No Euro Crisis, No Debt Crisis.

No French Currency Crisis, Either. JUST PLUTOCRATIC DERANGEMENT SYNDROME.

American economists just discovered what the Euro is all about. Namely the Euro is the French currency. (Please applaud how much more clever they just got!). Professional economists could have known this long ago, if they did more than read each other. See my: Why Europe, Why The Euro.

French yields have improved dramatically. Why? It’s not just what American economists just learned that (Euro = France), because that was true ever since the European Currency Unit (more than 20 years ago).

What has really occurred is that the cause of the present Greater Depression has been stumbled upon, for all to see. Moreover real remedies have started to be applied. (For the first time in this crisis that exploded in 2008.)

The French finance ministry took the lead in making plutocrats pay for their mess (at least in Cyprus; one has to start somewhere!). Good. But that was just a warm-up. Real reforms are now happening everyday.

And a miracle happened. Thanks to Jérôme Cahuzac, a bandit of plutocratic type who happened to be French budget minister, French and Swiss Justice are presently demonstrating how pervasive the plutocratic phenomenon and its entanglement with politicians and tax havens are. In the USA, of course, Jérôme would be just another wealthy politician, legal thoroughly, and cabinet minister. (See, Rice, Susan, for further edification; plutocracy is legal in the USA).

But France and Switzerland are supposed to be democracies, not plutocracies. The incoming consequences of discovering how huge tax evasion by the plutocracy is, are going to be huge. And are already showing up.

Indeed a corollary is that bond market participants know now that Europeans are going to realize that austerity is not just a sham, and a crime, but also a Transfer of Assets To Rich People (TARP!). The bond market understands that the collective consciousness is changing, and that real change on the way. For the better. Hence the collapse in yields.

In a society which does not revere plutocrats as “philanthropists” (as the USA pathetically does), austerity does not have a reason to be. Thus austerity ought to be discontinued, in Europe, the world’s largest economy. But austerity made the deficits worse. So, if tax evasion is mitigated, the economy can restart, and debt loads ought to stay manageable. Hence the bond rally in France. Now for some more details and perspectives.

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EURO = FRENCH INVENTION:

The Euro is, first of all, a French invention. President Mitterrand proposed to his good freund Kanzler Helmut Kohl to create the Euro, in a deal to support, in all ways, the reunification of Germany (including with French direct investment in East Germany).

Since the grotesque Second World War, all those who half think in Franco-Germania, decided that the one and only way to terminate the interminable, perfectly ridiculous Franco-German wars, was to reset the macropolitical clock back to 800 CE, when the Renovatio Imperium Romanorum extended from Catalonia to Poland. For about a millennium, there was just one currency in Europe. After that, there was war.
Paul Krugman in “France Has Its Own Currency Again” discovers the notion:

“Joe Weisenthal draws our attention to a development that may surprise many people: French borrowing costs are plunging. (Don’t tell George Osborne — he thinks that low British rates are a unique personal achievement)…

But wait– wasn’t France supposed to be the next Italy, if not the next Greece?

Well, Joe has what I agree is the right explanation: markets have concluded that the ECB will not, cannot, let France run out of money; without France there is no euro left. So for France the ECB is unambiguously willing to play a proper lender of last resort function, providing liquidity.

And this means that in financial terms France has joined the club of advanced countries that have their own currencies and therefore can’t run out of money — a club all of whose members have very low borrowing costs, more or less independent of their debts and deficits.

Welcome to the club, France. Now, why are you doing all this austerity?”

[France is not doing that much austerity: she went into a full war in Mali, and the deficit is still going to be closer to 5% rather than 3%; that's less austere than the USA. Still, there is enormous waste in, and from, the French bureaucracy; a referendum to diminish the bureaucracy just failed in Alsace].

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WHY THE EURO IN A NUTSHELL:

So American economists, traders and speculators are suddenly realizing what was true all along, that the Euro is very much the French currency. Always has been.

Many Anglo-Saxon leaders are so much into the business of deriding anything French that they believe reality has an anti-French bias, in all things, except wine and cheese. Now that dear Paul Krugman and company self congratulate each other for having come across the obvious, so true for 30 years, let me point out that their slaps in the back do not explain the sudden drop in yields in April 2013.

Before I proceed to do that, let me re-iterate what I have long said.

The Euro is more than the French currency. The Euro is the Franco-German currency. Just like the French, the Germans, after May 1945, and even many of the Nazis themselves (for example Albert Speer) several years before that, came to understand that the only way to win a war against the other  was by total unification.

This is what makes the Euro not just unavoidable, but necessary. Once Franco-Germania (re-)unifies, a superpower is immediately created. Indeed, France and Germany, plus the crumbs in between (Benelux), represent more than 180 million people. To this one has to add other satellites: Northern Italy, Austria, Catalonia… Even Switzerland (Swiss Franc is, had to be, pegged to Euro). At this point, one talks about 250 million people, a power roughly comparable to the USA in most of the most significant long term characteristics, most of them living an average distance of 500 kilometers from Bale/Basel.

The fact the distances are so small is of the essence: one can drive through pieces of the largest of these countries with one car, in one day. The Euro is a driving necessity. Before I used to dread to travel from my Alpine home without the proper papers, currencies, etc. It’s as if I were in enemy territory within twenty minutes of setting behind the wheel. Now I am still at home around home, I am not fighting WWII all over again.

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SO WHY DID FRENCH YIELDS JUST COLLAPSE?

The yields were high because of two reasons:

1) speculators prefer high yields, so they made it so (remember that, thanks to unregulated and mostly secretive derivatives, they have tremendous leverage at their disposal).

2) some bond investors were genuinely afraid they would not get reimbursed by the governments they lent to. (Indeed, watch Stockton, California, file for bankruptcy; ah, not in Europe? Just a detail. Still a government of sorts.) High interest is a way to make sure they get their money back.

An indication of future inability of government to pay back is if said government has high debt and is running a primary deficit (mostly borrowing more to pay past debt). Most Western government ran high primary deficits after 2008, because they had to pay jobless people, and re-capitalize banks.

At least, that’s the conventional explanation. The truth is more subtle. in truth, banks were recapitalized with public money, instead of being recapitalized by finding the money that had apparently disappeared.

Take Cyprus: extravagantly high interest rates (5% to 9% were paid, for years, as world finance collapse). So a Russian Afghan drug runner having dropped his ill acquired wealth in the “Popular bank of Cyprus”, could have made 50% on his money in 5 years.

The way the crisis of 2008 was solved, French and German taxpayers should have saved his 50%. But this time the French and German finance ministers said NEIN. Instead the drug runner plutocrat was told to kiss “his” money bye bye. Next time he can go leave his money in Dubai. This was giant conceptual progress.

By the way, 96% of depositors in Cyprus’ banks recovered 100% of their saving (plus extravagant interests paid!). It’s only the fat cats who are being punished (and even then, mostly in 2 banks).

