blanco, Franco’s confidante and successor was thrown, still in his armored vehicle, into a ballistic trajectory by ETA. After overflying the church where he had attended mass, Prime Minister Blanco was in for a rude landing. He died later, after contemplating his crimes.

It’s high time for Spain to become a republic again, a generation after the fascists killed millions to make sure it was not. The fact that several members of Carlos’ family have been stealing Spain in full sight makes Spanish, hence European, recovery difficult.

We have seen that problem in Italy with Berlusconi. Now that Berlusconi is gone, a great cleaning has started. As much as 35% of Italy potential tax base is evaded, one now hears. Italians are poor, Italian political parties, are filthy rich. It turns out that some in one of the parties, the Ligua Norte, stole in excess of ten billion dollars. The son of the founder had never seen an expensive sport car the Ligua did not buy for him.

That reminds one of the Chinese Princelings who all go to Harvard, to live like princes. Plutocracy is a world phenomenon and Harvard is a crucial link of this somber conspiracy of unprecedented reach. Harvard profs wrote Saif Al Islam Qaddafi’s PhD thesis, passed in London at the urge of George Soros (another plutocrat multi billionaire). Bo, the son of Bo, famous for his extravagantly expensive lifestyle was in Harvard, but now that his mother has been accused of being an assassin, he has disappeared. Don’t worry: the daughter of the coming Chinese president is also in Harvard.

Some Harvard supporter told me that 60% of student there receive scholarships. Paid by American taxpayers? and does that mean we are left with 40% heirs of plutocrats, and 60% future sycophants? Plutocrats need servants. The latter can go to Harvard, and get acquainted to their masters, who are, conveniently enough, in the same locale.

Spain’s problems mostly arise from a conspiracy of the bankers with the politicians. Bankers, backed up by taxpayers, engaged, thanks to politicians into projects that could not bring a profit, but would just force the People of Spain (hence Europe) to pay them rent.

Time for the clean-up. It has to start with the symbols.

Just as there is a worldwide banking mafia feeding its pet politicians, academic and media, there is a worldwide fossil fuel mafia feeding the same sort of critters.    

Paul Handover from the excellent Learning From Dogs site has detected a new angle of the fossil fuel mafia. I thought that I saw I read everything from the CO2 deniers, but this reaches new heights of perversity! Thanks to Paul to bring this to light.

Arizona State University Professor Darnall claims that:

“Livestock generates more greenhouse gases than all the planes, trains and automobiles on the planet. In part, that’s because the methane from, well, the other end of cows, has 21 times the greenhouse gas warming effect as carbon dioxide.”

Whatever. Good trick to utter a lie, and then explain it with something true. Yet, Prof. Darnall does not even know her own propaganda well. The Global Warming Potential (GWP) of methane, CH4, over 20 years, is actually seventy-two times that of CO2, and twenty-five times over 100 years. However its global Global Warming effect may be as little as 25% that of CO2.

Methane from herding may have spared us a re-glaciation, 7,000 years ago, some scientists have suggested. The good professor rides on that notion all the way to hell.

There is crushing evidence that what the good professor says about cows is NOT just incorrect, it is outright absurd. And the absurdity is easy to demonstrate. Why? Because the CO2 went from 280 ppm (1800 CE) to 395 ppm, but only up to 460 ppm in CO2 equivalent (see Radiative Forcing, below).

As Paul Handover points out: “Darnall’s solution? Meatless Mondays — to start curving that scary trend line.”

Just to visualize, that’s a lions’ diet. Once a week, lions at the zoo are NOT given meat, for better health. So prof. Darnall suggests that Americans, who, as Homo Sapiens, are omnivorous, should actually eat just like lions at the zoo, with “Meatless Mondays“.  

So even if all the supplementary CO2 like gases were all methane, CH4 (and they are not), one would get a methane contribution of only 30%, over the 1800 base.

