PLUTOCRACY: NEW WORLD ORDER

Western Intelligence, Oriental Despotism; Redux? Democratic Occident, Fascist Orient, & Vice Versed?

Obama just  nominated Commerce Secretary the billionaire heiress who discovered him, and introduced him to the Rubin-Summers-Goldman-Sachs-Citigroup conspiracy. Penny Priztker was condemned to pay a 460 million dollar fine by the Federal government in 2001, for financial malfeasance. 460 million, that’s more than Mitt Romney’s fortune, that made small rank and file democrats huff and puff, in indignation, a few months ago, just like their mighty masters told them to do.

Now, if the 460 million dollars fine felon becomes chief, that’s fine, as long as the masters of the people don’t ask the People to huff and puff about the fine. The finer the fine, the finer the master, say the little People, and they bleat, satisfied. As Obama put it:”Priztker is one of the most eminent personalities of our country“. When Pluto reigns, down is up.

When Common Decency Is A Hindrance

Plutocracy is the New World Order. The New World Thinking. The New World Emoting.

To get some perspective on this, it’s good to have a retrospective look at the greatest plutocratic realms of the past, and ponder why extremely wealthy fascism rose, increasingly, in the Orient, while clever democracy rose, occasionally, in the West. And sometimes fell, disastrously, for reasons related.

It turns out that, when Rome became fascist and plutocratic, it turned to Oriental despotism, and criminals, indeed, came to command and control.

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PERSIA REIGNED WITH ALL CRAFTS; YET NOT SMART ENOUGH:

Establishing  giant, metastatic empires in the Orient is nothing new: the Hittites tried it, they proceeded to invade Lebanon and the rich valleys behind, Egyptian territory. However young Pharaoh Ramses II, defeated them at Qadesh, next to present day Damascus. Through courageous combat in that battle which defined his long rule, Ramses rescued victory from the jaws of defeat, somewhat miraculously.

Ramses lost ground, though, and later made a loving peace with his enemies. Then, the Hittites having been destroyed by the mysterious coalition of the Peoples of the Sea, the Assyrians tried to impose their own giant metastatic empire, using the harshest methods. That brought them so many enemies that they got invaded from all quarters, annihilated as a nation first, and an army, later.

Then the union of Medes and Persians, thanks to three remarkable leaders, established a giant fascist empire, from Ethiopia to Central Asia, Libya to India. The third emperor, Darius, besides being excellent at sword-play in the dark, and a great general, proved capable of using a free market economy, switching to so called Keynesianism, and then a command and control economy, as needed. Darius established a giant “Royal” road network (ancestral to the one the Romans would build, four centuries later).

A Persian Pony Express, with posts every five miles, would bring news from distant corners of the empire in a week. Darius went on to invade the Scythians, land of the Amazons, present day Ukraine.

Darius’ Persia was the greatest empire, so far, larger than the present day continental USA. It became so, thanks to a great variety of methods of socio-economic governance. Some of these methods would later be used by the West, massively. Not just the communication network, the free market, the command and control, but also a crafty diplomacy of seduction, cooptation and local autonomy (that’s how the Ionian Greeks and Phoenicians became collaborators of Persia; whereas Alexander would annihilate Tyr).

However, unbelievably, tiny Athens broke the Persian empire, inaugurating the next great event, still on-going, the rise of the West. Again and again, minuscule Greek armies routed the juggernauts of professional giant armies. Again and again, small democracies proved superior to large fascist foes. I claimed that mental superiority entailed military superiority.

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FREE IN THE WEST, SLAVES IN THE EAST

Herodotus explained the Greeks’ military superiority: free men are more motivated in battle, as they fight for themselves, he said. But it’s not clear that elite Persian soldiers did not feel free.

So I hold something slightly different: free men are, living in an “open society” are not just more motivated, but, simply, more intelligent. Yes, intelligent.

Yet how come that the free men tended to be in the West, and the subjugated ones, in the East? And this for 4,000 years, defining the “West” as anything west of Mount Lebanon. Why did so much of the Mediterranean turn out propitious to freedom and individual initiative? What of the enormous Celto-German forests, from Spain to the Baltics?

Two factors played a role:

1) Trade, with the big man, the leader being the ship owner-captain (Tyr, Phoenicia, Crete, Athens, Carthage, etc.). This required to excel at technology and adaptative intelligence, confronting nature.

2) Small owner-peasants. The West’s agricultural system did better thanks to small, free owner-peasants.  The owner peasant was captain of his own plot of land, and found himself in a situation roughly similar to the ship captain. Such people worked hard, and thought hard about outwitting nature. All of Germany was this way, until the military encroachment of Rome in the beginning of its plutocratic phase, brought, by reaction, a militarization of German society (this is what archeology shows).

A demographic core of owner-peasants was the core of the success of the Roman republic, and its successors, the Imperium Francorum, and France, or anything working along French lines (most of Europe). When enjoying this basic culture, of free, independent peasants, the West did very well. Why so? Because thinking by oneself, for oneself, makes one more intelligent.

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WHY THE ORIENT IS DUMBER:

The Orient did better when the peasants could cultivate. That meant, when they had water. That was not obvious in the increasingly parched lands, from the Maghreb to India. First, there, one needed to bring water to agricultural lands. Whereas in the West, both water and arable land were in the same place, not so in the East. In the East water was on rocky mountains, arable lands in parts of plains at the bottom of said mountains. To bring the former to the latter, one needed great hydraulic works. Underground canalizations, sometimes fifty feet deep, could extend dozens of miles.

Such extensive works meant armies of workers and maintenance people. And also standing armies to establish and protect the necessary order. Plus a field army to roam around the empire, and keep the static defenses obedient.

In other words, food on the carpet in the parched, basin and range Orient meant a large fascist system to make it possible, and everybody enslaved to it, in a military organization (Christianity and Islam, both oriental religions, kept much of this essential psychological character: fascist god on top, giving absolute, even capricious  orders to its slaves below).

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ALL TOGETHER NOW, DOWN THE ROMAN ROAD TO HELL?

What consequences today? Western countries do not depend upon small owner-peasants anymore, but upon giant farms, or agribusinesses, for food procurement. Even trade has become unbalanced: production on one end of the Earth, increasing unemployment, at the other end.

Giant agribusinesses, and unbalanced trade became facts of empire in Rome, and lasted centuries. It was a deliberate plot of Roman plutocracy. At some point, six senatorial families owned most of North Africa. Seneca, Nero’s tutor, the plutocratic philosopher of note, used to boast that he had no idea how many giant properties he owned on the various continents.

That delocalization and globalization made Rome, and Italy into an empty shell of its former self. As those who had the power, the senatorial families, wished. What they feared first, was a proud, potent, empowered People.

(Part of) Italy would resurrect as independent republics, more than a millennium later. 

What’s the morality of the story? Men have a strong instinct for doing things right. In a plutocratic system, though, men who do things wrong get rewarded, and this goes on, until the situation exponentiates and breaks down. Thus plutocratic systems are intrinsically pathological: they reward criminals. Not just criminal according to the laws of men, but criminals according to the laws of nature.

In the Orient, life is harder, less natural, militarization exploits part of the Dark Side, because human beings, by living there, live in a less optimal situation. In the West, the rise of plutocracy did not have these excuses.

The Romans knew this well. The Roman republic was the product of a revolution against Tarquinus Superbus, the king of Rome, of Etruscan origin. So the founding act of five centuries of Roman republic was an anti-plutocratic revolt. Same for Athens (several times, during the same centuries). 

The Romans passed a strong anti-plutocratic law. That law limited, by force the size of a family’s fortune; it fixed an upper bound on how much one could own. The Second Punic war saw the death, on the battlefield, of too many of the best leading Romans. Meanwhile the conspirators of wealth, back behind the walls of the fortified cities, as Hannibal was roaming the countryside, established a New World order of rents.

When Carthage got defeated, those men of greed kept on pushing, and tried to grab control of the state. After several wars of distraction against Macedonia, Carthage, Numantia, Corinth, etc. it became clear that was what was going on to thousands of the best Romans, led by top nobles (in mind and ancestry), the Gracchi.

The Gracchis mostly tried to impose the wealth limitation law. They also succeeded to impose a land redistribution (an unthinkable socialist measure in the post Thatcher-Reagan world!). Yet, the Gracchi and their supporters lost a civil war. All got killed, by the private armies of the plutocrats. By 100 BCE, when Caesar was born, the dice had long been thrown. Only extreme measures could address the situation (extreme measures that Caesar and Cicero, on the good side, would try).

Now what? Losing democracy, means, ultimately, that we will lose not just freedom, but intelligence itself. It is difficult to imagine how the Americans will pull out of their present death spiral into furthering the wealth of the .1%. When bandits are called “philanthropists”, all values have been inverted in a country: gangsters are in control, the mafia has got metastatic. It will go on, all inverted, until it explodes, or get trampled over. The commerce chief will be a certified felon.

The situation in Europe is not as desperate: conditions for a revolt exist. Although Goldman Sachs has its servants in place all over, the Italians threw out one of them, a Goldman Sachs partner, Mario Monti, at the first chance they got.

Some may sneer, as they notice that, once again I used “Orient” and “Occident” according to old Greco-Roman semantics. What of the true Orient, the far-out East, China and company? Well, I will hide behind my usual observation: it’s Western culture that conquered the world. Present day China’s ideology has very little that is specifically Chinese, besides what the West and China had in common, such as the more or less free market. The idea of “People” (Populus) and “Republic” (Respublica) are Roman. So the very title of China, the “People Republic of China” is, well, (Greco-)Roman.

The dangers threatening China, accordingly, like those threatening us, are those that devastated the Roman republic. For the reasons exposed above, the development in the West, of a more advanced civilization was first, thus why everybody adopted it later.  Rome was first to rise as high as it did. But, the greater the rise, the greater the fall. By 700 CE, the fall of Rome had been so great, that China had risen higher, on many indicators. The West, invaded by hordes of savages for more than six hundred years (beyond even 400 CE to 1000 CE) was fighting for survival.

Plutocracy as a New World Order is not just the end of many things. In the fullness of time, plutocracy is the end of everything.

Even the Will to Power. Slave masters are not so masterful. After all, they are enslaved to their slaves.

When Rome went down, Roman plutocrats whined that the “world was getting old“. By this they meant that resources were being exhausted, and that, in its stupidity plutocratic civilization could not find a technology out.

Right now, the world is not getting old, it’s getting killed. And that’s worst.

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Patrice Ayme

Obama: Right Of Nixon.

PLUTOCRACY: GLOBAL GIANT, DEMOCRACY: LOCAL MICROBE.

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Many web sites just scavenge other people’s ideas, or, and, write short and superficial. The danger is that human brains degenerate into those of tweeting birdies: flashy, but all too light. I will appear to do this today, but not really. An article in The New York Times “G.O.P. Shift Moves Center Far to Right” exposes in concise form many of the themes I have rehashed for years. For example that Nixon, compared to Obama, was a leftist. So I will extensively quote the article (who invents the ideas first owns them).

All that article says can be found in essays of mine in the last 8 years, so I am quoting myself in a sense. I am not complaining: I wish the NYT, and the democratic party, had expressed themselves along these lines at the beginning of Obama’s residency.

Krugman had already done so a year ago (while quoting another pundit from the punditocracy, of course!). Krugman and company were all for mild measures when Obama was deciding and implementing such watered down measures, on their advice, while I was screaming that Obama was governing on the right of Nixon! Later, crude men and their kind admitted that they gave the wrong advice to Obama as they claim to have believed that there was time to correct things later… (As if they had never heard of elections, and throwing the incompetents out!)

My interpretation is much more cynical: they gave the wrong advice because they has interest to do so. After all, the chief of the democrats in Congress since 2006, is owner of a ski resort and her family in a famous political dynasty.

Obama has been a terrible disappointment, for an ardent supporter of change such as me. It happened in no small part because all too many were all too happy with the color of his skin, and other shallow, not to say racist, considerations. They forgot to look at what was really going on. If voters decide to throw out who does not matter, Obama, and replace him by someone else, who they may be led to believe (thanks to PACs, Super PACS, C4, etc.) may matter, they will have only themselves to blame.

So here is the business section of the New York Times, September 4, 2012:

To hear Republicans on the campaign trail, the United States could not have elected a more left-wing president than Barack Obama, one more hostile to business or more eager to expand government power. Left-wing Democrats, I’m sure, would disagree. If they had their druthers, they would probably make a more liberal, more pro-big government choice. Somebody, perhaps, like Richard Nixon.

That’s right. The Nixon administration not only supported the Clean Air Act and affirmative action, it also gave us the Environmental Protection Agency, one of the agencies the business community most detests, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to police working conditions. Herbert Stein, chief economic adviser during the administrations of Nixon and Gerald Ford, once remarked: “Probably more new regulation was imposed on the economy during the Nixon administration than in any other presidency since the New Deal.”

Nixon bolstered Social Security benefits. He introduced a minimum tax on the wealthy and championed a guaranteed minimum income for the poor. He even proposed health reform that would require employers to buy health insurance for all their employees and subsidize those who couldn’t afford it. That failed because of Democratic opposition. Today, Republicans would probably shoot it down.

So compare the achievements of Obama with those of Nixon (by the way, I used to dislike and despise Nixon). The New York Times’ Porter pursues:

“The difference between then and now is that Nixon — like most mainstream Republicans — accepted that government had a role to play guaranteeing Americans’ economic well-being. That consensus cracked around the time of Ronald Reagan’s inaugural speech in 1981. “Government is not the solution to our problems, government is the problem,” the president intoned. And the country’s political center set off on a long rightward migration.

Interestingly, Americans say their political ideology has changed little since the late 1970s. The share of voters who defined themselves as liberal was 20 percent in 2010, up slightly from 19 percent in 1980, according to polls by The New York Times and CBS News. The conservative share over the same time rose to 35 percent, from 30 percent.

But these polls ignore how much the meanings of the terms have changed. The rightward drift in economic thinking becomes apparent in surveys asking about specific issues. In surveys 25 years ago, 71 percent of Americans believed it was the government’s job to take care of those who couldn’t care for themselves, according the Pew Research Center. This year the share is down to 59 percent. And most of the shift reflects a decline among Republicans.

Republicans’ support for labor unions has fallen sharply since the late 1980s, according to Pew’s research, as has their support for protecting the environment. Their drift fits the position of Congressional Republicans, whose views on the economy have been shifting right for the last quarter-century while Democrats’ views have remained roughly still. And as Republicans have moved to the right, economic policy has followed. “

It’s all of course, about what I call plutocratic propaganda. But Mr. Porter, writing for the business section of the NYT, would not dare say such a thing. Instead he opts for the anything-but-plutocratic propaganda explanation:

Conservatives will say their ideas won simply because they are better. Social scientists have some alternative hypotheses of our great conservative shift.

The big government strategy from the 1940s through the 1970s produced a spectacular improvement in living standards. But many economists now say they believe the focus on full employment and income redistribution at the expense of everything else also contributed to the strategy’s demise, removing the fear of joblessness and encouraging excessive wage increases.

Combined with cheap money printed by the Federal Reserve, it produced a burst of high inflation and high unemployment that bedeviled the 1970s — discrediting government as an economic steward and letting a new belief take hold: the economy should be left to the market, which always knows best. The end of the cold war, which discredited central planning and other left-wing economic theories, probably helped solidify this stance.

I do not claim that what the factors Mr. Porter exhibits did not occur. They did. But the true full picture is much bigger, and not restricted to technicalities. First he forgot the giant waste of the Vietnam war, which exploded the entire economy. One can see that Mr. Porter does not believe that the picture he just drew is dominant, as he abstracts it in a completely different way, in a Freudian slip of sorts:

Economic philosophies could shift again, of course. Just as the big government policies of the New Deal emerged from the Great Depression and World War II, the financial crisis and recession just past might again persuade Americans of the perils of unfettered capitalism and cause the pendulum to swing back.

So, after all, it was all about the perils of unfettered capitalism, and not just the fact that living standards augmented spectacularly… Another problem has been “globalization“:

… a kinder, gentler economy in which American companies faced much less competition than they do today. Eastman Kodak could run a mini-welfare state through much of the 20th century —with profit-sharing, health benefits and pension plans — because it had fat monopoly-type profits. Detroit’s Big Three amounted to a cozy oligopoly.

Globalization and its attendant burst of competition put an end to the fairy tale. Companies squeezed costs to stay in the game, zeroing in on wages and working conditions. Unions, once politically powerful institutions fighting for workers’ share, became weaker and weaker.

Half a century ago, American employers might have accepted a higher minimum wage on the ground that they needed American consumers to be able to afford their products. They might have supported public education on the ground that they needed an educated American work force. They might have accepted financial oversight because they raised money from small investors in American markets.

But globalization freed businesses from the limitations of one nation and the clutches of the nation state. As businesses’ footprints extended around the world, these objectives became less important than assuring low taxes. Free to jump borders, businesses became much more difficult to tax or regulate. And in the current dismal economy, they don’t seem too eager for a return of the big government days.

The United States is in ideological flux. The Great Recession has given us both the Tea Party and the Occupy Wall Street movement, and produced perhaps the most polarized government of the modern era. Liberal-leaning Democrats, often disappointed at the president’s compromises, will pine for a more aggressive champion of workers’ rights. But they may want to count their blessings. Americans today might not elect somebody as liberal as Richard Nixon.

Well, and why would not “Americans today not elect somebody as liberal as Richard Nixon”? Because Americans enjoy the suffering of Americans? Or is it because a herd votes with its hoofs? Wherever the cow boys wants it to go?

Frightened little minds need to be led by masters. Led by the nose. This is how fascism works. Thus, the instinct says, force comes. The oldest instinct of social animals: E Pluribus Unum. Out of the many small frightened ones, one big monster.

Democracy is local, and has become a microbe. Can it become virulent enough to master the global plutocratic giant? Maybe, but that is ever less obvious as the USA succumbs to the Dark Side of secret political financing.

Notice that we have seen that movie before: as the tiny Greek city states kept on fighting with each other, a plutocratic giant rose in the north: Macedonia. Macedonia was led by an oligarchy of wealthy horse owners. Macedonia organized itself as a plutocracy of lords.

Macedonia spoke Greek, and understood many of Greece’s greatest ideas (or at least Aristotle and his student Alexander did). But some of Alexander’s generals, who succeeded him, missed the biggest ethical ideas. Or, at least so did Antipater (who came to crush and rule Greece). In Egypt, it was different as Ptolemy, another senior general of the rebellious Alexander youth, made himself Pharaoh, and went for the promotion of thinking.    

Overall, ethics is there to allow the weakest thing, the mind, to triumph above force, including the force of the multitude.

Obama did not understand that the minds had to be fed. Or, he was unable to feed with what he did not have. More probably, as someone who knew him well 40 years told me: “You know, Barry was just a regular guy.” Regular guys don’t lead the minds of the many up the right road.

And the pathetic comparison with that rabid anti-communist, Nixon, makes it all the clearer.

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Patrice Ayme

I Mood Therefore I Think

SYSTEMS OF MOOD ARE CRUCIALLY ENTANGLED WITH IDEAS:

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MOODS COME BEFORE IDEAS:

  The philosopher Foucault became professor at the most prestigious Collège de France in 1970 as a “Historian of Systems of Thought“. That was an admission, by the power that be, that there are such things as Systems of Thought, and that they are most important. I don’t know if Foucault did that much of a good job (I find his analysis of the Franks extensive but rather superficial, and worst, rather conventional; but, at least Foucault had the merit to think that the founders of the West were worth studying).

  The idea the Collège de France had,  of studying Systems of Thought, is crucial. (By the way the CdF was founded in 1530 CE, all its lectures are free, and the professors the foremost world experts.) All comes from there. Even the hardest sciences.

  Just as one studies arithmetic, or organic chemistry, one could, or should study any system of thought, from fly fishing to Islam. They have lots in common.

  Foucault’s “genealogy of knowledge“, was similar to Nietzsche‘s “genealogy of morals“. A colleague of Foucault was Maurice Merleau-Ponty. His phrase: “No preconceived notions, but the idea of free thought” is burned in golden letters above the main hall of the building of Collège de France. But is free thinking an idea, or a mood?

  Ideas are central to logic, but what do they do? They connect notions, that’s all what logic is, and that’s the job of axons in the brain, basically. Yet, the axonal network is only part and parcel of the brain.

  In a related effort at understanding, David Hume held that reason alone cannot move us to action. Action come from passion. Reason alone is merely the “slave of the passions,” i.e., reason pursues abstract and causal relations solely in order to achieve passions’ goals and that reason provides no impulse of its own. (Treatise Of Human Nature.)

  My opinion is more extreme. Just as in Quantum Physics, particle and wave are entangled concepts, logic and passion are also entangled in Brain Physics, at any single moment, or during each other’s blossoming.

 Not only are moods involved in thinking, but moods have to be attributed to entities involved in logic, for conceiving better what is going on. If nothing else, I observed this with top mathematicians and physicists, who I had the good fortune to observe in their natural environment for quite a while.

  These creators view themselves as the most rational people in the world, but they are pretty much dominated by passions, not just as a motivations, but also as a way, the way, of thinking. When addressing terms in equations, Fields medal level mathematicians will talk about, “these guys”. Top mathematicians need to make mathematics into an anthropological milieu, with mathematical terms running around in their heads like little beings, with moods of their own… I would even venture to say that it is this animation of mathematics that makes the top mathematicians: they are at the zoo, herding terms from equations.

  Modern brain imagery and studies show that neurons and neuroglia are entangled deeply together. Clearly neurons embody logical connections, and glias partake in entangled emotional support. Both make (their won, but entangled) networks.

  The mood behind Damasio’s  Somatic Markers Hypothesis, and similar work, supports all this. Damasio pointed out that Descartes made an error by concentrating just on logic, and forgetting emotions in the scaffolding of logic. But I go much further, be it only because I point out that, on (meta)logical grounds alone, emotion, and only emotion, can provide logics with the universes they need to exist.

  Thus we need to dig deeper. To study thought, we need to study the passions, which often come as culturally imprinted Systems Of Mood.

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AMERICAN ROBOTS DREAM OF FINANCIAL SHEEP; USA WEALTH ADMIRATION MOOD:

  Systems of mood are all over civilization. For centuries, Christians and Muslims screamed:”God Is Great!” Often while slicing each other up. They were both expressing, and reinforcing, a mood. A large part of this mood was apparently that slicing each other up, was the best of all possible worlds. (A more careful consideration shows that the most enthusiastic God Is Great screamers were part of military aristocracies which profited handsomely from the political systems that God Is Great served so well… Thus God/Allah was part of a mutually reinforcing triangle of oppression)

  When Obama became president, he arrived with the mood that financiers were most admirable: his “friend” Jamie Dimon, he much “admired for his gigantic portfolio, which he [Obama] could certainly not manage“.  It’s not just that Obama wants apparently a lucrative job of consultant at JP Morgan. It’s worse than that: he is sincere.

  Dimon was born and raised a financial plutocrat, third generation (at least). Dimon made his most important financial investment in a plot with the central bank of the USA, which was so famous, among banksters, that it got its own name, the “Jamie deal” (buying Bear-Stearns for peanuts, thanks to his always so generous friends, Ms and Mr. American Taxpayers!)

  Obama is still deep in his mood of admiring Lord Dimon.

  On May 15, 2012, episode of ABC’s The View, Obama responded to JPMorgan Chase’s recent $5 billion (or is it 9 billions?) trading losses by defending Dimon against allegations of irresponsibility, saying, “first of all, JP Morgan is one of the best managed banks there is. Jamie Dimon, the head of it, is one of the smartest bankers we’ve got”.