The old way to solve the financial corruption crisis was plutocratic, unfair, and just a way to extend the crisis, by going on with the transfer of capital from taxpayers (the poor) to the hyper wealthy (the plutocrats whining that their banks had gone bankrupt, because they just finished stealing them down to the last Dollar or Euro).

This is what I have been saying for years.

The old way just made the public deficits worse. “Austerity” was then introduced as a further boost for cutting money to the poor some more.

The “new” way adopted to solve the Cyprus crisis, make the plutocrats pay for the crisis they fabricated, instead of just augmenting the deficits some more (still the Europe gave 9 billion euros to Cyprus, augmenting public deficits by that much, and the IMF, one billion. So even USA taxpayer and beggars pitched in!)

There is nothing really “new” about this “new” way. Debtors going bankrupt were severely punished in the past. Now we are just going to forse them to regurgitate what they stole. Hopefully.

If plutocrats are going to regurgitate a bit, why not go the whole way? Then, it turns out, the deficits would completely disappear. Tax evasion to tax havens in the European Union is evaluated at more than a trillion euros. About half of the yearly budget of the USA.

Hence the following evidence, pointed out today by L’Humanite’, the Communist newspaper: austerity does not have to be. It would be enough to strike the tax evading plutocrats with austerity, as I have been claiming all along.

***

THANK YOU Jérôme:

That’s why we all have to say thanks to Jérôme the bandit. You see Jérôme, was not just a successful plastic surgeon. Part of his business development involved not just having, with his wife, also a surgeon, a private clinic. No. Jérôme became a “socialist”, just like many wealthy people become “democrats” in the USA. You know, the sort of people the president sleeps in with, in the Silicon Valley (Silly Cone?).

As an MD, Jérôme was a natural big negotiator of health stuff with rich health care providers such as Novartis. Thus the bright, towering, energetic and good looking Jérôme was naturally part of the “socialist’ government in the 1980s. he negotiated many things with the likes of Novartis.

Under the table. Under Swiss tables, more exactly. That’s why, as baking secrecy was threatened in Switzerland in 2009, Jérôme tried to get a number of Swiss banks to transfer 15 million euros from Suisse towards the safer tax haven of Singapore. That was not easy, because the banks noticed he was a Member of the French Parliament. Jérôme had to falsify a finance ministry document.

Under Hollande, Jérôme became budget minister, making a giant noise on how he was going to find and punish those who engaged in fiscal evasion. Ironically, the full and enthusiastic cooperation of prosecutors in Geneva brought his case to light, with the amplification of the French Internet magazine “Mediapart“.

Now French Justice has charged Jérôme with “blanchiment de fraude fiscale” (laundering of fiscal fraud”).

***

So let me repeat slowly: the reason for austerity is out. It turns out that French finances are actually excellent. And the finances of many other European countries are also excellent. This is why the yields are collapsing in France.

What has just been revealed to the masses is that the debt crisis was mostly about the hyper rich splurging with other people’s austerity. Make the hyper wealthy fraudsters regurgitate their stolen goods, and deficits disappear.

***

Patrice Ayme

Euro Derangement Syndrome

Abstract: Paul Krugman’s campaign against the European currency is reaching new heights of absurdity. In his frenzy, he now advocates catastrophe, any catastrophe, ”to exit from the euro“.

***

Paul Krugman passes in the USA for the “conscience of a liberal”. He is now recommending to invest in the future, insisting that debt for jobs or education is no sin, as I was doing several years ago.

However, Krugman has also Euro derangement syndrome. Paul Krugman wants Greece to become like Argentina. More specifically he recommends that Greece follow the disastrous sequence of events that started in 2001 in Argentina.

That, especially for an economist, is astounding. In 2002, Argentina defaulted and inflation reached 40%. Only during the month of April 2002, inflation in Argentina was in the double digits. In four weeks, prices officially augmented by more than 10%. This is what Krugman recommends for, would have liked to happen to, Greece, Cyprus… Anything, anybody, whatever, to break the Euro. Euro derangement syndrome.

As we will see, Argentina’s economic situation, upon a severe collapse of the financial system was much better than that of Greece, or Cyprus would be. Argentina has everything, including a giant, extremely fertile territory,  extending from the tropics to sub-polar Patagonia. Argentina was once the second richest country in the world, per capita.

However, Argentina is generally recognized by everybody, even economists, to have become a basket case. And that, for political reasons. Political mismanagement was so acute it extended to the economy.

Greece was also mismanaged: there was a civil war after World War Two, between Greek communists, and Anglo-American forces (who already knew what was best for Greece; that ugly war killed more than 158,000 officially, and was accompanied by the adoption/kidnapping of Greek children from internment camps to the USA).

Later a dictatorship of colonels, generaly viewed as put in place by the American secret services (following the orders of Wall Street, a place located few miles from Krugman’s mansion).

Greece was admitted to the European Union, as long as it became a democracy, first. Thus it escaped direct USA management (and tyranny, I avoided the pleonasm). It was a great success. Probably left many an American plutocrat frustrated.

But Wall Street did not forget its old Hellenistic dominion. Goldman-Sacks cooked up the numbers used for the admission of Greece to the Eurozone.  Goldman’s cooked numbers were believed at the Eurostat (the statistic arm of the EU). Maybe because Wall Street has agents throughout the European machinery (Mario Monti, ex Italian PM, and Mario draghi, head of the ECB were partners at Goldman-Sacks).

Of course Wall Street has agents, or should we say brains? all over the (plutocratic) universities of the USA. Such as Princeton, Harvard… Here is Krugman in the integrality of a March 28, 2013, blog post of his:

“What’s the Greek for Corralito?

It’s now three years since I suggested a possible route to Greek exit from the euro: a banking crisis, followed by sharp limits on bank withdrawals similar to Argentina’s 2001 corralito, and then — with the panic argument against exit removed — reintroduction of a domestic currency.

Obviously, that hasn’t happened. Despite intense suffering, the Greek political elite’s commitment to the euro has proved incredibly strong. My analysis of the economics wasn’t wrong, but my political guesstimates were off.

Still, Cyprus is now following the first part of the script. And let me ask again: what, exactly, is the point of remaining on the euro? The convenience and efficiency of a single currency is gone; meanwhile, the future for Cyprus on the euro is one of years of grinding deflation and catastrophic austerity. Is the hope of someday, somehow restoring the status quo ante enough to justify all of this?”

Corralito meant to corral Argentines, as if they were hoofed animals to be domesticated. After being corraled, those fierce stallions, the Argentines, rioted violently. As I said, inflation was 40% in 2002, and GDP per head fell 20% in the three years following the corralito. But that’s what Krugman;s professional advice is. Why? A hint:

Amazingly, the corralito ended up being good business for some American banks. They negotiated with their accomplices in the Argentine government to receive compensation bonds for the “missing” money, which had never really left their banks, only moving from one branch to another. These American banks made richer by the corralito have their world headquarters a few miles from Krugman’s mansion.

Krugman does not seem to have noticed that banks in Cyprus were bankrupt. The situation was exactly that defined by the word: bankrupt. The banks were ruptured. They had to close. They closed for 12 days.