The good prof. should have said that one could cut off all greenhouse gases of industrial origin. Some have 32,000 times the Greenhouse Warming Potential of CO2. One easy way to mitigate the greenhouse would be to outlaw them all. Their Radiative Forcing is about two-third that of methane, itself a third of CO2.

 So I would dare to say that the good professor’s discourse is corrupt. She looks cute like that, young and smiley, but she is out to seduce the big industrial interests of the fossil persuasion, or to seduce on their behalf. Obviously. It’s all about small people not doing enough, she says. They just eat too much of the bad stuff. Let them eat arugula instead.

This is typical: those who don’t want to change anything claim it’s enough to change a few little things: put the cardboard in the green container, eat grass, don’t shampoo, etc. In truth, the real problem is energy. Energy has to be made expensive. Why? Because it is. At this point, it is kept cheap by big armies, and an exploitative mentality. Even if there was no greenhouse and CO2 poisoning, fossil fuels will run out soon.

Whereas I say: rise energy taxes colossally, force professors, bankers and politicians to video-conference, instead of jetting around. I am myself jetting around right now, but it’s for (literally, vital family reasons). I have known professors who go around the world all the time, as if frequent flier miles were all they were really after, thanks to taxpayers’ ever more colossal generosity (does not beat Obama sending an army around his 13 year old to play solo student in Mexico, or Sarkozy recovering his bad belly adult son in Ukraine with one of the French republic’s fast jets).

I have not eaten much meat in my life (last time was a few months ago), so my defense of meat is altruistic. I know that in vast swathes of the planet, meat is the ONLY source of protein. Lack of proteins is a huge problem in Black African children, cattle and bush meat their salvation. We are far from arugula salad there. Cattle is also an important export and source of livelihood in the Third World.

There is probably more cattle in Africa than in the Americas. So not so good prof is saying millions of African children should go around with enormously distended bellies, and the poor there, getting poorer.

I am presently generating lots of CO2 myself, as I travel around the planet. But I am no hypocrite: I admit to it.

Plus, I have to do this for family reasons. I minimize air travel as much as possible. Out of dozens of flights, I remember just one for pure “tourism”. I may be somewhat hypocritical though, as my destiny was sprawled over three continents plus one archipelago. Thus I was condemned to conflate sightseeing and common decency. There are no free trips.

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Patrice Ayme

Fools’ Days.

The day of foolish jokes. I already wrote about Cosmic Inflation last week. What’s the joke in that? That a problem, the apparent synchronization of the universe over distances so great that light could never have covered them, is solved by an even more deeply mysterious, if not outright disturbing solution, Cosmic Inflation.

Solving one problem, with a worse problem is no solution, in my not so humble opinion. But that is exactly what has been done with finance, then the economy, and now the world. The biggest joke of them all?

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Throwing Money At Banks To Make Us Richer?

Please don’t laugh. This is the solution that (supposedly left wing economist such as) Paul Krugman and the head of the central bank of the USA (“Fed”), Bernanke have found.  OK, the latter hired the former at Princeton, so they are related. They keep on exploiting this curious notion, because that is the only thing they can do.

Now it is duplicated by the European Central Bank (“ECB”). It works. The ECB lends money for (basically) free to banks. More than a trillion euros, to hundreds of European banks, and counting. Then the idea is that the banks would buy government bonds.

Europe is like the USA. Except in the USA, one has these rather fake states. In Europe, the states are actually nations, with full democratic systems therein. Or nations made of unions of nations, such as Spain (Basques, Catalans therein), or the United Kingdom (as its name indicates).

Of course the head of the ECB was a partner at Goldman Sachs, that means he is from the New York financial aristocracy. Same for Krugman and Bernanke. When Krugman sees the Manhattan skyline from his first class seat, once a week or so, tears well up, and he celebrates what he calls “the most beautiful city in the world“. In New York the notion of beauty itself is being leveraged.

OK. Let’s be serious. Jokes are best, when one sobers up. Krugman and company’s argument has been that the economy is in a Liquidity Trap. Krugman talks about that every day, like the crow croaks in the tree, every day.