  Notice the imparted mood: Dimon is not just the “first of all“, but “we” all own Dimon as a sort of national treasure… Dimon got the treasury, the Fed, and apparently the president, by the balls (if any), but Dimon “we’ve got”! He is ours! Lucky us: we owned Dimon all along, we just did not notice. Dimon is our man, he works for us. Soon we will dreaming we sleep in the 17 rooms mansion he had in Chicago …It reminds me of the song of the Temptations: “Just my imagination![running away from me]“…

  Well, “best managed” is not the “first of all” of Dimon. On the face of it, very few banks, worldwide, have been as badly managed as JP Morgan. How many banks, worldwide, may have got maybe 100 billion of subsidies from taxpayers? Very few. Out of 8,000 USA banks, or so, nearly none needed taxpayer help. Same in Europe with more than another 10,000 banks. And certainly at most a handful of banks, worldwide got help on the scale of JP Morgan (OK, Dimon, a screamer, screamed that he did not need the help; watch what they do, not what they scream about).

  Obama should, please try to get out of his bankster admiration mood. Dimon is using taxpayer money. That’s the “first of all“, about Dimon, for those who approach the situation with the right mood, the objective mood. 

  Let’s Paul Krugman say it. Dimon is “the point man in Wall Street’s fight to delay, water down and/or repeal financial reform. He has been particularly vocal in his opposition to the so-called Volcker Rule, which would prevent banks with government-guaranteed deposits from engaging in “proprietary trading”, basically speculating with depositors’ money. Just trust us, the JPMorgan chief has in effect been saying; everything’s under control. Apparently not.”

  The key point, notes Krugman, “is not that the bet[s] went bad; it is that institutions playing a key role in the financial system have no business making such bets, least of all when those institutions are backed by taxpayer guarantees”.

  And, a fortiori, when those plutocrats’ heavens use taxpayer money directly, which is exactly what expanding the “monetary base” or “quantitative easing” amounts to. (Krugman did not mention these, because he is partial to them… He has to. But he knows…)

  Someone like Obama is desperately into the mood of believing Warren Buffet is his father, or something like that. Dreams of his father.

  Yes, fathers are important, in the plutocratic universe: Dimon got a gold plated career from the start; his father, a stockbroker, executive VP at American Express helped… Although the fact that Obama’s father was at Harvard, also helped him, no doubt, Harvard having instituted the prerogative of inheritance as part of its global reach of plotting pseudo intellectuals.

  I documented in “Sage of Obama” Obama’s mood of embarrassing adulation of riches. That deep desire to confuse financial wealth and wisdom, shared by all too many Americans (millions of whom partake in calling Buffet, a miserable financial conspirator, who, in a just world, would be the object of a warrant of arrest from Interpol, the “Sage of Omaha“).

  In Mexico, by the same token, we have Carlos Slim, plutocrat, son of plutocrat, and made much richer, as all real plutocrats, by being serviced by the state. Slim bought Telmex, Telecommunication Mexico, from the state, for not much, allowing him now to control now 90% of telecoms there, while charging some of the highest rates in the world. A conspiracy theorist may believe that happened because many politicians and bureaucrats got paid under the table. That is why conspiracy theorists are the enemies of philanthropists.

  Indeed, there again, the only reason Slim is not in jail is that the mood has been carefully sown that he is a “philanthropist“, and that such titans can only be admired (and they could never have conspired to buy Telmex because, just because, we told you, everybody knows, that conspiracy theorists are crazy.)

  Obama tasted of wealth enough when he was a child, to want much more. Something about having four in-house servants… That put him in the mood of respecting wealth. A mood that became much more extensive in the USA after Ronald Reagan was elected king.

  Being a prisoner of such a mood of adulation of the richest, one could not expect Obama to prosecute banksters with the vigor presidents Reagan and Bush Senior had shown with the Saving & Loans conspiracy.

  Contrarily to its ill repute of being cool and remote, science is completely entangled with systems of mood. Examples are found in fundamental physics (Big Bang, Foundations Quantum). reciprocally, science can be brought to bear on Systems of Mood. OGMs and the attitude relative to nuclear energy are two obvious examples.

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THE NEOLITHIC OUGHT TO BE FELT AS THE REIGN OF GENETICALLY MODIFIED ORGANISMS:

  A tale of two moods. Some are going around, hysterically decrying GMOs, feeling very progressive (the headquarters of the anti-GMO agitation being France, although that may change now that the Socialists are in power). I personally think that any GMO that could potentially, and plausibly, gravely threaten the environment should be outlawed. That’s a good mood to have, indeed.

  And yet, another, even better mood to have, is to realize that, without GMOs we would still be in a pre-Neolithic state. And that Earth could carry, optimistically, only a few million people (and they would be eating each other a lot).

  Indeed nearly all we eat, plants, nuts, fruits, animals, are Genetically Modified Organisms. So we should feel gratified to enjoy GMOs. (The most correct and deepest mood in that arena of thought.)

  Considering that civilization would never have appeared without GMOs, a meta-mood ought to be called upon: to be against GMOs is uncivilized.

  So in connection with GMOs, three moods are justified:

1) Potentially dangerous GMOs ought to be outlawed. (Caution!)

2) No GMOs, no civilization. (Gratitude!)

3) Throwing all and any GMOs out with rage is inhuman, the royal road to total destruction. (Defiance Against Chimps On A Rampage!)

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FUNDAMENTAL MOOD BEHIND SCIENCE: OFF WITH THEIR HEADS!

  Science has been distinctively unpopular under tyrants. Examples abound: Imperial Rome, which was crafty enough to cover its anti-intellectual mien with extravagant generosity to philosophers obsequious to the plutocratic system. The Catholic Church in the Middle Ages, Stalin, Hitler, were also great enemies of science…

  Science and technologies are often the butt of fierce moods. Some people have written to me of their hatred for the LHC at CERN (which just discovered the Higgs field). Some even identified CERN (a French acronym) with Hitler’s weapon programs, in the vain hope to ruffle me in the wall street Journal comments.

  I will explain in a future essay that the mood against nuclear energy is actually a mood that contradicts the reality that our planet is life giving because Earth is the largest fission nuclear reactor in the universe we know of.

  Once this fact gets to be well known and understood by the world’s masses, no doubt the mood about nuclear energy will change, from revulsion to adoration. Nuclear energy! Our savior! Our creator! Our shield! Our continent churner! Our CO2 storage device!

  Why so much hatred against new knowledge? Because new ideas threaten the established order, which is, first of all, a mental order. The mood that what we know leaves much to be desired, is intrinsically threatening to all and any established authority. If we know more than the authority why is it not us the authority? If we do not ask this question, the authorities certainly will, thus suspect and dislike us.

***

STRANGE MOODS EVERYWHERE, ONE, OR MORE, PER TRIBE:

  The Big Bang is another mood. Never has so much rested on so little. It just, feels good. Just like Genesis. Same mood, Fiat Lux.

  As far as I am concerned, established observations are compatible with a 100 billion years old universe. (Not 13.7 billions! They get to 13.7 billion by macerating the data with a special Big Bang sauce) But of course, the mood among the Very Serious Scientists is that, if you say such a thing, you are ignorant. The VSS are not known for condescending to be fully honest with the public.

  Never mind that Big Bang theory necessitates the Inflationary Universe, zillions of new universes everywhere, all the time. On the face of it, that’s the most insane idea, ever. Well, if you think so, you are just not in the right mood, and we know of no conference nor seminar you will ever be invited to. VSS are not in the mood to talk to you.

  Once I gave a seminar (at Stanford) on Black Holes (in a joint math-physics seminar), and I explained that the theory crucially depended up hypothetical Quantum effects, that I made explicit, and which were usually ignored. Thus the logic had unexamined bifurcations, and the standard Black Hole theory could not be viewed as conclusive. A (future) Fields Medal accused me of “meditation“. He was in the mood of embracing only what it was fashionable to embrace (sure it helped him to get the Fields Medal).

  The Big Bang has a great advantage: precisely because it rests on a great mystery (universes out of nothing, everywhere!) that deep revelation is impenetrable to the masses, and thus unites, and empowers the priesthood.

Along similar lines, the Nicean version of Christianism insisted that 1 = 3 (the mystery of the “Trinity”, justly derided by Arians, Copts, and, later, Muslims).

  The more absurd the belief, the more mysterious, the more distinguishing, unifying and empowering to the oligarchy that holds it. Such is the mystification mood.

  And I do say such a thing, because I lived in many cultures, and I have seen many, where dozens of millions of people are very much into the mood of deliberately believing into something stupid. They are in the mood of imposing upon themselves a crazy mood.

  Why?

  Simply because distinctively outrageous moods define, enforce and encourage an even more rewarding mood, the tribal mood. Tribes made humanity possible. They made the many into a super organism. The tribal instinct is tied to deep psychobiology to make it not just irresistible, but something to crave for.

  This why there are these insane moods supporting the local sport team (whatever sport, whatever team, whatever locale it is).

  The tribal mood is why the British view themselves as living in democracy, while refusing to live in republic, or with a written constitution, and call “Glorious Revolution“, the ignominious invasion that gave rise to the present rather plutocratic regime. Britain: not a thing public (res publica), but public rule (demokratia)? There again we find the mood of the absurdity that binds.

  On a less quaint note, an Israeli commission of eminent jurists suggested to validate all West Bank settlements, even the wildest, and less authorized. In other words, the ancient Israeli jurists are trying their best to make Israel hated worldwide. Why? Because hatred is a mood that reinforces the tribe. Moods within moods. 

***

MORE NUCLEAR MOODS:

  General Electric and Hitachi have applied for a licence to make a Uranium laser enrichment plant, a new technique that would allow to make nuclear bombs cheaper and more discreetly. There was great anxiety about releasing the details. An expert pointed out in the journal Nature, though that the main secret was already out: namely that Uranium laser enrichment worked. The details are less important than the mood: it can be done.

  Similarly, in World War Two, the top Nazi physicists were not in the mood of believing that one could make nuclear bombs, so they did not push for such a program. Whereas the French war Ministry was sure, as early as January 1938, in great part because of (Nobel laureate) Irene Joliot-Curie’s fierce temperament, that a nuclear bomb could be made.

  Similarly, Japanese scientists conveyed to their fascist government the mood that nuclear bombs were possible, and the Japanese military started no less than three different nuclear bomb programs, in an effort to nuke before being nuked.

  And of course, in the USA, Einstein wrote to president FDR, in the summer 1940, conveying his certainty that a bomb could be made (now that the French nuclear scientists had escaped to England). After the war, Churchill, suspecting French nuclear scientists were commies, eager to tell all to Stalin, wanted to jail them all (another funny mood; instead the PM was defeated in elections). In truth, French intellectuals, led, once again by Irene Joliot-Curie, confirmed to their dismay that, after all, Stalin was just another fascist, and were not in the mood of collaborating in any further bomb program, now that the Nazis had been defeated. The French military cooperated with Israeli scientists instead, to develop bombs. Israelis, for some reason, were in the mood…

***

THOROUGH THOUGHTFULNESS STARTS WITH HONEST MOODS:  

  Some will say: “Wait a minute! are you not regressing? Did not Socrates say that the correct way of thinking was by piling up little reasonings such as: ‘Socrates Is A Man, All Men Are Mortal, Therefore Socrates Is Mortal’?

  All I can say is that I have seen lions hunting, and their reasonings, on the fly, were much more clever than that. (The antelopes were pretty smart too.) This sort of reasonings a la Socrates were amusements. A 2 year old can understand them (I enjoy a two year old). The obsessions with these infantile reasoning covered up the truth. Athens’ truth. The truth of the plutocratic friends Socrates lived from, as Rousseau would later live off rich women.

  The truth was that Socrates was a man, because he was not a slave. That was the real mood of Athens, and, to be obsessive about: [(a>b>c)>(a>c)] was just a way to change the conversation, from the mature, to the infantile.

  Fundamentally a contradiction of moods stabbed through the heart all of Athens’ logical systems, just as it would with the Roman republic later, with the same result: collapse. Athens’ principal mood, the mood of the rule of a free people resting upon the mood enforcing the massive enslavement of others, for no good reason, but happenstance, was itself a happenstance waiting for no good.

  Everybody is dominated by moods, but nobody with contradictory moods goes very far. And the same holds for societies. No logic in the world will change that. Why? Because logic always needs a universe in which to unfold. And that is provided by moods (the Incompleteness Theorems in metamathematics say nothing else).  

  Those who want to think better will work on their moods first. It’s harder than to work on ideas. Philosophers will view any, all packaged, already prepared mood, with even more suspicion than an unexamined idea. The unexamined mood is not worth having. Yes, I always lived that way. Early on in life, I acquired the mood of respecting, somewhat, but not trusting, at all, the naïve way the natives felt about their perception of their universe.

***

Patrice Ayme

Right Makes Might?

WHEN CONFRONTING EVIL, BIPARTISANSHIP IS NOT THE ANSWER. 

Witness against himself Obama has made bipartisan thinking infamous, and rightly so. When confronted to the worst extremism, such as the Tea Party, he crosses the bridge, and offers himself as a target. This way Tea Partisans need not vote for Perry, they may as well vote for Obama. Hey, everybody will win! The audacity to win! As one of the “senior advisers” of Obama, 40 years old, had the impudence to point out.

Bipartisan thinking was not invented by Obama, even in Anglo-Saxon countries. Some notables of the American revolution switched sides. Bipartisanship was already practiced by Pontius Pilatus. Earlier Plato befriended the tyrant of Syracuse, while claiming to be a partisan of the “Republic“. (Thus Christian despots did not burn Plato’s books, recognizing in him a kindred spirit.)

Confronted to Hitler, many crossed the bridge to him, in the name of openness, bipartisanship, and thus enabled him (among the first to do so was G.W. Bush’s grandfather Prescott, one of Hitler’s closest collaborators, head of American-Silesian; thus it was not surprising that Bush covered his family’s tracks by exhibiting the opposite attitude, loudly proclaiming a vast gap between himself and evil! Very crafty.)

Facile, or bipartisan, or not partisan, thinking incites some people to still make the case for Auschwitz. That they do not understand this does not excuse them. After all, most of the Germans who enabled Auschwitz did not understand that they did so. Actually they did not even know what Auschwitz was, nor wanted to conceive of it. That would have been un-German.

 People who keep on making the case for Auschwitz can persevere in this, because not enough contempt, condemnation, and, first of all, revelation, has been heaped over them, their deliberate obscurantism and confusionism, and their criminal attitude of tolerance for “infamy”. (To use Voltaire’s non bipartisan semantics.)

 Roger Cohen wrote an editorial, “Score One For Interventionism” in the New York Times. As Roger puts it:” Libya will not end the debate on intervention. But it confirms that the West must be prepared at times to fight for its values.”

 Yes. One should not even have to wait for such a confirmation anymore. May 8, 1945 should have been enough confirmation. Remember Auschwitz? The threat thereof incited the most famous intervention of the spirit of the enlightenment of the West: when France and Britain declared war to Hitler and his criminal supporters. It took five years and eight months, but, ultimately, Western democracy, and the enlightenment of the West, crushed the Nazi barbarity.

 So I expressed in a comment to the NYT, my agreement with Mr. Cohen:

“Score TWO for interventionism, as France threw out the dictator in Ivory Coast a few months earlier. So let’s recapitulate; France won two wars in a year, and the USA lost two, in a decade. Something else: France and Britain started the intervention in Bosnia, but, at the time, were too insecure to push it to victory quickly. France also intervened way late in Rwanda. Of this, no more.
Civilization needs to be enforced. “

 I was a bit taken aback: just one reader of the NYT approved what I said, whereas more than 80 clueless individuals approved what I view as a tissue of the usual irrelevance, lies and stupidities from a  guy called Richard Brauer, based in South Africa. That was more than twice the number of approvals any other comment got, which means that such mass murderous friendly thinking is widely shared by many who read the NYT.

 Brauer made his mass murdering criminal friendly thinking transparent. It rests on a confusion of notions, and inventions.

 1) The first point Richard Brauer made was that “Bosnia is still  a mess“. Thus, according to Brauer, keeping order is more important than preventing holocausts. The West should not have saved millions in Bosnia, because it is still a mess.

  Presumably, if Hitler had killed another 200 million people in Europe, it would have been less of a mess, and, thus, according to Brauer, and his admirers, a greater success. Mass murdering fascists, such as the Nazis are always fond to celebrate the “New Order“. (I was myself bombed, once, by a French fascist organization called “Ordre Nouveau“.)

 Only fascists worry about order, rather than worry about human lives. So, actually, Brauer is somebody who has embraced a central tenet of fascism. To great applaud of the pseudo left wing readership of the New York Times. OK, Stalin, a genuine fascist, was also pseudo left wing (and boasted to Churchill that he killed even more Soviets than Hitler did.) Hitler too: not only did he invent the expression: National Sozialist, but he craftily borrowed socialist and left wing themes all over, to improve his appeal, as he cynically explained himself!

 It is as if Brauer wrote this from the perspective of an old South African white racist supremacist fascist. Richard, tell us ain’t so.  

 That Bosnia is, or is not, a mess was not the reason to intervene in Bosnia for those whom superior morality guides (by opposition to those that Hitler, Ghadafi, and the like, guide). Of course if the Serbian fanatics had been left to their own instruments, they would have killed all the Muslims, and all the Croats. Indeed, as Brauer implicitly points out, order in Bosnia would be much better by now.

 Similarly if whites South Africans  had done like the white North Americans, and killed all the Indians, I mean, the black, order would reign much better in South Africa, and Brauer would rest easy. Much better order, mein Fuerer, and purity of essence, besides.

 Historically, under a UN mandate, French and British troops were interposed between the civilians in Sarajevo, and the rogue (“Bosnian”) Serb army. Heavy Serb guns reached encircled Sarajevo, impacting it with thousands of high explosive shells, from 30 kilometers away.

 The French, allied to Serbia in 1914, were leery to counter-attack the descendants of their ex-allies. But they had to save the population Serb fanatics were determined to exterminate.

 The French finally used counterforce strikes: once a flying Serbian shell was detected on radar, the computer found where it originated from, and French shells were directed there. This destroyed the Serb guns, and allowed to stop the destruction of Sarajevo. The depredations of the fanatics kept on going, though, in the rest of Bosnia, and the siege of Sarajevo was not lifted. Years later NATO had to intervene in full. (Now Serbia is 99% collaborating with civilization, and improving by the day, in its anxiety to integrate the European Union, which is the final solution to the Yugoslav problem, for all concerned.)

 2) The second point that the fascism loving Brauer made was that “It’s way too early to judge the USA a success, even on idealistic Western terms. We’re pretty far from a stable and democratic country at this point.” OK, I replaced in Brauer’s original version, the word “Libya” by “USA”. It sounds just as pertinent. If the USA is neither stable nor democratic at this point, why to require it for Libya?

 3) The third point Brauer made was that “the rest of the world sees it [the intervention in Libya] as a naked grab by Western governments on behalf of their energy companies.”

  Brauer does not seem to have observed that most of the world is the West. At least, officially speaking. Indeed, the UN Charter reflects the basic credo of the West. All the Americas are in the West (except for Cuba, which is not too clear about where it wants to be). Most of Africa is in the West (OK, except Zimbawe, Sudan, and a few limbo states). Most of Eurasia is in the West, too, philosophically speaking (even Russia, officially speaking; the notable exception being China, which is a collaborator and accomplice of the West, or, at least, its plutocracy). Did I forget Australia and Antarctica?

 This is exactly why France was able to persuade most powers to support, or the rest to tacitly approve her intervention in Libya. France acted in the name of the principles of the West, id est of the principles of the Rest. This is by now the standard French tactic. It works if and only if genuine. 

 For Brauer, and his ignorant, or malevolent admirers, if the “rest of the world” believes in a complete, counterfactual idiocy, we should consider that a problem. However real problems are not defined by counter-factual idiots.

 As I said many times, Ghadafi was giving the West all the oil it needed. 80% of Libyan oil was going to France and Italy, which had, therefore no motivation to engage in war according to those who think that the war was about oil. Actually the oil flow from Libya has been stopped for more than 6 months now, so the oil men ought to have been on Ghadafi’s side, which they were, indeed.

 The historical development of establishing a set of reason for revolution in the Arabo-Muslim world and in Libya in particular, was due to philosophers, not to oil traffickers, and other plutocrats.

 This is something important to understand. In the 1930s, when France tried to do something against Hitler, American officials argued that France was being imperialistic, and that Germany should be left to be all it wanted to be, preserved from the terrible French imperialistic intervention.  That argument was entertained as early as 1934.

 There was just one fly in that ointment; the Ambassador of the USA in Berlin, the historian Dodd, agreed 100% with his imminent colleague, the French ambassador in Berlin, Francois-Poncet. What did Washington do? In 1939, it replaced Dodd by a pro-Nazi ambassador. The best way to encourage Hitler to be firm with France.

 The fact remains that philosophers were singularly silent in the 1930s (many, most of a new generation, fought courageously, in the 1940s, against Nazism, and died that way; but by then the infuriated Nazi dragon had escaped the grotto).

 In the 1930s, Anglo-Saxon plutocrats collaborated with Hitler and other fascists, because they augmented their profits that way. This collaboration was so enormous that it allowed Hitler to survive the initial shock against France and Britain (although the Nazis losses, by the time France fell, were already considerable, comprising more than 50,000 elite troops and officers; by the time Hitler had to attack the USSR, he had won in Greece, but his victorious paratroops had been wiped out; by the time American soldiers fought their first shots with the Nazis, the French had inflicted the decisive defeat to Rommel’s Afrika Korps, deep in the desert).

 Plutocrats collaborated with Ghadafi intensely. Thus they had no interest to fight him. Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal gives an example, August 30 2011. Here we go:

 “ TRIPOLI—On the ground floor of a six-story building here, agents working for Moammar Gadhafi sat in an open room, spying on emails and chat messages with the help of technology Libya acquired from the West….

Amesys, a unit of French technology firm Bull SA, [which] installed the monitoring center. A warning by the door bears the Amesys logo. The sign reads: “Help keep our classified business secret. Don’t discuss classified information out of the HQ.”…..The room, explored Monday by The Wall Street Journal, provides clear new evidence of foreign companies’ cooperation in the repression of Libyans under Col. Gadhafi’s almost 42-year rule. The surveillance files found here include emails written as recently as February, after the Libyan uprising had begun… VASTech SA Pty Ltd, a small South African firm, provided the regime with tools to tap and log all the international phone calls going in and out of the country, according to emails reviewed by The Wall Street Journal and people familiar with the matter. VASTech declined to discuss its business in Libya due to confidentiality agreements.”

 Maybe Mr. Brauer is somehow related to VASTech, or to the oil companies which lost money due to the Libyan rebellion?

 Conclusion? France intervened in Libya not because her plutocrats wanted it, but because (some of her) philosophers made an irresistible case for it. To French president Sarkozy. Contrarily to the 1930s, when the USA was systematically hostile to France’s higher thinking, Obama’s USA cooperated, and France was able to convince enough of the rest (to get the 9 votes at the UNSC she needed; she got 10).  

 By the way, genuine French philosophers are not in love with French plutocrats, although at least two individuals (BHL and the father of Bruni’s first child), belong to both categories. Usually there is strong, solid, professional and intimate enmity between both groups.