Why, how did the banks reopen on March 28, 2013, on the same day Krugman wrote the note above? Obviously, Krugman does not know. He shows no inkling that he knows, or understand, what happens. In Krugman’s mind, Europe is only a malevolent force.

Banks reopened in Cyprus, because the European Central Bank sent to Cyprus huge shipping containers full of Euro bank notes. That was ONE point of remaining on the Euro: having a currency. Krugman cannot know this, because he sees no point at being on the euro, that’s his metaprinciple, his fundamental emotion that rules over all his logic and data gathering.

Curiously, Krugman seems to be unaware of this basic fact. That the money was shipped by the ECB. Maybe he is unaware that in a free market economy, one needs a currency?

If Cyprus switched suddenly to its own currency, Cypriot debt would explode, the worth of Cyprus would be cut by half, or more, inflation on food and fuel would reach instantaneously 50%. The catastrophe would be immense.

As other texts of Krugman reveal, the Princeton Nobel Laureate is only aware of the first fact, the debt explosion thing, and it thoroughly confuses him. The other facts, which are much more important, although they are more fundamentally economic, he has no idea of, nor does he seem to care.

Krugman does not seem to realize that one can default on debt, but not on fuel, and, one cannot, a fortiori, default on food!

Krugman wants Cyprus to be like Argentina, but does not realize Cyprus imports French wheat, whereas Argentina’s economy turned around after 2002, greatly thanks to massive exportation of extremely expensive soybean to the People’s Republic of China. Details, details untended, and before you know it, the devil is attendance. Argentina is not only completely self sufficient on food, but it’s one of the world’s greatest agricultural exporter. Cyprus is not self sufficient in any of the economics fundamentals, by a long shot.

I will follow quickly with an in depth essay to justify what I just wrote, in more excruciating details, and explore why it is that Krugman has… What, gone crazy? Or is it simply ugly American imperialism, Wall Street style, at its best? Is it simply because, bottom line, Krugman lives richly off a system that has Wall Street as its skeletton?

A system of imperialism and exploitation, so thorough that it pervades the heart, so much so, that the mind goes crazy?

***

Patrice Ayme

***

Note 1: Is Argentina doing well now? Officially, Argentina has now 10% inflation (but non-governmental evaluations puts it at 25%). The evidence that Argentina is not doing well economically extends to the mental. Argentina is deeply disturbed. So deeply disturbed that it does not mind to flaunt its threatening obsession by islands initially settled by the French (“Malouines” from Saint Malo), 500 kilometers away from the closest Argentinean coast.

 Paul Krugman, does not seem anymore afraid to flaunt his nationalistic obsession than Argentinean leaders are. I like and approve many of the economic policies of president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. But one has to understand she had to put them in place after generations of mismanagement in Argentina. To have similar policies in Europe could only be the consequence of disasters that have not happened. And will not, because the economic disasters in Argentina were the product of dictatorship. And also of the influence of the Chicago Boys. Are the Princeton Boys any better?

Note 2: There was actually a campaign out there, probably orchestrated by the likes of Goldman-Sacks, complete with doctored graphs, that present ”Krugman’s” ideas above.  See the article in “Capital.gr” in 2011. Shall we see Krugman as part of this campaign? Tell us it’s not true, Paul…

Raid Treasure Islands, Finally?

Abstract: The plutocrats, plutophiles, and hired guns who dominate the planet have brought a Greater Depression. A punier crisis in the 1930s brought political fascism all over. To avoid a repeat, representative democracies need heavy corrective measures, now. Here is the latest outrage.

Cyprus has invested many times its GDP. In Russia alone. Year after year, for years. Cyprus is a money laundering scheme. One of the many pirate islands around the planet, whose main enterprise is organized crime. Initial violent reactions in Moscow from president Putin and his prime minister Medvedev show that they were party to this conspiracy.

That set-up allowed plutocratic mobsters to buy more and more of Russia. It has also enabled them to purchase a large part of the West. Criminal money, satanic minds, all over, what could go wrong?
Enough has been seen, it’s time to use force.

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Pompeius: Magnus Accomplice to Pirates?

ROME, OR WHY ONE SHOULD KILL PIRACY, NOT PAY IT OFF:

In the late Roman republic, the seas came to be paralyzed by piracy. Roman politicians, busy at each others’ throats, had overlooked the growth of pirate havens. Pirates owned ports, cities, countries. The situation became untenable; international trade was coming to a stop, and Rome depended upon grain from overseas. Pirates were hanging just outside of Rome, Corsica was full of corsairs, very naturally, even a young Julius Caesar was kidnapped against ransom.

Finally the Roman Senate gave full power to a young Gnaeus Pompeius. After a winter preparation, Pompeius sent 13 legates all over. Cicero was enthusiastic: “Pompey made his preparations for the war at the end of the winter, entered upon it at the commencement of spring, and finished it in the middle of the summer.”

Some say that it took just 40 days for Pompeius to re-establish  freedom of navigation. Yet, years later Cicero knew better. He bitterly criticized Pompeius’ work: “we give immunity to pirates and make our allies pay tribute.”

Sounds familiar? If Cicero’s charge is true, it explains a lot of the further deterioration of the Republic. Two reasons to believe it’s true: 1) No anti-plutocratic measure was taken in Rome at this stage.

2) This is exactly what we have been doing since 2008: exacting tribute from the citizens, and paying the pirates. “Quantitative Easing”, that is money given to the very banksters who caused the 2008 crisis was tribute paid by the citizenry, while immunity was given to financial pirates.

The grossest of the gross will claim that we have nothing to learn from Rome. But Rome had a republic, a pretty direct democracy functioning for more than 4 centuries, and that’s still the world’s record in duration. How did the Roman pull that trick?

The Roman republic lived for more than 4 centuries with an explicit limit on the wealth that could be acquired by any given family. It is precisely attempts to break down inchoating plutocracy by application of an existing law enforcing that limit, which brought the civil war that the Gracchi brothers lost. By then the plutocrats had private armies, and they used them to kill the Gracchi and thousands of their supporters.

Conclusion: Crack down on plutocracy, before it cracks you.

So what happened to Rome? Plutocracy kept on going, until by the Late Second Century it devoured the ability to destroy foreign enemies, and then devoured the state. In the Third Century, plutocracy devoured the socio-economy until the military rebuilt society in its image. In the Fourth Century, plutocracy merged with theocracy, and devoured philosophy and the brains. By 400, plutocracy devoured the army itself. The Franks were put in charge of the defense of the North-West corner of the empire.

Next Roman state was replaced by the Frankish state, which was very lean, and Frankish law came to rule. Frankish law enforced equal inheritance in (large) families, and leaders were elected. Plutocracy did not die, but became a shadow of its former self, all the more as brains were re-established under the guise of a church ruled by a secular state, that ordered it to teach secular.

Clearly the Gini Index of the Imperium Francorum and the Renovatio Imperium Romanorum that followed was much lower than that of the Roman empire. Only then could civilization be re-launched. Because there was money to finance progress. Again.