A Liquidity Trap is a situation in which injections of cash into the private banking system by a central bank fail to lower interest rates and hence to stimulate economic growth. A liquidity trap arise when people, or companies hoard cash because they expect adverse events such as deflation, insufficient aggregate demand, or war. Characteristic of a liquidity trap are short-term interest rates that are near zero and fluctuations in the monetary base that fail to translate into fluctuations in general price levels.

Generally, historically speaking, when central banks lend money to private banks at lower interest rates, the banks lend more to the enthusiastic rabble, and the economy rebounds. However, it may happen that the rabble, or the banks, feel mournful, refuse to play, and reject spending, even if the central banks lends at zero  interest rates (or even negative, below the inflation rate, as not only Japan has been doing). This is the Liquidity Trap.

The Fed has been reacting by buying all sorts of unworthy assets. That supports the price of these unworthy assets, preventing, short term, runaway deflation. Another thing it does is that, as many as these unworthy assets belongs to Banks Too Big To Fail (BTBF), it supports these banks and their plutocratic managements (“My friend!” used to cry out Obama, each time he evoked Jamie Dimon, the Deimon at the head of the biggest BTBF)

In other words the Fed supports the powers that be.

Well, that’s a joke.

Why? Because supporting the powers that be, fosters the very problem, plutocracy, that caused the problem, dejection, not to say depression. People do not support the economy, because the economy does not support them. They are too indebted (much more than in 1929, the last time the global economy crashed, for that same reason. I will show the graph another time).

Just go back to the definition of a Liquidity Trap. It’s a consequence of the expectation of greater problems. At least Wikipedia has it that way. Krugman does not have it anyway, he just has it. He wants to fix it, by throwing more money at it, through the banks. If Pluto is not nice, make him nice, by making Him gifts. That’s basic Abrahamism: if the boss wants to kill your son, just appease him, and offer your son, saying it’s not what it looks like. I read it in the Bible (hey, I have a copy at home. Not as much fun as Tacitus’ “The Annals Of Imperial Rome“, but still fun).

So what is really going on?

Irrelevant, frivolous elections are coming in France and the USA. Obama and Romney in the USA, Hollande and Sarkozy in France. Basically the same program, a program the commons cannot inflect.

In the USA Obama runs with his proudest achievement: Romneycare, also known as Obamacare.

In France, both the conservatives (starting in 1973), and the Socialists (after 1980) invented a system where the government financed itself by asking the plutocrats for money. The plutocrats accepted. Not out of generosity, but out of interest. It is the existence of that interest which makes borrowing more expensive than taxes.

It is also addictive. The French Socialists, main promoters of the European Monetary Union (“EMU”), presented the same system of borrowing instead of taxing, to finance the states of the EMU. This way, they were sure to get the support of the plutocracy.

So now the plutocrats are coming and asking for what they were after, their interest. The learned to have it easy: no need to finance the real economy. Their friends the politicians created a wondrous loop for them. Now the Fed and the ECB have even free money for them.

Very serious economists’ now share this opinion of mine; see http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/29/who-captured-the-fed/. (Simon Johnson from MIT was chief economist at the IMF, and has long advised a rather deaf U.S. Congress.)

Thus here we are, and the situation is roughly the same, in the USA or in Europe.

What is really going on is that it is not just a liquidity trap. It’s a technology trap, as we are fast reaching the end of the present energy system, without an alternative (this happened last around 1300 CE; the population soon crashed by half in Europe).

What is going on now is not just a Liquidity Trap, it is also a globalization trap: globalize Pluto, enslave the People. Also, particularly in Europe, a plutocratic trap: the more one claims to help the people, the more one helps what oppresses society, the banks. And, worse of all, it’s an ecological trap, for the whole biosphere.

What is going on, is the greatest joke of all. A few small men, knowing basically nothing, are supposed to take all the decisions, have all the ideas. And what they know best, is how to look good, and how to lie to get elected. What a joke.

But don’t be surprised if democracy falls apart. Among other things. And that will be no joke.

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Patrice Ayme