 Mr. Brauer neglects the interventions of the Western powers sometimes assisted by African allies in the Sudan (where French troops died in Darfur), Sierra Leone, Liberia, Chad (where France fought Ghadafi for decades, recovering a part of Chad occupied by the guy with the bad hairdo), Rwanda, Ivory Coast and Libya (the two French led interventions of 2011). Among other things. Intervention also worked against racist South Africa (but failed to replace racist Rhodesia by the better regime, as Zimbawe is clearly a terrible place).

 So what motivates the likes of the ignorantly aggressive Mr. Brauer? Does Mr. Brauer, and his supporters regret, deep down inside, that France intervened against the genocidal, racist, fascist Hitler, and his Neues Ordnung?

 Or is Mr. Brauer happy to join a herd of the ignorant and facile, thus creating cheaply in him and his flock the illusion of strength and wisdom? In other words, naturally enough, Mr. Brauer whines when one attack fascism, because he indulges in the fascist reflex.

 Thought crime ought to not send people in jail always, but it certainly should not go without condemnation, and evisceration, when it boils down to making a shrine to the concept of holocaust.

 Thus those inclined to idiotic lies of the mass criminality inducing type have to be answered, even if we have to stoop very low to do so, and engage in a shouting match. Ignoring the stupid brutes all too long is what made Hitler, Stalin or Pol-Pot possible.

 Right now the partisans and practitioners of torture in the USA are loudly claiming that torture is the best way to go forward. Never mind that it is a direct violation of the Third Geneva Convention, never mind that the U.S. Army, and the most elementary logic, are against it: Cheney and Yoo (the UC Berkeley professor of law who wrote the legal opinion giving the green light to Bush) preach torture, with more boldness than ever.

 They have been encouraged to do so by the ambiguous attitude of the ever bipartisan president. Confronted to torture, Obama crossed the bridge, and said: we don’t do that, but we will not do anything about those who did that, and want more of it. Instead of dragging Bush, Cheney, Yoo, and a Federal judge I forgot the name of, to court, Obama said: let them be, let’s not rush to judgment. Actually, let’s not go to any sort of judgment.  Obama let torture walk free, as he let the banksters walk free. And now he is surprised that society is captive, and people feel that it is his fault.

 French general Paul Aussaresses admitted in his 2001 book, “Services spéciaux, Algérie 1955–1957“, to the use of torture during the Algerian war (he claimed under civilian orders from subalterns to F. Mitterrand). Subsequent to his gloating, for justifying the use of torture, the elderly Aussaresses was condemned in court, stripped of his army rank, stripped of the right to wear a uniform, and he was stripped of his Legion of Honor. All of this happened decades after Aussaresses apparently advised South American militaries about his methods of torture. In other words, torturers breed torturers. Worldwide.

 Of course, convicted criminal Aussaresses went on major media of the USA to justify the use of torture against Al Qaeda. His defense of torture arguably incited the American proponents of torture. Thus thought crime propagates. Bipartisanship about torture, as bipartisan about anything else dubious, under the pretext of coolness, is encouraging torture, and all other sorts of evil.

 France, whatever France means, lost the Algerian war (some very close family members of mine died). Although, technically, the French army had won. But it was the wrong sort of victory. That war was not a military campaign, but a campaign about right and wrong, and the usage of torture guaranteed wrong.

 In 2011, France intervened, and won, twice: in Ivory Coast, and in Libya. Why? How? By being on the side of right, twice. If one wants to win, one better be right. To start with. That Obama forgot in Afghanistan, in his colossal naivety. But one would expect nothing else from someone whose moral sense is about being bipartisan, not attributing blame, and looking real cool, no matter what. Such a moral sense does not have “right” as a fundamental notion. “Right” is all about how it looks.

 Obama encountered Hitler. What do you think happened? “Enough blame  to go around,” confirmed the president. OK, pathetic, I agree.

 Being bipartisan about holocausts is no option for the morally correct. Non assistance to people in danger is one of the worst crimes there is. Once one has justified the worst, or let it go free, and unmolested, how much worse can one do? Indulge in infamy, instead of just entertaining it?

***

Patrice Ayme

*** 

ASSASSINATING TRUTH

DOES NOT DO A CIVILIZATION GOOD

Main Ideas: The USA attacked Afghanistan. In July 1979. The USA recruited, financed, trained and armed the greatest Muslim Fundamentalist army of Jihadist warriors, that the world had ever seen. In particular intelligence services of the USA and their proxies recruited Osama Bin Laden. That was the high point of the terror strategy of the USA, which consisted in supporting terror leaders, throughout the world, if they were friendly. If they had oil, they did not even need to be friendly.

Most Americans, being told of those facts, would think you are crazy to talk that way. The president may want your “head examined”. The plutocracy of the USA has succeeded to hide from its ignorant populace the oily game it has been playing by using Muslim Fundamentalist warriors to get to Middle East, and Central Asian oil. Central Asian oil? That is why the secular Democratic Republic of Afghanistan was attacked by Carter in 1979 (under advice from his pro-plutocratic advisers).

As if this were not bad enough, some of the fundamental tenets of Western civilization have been thrown to the wolves by the leaders of the USA, for all to see. Reintroducing “extraordinary question” (also known as “enhanced interrogation” or torture) was bad: torture was already unlawful against Roman citizens, 25 centuries ago.

But now Obama has suggested to wipe out 25 centuries of justice by proclaiming that it is done as it was done with Apaches. First use the Apaches, to hunt Apaches, then kill them, and cover it all up behind lies as thick as Middle Eastern oil.

In truth the Greco-Romans imposed justice as the supremacy of the law, above anything else, including expediency. The law is not just about killing Apaches… or Jews. There is such a thing as the law of the West, and it is above Americanism… just as it was above Nazism.

Adding to this, civilization has found more recently that justice’s highest goal is to establish the truth on criminal systems of thought. All of this should not be thrown to the fishes, just because one has a bigger boat.

Supporting terror leaders, and terrorist systems of thought, such as Islamist fascism (as American “intelligence” has done perfidiously),  goes against the necessity of making terrorism unlawful. Terrorism has to be thrown out, because, if it is not, there will be nuclear war. That means a world where people eat people (there would be nothing else left to eat, as neoconservative torture supporters will be pleased to inform you).

So it is high time for the USA to rethink its approach to progress. Truth is sustainable, lies are not. Blatantly violating the Geneva Conventions for the whole planet to see, is not tolerable, especially in a major, would-be democratic regime. There are no ifs and buts. 

***

***

Abstract: President Obama basically, and unwisely, admitted that he ordered Bin Laden killed, and then added: “…the one thing I didn’t lose sleep over was the possibility of taking bin Laden out. Justice was done. And I think that anyone who would question that the perpetrator of mass murder on American soil didn’t deserve what he got needs to have their head examined.”

Polls: 80% of U.S. citizens think that killing Bin Laden was the right decision. Those who think it was the wrong decision are 1%. (OK, the approval rate of the Iraq war was 83%, at the time, in 2003: same uncomprehending hatred, same wolves howling to the wind of madness.)

Obama is not expressing any opinion on mass murder on Afghan soil by American paid, armed and trained Jihadists. Mass murder on Afghan soil is an entirely different matter, let’s make a note of that.

Examining heads is what philosophers do, starting with their own. Correct thinking requires precision. Certainly Bin Laden got what he deserved. Anyone knows that. However, anyone who would not question whether the way Bin Laden got what he deserved is compatible with the continuation of civilization looking forward, should have his sense of civilization examined.

Confusing bullets and justice does not do a body politics good. It’s not just bad Karma, a terrible incitation, but also the justification of Osama, by Obama: I kill, therefore I just. Hyenas beat Descartes anytime, because they have bigger jaws.

Of course Obama is just a politician, the leader of the pack. If it’s a pack of culturally challenged wolves, he has to howl louder. A good politician has to be Machiavellian. Were I Obama, I may have assassinated Bin Laden too, putting to rest forever the assertion that I were a wet rag. Except, of course, that would have made me a war criminal, and that is a line I would not have crossed, not matter what. (Be it only because when Athens, a democracy, committed war crimes, it condemned itself to be hated by everybody, removed its greatest weapon, moral superiority, and that made Athens lose the war that destroyed half of its population, and would have extinguished it, but for Sparta.)

Obama has to do more than accompany the philosophy of the People, he has to lead it in the right direction, if he wants to be remembered as somebody who made a difference.

Philosophers make the philosophy of future people (and the best politicians consulted with philosophers, starting with Pericles). So contemporary people often act as the enemies of philosophers, because humans aspire to mental supremacy, and do not love to be told they are full of it.

In the week after Bin Laden’s elimination, the USA was traversed by another of these nationalistic frenzies we have observed in 2001, or 2003. I am well aware that Americans will hate what is written below. I am aware that nationalistic hatred knows no bounds. Here is a typical comment in the New York Times, made by “Justin”: “I consider myself a strong liberal but being upset about bin laden’s burial or not being taken alive is too bleeding hurt even for me.”

“Justin” has understood nothing, except that when the wolves howl, he better howl with them, to become their friend. I am also aware that the Dalai Lama has howled with the wolves. I expected nothing else from him.

Wisdom was not built on hatred as much as on a correct analysis of reality. 

That American so called “strong liberals” are like little children from a courtyard, or jackals howling with the jackals, is the fundamental reason why they are increasingly manipulated into oblivion by the victorious plutocracy. Plutocracy, or the oblivion of civilization. Civilization is not so much about “bleeding hurt”, than about the toughest, most elaborate mind reason can build. It’s the opposite of bleeding and hurt.

***

***

THE POWER, AND THE ETHICS, OF OUR CIVILIZATION RESTS ON TRUTH.

Any other description is a lie of the highest order, and most dangerous sort. Science establishes truth, so does justice. Bullets only make holes.

To survive and thrive, civilization will have to rest on ever more rigorous notions of truth. The ethics of Muslim Fundamentalists rest not on truth, but on superstitions found in old books: the Qur’an, and the Bible. Justice then meant whatever the guy at the top decided.

By throwing out, as if it never existed, 25 centuries of the advancement of the idea of justice, and choosing instead Biblical revenge, the government of the USA has allied itself with the enemies of the present civilization. Once again.

It is a curious thing that, while ostensibly fighting against bin Laden, after having fought in his company, in the end, the government of the USA agreed with Bin Laden on the most important subject. Ethics. Obama won Osama’s fight by killing him, the way he did. I kill, therefore I just.

It is an even stranger thing that, after being burned by Bush with the assault on Iraq, civilization and human rights by the Bush administration, the American people seems to have learned nothing, and becomes overwhelmed by joy as justice is subdued by bullets. “Does our children learn?” -As Bush would say, with his characteristic kindergarten grammar. (The fact that it is individuals with mangled culture who elaborate the devolution is rich in signification.)

 ***

NO JUSTICE, NO CIVILIZATION. WAS IT JUST TO ATTACK AFGHANISTAN IN 1979?

Our formidable, worldwide civilization progressed in no small reason because of ever more sophisticated notions of justice. Precisely because justice is a form of truth. The American president has decided to throw them into the trash. It is an ominous victory of primitivism over wisdom, in a country with global pretentions.

Contrarily to the mythology their masters have stuffed gullible Americans with, the USA launched a war against Afghanistan, on July 3, 1979 (see document below). Of course, 9/11 killed 3,000 Americans and this is a much more important fact for Americans to be horrified by than the 3 million Afghans (at least) killed since 1979.  If you tell Americans about the three million Afghans killed by a military action initiated by their government, they will look at you like goldfish. They will think you are beyond the pale, a type of crazy, who widely steps beyond appropriate mien.

This shows that, in the generally accepted estimate, an American life is worth more than a thousand times an Afghan’s life. 

Bin Laden, then a son in one of the world’s richest families, was recruited by the “intelligence” oligarchy which helps to rule the USA. Bin Laden, from the second richest Saudi family, had the contacts among plutocrats to provide the secret war with needed funds. As an engineer and businessman, Bin Laden’s organizational skills came in handy. He became the head of a 20,000 men terror army, the point of the CIA war in Central Asia. Bin Laden, and other Jihadists, were  taught to inflict terror on hard-to-defend objectives, such as primary schools for girls.  Yes, it is abject. I am just describing hell and its demons. Only then did the government in Kabul called the Soviets for help.

American leaders, the powers that be, have no interest to see some of their unsavory top ex-operatives being brought to justice, and this sort of facts to come to the surface. This is the true meaning of the CIA archipelago around the world. Nor does the American public want to hear the truth in a courtroom, or anywhere else. Not anymore than Germans wanted to hear about Auschwitz, when Hitler was conquering the world.

Some truths are more than inconvenient, they could be lethal to the powerful, the reigning oligarchies, and the hopeful little servants crawling by their feet, full of all the psychopathic emotions which animate the creepy.

By ordering jihad against a secular republic, Carter signed, basically, the order of assaulting Afghan primary schools: this is what we are talking about here, the abject reality of the policy conducted by the American oligarchies just boiled down to that. Carter, the ethical crater, was of course given the Nobel peace prize: he had served the established order well. This puts in evidence why American presidents always sing the praises of Islam: they order the armies of Islam around. Ostensibly for Islamist purposes (they say to the Muslims), and freedom (they tell the rest of the world).

Before that, the war against the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan had been conducted even more secretly, through Pakistani intelligence (ISI). Thus the relation between the masters of Pakistan and the masters of the USA is that of partners in crime, a fact best hidden to everybody in sight, lest said masters find their rule more complicated. Nothing such as terrible secrets in common to unite (Reciprocally many Muslim fundamentalists are aware of some of the elements above, and, as they spread that revelation, that true message, mixed with the grandeur of simplistic ethics, they gain in credibility, because it all makes sense; in other words, the lying of Western leadership allows the religious fundamentalists to use against the West its most terrible weapon, the truth.)

Why did the USA attack Afghanistan in 1979? Really vicious governance piles up layers of lies as if they were sediments. Officially, the Carter administration defended its attack of Afghanistan as an attempt to catch the USSR in an “AFGHAN TRAP” (this defense of U.S. policy was made in France; it is pretty much censored in the USA; see document below).

This is another excellent lie, because it has an appearance of truth. As usual, confronted to a mysterious crime, it is wiser to search to whom it profits. Much of the superiority of the USA in the last 150 years comes from oil.  So where is the oil? Afghanistan itself has no oil. The oligarchs alluded to the truth when they admitted that they wanted to build a pipeline through Afghanistan.

The real truth is that the American oiligarchy was trying to get to Central Asian oil and gas, and extend further American plutocracy’s dominion. It needed jihadists, bin Laden, to clear the area from the Russians. And it worked. So far, mostly: plutocracy: 100, everybody else, zero.

Bin Laden was assassinated, to prevent the public to contemplate deep perspectives, over the abysses upon which their masters rule. And the unraveling of elaborate tales.  Americans find themselves in the position of the Germans of old, not too keen to ask too many questions to their guides, lest their mental and material comfort suffers…

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AMERICANS ARE UNAWARE OF 32 YEARS OF AMERICAN ASSAULT ON AFGHANISTAN:

Obama gave the context of the death of Osama: “The American people did not choose this fight. It came to our shores, and started with the senseless slaughter of our citizens.”

Really? Came to our shores? Started with slaughtering U.S. citizens? The American people did not choose this fight? Well, that is speciously true; it’s the plutocrats of the USA who attacked Afghanistan. And they kept it secret first. So, indeed, the “American People did not chose this fight”! Well done Mr. President! what’s next? The Nobel prize in logics?

Then the plutocrats next described their assault on Afghanistan as a fight for freedom. but mostly, Americans chose to ignore that, and revere Reagan’s regain instead. The first inkling that most know-nothings American had that something wrong was going on was the (counter-)attacks on the USA, on September 11, 2001. THAT was painful.

ON JULY 3, 1979, USA’S PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER SIGNED A DIRECTIVE FOR SECRET AID TO THE TERRORIST OPPONENTS OF THE DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF AFGHANISTAN.

The (official) aim of USA was to drag the Soviet Union into the “AFGHAN TRAP” as US Secretary of State Zbigniew Brzezinski termed it. And that too, was also a lie. Lies, within lies, within lies… The USA attacked the democratic republic of Afghanistan, using Osama bin laden and his friends, for the usual reason, as I will explain. But let’s get the first version of the story from the snake’s mouth:

Interview of Zbigniew Brzezinski in Le Nouvel Observateur (France), Jan 15-21, 1998, p. 76*

Question, Nouvel Observateur: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs ["From the Shadows"], that American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet intervention. In this period you were the national security adviser to President Carter. You therefore played a role in this affair. Is that correct?

Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. 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.

 Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn’t believe them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don’t regret anything today?

 Brzezinski: Regret what? THAT SECRET OPERATION WAS AN EXCELLENT IDEA. IT HAD THE EFFECT OF DRAWING THE RUSSIANS INTO THE AFGHAN TRAP AND YOU WANT ME TO REGRET IT? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.

 Q: And neither do you regret having supported Islamic Fundamentalism [integrisme], having given arms and advice to future terrorists?

 Brzezinski: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? SOME STIRRED-UP MOSLEMS or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?

 Q: Some stirred-up Moslems? But it has been said and repeated: Islamic fundamentalism represents a world menace today.

 Brzezinski: Nonsense! It is said that the West had a global policy in regard to Islam. That is stupid. There isn’t a global Islam. Look at Islam in a rational manner and without demagoguery or emotion. It is the leading religion of the world with 1.5 billion followers. But what is there in common among Saudi Arabian fundamentalism, moderate Morocco, Pakistan militarism, Egyptian pro-Western or Central Asian secularism? Nothing more than what unites the Christian countries.

[*] The version of the Nouvel Observateur sent to the United States did not include the Brzezinski interview. Perhaps the minders of America did not want to stir -up the natives. Clearly, Obama does not want American youth to know more than the fantasy that the American assault on Afghanistan started in 2001.

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CIVILIZED JUSTICE VERSUS JUSTICE OF THE APE:

In primitive, Biblical times, justice was about retribution in kind, an eye for an eye. It was all about revenge, and it led to an unending cycle of violence. The cycle of vengeance and violence became the bane of the Mid Terra area. That vicious circle is still found in a few of the most primitives parts of the planet, such parts of Albania, or parts of the Amazon. Now the USA has proclaimed, loud and clear, that it has joined the reservation.

The Romans had introduced a more advanced notion of justice. Roman justice was represented as blind, weighting the evidence from the facts alone, and not carried away by the fury of appearances. Roman justice incorporated the notion of forgiveness: suspects could not be judged, too long after the facts, as those could not be determined precisely. Facts ruled: no facts, no justice.

Rational, fact and law driven justice broke the cycle of vengeance which came to wreck much of the Mid-Terra world. Superior justice was no small contributor to the supremacy of Roman civilization, and to the ultimate triumph of many of its mental elements through the superstitious, irrational, anti-intellectual, Biblically induced Dark Ages.

Roman style justice survived the Dark Ages, in no small part because Roman lawyers and/or generals had written down, in Latin, a Salian law for the Franks, which complemented nicely secular Roman law. Even the fanatical Justinian, emperor of most of the Roman empire (but for Francia), refurbished all of Roman law, ordering to separate carefully secular law from Christian law (this refreshed law was instated in the “Occidental Part”).

However, as the centuries passed by, it was found out that justice could be endowed with an even higher purpose that had escaped the Romans. The failure of understanding, in a timely manner, that there was more to justice than punishing the guilty, allowed the collapse of the Roman republic, and its transmogrification into the fascist empire.

The highest purpose of justice is not anymore what it was under the Romans. Replacing vengeance with the arbitration of a third party, the law, same for all, was the highest purpose of the Greco-Roman style justice. The leading edge of civilization has done much better since.

After the cataclysm of Nazism, the most careful thinkers in Europe imposed a higher purpose for justice. Contrarily to what the Nazis asserted, it was not “victors’ justice“. Quite the opposite. THE HIGHEST PURPOSE OF EUROPEAN STYLE JUSTICE  BECAME ESTABLISHING CAUSALITY. ESPECIALLY IN THE CASE OF CRIMES INVOLVING THE STATE. SYSTEMS OF THOUGHT WERE PUT ON TRIAL.

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INFAMY IS INDEFENSIBLE, PUTTING IT ON TRIAL INSTRUCTIVE ALWAYS:

Confronted to monsters who had killed sometimes millions of people, during WWII, the European leaders did not go ape. They kept their cool. they did not devolve civilization further. They did not behave like Nazis, but as their antagonists, that means they clang to the principles of western civilization.

European leaders, and democratic institutions, did not just put on trial suspect individuals. They also tried the systems of thought that animated them, by going deep in their motivations. Some of the criminals defended themselves with the best they had, and that was exactly what was the worst with them, their own criminal systems of thought. A careful selection of the worst thinking was made, and publicly tried, condemned, and executed.

The top Nazis themselves exhibited the paucity of Nazism when they tried to use it to defend themselves. Bin Laden using Salafism to defend himself would have put Salafism on trial. For all to see. Fundamentalist Islam would have suffered. That means: an ally American plutocracy has been able to surf on beautifully would have suffered, weakening the ride it provided plutocracy with. Also, of course, the symbiosis between CIA, ISI, and Jihadism, may have come to light. When crime is well organized, witnesses are the first to go, even if, especially if, partners in crime.

By defending themselves, Nazi criminals exposed their logic. In the end none of the miscreants of Western civilization had anything important to say in the defense of Nazism, fascism, and racism. Even the worst Nazis were emotionally shattered when the monstrosities they had allowed, incited, or ordered, were shown on the screen. In the end, most of them put themselves at the mercy of the court, admitting their best defense was to admit their own mental, cultural and moral retardation, and fundamental viciousness.

Goering himself, and many other Nazi leaders found themselves recognizing that the holocaust had been a horrible thing. Many claimed, implausibly, that they did not know. In other words, the top Nazis themselves could not defend Nazism in its hour of need.

Justice did not just execute criminals, it executed Nazism, and its executioners were its top practitioners. Justice made it so.

This way the world was rid of Nazism and racism, for good, and quite a while. (Things could have gone much further by exposing the forces behind Hitler and company, but those ruled in the USA, more than ever, after their collaborator’s ignomious fall; see the Dulles brothers, P. Bush, H. Ford, GM, IBM, etc…. It was a from of gravity assist: evil falling in the abyss, to gain even more energy. Hence the problem we are facing today!)

By assassinating bin Laden, the USA has proclaimed that, far from respecting the Roman conception of justice, it devolved back down to the Biblical notion of justice, not far removed from that of the apes. Forget all this European notion of advancing understanding through justice, and judging systems of thought. It’s a war, and an eye for eye. What war exactly? A war that, contrarily to what Obama insinuated, the USA itself started. The war for the control of Central Asia, and its enormous reserves of oil and gas. Who is next?

Far from being a secular, thus a modern country, most of the USA is caught in a time warp. It had it so good for so long that it cannot understand that the music has stopped, and it has run out of Apache territory to invade. With all the Muslim rebels, as with the Indians: progress means that, this time, the fishes will have Geronimo. Justice, the American way. Throw the means to get to the truth in the abyss.

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EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM:

Europe and Israel were careful to not throw their mass murderers to the fishes on the first day. First they made them sing. All those who were intercepted were tried (Himmler, once detected by the Brits took poison).

Great mass murderers and criminals against humanity are too good a counter-examples to civilization to go to waste. It is an insult to victims to dispose of criminals against mankind as if they were nothing important, just fish food. Move on, we have an electoral campaign!

Israel conducted a commando operation to arrest Eichmann in Argentina, in total and appropriate disregard of Argentine law (France conducted similar arrests in Bolivia and Sudan, removing respectively Klaus Barbie and Carlos the Jackal). Eichmann killed millions of Jews. Eichmann had a long and elaborate trial (so did Barbie and The Jackal in France). He was condemned to death, and executed.