Conclusion: plutocracy is a malignancy, it has to be eliminated ASAP, should one want civilization to go up, instead of down. (And of course nowadays we need more civilization than ever, as the old civilization we enjoyed is running out of resources. Same as what happened to Rome, just way worse, and on a planetary scale.)

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MOOD ABOUT PLUTO CHANGING IN EUROPE:

Injecting 85 billion dollars a month, as USA central bank chief Bernanke announced he was doing, is not enough (although that’s injecting 7% of GDP a year in printed money!). Rats have to be removed from power, prosecuted, fiscal havens have to be exploded, and tax cheat global corporations have to be forced to pay tax where they make sales. Earth’s problem is bigger than just banksters, and oil men.

Such was the hope Obama surfed, before he spent four years flashing his mesmerizing, mile wide, dazzling smile-to-seduce-the-world. And nothing happened.

Fortunately there are inkling that the mood is changing.

The  evidence is coming from Franco-Britannia, the EU, the Eurogroup. Suddenly, laws are passed: Financial Transaction Tax, limiting banksters’ bonuses. Taxing tax eschewing corporations is considered. The latest: telling Russian plutocratic mobsters that they have to pay tax, if they want to go on pumping dirty money through Cyprus.

This turn of civilization against plutocracy, to save itself is slow going. Indeed, the leaders of the West profit of a system rigged by plutocracy. Those elected politicians, supposedly servants of the People, live like kings, in the service of their plutocratic masters. Putting a few in jail, as justice is trying to do in France, may help.

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REVOLUTION BREWING IN FRANCE:

First the good news: the plutophile who was French president a year ago, has been indicted (“mis en examen“). Justice believes there is enough evidence that Sarkozy was “abusing” an old lady, to put him under “examination”. One cannot make that good stuff up: elder abuse is next to Pluto, second only to pedophilia. Meanwhile many prominent politicians are on trial for  what they did in Iraq. French politicians, of course.

Amazingly, the abuser of the elderly, Sarkozy his name, married to a Franco-Italian billionairess, cost French taxpayers 2 million euros a year. The rich is never rich enough, in the mind of the established order of things. The suspected criminal prepares his defense from a 300 square meter office, next to the Élysée! ($250,000 a year in rent, paid by French taxpayers.)

Top Americans politicians cannot be suspected of any wrongdoing; they prey next to god, as they emphasize all the time, and never go on trial (except for the son of Jesse Jackson). Does not matter if they chew down the Fourth Geneva convention for breakfast. In fact Sarkozy is hounded for practices that are perfectly legal in the USA. 

Sarkozy had to hide in the dark, and persuade an old lady it was perfectly OK to give him money. While he was doing what Obama does one thousand times more, just in one day, and while Obama does it for a thousand days, as he buys himself a presidency.

Americans have stricly no problems when they see their president sleeping in a plutocrat’s bed. And if the president sleep in 100 plutocrats’ beds, it’s one hundred times better. Well, in France, it’s illegal, and it’s elder abuse to make the richest lady in Europe believe she is suddenly in Palo Alto, or something, and American law has superseded French law.   

Ex USA presidents cost USA taxpayers at least 4 million dollars a year (without counting their health care cost, and regalian security cost for them and their relatives). Obviously they deserve it: they all are extremely rich multimillionaires, and the richest get subsidies, so that low lives can dream even more.

Meanwhile in Spain more and more people are imitating the king, his family and the PM: they are living outside of the law. In the region of Andalusia, unemployment is at 35%. Low lives have started to seize government property, and cultivate food to survive. I guess austerity has met ingenuity.

French President Francois Hollande confided that “the unthinkable is now becoming possible, in France and many other countries, I know what I want to do, the problem is I do not have much time to succeed”.  By “unthinkable” he means the return of fascism.

Some may scoff: “who cares about France?” But France is the brainy spider in the middle of the European web. The decider on Cyprus was clearly the French finance minister Moscovici (in full accord with his wheelchair bound German colleague). Interestingly, France is also of one mind with Britain, and not just about Mali… But about taxes!

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FRANCE & BRITAIN ASK OECD TO FIND WAYS TO TAX GLOBAL PLUTOS:

It is clear that France and Britain have had enough with mobsters (aka tax cheats). The governments there are on opposite ends of the political spectrum, that makes their alliance all the stronger. Alliance? Were not they trying to eviscerate each others’ budgets recently?

Conservative PM Cameron has realized that austerity alone does not work (as many have pointed to him with relish). British GDP numbers are worse than in the 1930s “Great Depression”. To relaunch the economy, Cameron reduced top tax margin from 505 down to 45%. Yet, Cameron is running a terrible deficit, he has to increase revenue.

Can taxes be augmented in France? The newly elected Socialist French government knows it has taxes as high as they can get without having the Sans Culottes take over. Indeed the Constitutional Court barred the proposed 75% proposed top tax margin rate (throwing the law out, although it had passed!). Then the Council of State followed on March 21 2013 by declaring that the top rate ought to be no more than 66%.

(The USA has neither a Constitutional Court, nor a Council of State, but it has a Supreme Court that plays with the constitution, when plutocracy is at bay, contrarily to, well, the constitution…)

So both the French and British government discovered the only solution: get those who pay no taxes to contribute, by force.

There are two main types of those: 1) multinational plutocrats, 2) multinational corporations.

So Mr. Osborne, the UK finance minister and his French colleague, Mr. Moscovici, sent a check to the OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, based, in Paris, France). They asked this economic organization of the 34 most developed countries to find out how to tax multinational corporations.

there for a decade or so, The head a OECD an ex Mexican finance minister, Mr. Gurria partly educated in the USA at Harvard. On Saint Patrick day, march 17, 2013, he flatly declared on Tele5Monde (French speaking world TV): “les multinationales ne paient pas d’impots” (“multinationals do not pay taxes”).  And he added in no uncertain manner that this had got to change. He is very happy with the Franco-British checks. And

So even Osborn is determined to tax an entire category of international plutocrats and corruptocrats. Gurria insisted that it was Osborne the Conservative, and not Moscovici the Socialist, who launched the initiative.

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MAKING AN EXAMPLE OF PLUTOCRAT ASSAD:

For me, plutocracy is, first of all, the rule of the Dark Side without any overwhelming justification from the Light Side.

This being said, Assad’s family is filthy rich in the traditional sense, having stolen We The People more than quite a bit. His shop-alcoholic wife used to support London’s luxury stores, and now she has fled to Moscow, one of Assad’s cornucopian source of weapons (the other being Iran, thanks to Iraq). She and Putin can commiserate of the fate of their funds in Cyprus, I guess.

To make their meaning clear, that the days of arrogant plutocracy are numbered, France and Britain announced they will ship soon to Syrian rebels absolutely lethal French and, or, American anti-aircraft missiles. The Americans do not even have to agree, because the French Mistral are even faster and more deadly than the American Stingers.