Eichmann’s defense during his trial was extremely edifying. He claimed not to hate Jews, far from it. His best friend was a Jew (he begged Himmler to save him). Eichmann suggested that Kant misled him. Kant was a Prussian philosopher of obedience, and respect of conformity, much admired by those who don’t want to think too much.

Thanks to Eichmann, those who have not been persuaded by Nietzsche’s fierce attacks against Kant, can now associate Kant to German fascism and mass murder. This is a very important point: Kant is still very admired. This is thought to be very scholarly an attitude. But Eichmann gave a vivid and livid illustration  that Kant is loved by those who crave the power of the conformism fascism cannot do without.

The philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote up a whole book, exposing her theory of the “Banality of Evil” (which was certainly an appropriate description for most Germans). In any case, a high level debate has been conducted ever since, to hunt down the elements in human psychology and philosophy which led to the criminal madness of Nazism, and how they seduced most Germans (and few others).

The Israeli Prime Minister Ben Gurion was monstrously courageous to send Israeli special forces kidnap Eichmann, and to conduct an open trial. During the war, he had negotiated with Eichmann. Eichmann proposed one million Jews in exchange for 10,000 trucks. Ben Gurion refused.  So, in a sense, Ben Gurion was a partner in crime with Eichmann. However, he was unafraid to stick by his position that (re)constructing Israel was the best way to save Jews. According to him, it was no good to send Jews to Britain.

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JUSTICE WAS NOT A GIFT TO NAZIS, BUT AS AN INDICTMENT OF NAZISM:

The U.S. president wants to ‘examine the heads of those who question’. Cheering assassinations is much better, and should not be questioned: the USA is turning into Godfather central.

Whereas the Europeans conducted all the trials of Nazis and their collaborators, and the trials of some of the world’s most famous terrorists in the open, the USA has refused to do so with Muslim terrorists. Why no open trials? Are Americans afraid that if a Muslim fundamentalist open his mouth, they will turn to stone? Or is it simply that the American People should not be reminded that Muslim terrorists were collaborators of the USA for many decades (at least 6)! The true meaning of the Guantanamo archipelago is that terrorists have not to make any declaration to the American People, only secretly to their secret masters in Washington.

People with unexamined heads feel that justice is a gift to the criminals. But justice, as it allows to discover what led to the criminal behavior, helps civilization understand sociopathy, and thus allows people to live better lives. It was important to determine what made Bin Laden tick. And it is even more important to know, if those who winded Bin Laden up sat in the White House (or would that then be the Black House?)

Once again, it is not my conspiracy, it’s not just inhabitating my mind: I did not raise a 300,000 jihadist army to bomb primary schools for girls. The powers that be in the USA did. Then they played gravely offended on 9/11.

Some of the oligarchs who decided to use “stirred up Muslims” to get to Central Asian oil, probably had not studied enough history: betrayal by a mercenary army is one of a great theme of history. It happened to Carthage. And to Rome many times, and, in the end, fatally (the battle of Adrianople, where the Oriental Roman army was destroyed, and the emperor killed).

But then, again, maybe some of them did: more on this later.

During the Nazi occupation, Europe was rife with massive state sponsored hate crime. Afterwards, some countries reinstituted the death penalty, after more than a century without.

Countries tried to understand what happened, what led so many people to crimes against humankind. In Norway, Quisling established a treacherous regime. Quisling knew Hitler even before the hostilities, and started his collaboration even though the Norwegian army and state was still fighting a few miles out of Oslo in April 1940 (the Norwegians caused considerable losses to the Nazis, even sending below the cold waters of Oslo fjord, the entire administration the Nazis planned to impose on Norway).

Quisling organized the deportation of Norwegians to Germany for assassination. Responsible of thousands of death, hated by the entire country, he was nevertheless given medical treatment, a good health, and the opportunity to mount a defense. He claimed he never suspected the holocaust (the usual line). He was executed five months after his arrest.

France confronted worse mass murderers than Osama bin Laden (they killed more, and more horribly). However France, as a state, showed real cool, jailing and judging all of the biggest fish appropriately. Famous collaborators, including writers, ex war heroes, highest police officials, and a Prime Minister, were executed in the end, along with many thousands of lesser Nazi loving criminals. No country (but for Stalin’s nightmarish fascist kingdom), executed as many collaborators.

Justice was done above the board, publicly. It is now possible to consult the argumentation the fascists made when they tried to save their precious skins. That exposed logic now allows jurists, historians, psychologists, sociologists, and philosophers to understand much better what makes fascism tick. This body of knowledge is now an archeology of evil. Digging through it allow to understand how to prevent the repetition of such dreadful abuse.

Why do Americans not want to understand why 19 believers killed 3,000 Americans, in an act of faith? Are they afraid that faith would not look good? Or that the 19 had strong reasons to believe that the USA was what ailed them? And if so, why? What about 19 Pakistani engineers believing the same, with their fingers on 200 thermonuclear bombs, inside 200 rockets pointed to the United Stupid of Apathy? Is there nothing important to learn there? Or is it all fish food?

An example: SS Klaus Barbie, killed more people than bin Laden ever (Barbie tortured to death 5,000 people, one by one, over the years, and some were children). France captured Barbie in Bolivia, where he was a top CIA operative, in charge of drug and arm trafficking.

How strange: Barbie was in a role of self financing of American intelligence, somewhat similar to bin Laden’s task. Barbie used drugs and weapons trafficking, Bin Laden his plutocratic friends.

Barbie was condemned to life in jail by a French court. After a public trial, defended by the best defenders. Plenty of facts were exposed, such as the systematic use of the worst torture by Barbie and his crew. Nothing to hide. France, as a nation, has tried to discover what happened before and during World War Two, be it only to find out what went wrong. That requires open justice.

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JUSTICE DONE BY KILLING APACHES VERSUS JUSTICE RENDERED BY CIVILIZATION.

The USA named Bin Laden “Geronimo“. This is more than a Freudian slip. It is more than a mockery of a past genocide. It is a more than a civilizational slip. Geronimo, the last free Apache had been… betrayed by the USA. It is also a warning: Arabs who resist are Apaches, and shall be treated as such: employed as the Apaches were to further the goals of the USA, and then eliminated, when not of use anymore (many of the Apache trackers who helped the U.S. Army were treated as badly as those they had contributed to catch…)

One has to keep in mind that the hunt and extermination of Native Americans was deeply uncivilized, starting in the technical sense: it was conducted on the frontier, where there were no cities. So frontier justice is fundamentally uncivilized. Now Obama wants it to be the world’s justice, in regions where there have been cities, for 10,000 years.

A few weeks ago, in a joint, UN requested operation, French aircrafts demolished the fortified mansion of the ex-president of Cote d’Ivoire. Ggabo wanted to pursue his decade long tyranny. Losing an election forced upon him by the United Nations, did not make him relinquish power to his highly qualified opponent. After serious, lethal combat, over many days, with thousands dead, republican soldiers captured the ex-president, his (hated) spouse, and their 30 something son (bloodied). They are alive, awaiting the wheels of justice. This is a face of topmost African justice, 2011 style. It has much improved. What is the face of topmost American justice, 2011 style? It has much decayed. What used to happen in secret in remote locales is now flaunted in public. The USA now hunts Apaches in the middle of Pakistan.

In the first few days, the White House floated various interpretations of bin Laden’s death. In some the villain took a wife as human shield, in others he engaged in a firefight. As it turned out the wife was shot by the Americans, and bin Laden was unarmed, and received one chest wound, and a shot to the head.

Real justice from real civilization means that, when you have 79 super trained, super armed, and armored commandos, you do not assassinate unarmed suspects, one of them a 19 year old, even if their name is bin Laden.

You do not assassinate, in a democracy, especially if the name is Bin Laden. Why? Because you want, if you are a democratic leader, to go to the bottom of things. And, if you do, as a democratic government, you don’t crow about it. Things are completely different if you are the hired and paid hand of a plutocracy. The difference between the army, or police force of a democracy, and mafia goons then come to the fore. The democracy acts out of justice, the mafia out of imposed silence, retribution, and reinstatement of the status quo ante.

The president glorified the dubious notion of plutocratic justice of frontier towns, where the local sheriff was on the payroll of the local wealthy rancher… or oil man. That old notion of “justice” where the local inhabitants, present there for millennia were hunted like vermin, where entire ecological systems were destroyed, not just to get to gold, but to starve the natives, where treaties after treatises were signed to gain advantage and provide opportunities for the most vicious betrayals.

To flaunt all this, to serve it as a reminder to the entire planet that, as far the American government is concerned, we are all Apaches, and it was correct, politically correct, judicially correct to massacre the Apaches, and so it would be to all the savages who stand between the USA and its oil, Bin Laden was named Geronimo. What else? They are not that clever? But that is worst: because they have learned nothing. Sometimes deliberate evil, in the know, is better than self righteousness so acute that evil is confused with goodness.

In the CBS “60 Minutes” interview, Obama admitted that, not only he got bin Laden killed, but other people too. After apparently assassinating Bin Laden for all to see, the president of the USA, just to make sure that the sheep out there got it, looked straight at camera, and assassinated the idea of justice.

Obviously, the government of the USA has things to hide from the People in the name of which it governs. Not just that, but it ominously let it be known that it does, and that everybody should shut up about it. The oligarchs did not want their ex-agent bin Laden to explain how their mass murdering collaboration evolved into squabbling. The oligarchs did not want bin Laden to stand up, and plead not guilty. They would have hated to see bin Laden request that directors of the CIA be brought to the stand as (presumably hostile) witnesses.

The same method was used with Saddam Hussein: silence, the Western governments have nothing to do with your badness, you little pawn! Bush kept repeating like a deranged parrot that Saddam Hussein had killed his own people, forgetting that this was during a war against Iran more or less incited by the West, and where the West gave the means to Saddam, including the chemical capability.  The will to dissimulation and dissemblance emanates from governments serving their friend the plutocrats (the oil men, the military industrial complex, the financiers) rather than their voters, the public.

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THROWING JUSTICE TO THE WOLVES IS ANTI-AMERICAN:

If Africans can do justice, why can’t Americans? Obama insisted that “justice was done”, “bin Laden was brought to justice”. He should know: he taught constitutional justice at the University of Chicago.  If anyone knows what American justice is about, it is Obama.

Perhaps Americans are stupid, and they believe the statement that “justice was done”. And, if they don’t, trust Obama to repeat it to them another 1,000 times. However, the rest of the planet is smart enough to know that if it is what the USA mean by justice, they don’t want it. By flaunting a Biblical notion of justice, Obama is feeding raw anti-Americanism, and also the very religious extremism, “stirred-up Muslims”, he claims to want to fight. That may seem contradictory, but it’s not. At least since 1953, a big part of the policy of the USA in the Middle East has been to stir-up Muslims, and get them to do the dirty work… Against democracy and progress.

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THE USA’S OILY & SLIPPERY GAME IN THE MIDDLE EAST:

An obvious observation is ominous for American democracy: the government of the USA does not want to reveal what transpired between itself and bin Laden. That is the one and only explanation for the elimination of Osama without examination. Alternatives such as Obama was so Oh Drama about Osama don’t stand scrutiny. As he said it himself, he did not lose sleep about him. 

An example of disinformation is the Wikipedia article “CIA-Bin Laden controversy” where the best reputable sources are presented as “allegations“, while propaganda is presented as “scholarly“. With so many Harvard professors on Qaddafi’s payroll, “scholarly” has a double meaning. Openness is rejected, because it would turn the USA to stone. The USA conducts its secrecy in the open, like its collaborator, China. Call that whatever you want, but democracy is not its name.

At some points, if enough allegations about American plutocracy double dealing with Hitler, even Stalin, all sorts of Muslim Fundamentalists, and organizing giant transfer of monies from the poor to the rich in guise of saving the world’s economy, end up on the surface, all exposed, the American People may understand that it is in its best interest to figure out what is going on. Elements of the Obama administration have even ludicrously claimed that money was made, by taxpayers, out of the financial disaster. It is a lie, as anyone reading the Wall street Journal (as I do every day, me and Karl Marx!) knows (see the WSJ, May 9, cover story about AIG). 

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WHAT COULD HAVE BIN LADEN REVEALED?

Well, Americans have been told to not know the following, and they, and their hypnotizing, plutocratic owned media, are doing an excellent job at it:

1) The plutocracy of the USA has instrumentalized Islam. Islam has become a tool to achieve some of its aims, so it is appreciated. That is why the USA admits that it organized, financed and armed a 250,000 jihadists army in Afghanistan, now known as the Taliban (“Wilson’s war”).

The instrumentalization of Islam is why the American president talks as if he were the Caliph. Just listen to him carefully, he will tell you what the religion is. Daddy knows best. Let me explain explicitly: Obama has come on the TV, many times, and told us what was bad Islam. He told us, speaking of some particular Muslim Fundamentalists: this is not religion. Obama, just like Osama, knew better. Ayatollah in Chief bin Obama thus played the oldest game in Christo-Islamism: deciding who is a believer, and who is not. (The proper role of the leader of a secular democracy is to NOT make religious interpretations; THAT is the difference between a Caliph and the president of a republic; the leaders of fuller democracies are careful NOT to present themselves as if they were caliphs.)

Those who are out, the unbelievers, said Jesus Christ, the well known prophet of Islam, should be burned (read the evangel of John carefully, if in doubt). Who knows what is good Islam, and what is bad Islam, and sends armies to impose his fatwas? Well the Caliph, of course. No wonder so many Americans think Obama is a Muslim: he proffers Muslim opinions (“fatwas”), all the time: this one is a good Muslim, this one, I kill. Bin Laden used to do that too. Takes one to silence the other. How do you spell bad karma? But of course Americans are a primitive crowd: 61% believe bin Laden is in hell.

Yes, really in hell, not as a figure of speech; then some chant that this is not a crusade! It goes without saying that the fact Americans believe that bin Laden is in hell feeds the opposite point of view, in those that the USA or its agents oppress. Let’s be explicit here: by making bin Laden an absolute revulsion, the definition of evil, 61% Americans say that it good to absolutely hate. And who do they hate? The one that their own government dispatched to commit terror jihad against the innocent, in the hope it would weaken socialism and secularism.

By saying that Osama is ultimate evil, and Obama ultimate good, they are a letter away from contradicting themselves. And they will, because one letter is not much, when all you have is chanting. How embarrassing. In any case they teach the Muslim world with the example of the metaphysics of hatred, unbridled emotion.

OK, let the primitives to their own instruments, and let’s be serious. The policy of fitting Islam to the purpose of American oil men and American financiers started in 1945. (16.5 years before Obama’s birth: I am not claiming that Obama is an original thinker!)

2) That policy of instrumentalizing Islam worked splendidly: plenty of oil and gas was produced, and made American oilmen rich, while plenty of petrodollars were recycled through Wall Street, and the military-industrial complex. Prince Bandar reigned over Washington. Americans were instructed to respect Islam and those who mastered it. Oil procurement distracted the populace through oil addiction and waste (the Romans wanted bread, the Americans wanted oil, so they could out and play with mind consuming toys). Bin Laden and Al Qaeda became themselves distractions, and blames defectors.

Don’t ask what you could do against bin Laden, ask what your bin Laden has done for you. Well, bin laden has made Obama into Osama. Kill, and call that justice. That is where my Obama head examination irresistibly leads me to.

However, a number of the believers who were instrumentalized, such as the Shiites in Iran, realized later that they had been pawns of Uncle Sam, and they turned against the American chess masters with a vengeance. Turning against the USA with a vengeance started with Nasser, it went on with Iran, Iraq, then bin Laden. It’s starting to happen with Pakistan. Anti-Americanism has a rich future, because one cannot exploit and manipulate all the people, all the time. Not everybody has interest to be as gullible as the American people. As the manipulation mechanisms are revealed, the People will revolt. It has already started. But this is just a start, although some hope to stop it, Tiananmen Chinese style (Assad’s line in Syria).

When bin Laden and his fellow jihadists understood that they were played like violins in American hands, they rebelled. That rebellion was facilitated by the fact they were out of work, after the ignominious defeat of the Soviets in Afghanistan. (Many then tried to make an Islamist revolution in Algeria, but the Algerian military, in full cooperation with the redoubtable, pernicious and obdurate French republic, blocked them in a bloody civil war reminiscent of the Algerian war of independence. Exploding very high speed trains and trying to crash jumbo jets over Paris in 1996, did not help any.)

After 9/11 American propaganda was able to fall back on its feet, by increasing lying and dissemblance Brandishing Islam, and claiming that “the USA is not at war with Islam” is part of the dissemblance, for the good and simple reason that it is not the proximal outrage at hand; the real question was:”How come the CIA employed operatives who now attack the American People?” Another dissemblance is to say that Bin Laden was not a CIA employee. Neither was Klaus Barbie, of course.

American policy in the main oil region of the planet has piled lies upon lies, upon lies. In the apparent hope, so far realized, that the American People is too misinformed, or too dumb, to figure it out.

There are no bounds to the Machiavellism. For example, American “intelligence” has created Pakistan, and its nukes (the latter partly, and officially paid by Bush and his taxpayers!). At first sight, that does not look very smart. But, on a second, and much deeper look, a nuclear, crazed Pakistan is exactly what the oiligarchy and the military-industrial complex need. If the interest of warring in Afghanistan now escapes the American public,  warring all over Pakistan offers rich opportunities. OK, not everybody will get rich, only those who pay millions to befriend the president, or only 50,000 dollars to be in the same room, admitted to the presence.

In the end the system laundered money from the American public, through oil producing countries, back to the richest manipulators of the USA, on Wall Street. A small example: the financial system of the USA found itself with 60 billion dollars controlled by Qaddafi (the Saudi sums are astronomically larger).

***

WE THROW YOU TO THE FISHES, SUCH IS THE MAFIA:

The mafia style assassination of bin Laden, and the propaganda accompanying it, with its imagery from the Mafia (“fishes”), and ethnocide (“Geronimo”), will live in history as one of the most famous cover-ups.

Movies such as “The Godfather” are nothing relative to what we just witnessed, the guy on the red carpet, looking the whole planet in the eye, coolly announcing that the notion of justice of Athens and Rome was not valid anymore. Too soft that law according to Greece and Rome. The USA has returned to the old fashion way, Babylonian justice. According to Obama, justice is now back to pure force, and those who thing otherwise “should have their head examined”… probably before being thrown to the fishes too.

Socrates, who could have escaped, as Aristotle did, preferred to die to confirm the supremacy of the law over the City and its citizens. Now an American comes to tell us inconsiderately that the last 25 centuries of civilization were for nought. “Justice is done” now with bullets. Those who “question” that, “should have their head examined”. The Guide’s hysterical populace is besides itself with joy, in a show reminiscent of the public face of Nazi Germany, complete with the joyful face of hate and bloodlust, music bands marching on TV sets.

 

Not only is the silencing of partners in crime by the powerful unworthy of a confident democracy, or republic, but it is a further step in its decomposition. The relationship between bin Laden and American intelligence and its proxies lasted a quarter of a century, and was perfectly illustrated by the sheltering of bin Laden right in the lair of the Pakistani military, for all to see, once again. Maybe that is why Bush was so unconcerned about catching bin Laden: who would want to catch oneself in public?

I am calling here onto the spirits of big time history. When democracy in the USA behaves worse, 21 centuries later, than an already deeply troubled Roman republic, Earth, we have a serious problem. Confronted with much more serious, dangerous, and mass murdering foes of the treacherous type (Jugurtha, Vercingetorix), the Roman republic arrested them. They were executed much later. There is little doubt that bin Laden could have been executed later. In theory, the ruler of the USA is the People.

The People should have had questions for bin Laden. Starting with: why did you meet many times with CIA operatives at the American hospital in Dubai in July 2001? What was exactly your relationship with the CIA? And the ISI? And Prince Turki (Saudi intelligence head)? Were you ordered to attack primary schools in Afghanistan? If not so, who did it? Etc.

I do believe in the superiority of civilization over the wastes of the wilds. That superiority rests on logics. Thus it can come and go, as logic does. Who profited from the immediate elimination of bin Laden? Well, those who did not want him to answer questions in a judicial process.

***

FIGHT OF THE DINOSAURS: ADVANTAGE AL QAEDA:

American plutocracy versus Jihadism, its ex-employee. Al Qaeda was able to steer further the USA towards civilizational irrelevance, by making it embrace Biblical justice. So Al Qaeda won in spirit. And spiritual elements are what lasts longer.

Al Qaeda had only 200 men in 2001. The USA launched a three trillion dollar war, ostensibly to fight it, killed hundreds of thousands of people, changed the nature of American society, and made the USA more like old Sparta, with an oligarchy ruling an increasingly destitute American population, as the society became more and more molded by war, for war.

The disproportion is astounding. 200 guys on one side, and the USA has still not won! The USA ruined its economy, its sociology, its law and its civilization, and the 200 guys are still out there, fighting back. Bin Laden was not the most important character of Al Qaeda. Al-Zawahiri, a surgeon from the Muslim brotherhood, is much more important (and may have given bin Laden’s location to Obama, for all I know… There were good reasons for this crafty move…)

Not just this, but, the USA did so, while making Al Qaeda and its imitators stronger. Only fools will think that this was just out of clumsiness. A more subtle interpretation is that this was a computation of the American oligarchy to reign more, onto its own People.

Pro-plutocratic Romans used to chant:”One must destroy Carthage!” (“Cartago delenda est”.) Carthage had become democratic, and thus, being the enemy of Rome, Carthage became a way to paint democracy as the enemy of Rome. Something similar is going on now. The presence of Carthage had been used to justify the weakening of democracy, while increasing the militarization. Similarly, the presence of a jihadist army allows American plutocrats to do exactly the same.

Before howling that I see conspiracies everywhere, and my head should be examined again, think about it. Which country, in the world supported financially, trained and equipped an army of  300,000 jihadists? Only one: the country of the towers which fell by total surprise, among the bleating sheep.

“A fight that we did not start, but came to our shores”, as the thinker in sheep, I mean in chief among the sheep, blurted out repetitively, the way sheep are won to do.

“To watch the courageous Afghan freedom fighters battle modern arsenals with simple hand-held weapons is an inspiration to those who love freedom.” (U.S. President Reagan, March 21, 1983.)… we’ll be damned by history if we let them fight with stones” (Charlie Wilson, head of U.S. Congress for Afghan jihad.)

In the end, American commandos fought just one guy to kill an unarmed bin Laden, and no American was wounded. Was it much ado about nothing? No. Bin Laden became a pretext to invade much of the oil producing part of the planet, that the USA did not control yet.

 

However, in the end it cost too much in lives and treasure. More than 6,000 American soldiers, and more than 1,000 other NATO troops have been killed in action, and dozens of thousands of soldiers have been gravely wounded. NATO populations, profoundly incognizant,  are still supporting the wars, but their economies have already cracked… And we were told it was all because of greedy homeowners. (Now to be helped, by giving free money to the world’s richest people, the one who fill the campaign coffers of the politicians who serve them.)

The conflict did not come out as intended by American oligarchy. By making the fight with 200 guys into an enormous war, with the enormous ambition of controlling Iraqi oil, and Central Asian oil and gas, the USA bit more than it could chew. Al Qaeda, and a new anti-American galaxy, won militarily. The USA is defeated militarily, and is trying to extract itself from Iraq and Afghanistan. Iraq is on the verge of a grand alliance with Iran and Syria. Pakistan is playing a complicated game, using both the jihadists and China against the U.S. taxpayers. The plutocracy of the USA keeps its cool; nothing like a big mess, to advance its cause.

Al Qaeda won philosophically: the USA embraced its primitive disregard for Western civilization. Not only Americans, like the Salafists, believe in hell, but they indicate that civilization is in the way, and ought to be jettisoned.

Some will say that is sad, and unfortunate. They miss the point: it was deliberate, and a joyful occasion for the plutocracy. And so was the pseudo-crash of 2008 (which was more akin to gravity assist, when a space probe falls into a passing planet’s gravitational field, in a near crash, and then comes out with much more energy.) A whole menagerie now reigns on American TV, celebrating “enhanced interrogation”. In the Middle Ages, that was called “extraordinary question”, colloquially: torture. It was discontinued in the Middle Ages, because more efficient ways were found to find things out, while making civilization progress.

***

DEMOCRACY IS BEST FOR WAR, & SOMETIMES CANNOT AFFORD ANYTHING ELSE:

Salafism is a form of fascism. So is all too much (not all) of Christo-Islamism. Christianism was fascism, and so was Islamism. Christianism was domesticated long ago, when the Franks took control in 486 CE. (It escaped out of its cage, by using the Crusades, and it took centuries to completely re-domesticate it). But nobody came out, and domesticated Islam. Even the French, expert at the domestication of Christianism and Islamism in “Francia” herself, did not try to domesticate Islam in Algeria. That was to the advantage of the hyper wealthy (who feel that they profit from an ignorant population), but not to the advantage of advancing civilization (which all too many French did not want to advance in Algeria, as primitives are more easily exploited than the sophisticated).

Islamism is more alive than Christianism. People have been lapidated in Afghanistan in 2011, because of so called “infidelity”. Videos were taken (they have been shown in the West). The game of NATO and the USA in Afghanistan has been to leave islam in command, for the same reason as stupid French left islam alone in the Maghreb; it is easier to exploit the primitives. More exactly it allows to make deals with a few fascist leaders, such as Karzai.

Mubarak and the Saudis, or Qaddafi, did not charge fully for oil. If those regimes were democracies, oil would be more expensive, and Israel would find harder to pursue its exploitation of the Palestinians, and the oppression of the quarter of its citizenry which is not Jewish.

Islam, just as Christianism, has been mostly used as an excuse fascists have found to stay in power. Fascism is the  Raison d’être of Christianism and Islamism.  See the (rich) Egyptian military leadership making deals with the Islamists, as Mubarak used to, under the cover of officially not liking them. And see the deal between the Saud family (fascists) and the Wahhabists (theocrats).

The planet has shrunk, democracy cannot be weak with fascism. Weakness, or more exactly, in the case of the (plutocrats of the) USA and the UK, double dealing, was tried with German fascism. It worked well, but mostly for the (plutocrats of the) USA. Bin Laden was part of a similar system: as a good Saudi, he brought the goods to the USA, in this case, a jihadist army. So, basically the same double deal was done with Muslim Fundamentalists as was done with Hitler: get the best deal from the fascists, by collaborating with them.

Resting one’s fortune on a holocaust is not easy to duplicate, though. The (plutocrats of the) USA ought to be careful next time. Apparently next time is now. In no small part because the plutocratic system is increasingly hard to hide, from Wall Street to Qaddafi.

I have advocated that fascists who lose legitimacy and present a threat ought to be aggressively removed in a timely manner, as needed by democracy. Hitler ought to have been assassinated by the Germans, and the West ought to have assisted in that matter by treating Hitler with proper disrespect. This is done with Qaddafi right now, by stopping him militarily, attacking his reputation, property, and dragging him to justice in absentia, for crimes against humankind.

An obvious problem, though, is that the world plutocratic system is all tied together, as an organic whole. The ambassador of the USA related secretly the North Korean weapons transfers through China (WikiLeaks). The Chinese and the North Koreans know that Washington knows, and Washington lets it happen, becoming an accomplice. Why? As I said, it’s an integrated whole. As long as the public does not know, it flies. WikiLeaks worries Beijing and Washington, because it exposes how they rule, for the benefit of their oligarchs, and that rests on excluding the public from ruling.

One more example: Switzerland just found in its coffers 400 million dollars tied in to Ggabo, the arrested dictator of Ivory Coast. OK, that’s far from the 150 billions of the Qaddafi clan and the 80 billions of the Mubarak clan, or the 8 billions of the Ben Ali clan (Tunisian dictatorship). But that is only in Switzerland. The world’s greatest tax heavens is actually the… USA. And the Qaddafis had 60 billion there (according to Hillary Clinton).

***

A BIN LADEN TRIAL WOULD HAVE BEEN ADVERSE TO THE RULING CLASS:

Pluto can make itself invisible, such is one of its qualities the Greeks discovered.

Obviously, the government of the USA has things to hide from the People in the name of which it governs. Not just that, but it ominously let it be known that it does, and that everybody should shut up about it. Heads examined otherwise. And don’t forget “enhanced interrogation”.

The oligarchs did not want their ex-agent bin Laden to explain how their mass murdering collaboration evolved into squabbling. The oligarchs did not want bin Laden to stand up, and plead not guilty. They would have hated to see bin Laden request that directors of the CIA be brought to the stand as (presumably hostile) witnesses.

The same method was used with Saddam Hussein: silence, the Western governments have nothing to do with your badness, you little pawn! This will to dissimulation and dissemblance all comes from said governments serving their friend the plutocrats rather than their voters, the public.

***

THE LEGEND OF BIN LADEN WILL LIVE ON:

The stories about bin Laden’s death keep on changing considerably. In the latest version:

…” the raid, though chaotic and bloody, was extremely one-sided, with a force of more than 20 Navy Seal members quickly dispatching the handful of men protecting Bin Laden. Administration officials said that the only shots fired by those in the compound came at the beginning of the operation… After the Seal members shot and killed Mr. Kuwaiti and a woman in the guesthouse, the Americans were never fired upon again.”

An unarmed 53 year old man, armed only with his bare hands, cannot be subdued by dozens of super trained American commandos.  The indomitable bin Laden, we are told, faced with immense numbers of armed, armored professional killers, not only does not surrender, but resist splendidly the elite American supermen. A crowd of the best American warriors are like nothing, faced by an invalid in pajamas. Just here, we now have more than enough for a formidable legend: see what a true jihadist is! Bin Laden may have been gravely sick for more than ten years, Americans are still like insects, relative to him. They cannot subdue him. In that crucial moment, the impotency of the USA reaches the visage of god, and god spit them back.  So the Seals shot bin laden lethally. But so great is his spirit, so great is their fear of incompetent little men, they have to shot him lethally multiple times. 

We are also told that bin Laden was shot at least twice: in the head, and in the chest. Wait a minute: if he had been shot in the head, why to shoot him in the chest? Thus it has got to be the other way around. And if he had been shot in the chest, why to shoot him in the head? Because one wanted to make sure he was really dead? So that he could not hold any interesting conversation? Then Obama tells us that bin Laden has been too disfigured  to be shown. Really? Or is it because it looks like a mob execution? Bad karma that would be, and karma sees through all.

Then bin Laden was thrown to the fishes. When I advocate civilization, I do not mean that the fishes have it.

Then there were the grotesque rejoicing in the USA, reminiscent of the grotesque rejoicing on September 11, 2001. The Main Stream Media used marching bands, etc… But no element of media went  beyond any analysis about anything preceding September 11, 2001. The conspiracy of starting history on September 11, 2011 has worked splendidly: all Americans seem really to believe it all started with the big boom booms that September day. That reminds me of the German (fascist) conspiracy of starting history in 1919, with the Versailles Treaty (as if nothing had happened before, and in particular, grave injustices had not been committed by the Germans against many peoples of Eastern Europe, such as disappearing entire nations) .

***

FURTHER DISSEMBLING, FURTHER PLOTTING:

Obama insisted for half an hour on CBS that they were no more than “50%”, or 55% sure that Bin Laden was there. It looks highly implausible that the USA would have risked a shoot-out, in the middle of a sovereign country, with the armed forces of that country, while killing the bodyguards of some rich plutocrat.

The very fact that Obama insisted, again and again on the notion that the CIA figured it out, all by itself, without any help from anybody else, is conducive to suspect that the opposite is true. So Bin Laden was sold, and probably by some accomplice(s) in the Pakistani governmental structure, and that Trojan Horse has to be protected.

It is clear that elements of the ISI sold Bin Laden. Actually major arrests of Al Qaeda leaders had been made in the same city 3 months earlier (of some Bali bombers). And they said enough to deduce bin Laden was in that house. So Obama was clumsily trying to protect his accomplices. He should work on his lying.

As I mentioned other members of Al Qaeda may even have had interest to dispatch Bin Laden. The democratic revolutions in the Arabo-Muslim world made Bin Laden irrelevant, He could not bring any funds anymore. Long gone the times when he would jet into London, in his private jet, as he did as recently as 1998. Best to make him a martyr, and re-orient Al Qaeda a bit.

Why do I mention this? Am I not an enemy of the fascist Pakistani system. Sure. But fascism is fought by exposing it, not by plotting within. The forces of light triumph by exposing the darkness, not by pulling the curtains.

***

Conclusion: AMERICANISM IS AN INFANTILISM:

When the dust settles, one fact stands firm: the USA thinks the Geneva Conventions, the laws of war, are for the fishes. They don’t hold for Apaches, and, presumably, not for the rest of us either.

According to a senator who saw the pictures of Bin Laden after he was shot, an explosive bullet entered in his ear, and came out, by Osama’s left eye, spilling brains over his face. In other words, after having been shot a first time, bin Laden would have been shot from the back, in the head. Yes, when an army does that, it commits a war crime. And when the commander-in-chief calls it justice done, he also commits a war crime. (There are very precise laws on this. Obama said he would visit Europe after his presidency. It’s not so clear now: Bush had to cancell a visit to Geneva recently, lest he be arrested… For his apparent crimes against mankind.) 

Erich Maria Remarque observed that: “Tolerance is the daughter of doubt.” By the same token, “Intolerance is the daughter of certainty.” True justice is not certain to start with. It explores, and observes. It questions. And nowadays it needs to go beyond culprit individuals, to culprit thoughts. Bin Laden did not start the war in Afghanistan. The USA did. And that much is certain.

What do children want? Everything. After all, they are trying to find where the bounds are. But infantilizing an entire population while giving it thermonuclear weapons cannot have a good outcome. That way the USA and Pakistan are similar.

Trying to justify not showing the gory pictures of a dead Bin Laden, which would have made clear to forensic experts that he had been assassinated, Obama said several times:”We do not spike the football, that is not who we are”. So how come you have that infantile picture in your mind? And did you not compare Bin Laden to a football, just now? How much more childish can one be?

Given a populace of lemons, plutocracy makes lemonade. The oligarchs were ready for a new approach to the Central Asian oil procurement plan. Since Pakistan was a problem, they suggested hopefully that their “allies” to the north of Afghanistan would come in handy to help. In other words, the Central Asian (oil & gas) issue, which, as I said, is the fundamental one, is already acquiring a new cover-up! The American army has to occupy Central Asia to save Afghanistan. Pakistan made us do it!

Can a civilization thrive on lies, fables, and children stories? Sometimes yes: the Nazis and their supporters got quite a bit of mileage, from claiming they were protecting the Jews, as they were removing them (and stealing all their property).

All humongously oppressive regimes rest on enormous lies, and those can last centuries. The most enormous example is Jesus Christ himself. Jesus Christ is viewed as the definition of love. That was a lie: Jesus ordered to burn those who did not believe in him. That was, clearly, not very loving. But that lie was extremely convenient to various “Christian” fascist regimes, for 15 centuries, as the rebellious ones were not condemned just to have their heads examined, but were actually thrown in the fire.  

To describe infantilism, one has to define what a lie is.

A lie is a misrepresentation of reality which could have been avoided, had the agent which proffered it taken full care in deploying full, imaginable logic, and checking thoroughly the subassemblies it is made of.

This apparently convoluted definition covers deliberate ignorance and other mental contraptions erected to manipulate one’s subconscious into a state of dissemblance. The archetype of the modern lie is that the Germans did not “know” about the Holocaust (or the Communists did not “know” about Stalin’s terror, horror, enslavement and mass murdering). Sure they did not “know” about it, in the sense that it was not front page news. But, had they been a bit observant and logical, they would have deduced that they were lied to.

The lamentable shows of exuberance throughout the media of the USA to celebrate bin Laden’s execution, were a form of lie. They assumed that ultimate happiness has been reached, because the military of the USA terminated, with the help of the CIA, the essential problem which affected the USA. In truth, it was nothing of the sort. Bin Laden was just one of the CIA’s most important past operatives. Bin Laden did not start the war, he was just a recruited agent.

This is immature. In the full sense of the term: are Americans little children?  The CIA organized a little show for them, and they cheer. The Bin Laden rocket climbs up the sky, its great fireworks extinguish the USSR in the name of Reagan, before falling down to the ground, and being extinguished, by the CIA. Among thunderous applause. Apparently the president can get away with enormous hallucinations such as “we did not start this fight”, and nobody serious and respected rises, and call the hallucination for what it is.

No wonder that the Pakistani intelligence tried to preserve in bin Laden a living witness of what had really been going on, and who gave which orders, who got which ideas, and who had been manipulating whom. No wonder too, that this indispensable witness was fed to the fishes by the masters. As in old Mafia movies.

Oops: I guess i have fallen back already in my anti-American mode. All good, rational Americans learn as early as 2 years old, that there are good and bad people, and “no conspiracy theories”. A “conspiracy theory” is any explanation in which plutocracy does not come on top, ethically speaking.

Rachelle Maddow said that Bin Laden’s assassination  was a “cathartic moment for all“.  Maddow is as left as American left go. As far as I am concerned her lack of critical sense suggests that she should be called “meadow”, like something to be trampled on and munched by cows. The Greek word. kathartikos  means “fit for cleansing, purgative”. Far from being cleansing, Bin Laden’s elimination has removed an easy path to the truth.

Thus, bin Laden was absolute evil, now it has been made into fish food, justice is done, and all conspiracy theories about the forces of good are also dead. The only conspiracies are those of the forces of evil. American Main Stream Media actually run shows “advising” parents about what to say about Bin Laden. The new sense of justice is introduced to toddlers: kill your enemy, that’s justice done.

There have been many systems of thought which have become oppressive, or even murderously insane. Marxism-Leninism, Maoism, Nazism are examples. They all have this in common to be forms of political fascism.

Not that all fascism is bad all the time, even from a fascist political system. The best example of that was the invasion of fascist, mass murdering Cambodia by the Vietnamese army. Vietnam, a communist regime inspired by hard core French communism, battle hardened against the French and American military, intervened for humanitarian reasons. And it was true, and it was well done. Vietnam stopped the holocaust in Cambodia.

It is often said that democracies do not fight democracies. But Rome, a plutocratizing republic, attacked several democracies around 146 BCE. The massive wars around 146 BCE allowed Roman plutocracy to seize the world, starting with the Roman republic itself. No wonder that Roman plutocracy had interest to get them started. So maybe some of the American plutocrats believe that a world war would be the best thing which could happen to their class. In that sense, helping Pakistan with nuclear weapons makes a lot of sense.

Moreover, democracies can become extremely exploitative. Peoples can attack, and exploit peoples. An example is the slave system which fed the American colonies. Or the way Belgium, a democracy, let its head, the plutocratic king, ravage the Congo.

People, and their democratic government , can even exterminate other peoples. The best example is, of course, the USA itself, which exterminated (most of) the American natives. Don’t mention this too loud, if you want friends in the USA: evoking this is in the category which leads your friends to think your head should be examined.

So what is Americanism? A system where reality, sometimes uncomfortable, is denied through infantilism. The key there is high school, and college. The philosophy, and even the culture imposed on American youth is that of sports, and scoring over the rival team. As the banners screamed it: Obama 1, Osama, 0.

In infantilism, higher ethics is not the furthermost guidance, sports and Jesus’ call to burn miscreants, are good enough.

Some of my interlocutors have suggested that I was naive and that the democracy movements have been also instrumentalized in Libya by the Western oppressors. Just as I have long argued that Islam was instrumentalized. But I completely disagree: literal Islam is mentally primitive, democracy is not just advanced, but inimical to literal Islam (as it is inimical to literal Christianism).

The French instrumentalized Islam a bit, to help with African volunteers to fight German fascists in WWI and WWII. It was a complicated relationship: some Islamists were arrested and exiled, before being reinstated, celebrated, and honored by the republic.

However, overall, the French and British were careful with Islam. They kept at a distance. When the French nationalized religious establishments in 1905, Islam was ignored (big mistake).

On the other hand, the USA had no such qualms. Remember: from the American point of view, Middle easterners had oil, and were all Apaches. Instrumentalizing Islamism  was the way to manipulate those who had oil, while pushing out the French and British, by financing, helping and organizing jihadists… Against the French, and the British, or their proxies. The method of American intelligence to use Muslim Fundamentalism against the progress of native socializing republics  or democracies was used in Egypt, against the French, and most famously against PM Mossadegh in 1953, in Iran. And, actually, all over the place.

The rising of a giant American Mujahedeen army in Afghanistan was a particularly striking symbol of that. Financing Pakistani nukes, now built at an amazing pace, another. Don’t forget that American planners think they are only dealing with Apaches: they have no fear.

In Egypt, the old (secret) alliance between the plutocratic military and the Muslim Brotherhood, pushed (secretly) by Western plutocrats, is alive and well. It’s partly a question of American (Egypt, Saudis) spheres of influence: the Egyptian army has been trained, educated, domesticated by the Americans. . In Libya, the Europeans are trying to regain a foothold in their own backyard, and they push democracy, not Islam.

By throwing the idea of justice to the trash, the American government is trying to throw to the trash a piece of Greco-Roman civilization which survived even the Dark Ages. Last time a big, modern country full of arrogance and exceptionalism threw justice and civilization to the trash, it was called Nazi Germany.

What to do then? Well, tell the truth. And tell it to everybody. That is how justice starts.

***

Patrice Ayme

Comic Relief?

 

AGAINST MEDIOCRITY, THE PHILOSOPHERS THEMSELVES CONTEND IN VAIN:

We hear everywhere that Barack Obama is a very smart man, an intellectual, and that makes him aloof, and misunderstood by the "folks".

And then there is what we hear, from the horse’s, or shall we say, the ass’ mouth (the ass being, appropriately enough, the symbol of the "democratic" party in the USA). Obama gave a long interview on "60 minutes" [November 7, 2010]. Here is a sizable extract, for people to appreciate the astounding mental meandering of Obama’s flabbergasting rambling:

"60 minutes" Interviewer: People have made the argument you lost control of the narrative. You’ve let other people define you. That you haven’t sold your successes well enough.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: I think that’s a fair argument. I think that over the course of two years — and I mentioned this during the press conference — we were so busy and so focused on getting a bunch of stuff done that we stopped paying attention to the fact that we yeah, leadership isn’t just legislation. That it’s a matter of persuading people. And giving them confidence and bringing them together. And setting a tone. And making an argument that people can understand. And I think that we haven’t always been successful at that. And I take personal responsibility for that. And it’s something that I’ve got to examine carefully as I go forward.
You know, now I will say that when it comes to some of my supporters, some of my Democratic supporters who express some frustration, part of it, I think, is the belief that if I just communicated things better, that I’d be able to persuade that half of the country that voted for John McCain that we were right and they were wrong.
And, you know, one of the things that I think is important for people to remember is that, you know, this country doesn’t just agree with The New York Times editorial page. And, you know, I can make some really good arguments defending the Democratic position, and there are gonna be some people who just don’t agree with me. And that’s okay. And then we’ve got to figure out a way to compromise. But even as we acknowledge that, this is a big country. And that, you know, there are conservatives who are good people, who feel very strongly about their ideas. That I’m never gonna persuade on some issues.
I think what’s still fair to say is that I can do better than I’ve done in painting a picture for people about where we need to go. That pulls people together as opposed to drives them apart. And that’s one of my central tasks over the next couple of years."

What did the great man say? He said he did not make an argument that people understand. That, indeed is hard, to make an argument that people can understand, when there is no argument at all.

Asked why he did not nationalize the banks, as Scandinavian countries did in the 1990s, Obama laughed, and gave Summers’ talking point: Sweden had only 4 or 5 banks. So Obama called on a basic racist argument: let’s make fun of the foreigners. A xenophobic slur replaced a serious financial and economic debate.

Conclusion: 5 trillion dollars, for the banks, and counting. and an economy thrown to the plutocratic wolves, among which the Wall Street types (unjustifiably rescued with people’s money in 2008 and 2009) gave themselves about 300 billion dollars in bonuses, in two years, from, ultimately, people’s money.

The truth: Sweden had 147 banks, and the rest of Scandinavia, much more. Sweden nationalized only two large banks (and made hefty profits selling them much later). Great Britain nationalized much more giant financial institutions in the last 3 years. The USA nationalized around 2,000 banks during the Saving and Loans crisis two decades ago, and that inspired the Scandinavians to follow suit, when their own bust, also caused by a housing crisis, happened a bit later.

The truth: the economy of the USA is stuck, because all the money is going to 19 giant banks and their hyper wealthy co-conspirators (the other 8,000 banks are too small to profit from the largesse of the Fed). The support for these financial vultures is on-going, and about 5 trillion dollars so far, as I said (more than a third of GDP, about 7 times TARP, which is used as a lying decoy). Obama paid for nationalizations, many times over, and keeps on paying. Or, more exactly, the American people does. And, in a sense, the entire planet (as the US payments to giant private American banks create global financial imbalances more responsible countries have to work hard to counteract).

What did the great intellectual say? He said that his supporters are "frustrated" (Obama’s preferred emotion) because Obama did not "persuade that half of the country that voted for John McCain that we were right and they were wrong".

Why would Obama’s supporters want Obama to persuade those who did not vote for him "that we were right and they were wrong"? Why would the supporters want that? Does Obama think his supporters are crazy? Obama thinks his supporters voted for him because they hoped that, once elected, he would persuade those who did not vote for him that they were wrong??

What does Obama think a leader is supposed to do once elected? Persuade those who did not vote for him that they should have voted for him? Does not Obama know that the election actually happened, and is over with?

The truth: People who voted for Obama hoped that Obama would rescind many of the policies of Bush.

In truth, Obama’s only serious deviation from Bush was about Afghanistan, where Obama more than tripled the war, while extending it clumsily to Pakistan. Even Bush was not that dumb. On the rest, be it the giant bank holding companies, or Wall Street, or Iraq, Obama followed Bush’s policies.

The truth: Obama is not the only one culprit: in four years of controlling Congress, the democratic asses have proven unwilling to augment the extravagantly low taxes of the top financial manipulators (those low taxes for plutocrats are around 10% on their highest rate, using technicalities such as "carry interest" and converting all their incomes into long term capital gains). This is not just unfair, their activities, in conspiracy with the banks, monopolize the money creation process, starving the rest of the economy.

The truth: Nancy Pelosi is a socialite, not a socialist. Among other things, she owns a ski resort in California, and has known money, politics and privilege all her life (she was a wealth riser for politics before running for office herself). The top democrats never wanted to change the system. Whereas the basic Tea Party and Obama supporters do; they have nothing to lose. But of course, both the Tea party (Koch brothers) and Obama had major plutocratic supporters. And the agenda of the later is generally at odds with the base.

The great man is completely obnubilated by compromising with "conservatives who are good people, who feel very strongly about their ideas. That I’m never gonna persuade on some issues…there are gonna be some people who just don’t agree with me. And that’s okay. And then we’ve got to figure out a way to compromise."