The essence of the matter is to make revolutionary secular forces win the war, because otherwise Russian inspired, or Salafist inspired, plutocrats will surely win, and establish their terror, strong as they will be after killing a million or so. Not intervening in the Spanish Civil War had been the fundamental mistake of France, Britain, and the USA in 1936… OK, intruth American plutocrats were fully on the fascist side (with fuel, ammunition, weapons, and Texas oil). At least, this time, those three are no as inert… 
***

CYPRUS ULTIMATUM:

Cyprus’ banks invested heavily in Greece, while paying, year after year, interest rates between 5% and 9%, for years. Cyprus’ banks need immediately 17 billion Euros to keep on operating.

The Eurogroup (mostly the finance ministers of France and Germany) agreed to give ten billions, if Cyprus found the rest. As the Greek church is part of the state there, it could easily sell part of itself, and find the money. Another solution is to tax plutocrats. There are 8,000 (mostly Russian) plutocrats in (nominal) residence in Cyprus.

The European Union gave a banking ultimatum to Cyprus. I saw that one coming. Cypriots had a good run. Money from their tax haven. Hush money. Who protects the tax haven from, say, Turkey? Franco-British military force. Do Cypriots pay for the Franco-British military establishment? Now they will.  

Moscovici agreed to lift the limit of reimbursement to 100,000 euros. (I don’t see why, as those accounts made huge money in the last few years!) That means the Plutos will be taxed at an even higher rate. 25% has been suggested.

There can be NO run on the banks, as all accounts have been blocked in Cyprus. Even the smallest ones. Plutocrats are given a choice: be taxed, or go bankrupt.They can’t even escape, because of capital controls. The days of Cyprus as a tax haven are over. Let all other tax havens join them at the bottom of the sea.

The problem with plutocracy is not just the plutocrats themselves, and the institutions that serves them. It’s also the general mentality that crimes pays, and the more criminal, the more paid one is.

That psycho mechanism, that crimes pays best, has to be broken at some point, and the point is now. Otherwise one would down in the sort of catastrophe that affected Germany. Nietzsche screamed in writing, by the 1880s, that Germany’s mood was turning from ugly, to criminal, and even mass criminal. Nietzsche even explicitly accused Kant. Indeed, Eichmann in Jerusalem, tried for the assassination of more than one million people, brandished Kant’s moral system as his justification.

Nietzsche was not listened to by Very Serious Germans. Why? Because Germany was a successful, run-away plutocracy, ever more fascist to fight the socialists. When Bismarck, no shrinking violet, nor fanatical socialist, finally understood a monster was born under his loins, he was thrown out, and Nietzsche’s prophecy, the destruction of Europe by Germany, proceeded.

We now have the same situation, on a world scale.

Plutocracy, fascism and depletion of resources (including climate) are all entangled. if we did like the Romans, and let our civilization go down, we would not have, like the Romans, a plan B. For the Romans, plan B, as it turned out, was the Imperium Francorum. 

What is therefore needed, immediately, is to traumatize plutocracy. In all sorts of ways. Exploding the island tax havens is a good start.

It’s a new paradigm. Common financial commentators in the USA whine to high heavens that trust has been breached, never to be seen again. Quite the opposite, a new trust has been established. It’s all about trust. Put your money in a tax haven, TRUST the European Union to tax it.

Spare nought. Cyprus today, Monaco tomorrow.

Even Monaco Has Got To Go

Of course, it’s traumatic. Voltaire gave a moral order:”Il faut ecraser l’infame!” (“One ought to crush infamy“) Traumatizing infamy comes before crushing it thoroughly. What else?

So it’s very simple: give an ultimatum to every single tax haven. The truth about these havens is that they are a modern form of piracy. Their relationship to the West is even more abusive than that of Rome’s pirates to Rome. Indeed, they are just another face, another interface, of Western plutocracy with the the weak it’s abusing.

The exact charge against Sarkozy is “abus de faiblesse” (“abuse of weakness”). It’s highly symbolic

In the case of Cyprus, it can submit, or be kicked outside of the Eurozone, to join the fishes at the bottom of the sea. Against the Russian mafia, a greater force has to be employed, and examples made. After years of tremendous interest rates, Cyprus’ parliament has stupidly decided to be greedy in the line of fire. Excellent.

***

Patrice Ayme

Lincoln, CO2, Oblabla, etc.

REALITY HAS AN ANTI-AMERICAN BIAS:
I don’t know much about Lincoln or the Secession War. Although I confess that I certainly know more that American college graduates. While I admit that this is nothing glorious, it’s enough to say plenty, in a grand American tradition of knowing it all, that I will denigrate, later in this essay.

Propelled by the momentum acquired by watching the excellent “Django Unchained”, I went on with doing my duty, and watching “Lincoln”. This movie frenzy started with “Life of Pi” watched with my three year old daughter. She is familiar with natural food procurement processes unfolding in nature documentaries. So she did not mind that the tiger killed the hyena. What scared her more were the waves, a healthy fear to have.

No Dark Side, No Humanity. A Paradox.

I heard that Obama liked the “Life of Pi”, while he did not like as much the Spielberg movie, “Lincoln”. I could guess why: “Lincoln” the movie had got to be boring for those not anxious to boast that they are intellectually inclined. The movies reminded me of a shallow version of one of my own essays, spread over three hours.

The movie depicts the last 4 months or so in Lincoln’s life. The Confederacy is running out of steam and men. The Civil War is finishing, but the mass dying on the battlefields is in no way abating. A butchery without compare in the history of the West. Lincoln is trying to use the momentum of his re-election and battlefield victories to abolish slavery. (As it was, slavery was finally outlawed after Lincoln’s assassination, in December 1865.)

Contemporary citizens of the USA can only find that picture uncomfortable. Is that all what the great USA was about? Buying people? what sort of city on the hill was that? what sort of example for humanity? And it was a scandal not being able to buy people anymore? Was slavery the greatest cause worth dying for?

The movies is thus somewhat anti-American, as it shows too much reality, the incredible trash that political life was in the USA at the time. OK, sorry about discriminating against that particular period. it’s still trashy today, one could even say trashier than ever. After all, courtesans in Washington are trying to kill the planet.

I saw a picture of Obama shooting a gun today (OK, that was an appropriate gun, so gigantic it was not conducive to mass shooting). Apparently to show he still loved guns, in spite of all the little children dying, pierced with bullets. Is this was the presidential moral fiber has come down to? Salute the shooting of the children by the shooting of the guns? Should have Lincoln tried to seduce his opposition too? Will I have dreams of Lincoln passing by, pulled by with powerful black men chained to his chariot, he whips softly?

If Obama had been in the White House instead of Lincoln, in 1865, would he have had photographers immortalize him, whipping up a slave, to show to the slave lobby that he, Obama loved slaves too?

Obama could point out that gun totting Americans shooting down gun totting Americans is not as big a problem as Americans buying Americans. Right. Especially in Washington: is it not the essence of the place?

However Americans shooting down their own families (according to statistics, that’s the most marking activities of those with guns) is only a psychological hook: something very small, very hard, with lots of consequences.