And there is the air, and that’s OK, and I will compromise, and breathe water, and that’s okay too.

You want more platitudes? The great man never runs out of them: "But even as we acknowledge that, this is a big country. And that, you know, there are conservatives…"

I can say even worse; and there is the universe, it’s a big country, and we will compromise, the folks will be frustrated, but you know, there are conservatives.

Obama was elected by his supporters, obviously, so that Obama could only think about the "conservatives". Or, at least, that is what Obama thinks. Thinking may be too strong a word. I will have to take heed from the great man, and become more conservative in the way I express myself, looking forward.

The truth? What is needed is someone who knows what ideals to fight for, and loves combat. The greatest beliefs, and the right ones, and the greatest fights.

Health care could have been done in 5 minutes: just sign an executive order expanding and opening Medicare. That would have killed four birds with one stone (financing Medicare, separating health insurance from employment, converging towards making healthcare universal and cheaper, weakening the healthcare plutocracy).

From the point of view of a seducer of the conservatives, a drawback, naturally, would have been the ire of the plutocracy, as it would have seen some of its income vanish.

The financial reform could have been done in five minutes too: just sign an executive order to separate BANKS FROM SPECULATION. That is called an IDEA. President Roosevelt had it in 1933.

Summers demolished that idea during his great career as the ultimate plutocratic agent, under presidential puppets and actors, starting with his boss Ronald Reagan (oh yes, because Summers, as Reagan’s demonic adviser, also collapsed the Saving and Loans, through his usual trick of deregulating. Interest? It served Summers’ master, Rubin, head of Goldman Sachs, creator of Citigroup, treasurer of Clinton, one of Obama’s puppet masters).

Generations of religiosity worshipping plutocracy, decerebration and castration have resulted in producing a timid "leader", obsessed by not appearing to be an "angry black man". A leader of the sheep, anxious to extend kindly his little hoof to the really dark plutocratic wolves, in the hope that accommodating them is the essence of wisdom.

Obama has been surrounded with sycophants who thrived at his expense. Obama really believes Summers "in all fairness, did a heckuva job", and that his health care bill (to be reversed in a few weeks) is "historical" (although it cut Medicare).

In the same "60 minutes" interview, Obama proudly informed everybody, that the little austerity the Tea Party wants is nothing. Obama intends to out Tea Party the Tea Party, by being more austere, and "cutting entitlements".

So Obama intends to be more conservative than the craziest conservatives themselves. Maybe he could get a job at Goldman Sachs (Goldman, although not a bank, was rescued as if it were a bank, because Goldman has a lot of friends; cut Medicare, by 550 billion over ten years, but don’t cut the Goldman bonuses, which, over ten years, are, unbelievably, of the same magnitude… Medicare, Obama can do less of it, Goldman, never enough).

So what does the great leader do? He goes to Los Angeles to play to see Jay Leno, a xenophobic humorist, but he has nothing to show, except that he is a "black" man with an enormous smile. Then Obama flies back in Air Force One, watching five hours of basket ball… Straight. With the CIA Afghanistan specialist watching too. Obama hid the CIA guy inside the plane so that the generals at the Pentagon would not know he wished to form his own opinion about the war. But, in the end, the generals needed not to worry: to a boy, basketball is more interesting.

Does Obama know who is the boss?

The entire scene reminds me of Louis XVI of France, a simple man fascinated by locks. A simple man who meant well, and bankrupted France. A simple man who had the courage to make great economists such as Turgot and Necker finance ministers. The philosophers applauded.

Once they were appraised of the unfolding economic catastrophe, both Turgot and Necker opposed the American war, because it was ruinous. But Louis XVI was also a simple man who did not have the intellectual courage, or comprehension, to oppose the plutocracy, or to show the real cost of the American war (which was kept secret, hidden in secret books, for ten years, because France would have been bankrupted the next day, had the real cost been revealed). So Louis XVI preferred to sack Turgot, Necker, and the truth, rather than reform, and oppose the conservatives!

Louis XVI kept on compromising with the conservatives, and not engaging in the needed reforms to repair the catastrophic deficit (by rising taxes on said conservatives and plutocrats). In the end, pleasing the conservatives led the simple man to high treason of the new constitutional monarchy he himself headed. The simple man climbed the scaffold very courageously, though. He meant well. He was just in well above his head. It’s all about the head.

Against mediocrity, the philosophers themselves clamor in vain.

Patrice Ayme

Derivatives’ Temporal Perversity

 

SECRET BASIC PLOT OF DERIVATIVES EXPOSED

Abstract: A ridiculously simple trick allows the financial plutocracy to make ever more money, hence gather ever more power.

***

CRIMINALITY + RESPECTABILITY = PLUTOCRACY:

Is the present public-private financial system one of the largest criminal enterprise ever? It depends how one defines "crime".

Was the Feudal system a crime? Yes; it arose from the Roman republic, and clearly violated it. How? By putting most of the riches, and therefore, powers, in just a few hands. In the USA, in 2009, 25 hedge fund managers made more than a billion dollars of personal profits, each. Less well known is that, in the final analysis, they use public money to do so. The public would not be too happy if it understood that. The following is a contribution towards understanding the sticky plutocratic web the public finds itself ensnared with.

Of course, by the time the Feudal system violated civilization, the res-publica was a distant memory. The plutocracy had captured everything, even minds, and left them only sports to talk about, and a few little things below their nose. To subjugate people, one needs to overwhelm their mental defenses first, and put their minds inside very small boxes.

The modus operandi of the public-private financial system is still not understood. even the Nobel Prize level economist take a wide berth, lest they lose their credibility and profitable aura of respect. This helps to explain why Barack Obama did not do much against it. Neither Obama’s advisers, nor his critics (Stiglitz, Krugman, Johnson) have gone to the core of the problems posed by the private-public financial system, and deconstructed its logic. At the core of private-public finance is a bargain a la Faust, which is now violated by the plutocratic side. But here I will mostly talk about something more technical.

***

HIDING DERIVATIVES BEHIND HARD, IRRELEVANT MATHEMATICS:

In this essay, we dismantle the fundamental reason why derivatives ought to be (mostly) outlawed, and not just vaguely tweaked (as Obama’s vaunted "financial reform" has it). It is not because slavery is technically possible, that it should be tolerated.

Obama gave a talk to the hyper rich at the home of Richard Richman. The worthy in attendance had paid $30,000, yes more than half the yearly average family income in the USA, to conspire together and hear from their public servant, the president of the USA that:

"Democrats, just congenitally, tend to get — to see the glass as half empty. (Laughter.) … If you get the financial reform bill passed — then, well, I don’t know about this particular derivatives rule, I’m not sure that I’m satisfied with that."

Obama cannot understand what derivatives are about. Nor do most people. Derivatives constitute a violation of the fundamental Faustian bargain of the state with banks. The reason why they cannot be understood is that derivatives have been designed to maximize wealth for the financial plutocrats, and this depends upon hiding their true nature.

When one searches for an explanation about what derivatives are, one typically hits haughty Partial Differential Equations (PDEs), describing some "options" trading. In other words, one is confronted to a level of complexity common people, including common lawyers such as the USA president, have not studied. Actually complexity of option trading is a bit reminiscent  of the level of complexity of Quantum Mechanics, which uses PDEs to compute probability waves.

99% of the population does not have a clue what a PDE is (a PDE is a way to relate rates of changes in various directions, or dimensions, it’s not witchcraft, but not far from it, because there is no general theory). The trick of hiding greed behind a PDE was so neat that the obsequious servants of plutocracy gave a Nobel Prize for it.

In truth, one can understand the basic mechanism for feeding greed at will through derivatives without much more than high school mathematics. (I already explained that in the past, but in a more cursory fashion.) So we will now review some high school mathematics to show that DERIVATIVE TRADING CAN CREATE MONEY FOR THOSE WHO PRACTICE IT WITHOUT ANY ADDED VALUE WHATSOEVER FOR THE PUBLIC, WHILE INDULGING IN THE CLEAR CRIME OF SUCKING MONEY OUT OF THE REST OF SOCIETY.

***

WHAT IS A DERIVATIVE?

Financial derivatives are related to what is commonly called a derivative in analysis. Before understanding derivatives, one has to understand the function they come from. Derivatives, in turn, are themselves functions.

What is a function? Well, in mathematics something that allows to compute numbers, using numbers. At least that is the way Descartes thought of it, and he used algebra to describe said functions, starting "Algebraic Geometry".

Another way to look at the idea of function is to draw a curve "f" on page, with an x axis horizontal, a y axis vertical, and for each vertical line only one intersection (x, "f(x)") with f, where "f(x) is the height of the intersection point thus obtained. The simples f is a line, with f(x) = ax + b. More generally polynomial functions of degree n were contemplated: f(x) = a + bx + cxx + c xxx +… u (x^n). I don’t know how to write x^y with this computer, and many mathematicians have opted for the subterfuge: x^y. So x^n is nx’s multiplied together.

In any case the derivative of a function f, df, is the curve obtained from f by looking at its slope, or rate of change, at every single point, creating a new correspondence between numbers and numbers. So if f is constant, in other words flat, the slope is zero, so df is zero. We have excluded above functions with infinite slopes. The slope of a line is constant, and for ax, it’s a. The slope of a(x^n) is: [an(x ^(n-1))].

Thus, in some sense the derivative of a polynomial f of degree n, being a polynomial of degree (n-1) is smaller than f (more exactly |f(x)|> |df(x)|, for x large enough). Also df is of lower degree than f, thus simpler. A lot of mathematics consists into studying the (hopefully) simpler df instead of f. This carries on in higher dimensions, with the study of differential forms and tangent bundles instead of studying directly the objects they came from.

A lot of the equations of physics are about rates of change. For example, the Maxwell equations of the electromagnetic field f reduce to df = 0 and *df = j. Not bad, since in their initial version, those equations covered an entire page, or so. (Here the differentiation operator d is a version of differentiation adapted to higher dimensions, namely the 4 dimensions of space-time, and * is another operator).

***

BASIC NON TRIVIAL DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS: EXPONENTIAL, AND TRIGONOMETRIC FUNCTIONS:

Something natural to consider is infinite polynomial. An example is e(x) = 1 + x + x^2/2! +… + x^n/n! +…. This function, e, is called the exponential. As x^n grows in its general term, it gets divided fiercely by factorial n, n! = 1.2.3.4… (n-1) (n). Exponential is equal to its own derivative: de = e. some mathematicians have called it the most important function in mathematics.

e is related to the trigonometric functions, cosine and sine.

The sine and cosine functions graphed on the Cartesian plane.

Both the sine and cosine functions satisfy the differential equation

ddy = y”= -y

That is to say, each is the additive inverse of its own second derivative. So this is true if y = cos(x), say. Now suppose y is different; y(x) = cos (ax). Then dy (x) = -asin(ax), and y”(x) = -a^2 cos(x). Thus the differential equation has changed. It’s now: y” = – a^2 y!

This is all high school mathematics, and does not fly very high. However this is the sort of trivialities that the extremely profitable financial "industry" of derivatives rests on. I am not sorry to make fun of them by exposing what they have been really up to, it’s purely intentional.

***

THE NATURE OF THE TRICK WITH DERIVATIVES & HIGH FREQUENCY TRADING:

Functions found in nature, at the classical scale, tend to have derivatives commensurate with the functions they come from (a non rigorous, but crucial subtlety). For example, sea waves can have steep faces, and can even invert in a tube (something excluded in the simplest functions in calculus, as we held above).

However, the waves’ slopes are, in general pretty tame (not when the waves break, once again, because then they become fierce, very powerful). The third derivatives of waves are actually always very tame: if sea waves are coming 50 meters apart (wavelength 50 meters), the third derivative slowly goes from slight positive to slight negative, every ten seconds, or so, etc…

Now a financial market is also animated by waves. Waves of selling and buying. In a so called "trading" (by opposition to "trending") market, traders can hope to make money by buying and selling at opportune times. In the past such wave were constrained because people were buying and selling, and they need to eat, sleep, and rest. According to real time, or, one should say, animal time. Not so for computers; they go according to clock time, ever faster. (And we have no Quantum computers yet, where time may disappear all together.)

Sea waves of a given height cannot go faster than they do: their heights and speeds are strictly connected by what mathematicians call a bijection: to a particular height, a particular speed, and conversely.

If traders were buying and selling sea waves, there is an upper limit to how much money they could make in a given unit of time.

But modern traders are not just Masters of the Universe, they are Masters of Time. They have created a fake, derived universe, complete with fake, created time.

Traders, using electronics can trade more and more, and thus increase clock time as the computer makers say, and for the good reason that the traders use computers to do so. Hence they can augment the frequency of the waves they trade: up and down, ever faster. In other words instead of looking at cosine(t), where t is universal time, greedy traders look at cosine(gt), where g can be made arbitrarily large, and stands for greed. As g augments, frequencies go ever higher.

This pernicious activity has even a name: HIGH FREQUENCY TRADING. (It has other nefarious effects, because, done carefully, it allows big banks to control the direction of trading, but that is another story!)

Augmenting the frequency of the trading also augments the wave heights of the derivative (now -[g sine(gt))] and the second derivative, now [-g^2cos(t)!)]. So not only can electronic traders trade more and more, and make more and more profits, but they fabricate thus ever greater leverage for themselves!

What is going there? Very simple; instead of having a market normalized by reality, the reality of cosine(t)), with t as real biological time, which has ruled markets since ever, the electronic traders can now trade an arbitrarily large market, arbitrarily large market, by trading the derivatives. (Augmenting the frequency allows to augment the total volume of finance involved, which is now of the order of 20 times world GDP!)

This, of course, sucks money out of reality, and invest it in something which does not exist, except as a figment of imagination.

Thus unemployment is not just a question of having sent the jobs far away overseas, but also of having invested capital in the alternative, derivative universe.

Obama accuse the "professional left" -"you know who you are!", to get in the arcane details of derivative trading. But he is the one who indulge in it, why not understanding the math.

Instead there should be derivative trading only when proven safe and effective. Besides arbitrarily high "High Frequency" trading ought to be unlawful (as it puts ever more arbitrarily high amounts of money in ever fewer hands.)

In general, Obama needed a vision in finance, not tinkering. The vision existed before; F.D. Roosevelt OUTLAWED FINANCIAL SPECULATION BY BANKS. It’s only normal; banks have been given the astounding, very profitable privilege of creating most of the money. With the idea (that’s the Faustian bargain) that they, the banks, in turn, would finance profitable projects in house-management ("eco-nomy").So they were richly paid to do that. Instead they ran away with the money to a derivative universe.

With the derivatives and the like, banks divert their astounding privilege towards "plutonomy" (for wealth management) as the chief economist at City put it.

To ask to go back to FDR’s clear principle is not to ask much. FDR was from a plutocratic family, he was no foaming at the mouth Marxist. Actually Sarkozy, the conservative, right wing president of France echoed president Roosevelt by calling for the separation of banks and financial speculation.

In any case, we have seen that the fundamental mechanism at work with derivatives is a trick to take the money of the people, and leverage it ever more, for ever few.

But Obama, all engorged with himself, instead of being humble, celebrates "THE" " financial reform bill". He knows the title, and seems really impressed by it. It sounds magical: "historical health care reform": done! "Historical financial reform!": done!

But a big title does not make a big idea. To re-form finance, for real, one would need to achieve, at least the cognitive level reached in 1933 by FDR. Instead Obama chose as adviser Summers who believes that endless summers came to plutocracy when it created ever more money for itself, thanks to computers, and the TIME RENORMALIZATION TRICK I exposed above… with seed money provided by the central bank, that is the public. "I don’t make public policy" as Geithner, fifth in line for the throne, intone categorically. No need indeed: policy was made long ago, and nobody in the public noticed.

Creating ever more money for plutocracy is nothing new, and civilization’s greatest pitfall, ever since civilization appeared, and got stalked by the exponential function.

Plutocracy does not rule with the mind of the people, which is many, and thus clever, but with the mind of Pluto, which is lonely, and thus vengeful, vicious and dumb. Just one mind does not a civilization make.

Talking to elite plutocrats paying $30,000 per person to hear the president of the USA, close and personal, will not make any of that easier to understand for a president who runs on money like a jumbo jet runs on fuel. It just makes for the world’s most expensive brothel.

***

Patrice Ayme

***

Technical note; The preceding will enrage many a derivative trader. So they will say that I understand derivatives not, and the proof is that there are many other types. Well, not really, deep down inside. But when the plutocrat is forced to think deep inside plutocracy, all he meets is his master, Pluto. Hence his rage. (And when did you see a female hedge creature?)

I also suggested in the past to put a speed limit (for example with a tax ; Oxfam now concurs) and to differentiate between commercial operators (such as airlines buying futures contract on jet fuel) and speculators (who would get fewer privileges).

***

Technical note on how derivatives and, in particular, futures, move underlying market: Krugman could not find a mechanism for that connection, and thus long argued it did not exist. But the preceding can be modified to make it so.

Suppose S is the total amount of money available in a field, say O (like oil). S will tend to go to the “overlying” derivatives market, because there is more leverage there. So instead of investing with, say S, with the underlying commodity O, if S is invested in derivatives, it will be like investing with 10S. On a market, that of the derivative, which is enormously more variable (for the temporal renormalization reason explained above), capable of (say) ten times the swings. Result: investing with the derivatives is just as if one were investing with 100 times the capital S one started with.

Now, of course, there is no more money to support the underlying commodity itself (because all speculators are invested in derivatives, since it is as they were 100 times richer). Hence small fluctuations in selling or buying of the underlying commodity will have a huge effects on O. And of course the buying, or selling, will be dominated by the psychological effect of what the derivatives, esp. the futures are doing. To do the detailed math of all this is just, well, details…

***

Obama Commemorates 9/11 His Way.

 

PAX AMERICANA TRICK: USA FIGHTS AND SUPPORTS SALAFISM.

“Omission is the most powerful form of lie” – George Orwell. We analyze why Obama celebrated 9/11, by selling lots of advanced weapons to those originating the system of thought that organized it.

***

Abstract: The Qur’an is an incredibly violent book, so why do American presidents insist that it is peaceful? Those who only want to us to see goodness everywhere, so we better get fleeced, call islamophobic those who try to quote from the Qur’an. Then they evoke the Hebrew bible, as if critics of the Qur’an were in love with that other bloody book, and could not burn it in peace. And as if Hebrew bible law had been seriously imposed anywhere, since the Romans cracked down on the Jewish fanatics, 19 centuries ago.

I extract a few verses from the first few pages of the Qur’an (which are among its most peaceful). People can twist logic anyway they want, but if they want to look half cogent, they should master their own islamophobia, and go read the unexpurgated Qur’an (Islamist agents have been circulating amputated, censored, pacified Qur’ans through creative editing, or then brandish always the same two or three peaceful quotes, omitting hundreds of the lethal threats and grotesque insults).

Some allege that the Qur’an’s context justifies its violence, as if violence ever came without context.

In any case, there is so much violence in the Qur’an, that the violence creates its own context, much as a great fire creates its own firestorm. A weasel lie, found a lot in the New York Times, nowadays, is to pretend that the Qur’an’s murderous violence is directed at polytheists. As if burning Indians was okay. But as soon as the second chapter of the Qur’an, all sorts of other people are insulted and threatened with "fire".

In the Qur’an, Jews are explicitly brandished at heading towards incineration, chapter after chapter, starting with the "Cow" (see below). Then people wonder about a violence situation in Palestine… Inasmuch as Jewish fanatics are insufferable, the Qur’an is clearly also part of the problem.

So how come American presidents insist that "Islam is peace"? Of course, Bush said: "Islam is peace", and then went on to kill at least 100,000 perfectly innocent Muslims, just as the wolf says: "sheep is peace", and then goes down to wolf them down. It reminds me of the Nazis, who were removing the Jews from Germany "for their safety", they said… And most Germans were happy to believe that lie. Of the biggest lies, fascism is made, especially when they are too big for people to see, as Hitler himself wrote down.

Simply by interfering with Iraq, the USA got several million Iraqis and Iranians killed (the USA was on both sides of the Iran-Iraq war, which killed more than a million. Blair, the ex-British PM admitted on TV that this war was the work of the West). But Americans in good standing are not supposed to talk about these things. Just as Germans in good standing knew how to avoid some special subjects (those subjects best handled, by the special commandos, the Zonderkommandos).

Less well known is the fact that the USA attacked Afghanistan more than 31 years ago, as Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s National Security Adviser admits below. Carter is right to build homes for humanity, as he does on TV, because he destroyed so many, with so much inhumanity, for real, that he better trains, just in case his God exists, and has him doing hard labor in hell for the next billion years.

A deal was made between the Salafists and the government of the USA, long ago, and is reminiscent of the way the USA and its plutocracy used the Nazis. It’s always the same strategy; make to the worst actors an offer that they cannot refuse, then denounce them superficially, while supporting them secretly. Or not so secretly; just as the 9/11 weapons deal Obama made with Saud, the countless deals between the USA and the Nazis were not secret, they were hiding in plain sight.

The trick consists into having a pliant Main Stream Media give a different perspective to the events. A bombing raid on Riyadh would cut off the crucial financial aid to Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. American intelligence agencies know this well, but it’s not what they want. Indeed, how could the military-industrial complex of the USA justify itself thereafter, in its present splendor?“During a war, news should be given out for instruction rather than information” – Joseph Goebbels.

In Afghanistan, the USA has been at war for more than 31 years, so instructions have been given to Main Stream Media about how to handle the information. Those can be given pleasantly, and discreetly during social functions of the power oligarchy.

***

***

 

NO RELIGION BUT OBAMA DEFINED ISLAM, & PERVERT YOU ARE OTHERWISE:

"As Americans, we will not and never will be at war with Islam," Obama said at a memorial service for the 184 people killed when a hijacked plane slammed into the Pentagon. We just give them eternal peace with our Hellfire robots controlled by some CIA operator located in Las Vegas, Nevada. Not content with prophesying the wars of America, Obama is also a religious scholar. Says he:

"It was not a religion that attacked us that September day. It was Al-Qaeda, a sorry band of men, which PERVERTS RELIGION."

A band which "perverts religion"? So now there is just ONE religion? Obama uses his bully pulpit to defend "religion"? The religion? A religion perverted by Al Qaeda? The attackers of 9/11 thought they were doing their religious duty (and this explicitly, see sura 3: verse 169-171 of the Qur’an below), and the adjective "sorry" is sorely misplaced to qualify that band. These were obviously very ferocious men.

But Obama knows better: the hijackers were "perverting "religion". I guess that Obama has got to be an expert on perversion too. Were the Aztecs perverting their religion, as they cut the hearts out from some Spaniards? That is the question.

The Celtic and Punic religions culminated with human sacrifices. The Roman republic did not just denounce the "pervert bands", while celebrating those religions incompatible with civilization.

The Romans  outlawed the offending religions. Oh, yes, Mr. President: because there is more than one religion; please learn. OK, I should not be too mean: Obama played basketball a lot. Recent studies have shown it often causes brain injury (all the shocks)… if you add that to a little "blow" (sic!)…

The American secular republic should do like the Roman republic, and outlaw religious perversion too. Define the perversion first, then outlaw it. That’s what the Roman republic did. Notice that no huge public buildings of Rome was attacked, causing a huge loss of life, by fanatics of the Celtic or Punic religions. However, the Romans saw the danger for civilization, and they outlawed all religions conducting human sacrifices. That is why Western Europe and North Africa stopped doing what the Aztecs were still doing, 15 centuries later.

***

CELEBRATING 9/11 WITH LOTS OF WEAPONS FOR THOSE WHO ORGANIZED IT:

To prove his point, that whatever he calls "Islam" has nothing to do with it, Obama then commemorated 9/11. His way. In Obama’s book, Saudi Arabia is as good as religion gets, apparently.

9/11 was organized by some prominent Saudis, and perpetrated by 15 Saudis (out of 19 hijackers). The bin Laden family is the most important family in Saudi Arabia, after the house of Saud. To this day, gigantic amounts of money are going from Saudi Arabia to Salafist groups and preachers, worldwide. Those astronomical quantities of oil money pay goons who threaten with their lives secular Muslims, and the religious Muslims who believe that the Qur’an is allegorical (as the clerics of the Islam de France have repeatedly testified).

That Saudi oil money also goes to the warriors fighting NATO all over Africa and the Middle East. Al Qaeda has lots of brand new, shiny equipment. So what does Obama do, on 9/11?

Well, Obama sells for more than 60 billion dollars of advanced, sophisticated military equipment to Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is a SALAFIST regime. The hijackers of 9/11 were Salafists.

***

WHO NEEDS SAVAGERY, WHEN YOU HAVE GOT SALAFISM?

What is Salafism? Well it is increasingly the religious fanaticism of 1.5 billion Muslims, as oil money goes towards imposing it ever more, worldwide. The Saudi power rests on out-religionizing its opposition, because the Qur’an requires the believer to obey the leader, as long as he is a Muslim. So the Saudis exert their salafism, and the more they do, the more they have to oppress, so the more Salafist they have to be. At the limit, if Salafism spreads worldwide, the House of Saud would lead the world. On the positive side, Obama cannot bow any deeper.

After the king extended his hand while Obama approached, Obama insists to bend from the waist. Seems he met his master:

I became president because I knew how to bend to the powers that be, and if this amazes you, you should see me bend to Wall Street.

*

The USA decided in 1954 that its motto was going to be changed into "In God We Trust". And that was of course unconstitutional. Still is.

Apparently we have the result of this propaganda above. Obama was born in 1961, and naturally bends to religious authority, especially from the religion, you know, the one that gets perverted. So we are reduced to seeing the leader in chief bowing deeply to those who were viewed as fanatics in 1300 CE. In Egypt. Well, in "Allah", I don’t trust, and to the Salafists, secular republicans don’t bend. A Roman Consul would certainly not have bent. The Romans knew the power of symbolism.

"Salaf" means "ancestor" in Arabic, and, in the tradition of Sunni Islam, refers to the companions of Muhammad, and the two generations after that. So only the first three generations of Islamists’ ideas are viewed as worthy… And only among those Islamists, those Sunni individuals Sunni Islam adulate, while avoiding carefully those it hates, such as Ali, a companion of the prophet, and his son in law, founder of the other "party" ("Shiah").

Wahhab made into the metaprinciple of his reform movement that every idea added to Islam after the third century of Islam (circa 950 CE) was false and should be eliminated. Anything else is jahiliyya, the term in Islam referring to the barbarism and ignorance prior to the coming of the word of God, the Qur’an.

***

WHY MUSLIM FANATICS KILL MUSLIMS:

Al-Wahhab accused most Muslims to be living in jahiliyya, thus of not being true Muslims after all. This is rather grave, because the Qur’an implies, and the Hadith says all over that people who stop being Muslims ought to be executed. [Hadith is a set of gossip about Muhammad that Muslims take religiously; the core of the Hadith is about 100 times bigger than the Qur'an…]

In Morocco in 1834, 17-years old Jewish girl Sol Hachuel was beheaded for alleged "apostasy" from Islam. This is a well known case because the Sultan was directly involved, and condemned her father to pay for her execution under the threat of being flayed to death, and her father was too poor to pay. A rich Spaniard named Rico (!) paid the fee.

In reality Hachuel had never converted to Muhammad’s fantasy in the desert. She was just very beautiful, so some Muslim said she converted. In the Qur’an the word of a believer, depending upon gender, is worth more. Hachuel said: "A Jewess I was born, a Jewess I wish to die." After she was wounded, to help her recant her imagined apostasy, because the Sultan’s son wanted her, she insisted on the scaffold that: "Do not make me linger—behead me at once—for dying as I do, innocent of any crime, the God of Abraham will avenge my death."

Why was Wahhab looking so much for reasons to execute people? Well, that was his ticket to power. His ticket to his relationship with Ibn Saud, the secular ruler from the greedy Arabic family, who invited him over. Saud was looking for reasons to execute his enemies. Learning they were all apostates was helpful.

***

HOW DOES OBAMA DEFINE "PERVERSION"?

Back to whom Obama calls religious "perverts". Which religion are we talking about here? It is time for a reality check. Reality comes from reading the Qur’an (a better spelling than "Koran"). That’s the "holy" book of Islam. Some say all "Holy" books are, well, holy. Well, there are some pictorial remnants of Aztecs, Mayas, and Incas religions they ought to consider. My own position on this is that what is truly holy is the good side of human ethology. So pick and chose inside your holy books.

Islam is the adoration of God as defined, first of all, by the Qur’an. Obama talks about Islam, but did he read the Qur’an? Seriously? Well, I read the Qur’an, many times, over many years. And I was brought up, for real, in two Muslim countries (one in the Maghreb, the other in Black Africa).

***

THE QUR’AN, OR WHY JEWS SHOULD BURN:

The Qur’an is only about 400 pages. It is in 114 chapters or "suras". And about 6236 verses (the exact number is controversial). Anybody talking about Islam cogently is required to read the Qur’an. So why not read the Qur’an? OK, let’s try together, by taking a few little bites.

The first sura is just salutations, and laudations. Here are some verses, just from the second Sura, "The Cow", and some verses from a first portion of the third, cut off at a verse that bin Laden quoted to justify his enterprise. Here we go:

“You know of those of you who broke the Sabbath, how We said unto them: You Be apes, despised and hated!”– [Qur'an, Sura 2; verse 65]

“A fire has been prepared for the disbelievers, whose fuel is men and stones.’ [Qur'an sura 2: verse 24]

“Disbelievers will be burned with fire.” [Koran, S. 2:39, v. 90]

“Jews are the greediest of all humankind. They’d like to live 1000 years. But they are going to hell.” [Koran, s. 2: v.96]

“Allah will leave the disbelievers alone for a while, but then he will compel them to the doom of Fire.” [Koran, s. 2:v. 126]

“Kill disbelievers wherever you find them. If they attack you, then kill them. Such is the reward of disbelievers. (But if they desist in their unbelief, then don’t kill them.) [Qur'an s.2:v. 191-2]

“War is ordained by Allah, and all Muslims must be willing to fight, whether they like it or not.” [s. 2: v. 216]

“Those who marry unbelievers will burn in the Fire.” [2:221]

“Disbelievers worship false gods. They will burn forever in the Fire.” 2:257

“Those who practice usury … are rightful owners of the Fire.” 2:275

“Those who disbelieve will be fuel for the Fire.” 3:10

Those who disbelieve will be burnt in the Fire. 3:116

The Fire is prepared for disbelievers. 3:131

We shall cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Their habitation is the Fire 3:151

If you die fighting for Allah, you’ll be rewarded in heaven. 3:157

“Is one who followeth the pleasure of Allah as one who hath earned condemnation from Allah, whose habitation is the Fire?”

Unbelievers will burn forever in the Fire. 3:162

“Think not of those, who are slain in the way of Allah, as dead.” sura 3: v.169-171

(The later verse was quoted by Osama bin Laden in his ‘letter to America’ regarding the 11 September 2001 attacks.)

And so on. Salafists interpret the preceding as orders from God.

Bin Laden has of course quoted many other parts of the Qur’an to justify mass violence and terror, such as the verse of the Sword, in sura 5. I deliberately picked up a little piece at the beginning of the Qur’an, because that beginning does not have the reputation of being violent, to show how incredibly violent the whole thing is. It’s so incredible, in-credible, that people traditionally don’t want to believe any of it, so they don’t look at the evidence. Looking at the evidence is often disparaged as islamophobia.

The preceding set of Quranic verses was sent several times to the New York Times, in their comments, and they published it, finally, only after I pointed out that it was gross islamophobia not to do so.

The SALAFISTS (those "followers of the old ones") make a literal reading of the Koran.

The Wahhabists who rule Saudi Arabia constitute a particular type of Salafist. Salafism was made unlawful in Egypt in the time of its great Kurdish ruler, Saladin. Circa 1300 CE. So the excuses for bowing deeply to Saud, the Wahhabist-In-Chief, as Obama did, as president of a secular republic, the USA, are running thin, or, at least, extratemporaneous.

Further on in the Qur’an, women are treated as half citizens, at best. Actually women cannot drive in Saudi Arabia (only such country in the world), nor vote, nor go about without a male guardian. Sheikh Abdul Rahman al-Barrak, a prominent cleric, issued a fatwa (religious opinion) that proponents of ikhtilat (gender mixing) should be killed. That’s the way Islam works: self defined clerics issue “fatwas”. Bin Laden is an example of such a lethal self definition.
***

THE WAY SALAFIST ISLAM WORKS:

"Prominent clerics" issue execution orders, and the faithful who pray five times a day, foam at the mouth at the prospect of exerting their blood lust. Maybe if they had been educated by educated women, they would be less stupid. And less frustrated.

Yemeni-American cleric Anwar al-Awlaki made an edict that Molly Norris is a "prime target" who should reside in "Hellfire" for suggesting a "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day".

Authorities in Pakistan, a Salafist country supported by Washington, outlawed YouTube, Facebook and WIKIPEDIA as they reacted to Norris. The FBI advised Norris to go in a witness protection program, since now dozens of millions of enraged Muslims want to kill her. Like frenzied sharks biting each others, dozens of enthusiastic Muslims have already died about Seattle cartoonist Morris. Is the Qur’an such murderous propaganda that people believing it too much become like sharks? I am just asking, not drawing sketches, especially not sketches of devil inspired lunatics in the desert.

I would suggest some serious crack-down. For example on Pakistan. But the exciting question to ask Obama is:"who are the perverts now?" Is it the same "sorry band", or another "sorry band"? Are there dozens of millions of perverts?

The Qur’an was written long after (20 years) Muhammad’s death, by a bunch of generals under the third Caliph. People from Muhammad’s family (Aisha, Ali) said that the Qur’an was a bunch of lies. Aisha and Ali went to war about it. The Koran creating Caliph himself was stoned to death in an insurrection about, precisely, his fabrication of the Qur’an… having already been stoned on the roof of his house, the Qur’an creating Caliph took refuge in a room, and was assassinated while… reading his Qur’an. He had ordered all and any other, pre-existing versions of the Qur’an, destroyed.

Thus the founding documentation of Islam is mostly a fabrication made well after Muhammad’s death. A reformulation of the whole thing may be in order, around the best composite personality of Muhammad.

A more complete list of extremely violent, disparaging, filled with hatred set of quotes from the Qur’an is at
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com…
Extremist Muslim Fundamentalist, Salafist web sites, claim that there are nearly 200 passages in the Qur’an calling for lethal aggression. That justifies what they do, religiously speaking. Notice that I do not claim that, when one’s country is attacked, one should not resist.

"The perpetrators of this evil act" who ordered and carried out the 9/11 attacks "may wish to drive us apart but we will not give in to their hatred and prejudice" the president added.

Well, all right. If there is pre-judice, there should be postjudice. Post-judice. And if we are not going to give in to hatred, well, we can either rise the white flag, and extend our throats to the knife, or we are going to fight.

***

SALAD WITH SALAF, A RECIPE FROM WASHINGTON:

Ever since 1945, the official policy of the USA has to be to use the Salafists against the European powers (Britain, France, Russia), and against other Muslims. That is why they arm the Saud family to the hilt, and why Israel, a sort of giant Western aircraft carrier planted firmly in the Holy Land, agree to that counter-intuitive move.

A pact was made between the USA president, FDR, and the founder of Saudi Arabia, who had previously conquered his kingdom thanks to the help thousands of extremely extreme Wahhabists organized in an entire army. (They were so dangerous that he then sent the worst of them to attack British Palestine, knowing full well they would be exterminated.) In exchange for oil, the USA would not call them perverts, but give them weapons instead. This is one of the griefs of bin Laden: we are getting manipulated, he said, and, of course, having served the CIA and the American Congress for twenty years, he is in excellent position to know that (the bin Laden family has been around USA circles of power for much longer than that).

The same policy, of the USA supporting the religious extremists, was used in 1953 in Iran. For financing and exciting the Shiites to help them bring down representative democracy, the USA, and its servant, British petroleum, got to keep the oil, and… Well, the USA did not quite keep their word, although president Reagan tried to make amends by making good on the promise by helping ostensibly albeit secretly (!) the Khomeini’s Shiites against Saddam Hussein, who had been incited (and armed!) by the West to attack the Islamist republic of Iran. It’s this delicate Iraq-Iran balance that Bush has disrupted, in his hubris, and now the USA has got to replace Hussein by Barack Hussein, or then, if the later prefers to play golf compulsively, find another cooperative native, with a strong neck…

To conquer Afghanistan, the USA used the same method: think with hubris and no knowledge of history, long enough, and then bring in Wahhabists, many of them from Saudi Arabia, on Saudi money, American weapons and infrastructure (Osama bin Laden is a construction engineer, a family tradition which came in handy in Afghanistan, and on 9/11). The American agents scored when they persuaded bin Laden to attack soft targets, such as schools (hence the little vengeance on 9/11). By the end of the war, bin Laden’s personal army was well over 10,000 (some say above 35,000). It had been trained by the CIA.

The civil war in Afghanistan was a lot about NOT letting girls go to school. That allowed the Salafist spy and killer service from Pakistan, the ISI, to have a religious pretext to intervene in Afghanistan. People like best to do what satisfies their sense of morality.

But this is all America’s baby. The modern USA is apparently anxious to pose as a modern Assyria, going all around to make war.

***

ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI, PRESIDENT CARTER’S NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER ADMITTED FINANCING SALAFISM:

Interview of Brzezinski in Le Nouvel Observateur, Paris, 15-21 January 1998:

Question of Nouvel Observateur: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, Obama’s Defense Secretary, stated in his memoirs ["From the Shadows"], that American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet intervention. In this period you were the national security adviser to President Carter. You therefore played a role in this affair. Is that correct?

Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secret until now, is completely different. 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.

Q: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action. But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into war and looked to provoke it?

B: It isn’t quite that. We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.

Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn’t believe them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don’t regret anything today?

B: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter. We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.

Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic fundamentalism, having given arms and advice to future terrorists?

B: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?

Q: Some stirred-up Moslems? But it has been said and repeated Islamic fundamentalism represents a world menace today.

Zbigniew Brzezinski: NONSENSE!

***

What’s truly nonsense, is not to go to war against those who make a literal reading of the Qur’an as the word of "God", whereas it was simply the word of one of the best, most ferocious general who ever was. Salafism was actually invented to destroy the Roman empire, to destroy the West.

But, of course, destroying bits and pieces of the West, the plutocracy of the USA has found highly profitable. It is only now that it is becoming increasingly clearer, at least to American workers, that Washington’s plutocratic approach in not in their interest. It is not just China, the banks, Wall Street, the real estate industry, the drug companies, the HMOs, the insurance companies, the military-industrial complex, the tax heavens, the crooked tax codes, which constitute as many devices the plutocracy plays like a conductor in an orchestra. It’s also Salafism. To this day, a large part of the plutocratic establishment in the USA is no doubt still happy about bin Laden’s work, and the pretext he provides with.

Witness Obama, who dares to justify his giant invasion of Afghanistan by spending half a billion (500 millions) dollars per Al Qaeda member every six months. At this point NATO has more than 150,000 troops on the Afghan theater, and the number of NATO soldiers killed is more than 2,000. What is Obama doing there already, besides going Quail, I mean, Qaeda hunting? Well, he is fighting for the constitution of Afghanistan, which boils down to Salafism.

***

Here for Washington sponsored Salafism at its best: :

Pool photo by Massoud Hossaini

The Salafist dictator of Kabul, Hamid Karzai, second from left. In this picture, he is protected by highly paid private plutocratic security, the sort of goons not counted in the 150,000 NATO troops, but much more qualified to kill, and much more expensive. The sort of Salafist pawn the USA loves, in the sort of environment the military industrial complex loves, paid by NATO taxpayers, what’s not to like? Of these Salafi salads an empire is made, and it works until it collapses, alleluia!

***

Patrice Ayme

***

Note on the USA messing up with Afghanistan for half a century: What Brzezinski does not say is that before the DIRECT intervention of the presidency of the USA, the USA was indirectly involved, through the ISI. The CIA-entangled Pakistani ISI had already been hard at work in Afghanistan, for years.

***

Note on the Abrahamic religions: Abraham was a child molester and would-be child killer, who decided, at the last moment, after the intervention of some agent not him, to not kill his own son. To this day, Muslims celebrate this. I personally do not see the cause for celebration, but I see quite well the celebration of ultimate violence, extremely unjustified.

To boot, Islam does not have the official buffer Christianism acquired after four different levels of interpretations were grafted on the bible, with a dominance of the allegorical. In other words: it’s not real, just stories to be interpreted secularly. Throughout history, starting apparently with Aischa, the cleverest Muslims have tried to do the same, but the absence of Islam central has prevented to do so, especially since the closest thing to that, the Caliphate in Baghdad, was annihilated, with all its books, by the Mongols.

*** 

Note on the Main Stream Media-Plutocracy conspiracy: A recent example is the case of Helen Thomas, the eldest and most famous journalist habilitated to interview the US president. As soon as she deviated form official propaganda about Israel, she was fired and forcefully retired, to encourage the rest of the so called “White House Pool”, to keep on with the party line, the bipartisan party line, and nothing more.

Thomas, the dean of the “White House Press Corps”, had suggested, in a casual conversation with two Jews she met, that the citizens of Israel go back where they come from. In the case of the recently arrived million Jews from the ex-USSR, many a long time Israeli will agree (those recent immigrants do not have the same democratic traditions).

Anyway, this private, extra-employment slip, was obviously unforgivable… Israel at this point survives only from the taxpayers of the USA, and the generous endowment they provide to the entire area…

***

Teleprompter Plutocracy

 

ASK NOT WHO READS THE TELEPROMPTER, ASK WHOM HE IS READING FOR.

***

Tele = Greek for "At A Distance". Prompt comes from the Latin "promere", which means to bring forth. So when a politician uses a teleprompter, the question is: who is bringing forth that politician from afar? Answer therein.

***

Here is the president of the USA on TV, announcing the "end" of the Iraq war. Whatever. Obama has announced many things before, and delivered the opposite, while calling it still something else (it’s no more operation "Iraqi Freedom", but operation "New Dawn"). The top US general in the Middle East (who looks like a villain in an horror movie, with the appropriate verbal delivery) already declared the USA would use force if things got out of control again. Meaning USA control, of course.

Of course Obama needs to read a teleprompter about the end of the Iraq war, because, otherwise, he would not know what to say. He called the Iraq war a "dumb war" in 2002. But the plan he is presiding over is to enjoy indefinitively the fruits, or rather the oil, of that dumb war with 50,000 soldiers and thousands of mercenaries. How clever is that?

But forget about Iraq. What is interesting is the presidential verbal delivery: big exorbited eyes reading the teleprompter, a machine sitting above the camera, with an haphazard gluing of invented emotions, while a hand delivers the J F Kennedy routine of waving, an index and thumb together for calm precision. A magical trick.

Certainly, if a lawyer came in front of a judge, and read from a teleprompter, that would not be tolerated. What is the difference between teleprompter reading and reading from notes? Well, when one reads from notes, there are basically two behavioral strategies: that of the old Stalinists, and that of readers who want their audience to believe that they genuinely believe in one what they read.

The old Stalinists read from a text, for hours. That looked completely canned. Everybody could see they were not genuine. They did not care, because they had the power, and that was their message. Being so obviously disingenuous was part of their oppression scheme. It said: ‘Look at us, we don’t believe in what we say, so we have to read it carefully, because it’s so disingenuous. But we can do so, because you can do nothing about it, and the proof is that we don’t care that we look so disingenuous. So don’t try a thing, you don’t have a chance.’

Indeed, it took 50 years to get rid of most Stalinist regimes.

If one wants, or needs, to read from a text when speaking, because one has a bad memory, while one wants to shows one’s face, eyes and emotions, to demonstrate to one’s audience one’s authenticity, one has to engage in a complicated mental gymnastic between reading a fragment of the notes, and projecting one’s mind, while recalling the corresponding emotions, when one verbalizes that fragment.

One uses the notes to make a memory recall, emotional and logical, each time one looks at a fragment of the notes. One reads a fragment quickly, then, having disengaged from the text, to look up at the audience, one goes back to the set of ideas and emotions connected to that fragment. The point is that part of one’s mind is recycled to some extent, and rises to the surface, at the moment of speaking. The notes act as a spark, the mind is engaged in fabricating the speech that is delivered, fragment by fragment. Spark, re-creation, spark, etc.

IT OUGHT TO BE UNLAWFUL FOR POLITICIANS TO READ FROM A TELEPROMPTER, JUST AS IT IS UNLAWFUL TO USE PERFORMANCE ENHANCING DRUGS. Normally intelligent persons do not use a teleprompter when speaking. A teleprompter is a performance enhancing device. Leave aside the fact only well financed politicians can afford them. A teleprompter allows to fake authenticity more than reading from a text. Indeed the politician can be much more of a complete puppet, while faking much more genuiness, when using a teleprompter.

Suppose you want a tall, lanky young man who is brown and looks like a sort of model at a distance. Suppose you find one who is willing to read whatever text you prepare for him, as long as you fork the money over, and offer power on a platter. Suppose you are a plutocrat. You have found your agent of misguidance. You will bring forth (prompt) the telegenic young man to present whatever misinformation you concocted to mislead and misinform the public, you will do it from afar: tele. You are using a "teleprompter" to do so. While filling your own pockets. As a plutocrat, you make war to the people. Nothing better than a Trojan Horse to ride in.

" In war, practice dissimulation, and you will succeed." (SunTzu; circa 500 BCE.)

Now suppose you are a voter, and you listen to the puppet saying whatever you want to hear. You will vote for the puppet, as long as you believe he is genuine. You will vote for the puppet, as long as you believe that the puppet is not a puppet. But it is much more difficult to find that out, when the puppet reads from a teleprompter. You observe his mechanical delivery, and emotional disengagement, and you naturally think: ‘It’s just the teleprompter.’ You would not tolerate such a masquerade from a normal speaker.

Somebody who is reading from a teleprompter is not processing the information. Such a person does not necessarily believe in anything he or she says. It is worse than in acting: at least an actor memorizes her, or his lines, and a good actor weaves them with emotion, just to effect recollection. So the mind of an actor mixes with her, or his discourse. Not so with a teleprompter reading robot.

Seeing Obama reading from his teleprompter that he was announcing the end of the war in Iraq, two things were obvious: he did not believe in anything he said, and he did not care. He was just reading what he had been told to read, that was his job, and he found it boring, and a bit uncomfortable, perhaps because there are limits to the sort of lying a gentleman will do. But it required careful observation to figure all that out, because of the teleprompter.

In any case, removing teleprompters from politicians will make the puppeteering harder. It is as many invisible strings cut off.

Meanwhile, there is little to do about Obama. His stimulus on infrastructure was only 66 billions (paid by July 2010, says the WSJ). Moreover there was no plan, besides helping the banking plutocrats, helping the military-industrial plutocrats, and the health industry plutocrats. Obama has professed his admiration for Reagan, and Reagan, another plutocratic puppet, knew that power trickled from the top (Reagan’s own life was a testimony to this, so it had got to be right: it felt good).