If Americans are obsessive about shooting other Americans, should we be surprised that they don’t mind thinking exactly what they masters told them to think, and shooting the biosphere down too? Something about the rage inside rather that the speech outside. A complementary principle. obama is often too subtle by half, and gets played instead of being the one playing.

Strictly from statistics, the USA is the only developed country where most of the war dead happened during a Civil War (the losses were close to one million, the latest scholarship shows: about 3% of the population).

***

HIS DARK SIDE WAS BIGGER THAN YOURS:
“Lincoln” the movies, shows that Lincoln, the president, had to buy his way out of slavery. Lincoln used whatever it took. Big difference with the not-doing-anything-much president.

Obama and his plutocratic demoncratic Congress (yes: demon-cratic) did not put much pressure on banks, health providers and corporations. According to Obama, these problems do not compare with slavery.

But Obama is wrong. Slavery was a joke. A very very very bad joke, but still a joke. They might as well have sold human meat at the market. Actually that’s what they did. But it went against the flow of civilization. The Romans themselves would have been shocked by American racism. American slavery was that weird. That full of hatred and greed.

The problem with the present atmospheric crisis is that it is doing judo with civilization; it’s using the very momentum of civilization, to trip it. The present crisis goes with the flow, and was never seen before.

The worst scandal being the USA-led total absence of any serious efforts to stop the climate catastrophe.

In all these things Obama did not exert presidential powers, contrarily to what many of his predecessors did, and Lincoln did, first of all. Obama was opposed within his own party on cap and trade, and, instead of threatening to destroy his opponents, small hurtful piece by small hurtful piece, he made clear he did not want to fight.

A commander in chief who can’t fight? A commander in chief who thinks it is wiser to not engage in battle? What a bizarre notion. It’s the symptom of someone who did not read the job’s description.

I suspect that Obama, who tries to ride Lincoln as he were a horse, has reason to feel diminished by the 16th president. Obama goes around writing on official documents, that he is black. And Obama went all out to kill Bin Laden. And Obama went all too much out ordering extrajudicial killings and drone madness. True. But all this is Mickey Mouse style Dark Side.

The real, the glorious Dark Side is about shock and awe, not popularity, but fear, and justice. The real Dark Side, the useful Dark Side, the honorable Dark Side, is about doing what is necessary for the highest moral purposes. All has, always will be.

Obama’s Mickey Mouse Dark Side is a smokescreen that should not fool those who are real tough. When he had to be really tough with financiers, corporations, the fossil fuel lobbies, gun lobby, military (Afghanistan), and the for profit health care lobby Obama just meowed, and purred.

In other words, when Obama had to be real tough to the modern slave masters, he just folded. Lincoln did not fold. That’s why he has a big statue in Washington standing in a silent judgment on those of his successors who just aspire to free rent, girls, bodyguards, and lots of money, a la Bill Clinton, the president of the Degenerate State of America.

(Or Utterly Stupid America? It’s Clinton and his minions who empowered financiers, by diverting most money creation towards financial derivatives, and the likes of Enron. To this day, the fact that the Demoncratic Party is full of Romneys escapes the little minds.)

Lincoln had to use the Dark Side, for the triumph of goodness, big time, because George Washington had not had the moral courage to do his job. Lincoln went, well, all out. This is mentioned in the movies during an exchange Lincoln has with the commander of the US Army Ulysses Grant (himself president later).
***

SLAVERY IS NOT EASY TO QUIT:
Lincoln, as president, using his considerable war powers, had made an Emancipation Declaration, January 1, 1863. It freed the slaves over which the Union had no power (!)

The Emancipation was not a law passed by Congress. But by Lincoln’s personal “war powers” as a modern Caesar.

Caesar himself indeed used similar war powers during the Roman civil war, as Consul, and, or, elected Dictator; that’s where this is all coming from, through the Franks, and, in particular, through Consul Clovis who had to knock some sense in his Franks, that, from now on, the fascist Roman model of war would rule (incident of the Vase de Soisson!).

As Lincoln explains in the movie, that Emancipation Declaration was full of contradiction, because it recognized slaves as property confiscated from the enemy. Except Lincoln did not want to recognize the South’s rebels as enemy, as that would recognize them as an independent nation. Nor did Lincoln want to recognize slaves as property, because, when the war was over, logically the owners would be able to recover their property.

So Lincoln wanted to pass the 13th Amendment to the Constitution of the USA, which recognized explicitly that people could not be owned, or forced to work, except if they had been convicted of a crime through due process. In other words, no more slavery.

Some claimed that the amendment would entice the Confederacy to fight to the bitter end. But that was nothing the military could not fix. The bitter end was at hand, thanks to Sherman’s March to the Sea. The best way to handle terrorists is to destroy them, as president Hollande pointed out, in connection with Mali.

The various quandaries encountered in abrogating slavery were nothing new. Bathilde, an English slave, escaped an abusive plutocrat, who had her recaptured. But she caught the eye of the Prince, who bought her, freed her, married her, and engrossed her. Then he became king and promptly died.

The Franks, as all Germans, had arisen, long ago as independent farmers, and hated slavery. However they encountered Greco-Roman civilization, more advanced in many ways, but also pervaded by fascism, slavery and militarism. The Germans learned from their Roman masters, but both their implementation of fascism and slavery was unenthusiastic. However the Gallo-Roman aristocracy had become entangled with the Christian Church, who claimed to be very good, although Christ never said (supposing he really said anything at all), against slavery.

But there it was, a queen of the Franks, who had been a rebellious slave, a few years before. Her government and the regency council agreed to do away with slavery. But Bathilde had it less easy than Lincoln: there was no civil war with enslaving rebels. Bathilde’s government could not just expropriate bishops. Bishops, being scions of the plutocracy, had often armies of slaves.

So Bathilde had to be subtle. She outlawed SLAVE TRADING within the Merovingian empire. That was as good as outlawing the slave trade outright. That was in 658 CE.
This prohibition was later extended to the even more gigantic Carolingian empire that surfaced within a generation. (That Venice made lots of money trading non Frankish slaves with the Islamists is irrelevant, except in that it created a conceptual pattern that would allow to authorize slavery in the colonies.)

Fast forward 1207 years, it’s 1865, and the USA, institutionally, militarily and historically a Franco-British colony, is trying to finally outlaw slavery, as Lafayette had urged relentlessly his good friend George Washington to do. Lafayette was a French military man, and he knew all too well what a monstrosity slavery was.

All over Europe, but for the vast areas controlled by the Muslim Turks, and the wilds of Russia, thanks to Bathilde, slavery was unlawful.

Lafayette entreaties were unsuccessful. Washington congratulated his friend about his humanity, but obstinately refused to do anything positive. Jefferson (3rd president and a babble box) was pretty much the same.

Arrives Lincoln. Lincoln, you see, is courageous. Instead of going around with armies of bodyguards, he goes around pretty much unprotected.
President Hollande made a visite éclaire to Timbuktu, 5 days after the sacred city fell to the French Guerre Éclaire. (Contrarily to Anglo-Saxon-Wall Street French bashing legend, it’s French generals who invented the concept of Blitzkrieg, and cleverly published it, in 1932, teaching Nazis something!).

Hollande’s visit was courageous. So did Lincoln’s 15 battlefield visits during the Civil War, oceans of bodies still writhing on the ground, a general holding a pistol cocked up, just behind him, lest one of the Confederate soldiers was not completely dead.

Armies of bodyguards is no new trick. One of Caesar’s generals used to always go around with such an army, Caesar contemptfully observed in his memoirs. The fact that the underling survived (with wounds) an assassination attempt, did not impress Caesar very much.

Caesar himself refused even the accompaniment of Marc Anthony, a superlative special force brute, to go to the Senate, although he had been warned of an assassination plot that day. What was Caesar’s point? Well, he did not run a dictatorship, he governed with the approbation of the Populus (funny for someone who had made himself “dictator for life”, but the word “dictator” became pejorative only after Caesar’s assassination!). In the Senate, pierced by dozens of knife wounds, Caesar found out that he did not govern with the assent of the plutocrats.

Lincoln did not run a dictatorship, either. He wanted to make that very clear. At the battle of Appomatox, the army of the chief of the Confederate Army, Lee was surrounded on three sides. After 700 casualties, Lee surrendered. 29,000 Confederate soldiers were paroled. Lincoln wanted, and had ordered, generalized forgiveness.

Caesar and Lincoln died, when they were still on the verge of attempting great things (Caesar by putting an end to the Persian-German problem in one stroke, Abraham Lincoln by freeing colored people from all those other chains that still held them, such as no right to vote, or no right to marry out of their “race”, etc.)
***

THOSE WHO DON’T KNOW SHOULD LEARN, INSTEAD OF BARKING OUT ORDERS:
Are there lessons, within Lincoln wondrous adventure, to be drawn for the world today?

Something striking about the USA, is the tendency to give lessons to everybody, as if the USA invented civilization. Now, OK, slavery was still lawful in Turkey in 1865. But there was no slavery in most states, worldwide. In 1865. The USA was a glaring exception. Can one be that primitive, and still give lessons about how to live, as the USA does to the planet, year after year? Yes, sure, Jihadists do that every day.

What is striking, in the politics of the USA is the absence of towering intellectual figures dominating the debate. No Montaigne, no Montesquieu, no Voltaire, there. Instead, mongrels are disputing in front an electorate of the gullible what god wanted, while filling up their pockets.
In Antiquity, even a fascist philosopher such as Aristotle had to make excuses to justify slavery. He knew he had to. That was from a tiny city, Athens. In the gigantic USA of 1865, no philosopher dominates the landscape, except, well, for the philosopher president, Lincoln himself. A philosopher among mice is still a philosopher, I guess.

Aristotle whined they, his kind, the slave masters, had no machines, so they needed slaves. However that means Aristotle had the concept of machine. Aristotle knew that there were machines… The Greeks had just made no effort to develop them, and the Romans were going to become even more lazy.

Because there were machines: slavery just looked more convenient, thus machines were not deployed.
***

IT’S WORSE TO ENSLAVE THE PLANET THAN TO ENSLAVE MAN:
Just like now. But now is worse. Combining the oxygen we breathe with 450 million years of poisonous, flammable rocks and rotten fluids, looks more convenient to the monsters who lead us to oblivion, than deploying the new energy sources we have at the ready. While there is still time.

Slavery was convenient, until Bathilde outlawed it. Then there was no choice. The machines that had been waiting in the wings were deployed., and animals were bioengineered. It took Papin 1,000 years more to introduce a perfectly functioning steam boat, but Papin’s steam engine was the logical evolution of centuries of metal works and engineering. The Cathedrals could be constructed only because of hydraulic hammers, to bend the enormous steel girders.

In another gloomy perspective Dr. Chu, the Energy Secretary a Nobel Prize winner in physics resigned. Under Chu a form of Cobertism was practiced: encouraging some industries by direct financing, That’s one pillar, but, to make something a stable sustainable switch, two more pillars were needed: making fossil fuels pay for their true cost (in other words a carbon tax, thus making better energy sustainable), and massive fundamental research.
Quoting Michelangelo, Chu said: “‘The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark.’”
President Washington obstinately refused to see that slavery was a mortal moral danger. He had set his mark too low. Similarly, when Obama, as the biosphere faces the worst crisis in 65 million years, informs us that problems in the USA are not as severe as in Lincoln’s times, he sets his eyes too low, somewhere by his feet.
Chu pointed out that burning fossils and their gases is economically viable in some sense: “Our ability to find and extract fossil fuels continues to improve, and economically recoverable reser-voirs around the world are likely to keep pace with the rising demand for decades. As the saying goes, the Stone Age did not end because we ran out of stones; we transitioned to better solutions.”
Our ability to find and kill innocent victims continues to improve, too. But that does not mean we should do it. The Slave Age in the USA did not end because it ran out of slaves, but because a better solution was imposed onto the slave masters, by force. Lincoln was force. Slavery was outlawed.

Combining all our oxygen with fossilized carbon should also be outlawed. An Emancipation Declaration of oxygen, using war powers, should be made.

Chu used the old tried and true: “There is an ancient Native American saying: “We do not inherit the land from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.” A few short decades later, we don’t want our children to ask, “What were our parents thinking? Didn’t they care about us?””

The Natives did not inherit the air from their ancestors, either. Air is the fundamental human right, a right that cannot be let to expire for a minute.

So it’s not just about the poorest and the unborn. There is much more than that. It’s about us, too. Why did Lincoln destroy slavery? Lincoln destroyed slavery, not because he was “black”, and not to save his children (one of his sons died in the unCivil War).

No, much more simply, Lincoln destroyed slavery because Lincoln was a good man and he found slavery abhorrent.

Show me what you hate, and I will tell you how good you are.

It’s worse to enslave the planet than to enslave man. Make a note of it. Too bad there is no Lincoln around today to save the planet, but only the greedy to lead the needy.
***
Patrice Ayme

USA Attack Against Afghanistan

[A little reminder!]
ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI, PRESIDENT CARTER’S NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER, CAUSED WAR IN AFGHANISTAN
National fables can be the ultimate weapons of mass destruction. One such fable is that the USA was attacked on 9/11 by forces it had nothing to do with.

The conflict in Afghanistan killed three millions Afghans, while wounding and displacing much more civilians than that. This conflict was instigated by the USA’s CIA, through its agents in Pakistan instrumentalizing Islam. The conflict took a worse turn when the White House of demonocrat President Jimmie The Very Pious Carter put its full weight behind it:

The following interview of Brzezinski in Le Nouvel Observateur, Paris, 15-21 January 1998, was never published in the USA:

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!
***

Thus the USA did attack the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. The CIA and its Saudi equivalent got the good idea of recruiting a god crazy scion of Saudi Arabia’s second plutocratic family, Bin Laden. It was a good choice: Bin Laden was also an engineer and a manager, he quickly organized a powerful army of fanatics well financed by friendly plutocrats. The CIA suggested to attack soft targets, such as schools, and the tactic was highly effective.