Obama’s strategy of helping the banks is sinking the economy. Trillions of dollars have been sent to the banks. At this point they get money for free, and reinvest it with the government on so called longer maturities to make more money, and call that profits. Toxic mortgages held by banks are sold to nationalized FNMA and Freddie Mac, which swallow them greedily, as ordered. Of course banks do not provide any money for the economy, although that is their FIDUCIARY DUTY, in exchange for the exorbitant privilege they have, and abuse, of creating most of the money of the realm.

Why should they provide money for the economy? The Obama economic team is their friend. Moreover the bank surge has created a fake GDP surge.

So, instead, one talks about side issues, such as China’s debasing of its currency. Changing the Chinese currency by even 100% would not change the problem: China has a plan, the USA does not. Obama’s stimulus on infrastructure (only $66 billion, as I said) was even then not concentrated on the edge of competiveness and efficiency, as it should have been (and is in China, or Germany, or France, and now Britain). Most of the enormous financial effort is in making war in the Middle East, and in allowing the banksters to stay so powerful that it was worth being friends to them.

Indeed, GDP reflects nothing important. Dues to the malignant growth of the financial sector, as that tumor gets enlarged, so does GDP.

Frank Rich denounce in an editorial on the Billionaires Financing The Tea Party. One will recognize in them, the one I used to call on the Tyranosopher web site, "Murderoch" (for his rabid pushing for the Iraq butchery). But there are other, like the immensely rich Koch brothers.

Obama got financed, at great sacrifice, by plenty of small people (including the author and his family). Some small people I know very well gave even more than the Fat Cats on Wall Street. Still Obama listened only to the later. Because the Fat Cats did not just offer money, they offered a future. They offered Obama and his economic team a dream: read the teleprompter, and all your wildest dreams will come true; vacations in 5 star hotels forever!

That was the surprise. Famous democrats in the past, such as LBJ, JFK, and FDR did not behave that way, as if greed were the  ultimate personal good. Instead, great democratic presidents of the past turned against the plutocratic class with a bellow and a vengeance. There were no less than four presidents of the USA in the twentieth century who took on the plutocrats. Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt "welcomed their hatred".

None of these presidents were naïve: three belonged to the plutocratic class itself materially, but they were free from it, spiritually. And Lyndon Johnson had seen it all, had seen the dirt before. Of course those presidents had not been selected as teleprompter reading robots; that particular trait of character did not exist yet. Now it does, and it’s most convenient to the plutocratic masters.

The great strategist Von Clausewitz points out that surprise demoralizes the enemy: “the surprise is, therefore, not only the means to the attainment of numerical superiority; but it is also to be regarded as a substantive principle in itself, on account of its moral effect.(Von Clausewitz’s "On War", "General Strategy".)

Obama has been the surprise the masters needed. Obama has done well for the plutocracy: he has demoralized the left. A deeply undermining job.

When Hitler came to power, his crucial trick was to gather support from the unemployed, the working class, and all those who desperately wanted change, from the bad economy. Behind Hitler were American, and German plutocrats (this is explained here and there on my sites). We have seen that movie before, but people were told it was not what it was. So it’s happening again. The fish rots by the head, so does a country.

Patrice Ayme

Crazies In A White House

Abstract: The modestly intelligent Gibbs has declared that people like me are from the professional left…and are crazies that ought to be tested for drugs. A friend sent me a long letter related to this, in a more cogent style. I reply point by point. Not for those that the present sinking state of American politics bores to death.

***

I have long hesitated, and balanced between the personal and the truth in these matters… I started to complain loudly about the advisers which were selected for Obama, as soon as Nov 5, 2008. A friend accuses me of undermining the ship of state:

" Gibbs’ remarks (see below) sound pretty sarcastic, but they contain some truths as well and demonstrate clearly the White House’s frustrations with its critics on the left, of which you are one whether you are willing to admit it or not.  Your ideas are not middle-of-the-road, neither are they from the right.  I don’t hold it against you as long as you do not deny which side of the political spectrum you are writing for.  As for agreeing with Glenn Beck, make me laugh.  You envy his audience, but I’m not sure your views have much in common with his.  Maybe you’d like to explain this further because I don’t listen to talk radio personalities who make millions by pandering to people’s worst instincts."

Well, here is my answer:

1) I am not from the political spectrum, but from the philosophical one. Now, according to me, politics is practical philosophy, true. But my philosophy is one of truth, power, and expected consequences. In France, Sarkozy has been pretty much capable of capturing the entire political spectrum (he is disliked nevertheless, perhaps precisely for that reason). Many around Sarkozy have been making the point that many of the old categories do not apply. For example, I am anti-plutocratic, but not anti-capitalist. I do believe small people ought to pay zero percent on capital gains, or inheritance tax.

2) philosophers are not middle of the road, except to stop the train. That is why countless philosophers were assassinated.

3) I do agree occasionally with Glenn Beck. For example he recently pointed out that US president Wilson was a racist (Teddy Roosevelt too). I have long argued that Wilson’s racism was the tipping point in the German attack on France in August 1914. Nobody else has been making that argument, or even has dared to relate Wilson’s exuberant racism… Until Glenn Beck on the later point. Beck has pounded on Wilson’s racism. I don’t know whether Beck and me were made for each other, or he just read my site(s). And it is irrelevant, whether it’s one, or the other. Just, when Beck starts to talk about god, being the devil, I become incandescent, and switch channels.

4) I am not adopting truths because I am in love with whom proffers them. I am not 4 months old. Nor do I hate truths from people I hate. I have learned to separate truth and emotion. A truth can be sad, but it’s still the truth. When Palin says that Obama is in above his head, it’s the truth, and it is sad, but it is obviously the truth. This is an example of a recent Obama couple of sentences: " Say, well, you know, I don’t know, I wish we had gotten that public option. Well, that’s great, but we got 31 million people health insurance."

Does he know, or does he not know? “you know, I don’t know”??? Apparently, neither. And he did not get 31 million people health insurance: he got to order 31 million people to pay for private health insurance, by 2014, who cannot pay for it in 2010. I am sure the republican Congress will love it, and will not know how to change what pie in the sky O Bambi got for them in 2014.

5) I do not envy Glenn Beck’s audience, be it simply out of self preservation. My god of truth and human power is very far removed from their god of Abraham (the child molester, to put it mildly, since Abraham’s god is ready to kill his son, because of voices in his head). The god of Abraham of the self proclaimed ex drug addict Beck. It is the same god of the self proclaimed (ex?) drug addict in chief. It’s also the god of bin Laden, and I despise Judeo-Christianism and Muslim Fundamentalist Literalism in their fanatical variants (although I love beautiful churches and mosques, and have visited quite a few… even the most beautiful, in Iran).

6) To finish with Beck, if he, or his staff, reads good stuff, I am not going to condemn him for that. Well after me, but ahead of the rest of the media, ahead of Jon Steward and Steven Colbert, or the "left", Beck demonstrated many of the amazing, quasi hilarious connections between White House and Goldman Sachs House.

7) Worst instincts are bad, but worst lies are worse.

8] Paul Krugman thinks, correctly I think, that bad or mediocre actors such as Gibbs, Emanuel, and company, are talking for themselves. As Krugman puts it:

"Think about it. Complaints that the administration should have pursued a bigger stimulus, or fought harder for the public option, or taken a different position on Afghanistan aren’t going to matter in the midterms. But they might hurt White House aides who argued against a bigger stimulus (to the point of not even passing the option on to the president), or argued against a harder push on health reform, or have argued that continuation of Bush foreign policy is a political winner. The point is that the president might actually take those criticisms to heart, and rethink who he listens to."

Talking to corrupt idiots produces indeed nothing to write history books about. In the fullness of time, the idiocy of Obama’s policies, often strict continuation of Bush policies, in a "black" package, will be incomprehensible in their mediocrity. Even Bush, in the end, knew that many were wrong.

***

My friend persists: is not expediency better than the truth?

He says: "You are doing your best to put the Obama administration’s shortcomings under a spotlight, but consider how short his time in the White House is going to be when he decides to resign because he no longer has a constituency and gives in to the temptation to let partisan politics reign again like they did under Bush.  Obama is already fast losing middle class voters because of very high unemployment.  If you win the argument you will then have a pyrrhic victory.  What kind of President are you going to get then instead of Obama?  Somebody worse, maybe someone more opaque but not better I suspect.  Probably somebody more to the middle or the right, which will make your ideas even more unlikely to gain a larger following though I agree you have some good ideas."

The answer to this is simple:

1) Obama was supposed to be an excellent plane to carry us towards a better future. Instead, he is crashing, from deliberate, repeated and persistent pilot errors. I saw it come. I explain how and why he will crash, should he persist on his present, flaming wreckage course. Now he is going down in flames. I am doing forensics, point by point.

Many Germans had the best hopes for Hitler, having listened to what Hitler said. But, shortly after he came to power Hitler engaged in a number of unsavory policies, and many Germans regretted their choice. They tried to invert, but it could not be done legally. So they did nothing on a large scale until July 1944, when a large part of the army rebelled. People will find the comparison unreal, but the USA is literally held by the throat by its plutocracy, which buys elections handily.

2) I sincerely doubt that Sarah Palin could do worse than Obama. Obama is clearly following scripts not written by him (he repeats the same exact points, themes and sentences: the four sentences quoted by Obama in this essay have been used before; they look spontaneous, they are not; I can compare with some prominent European leaders, who are not scripted… nor do they read their text, as Reagan did, and Obama does.) What would Palin do which would be worse? If president Palin had sent 3 times more soldiers in Afghanistan, and trillions to banks, she would be in serious trouble.

3) Partisan politics are already reigning. The democrats have been in power for 4 years (presidency for 2 years, but the presidency is weak in the USA, unlike say, France). And what did they do? The plutocrats pay as little taxes as ever, and they can spend more money than ever for their servants to win elections.

***

My friend persists: "So while I endorse your efforts I encourage you to be more honest with yourself about the political culture of the U.S.  The left has been repeatedly "run over by a truck" during the last 3 decades as you recognize happened as well under Clinton.  You describe Clinton as having been no friend to the middle class and in some ways this is true.  But judging him by the performance of the stock market (what Wall St. likes to do) and the economy he didn’t do badly despite his many shortcomings.  And middle class American households have not insignificant investments in stocks and bonds.  Not significant compared to the richest 1%, but significant nonetheless.  Now they’re scared because of the effects and still vivid memory of the finance crisis and they’re saving more and using credit cards less.  But the left by itself cannot get a President elected in the U.S. because it can’t agree on anything."

Socrates balanced between obeying Athens and repudiating Athens. Aristotle just fled Athens when Athens became aggressive towards him, ironically claiming to want to spare the noble city another crime against philosophy.

I am very honest relative to the political culture of the USA: it stinks. 80% of people, or so, find that money in politics is OK. They have learned nothing. Most other countries, with the exception of Burma and North Korea, are cracking down on money in politics. And I view Obama as a traitor. At least to his own discourse, which was similar to my discourse, when he was campaigning.

Soon, as this assessment spreads worldwide, Obama will see his notoriety joining that of Bush, and he will get as effective. After all, progress will be worldwide, or will not be. The USA has proven an enemy of progress for the better, even under Obama, so the regressive policies have to be rendered ineffective. This blog is in English, mostly a variant of French read worldwide (except in France, a question of pride and laziness).

Obama talked the talk, but, when he came to walking, he walked the other way. At this point, as the situation gets worse, I wonder if even Bush would have been that perseverant in ever greater errors. After all, Bush reverted some his policies, whereas Obama just extended all those he found (except some with his tongue, which goes the other way occasionally, to try to distinguish him from Bush).

It is amazing: we had nearly 4 years of senate and Congress control by democrats, and what did they do exactly? If the republicans come back to power, they will be much faster at dismantling than the democrats have been at constructing. And it is not that it was so hard to tax the hyper rich. It is simply that democrats did not want to. Take hedge fund managers and private equity taxed at 15%. Obama and his Congress could pass a law in ten minutes, applying normal taxation, above, say, a million dollars of income. They did not do it, they still do not do it. Why? Because they are no different from Bush. Simplest logical explanation. They feed at the same trough. Don’t forget Obama is a very rich multimillionaire already.

Here is my little incantation.

***

THE ULTIMATE CHARLATAN:

char·la·tan –noun "a person who pretends or claims to have more knowledge or skill than he or she possesses. "

Charlatans can’t have courage: they don’t know the difference between babble (the Italian origin of charlatan), and a honest discourse. For example what are the reasons for Obama to send three times more soldiers in Afghanistan? Mission [To Be] accomplished? Like bringing back home rogue CIA employees (bin Laden, etc.)? But that’s babbling: Bush said it before, so the next child tries to repeat the same words, let alone the same gestures.

So courage is not easy. One needs enough smarts to have courage. Charlatans have neither courage, nor true smarts, just the power of gab. Who is the ultimate charlatan? After 1945, it was clearly Stalin. Before May 1945, it was Hitler. In 1914, the Kaiser. In 1917, Lenin. Who is the ultimate charlatan now?

The ultimate charlatan is the one who talks about redressing injustice, and does not do anything, but keeping the 15% maximum tax rate for hedge fund managers and private equity, and sent 3,700 billion dollars to the bank managers who caused the problem. The ultimate charlatan talks change, and brings back the Clinton-Rubin team which dismantled Franklin Roosevelt’s financial safeguards.

The ultimate charlatan talks change one can believe in, and, indeed finance the military-industrial complex like never before, while refusing to prosecute war mongers and torturers from the Bush era.

The ultimate charlatan depicts himself as an historian, and sends the legions into Afghanistan, supposedly to hunt ex-employees of the CIA. The ultimate charlatan claims to help homeowners, but the total debt of homeowners to banks is just as bad as at its worst, several years ago. The ultimate charlatan claims to fix health care not now, but by now, he means 2014, and in such a way that the republicans can invert it all (but for details they will like such as the treatment-reducing panels, forcing all to pay private monopolies always more).

The ultimate charlatanism thrives with democrats so bad, that nobody needs the worst republicans.

***

HITLER WAS NEITHER NATIONALIST, NOR SOCIALIST, HE JUST CLAIMED TO BE:

Hitler’s accession to power was a long and windy road. Hitler claimed to be a nationalist, and a socialist. He was neither: a lot of his money came from American plutocrats. That way he was similar to an American presidential candidate.

Although Hitler was Austrian born, he was a sincere German nationalist, but, if he had been a more intelligent nationalist he would have questioned his dependency upon American plutocratic support. One thing Hitler was not was a socialist, he just played one on TV. Claiming to be a socialist was a cynical ploy on his part. He knew, and explained, that many Germans were socialist, so he decided to woo them, and get elected that way. Hitler admitted to have put the red of revolutionary left in his flag, just to seduce the hard left. Propped by American plutocratic money, and a private army, supported by the lying chief of the imperial German army, Ludendorff, Hitler tried a coup in 1923. It failed, several plotters died under army bullets. Then Hitler tried more carefully, and got all his plutocrats carefully aligned, first. Mr. Schacht, the most important Lord of Finance in Germany, a pawn of JP Morgan (who he had met already in 1905), helped a lot.

THERE IS ONLY ONE GERMANY:

The German right tried to seduce Hitler, and, so doing, gave in to many of his theses. The more the right agreed with Hitler, the more honorable it made him (Obama has this problem with today’s American right: the more it does its policy, the more honorable it makes it look). Hitler was very bipartisan: a socialist, but also a nationalist, and from the right, and amazingly well financed by the plutocracy (just as Obama had a famous conference in the Silicon Valley to seduce the plutocrats, boasting of how well he would run his campaign, Hitler had done a similar conference, decades earlier, in front of German plutocrats, about how well he would run his campaign; then Krupp rose, and wrote the first check).

Hitler’s main campaign theme, in a speech repeated countless time, was that there was just ONE Amerika, sorry, I meant, ONE Germany: there was not a black Germany, there was not a Jewish Germany, there was just the united state of Germany. sorry: the united people of Germany. EIN VOLK. Etc. Notice that I am not accusing Obama of plagiarism. Not everybody can be as creative as Hitler, and write his own speeches.

Funny how the same speech works throughout history, though. I guess the great unwashed, economically stressed, tends to react the same, after they have dreamed of their national dream, sang about the exceptionalism of their country, and their leaders tell them, ALL THEY NEED IS WAR. (Hitler was talking peace all the time; he was just defending Germany against the terrorists… according to him; similarly Obama is defending the free world against ex CIA employees in the woods of unknown mountains.)

With Hitler, we know the rest: 75 million dead later, the American Lords of Finance were controlling the world in 1945. Europe, with more than 50 million dead and sometimes the deliberate annihilation, by bomber fleets, of non military objectives, even the cities of allies such as France, laid in ruins.

Keynes, chief of the world financial conference (Bretton-Woods), objected to the making of the dollar as the world reserve currency, blocking the Americans twice. So the Americans substituted the documents to be signed by the chiefs of states: voila.

All this to say that American plutocracy did not start its manipulations yesterday. They made the "American Century". American plutocracy knows how to use stooges and puppets.

***

CRAZY DRUGGIES IN A WHITE HOUSE:

During an interview with The Hill in his West Wing office, modestly intelligent White House press secretary Robert Gibbs blasted liberal naysayers, whom he said would never regard anything the president did as good enough.

“I hear these people saying he’s like George Bush. Those people ought to be drug tested,” Gibbs said. “I mean, it’s crazy.”

OK, wait a minute. What is crazy is that many of Obama’s advisers, advising policies often to the right of Sarah Palin. I would like to be shown an Obama policy that Bush did not start, or was not compatible with. OK, I found one: Afghanistan. G. W. Bush was simply not stupid enough to try nation building, with a Muslim constitution, while tripling the legions there.

By "right of Sarah Palin" I mean the so called "death panels". Zeke Emanuel is offended by that label. I doubt that he knows that Hitler started his death program by eliminating degenerated, irreversibly damaged Germans. (Unsurprisingly, cynics will say, a close relative of Hitler was eliminated that way). I have read the German program, pre-World War Two, and the way it is expressed is strikingly similar to some of Dr. Zeke Emanuel’s statements. Protest were so strident, the Nazis had to stop their death panels.

Now, I have never used any drug, beyond coffee and tea. No alcohol, no wine, no tobacco, no pot, no "blow". "Blow" is slang for cocaine, and I learned that from Obama himself. "Blow" is one the illicit drugs Obama used. Obama said. Probably damaged his brain, resulting in his selection of the entire team that destroyed the USA’s economy as his own economic team… to go back to an infernal cycle of the same.

The only drugs I abuse are knowledge and truth. I did not spend two decades, or more, as a drug addict, trying to get high, because I was low. I particularly resent that Obama, a drug user, then uses the argument that he knows better, and wants to forbid Afghans, who have no income otherwise, to grow poppies. If Afghans disagree, Afghans get killed. Not cool, and quite a drama.

The press secretary dismissed the “professional left” in terms identical to those used by the ideological right, saying, “They will be satisfied when we have Canadian healthcare and we’ve eliminated the Pentagon. That’s not reality.” Of course, it is not surprising that Gibbs talks like the extreme right; he is the extreme right. What is wrong with Canadian health care, anyway? There are other health care system. I have argued that the closest system to the American would be the FRENCH system, using Medicare to morph into it.

Of those who complain that Obama caved on issues such as healthcare reform, Gibbs said: “They wouldn’t be satisfied if Dennis Kucinich was president.”

The White House claims to be frustrated by attacks on cable news shows catering to the left, where Obama and top lieutenants like Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel have been excoriated for abandoning the public option in healthcare reform.

Rahm Emanuel is the very definition of a corrupt politician: without any knowledge of, or degree in, banking, finance, economics, or accounting, he got 17 million dollars from a bank for two years’ work. He paid back the banks well.

"Sometimes Democrats, we’re our own worst enemies, because we can do great stuff and somehow still feel depressed," Obama said. "Sometimes we do a little too much handwringing. Say, well, you know, I don’t know, I wish we had gotten that public option. Well, that’s great, but we got 31 million people health insurance."

Obama loves to use that opening sentence: as innovative as the same squeaking door. As it is, there is NO health care reform. The USA system of tying up employment and health care cannot work. Obamacare is all smoke and mirrors. Obamacare is an unconstitutional attempt at forcing Americans to give more money to private operators of the plutocratic pharmaceutical right. It is in particular UNCONSTITUTIONAL because you cannot force private individuals to give money to private, for profit companies (car insurance is mandatory, but the AAA provides insurance all over, and is not for profit).

So what is going to happen? Sometimes before 2014, the republicans will acquire control of Congress. Then they will throw out the whole thing, except the pieces they like. Lo and behold, the health care profiteers will claim that was not the deal, and they will bolt out too. Obamacare will be in ruins. But don’t worry: everybody you see in the White House will be doing fine for themselves. It’s all about the charming smile. Modestly intelligent Gibbs will be richly rewarded for his modest intelligence.

; for not moving faster to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay; and for failing, so far, to end the ban on gays serving openly in the military.

***

My friend conclude his critique:"Bottom line: the left is a part of the political spectrum in the U.S. consisting of groups that do not agree on much and which cannot get along with each other most of the time.  The right takes every opportunity to turn this to its advantage by voting as one block against reforms that might otherwise have a better prospect of getting through Congress.  Obama may not have gotten elected without the careful stage managing of his career by Goldman Sachs.  But consider the alternative to Obama.  John McCain inveighing against economic stimulus because his party’s standard line is that it consists mostly of wasteful spending (something his party is already famous for but always quick to deny).  What Obama has done hasn’t been great for the economy but McCain might have done much worse because he doesn’t understand the first thing about economics and the need for massive fiscal stimulus when the economy crashes.  McCain has some of the instincts of a reform politician, but has never been gain wide support for his views in his own party.  He was the "red-headed stepchild" to whom fell the sorry task of running for President in an election year when no GOP candidate stood much of a chance of getting elected because of Bush’s unpopularity.  Because some baby boomers are still nostalgic for Kennedy and the idealistic generation he encouraged to go into politics doesn’t mean their prayers are going to be answered when another Democrat finally wins the Presidency. "

Well. Philosophy drives civilization. As it is the USA is becoming more insignificant every single second it spends $10,000 in Afghanistan, which is every second there is, under Obama’s childish leadership. Me, and my family, are immensely disappointed by Obama. We spent a huge effort trying to get him elected. (A close family member, and his family are nearly destitute after volunteering for Obama for a year.) And we probably would not have done that, had we known that Obama was just a social climber of the Goldman Sachs type. That does not mean we would have voted for McCain. McCain may have been fiercer with Wall Street and the banks. He is a fighter pilot, not just a basket ball player. Wall Street detested McCain. In any case, once again it is hard to find something bad that Mc Cain could have done that Obama did not already do.

The worst situation right now is Pakistan, not Iran. To solve it for the best requires the nuclear disarmament of Pakistan. Nobody ever talks of that. The policy of the USA, so far with Pakistan, ever since Pakistan exists, has been to make a bad situation worse.

It’s a big planet, there are other powerful countries than the USA. The USA is not Athens, which was basically alone and unique. Nor is the USA the plutocratic Roman republic, when Greece was occupied by, and rebelling against, fascist Macedonia. Except for its extravagant military spending, as if it intended to attack something else, soon, the USA is quickly becoming an unexceptional country (sorry to contradict Rush Limbaugh, another ex (?) addict).

In the threat of imminent collapse of the USA, there are many lessons. Let those lessons thrive. There is a future to irrigate with good wisdom.

***

Patrice Ayme