After 2001, the USA installed in Afghanistan a theocracy (as a holy book is the basis of its constitution).
Theocracy comes naturally to the USA. On January 21 a benediction was given on the steps of the capitol as part of Obama’s election. In a discourse that the worst of the Taliban no doubt applauded, Rev. Luis Leon informed us that “without the blessing of god” we would be abominable monsters. It was fascinating to see the leadership of the USA bowing to the Reverend’s horrible declarations.

The situation in the Republique du Mali is completely different: it’s a secular state which called the United Nations to intervene, and the UNSC agreed, unanimously. The French Republic is just implementing that resolution.
***
Patrice Ayme
***
For seeing the war of the USA against Afghanistan in a wider context; http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2010/09/17/obama-commemorates-911-his-way/

Obama Unchained?

Abstract: Kneading a violent, but, sadly, factual movie of Tarantino with Obama in an explosive conceptual mixture…

Quentin Tarantino, in his best movie so far, explores how slavery worked in the USA. It exposes slavery as not just a grotesque paradigm of plutocracy, but also its essence.

The violence of slavery in the South was deliberately engineered to appear as insane and as terrorizing as possible. There was a deep reason for the apparent insanity. Insanity sometimes has its reasons that reasonable reason can’t reach.

(The reason for this is synonymous to the incompleteness theorems of metamathematics: the space of all reasons is bent, just as the cosmological universe is, and has an event horizon, for closely apparented…reasons.)

Crushing Infamy Wisdom Makes

Insane violence, just as in Mali, where terrorists have destroyed hundreds of mosques (!) named to the collective patrimony of humanity by the United Nations, destroyed extremely old books, cut feet, hands, raping children [witnesses say], making “battlefield brides” from 10 year old girls, recruited 12 year old boys as soldiers, etc. And for the same… reason.

Confronted to such a degree of maniac violence, reasonable people tend to, well, reasonably submit, as the terrorists hoped, to start with. So criminal madness, made to look as mad as could be, is the force multiplier of ultimate oppression. A secondary enabler, in the particular case of the American South, was the American justice system, which pretty much rested on arbitrariness and ultra-violence, in an uneasy balance of evil with outlaws and slave masters.

Tarantino shows that the only way to advance out of the deepest infamy is to explode compromises, not to say compromission. President Lincoln was forced to draw the same conclusion.

The case of American slavery reached grotesque violence. Even greater, but righteous, violence was the only way to deal with it. This is the lesson of history. (The Civil War killed nearly a million, about 3% of the population.)

In Mali overrun by satanic terrorists, negotiating with those fanatics who value no life, not even their own, means to reconquer the country, using maximum force. Nothing short of this will do. Wisdom means using maximum force against those using maximum evil.

President Hollande said:”On me demande quoi faire avec les terroristes.[Short pause, as if the question was eerie]
Bien, LES DETRUIRE!” [Looking around bewildered, as if he could not believe he was asked to profer such an evidence.] (“I am asked what to do with the terrorists? Well, DESTROY THEM!”)

Destruction is how to deal with evil. Nothing else will do. Waiting too long with DESTROYING Hitler and his Nazis, just made it worse. And so it is always, with any genuine evil. the fact pacifists refuses to understand this makes them into evil collaborators, cowardly, but, even more fundamentally, plain lazy. Too lazy for brainwork.

Half of the word “plutocracy” is made of “evil”, let me insist to those who are overlooking the notion. Tarantino made a movie about plutocracy in action. That is, evil in action.

Obama, was, of course, elected to do away with plutocracy, but that aspect of his mandate long eluded him… even if it means violating his campaign promises (which were so compatible with my views in 2007-2008). (OK, now that he is on top of the crab heap, it’s much harder to do. Power does that; half of my family stopped talking to me, lest I indispose Obama, or the miserable crab heap below…)

In a tax deal, Obama just augmented taxes on salaried people, even some earning very little, but mostly eschewed taxing plutocrats & their corporations. A move in the wrong direction?

Will Obama emulate the fictional hero, Django, and unchain himself in more ways than one? The medical jury is out. The latest symptoms of Obamania are that the desire to be perceived by the masters as the only adult in the room, an infantile syndrome that Tarantino fingers extensively as fundamental to what made slavery possible, is still alive and well in Obama’s brain. Sad, oh so sad.

I advocated that for guns, Obama should open fire on the gun maniacs. He seems to be doing just this.
For the debt ceiling, what about emulating President Eisenhower, proclaim an emergency, and raise the tax on multimillionaires to 92%? There sure is a much worse emergency now.

We surely do not want that, when historians look at Obama’s reign, they just think: 1858 (explanation below). And, certainly, that’s not what Obama want, either? Time to get unchained!
***

SLAVERY WAS SYMBIOTIC WITH INSANE VIOLENCE, & THAT WAS DELIBERATE:
“Django Unchained”, is an excellent movie by Quentin Tarantino. Excellent, but mean, cruel, somewhat demented. The movie is addressing a set of facts, slavery in the USA. Mean, cruel, completely demented facts. Ingrained, set in stone. A galaxy of evil. That complete dementia enabled slavery’s nature, and nothing short of that would have done it. Tarantino is just depicting an insanity that was.

An insanity that was perfectly self sustainable. If the North had not destroyed the South, that evil was perfectly sustainable, it could have lasted 1,000 years.

We have an even worse dementia nowadays, when the leaders of the world, with their empty minds, believe that there is nothing wrong with burning 400 million years of accumulated carbon. Maybe they can personally profit, but their memories will not. Someday, no doubt, after 70% of humanity had to evacuate their homes from the rising acidic ocean, they will be viewed as the worst monsters history ever produced. Their names will live in infamy, long after Hitler’s name is forgotten.

Some have told me, in light of the primary school mass murder by a war weapon, that it was a sin to even mention such things, because, you know, they are so terrible. This exact reaction is what made Auschwitz possible: Hitler’s Germans did not want to talk about terrible things.
Web sites have even censored me for mentioning the gun problem! As if me, who has never touched a gun, was somehow culprit of atrocity by explicating, and condemning, the machinery behind the atrocity. Similarly, Tarantino is getting accused of guns and slavery, for showing both in action.

This confusion between fact and fiction irks me, and also irks Quentin Tarantino. And rightly so. Those who conflate critique and practice should get their heads examined.
The confusion between act, and practice, on one side, and fiction and analysis on the other, is how philosophers such as Sade or Nietzsche, and actually, pretty much all philosophers, have been identified with what they detected, analyzed, and condemned.

Carefully entertaining confusion between message and messenger is a tool of oppressors. The very first thing about the brain, is that the brain massages the message, while becoming a messenger of whatever it kneaded inside.

Conflating incoming data and brainwork on said data denies the very nature of the brain, and imposes crushing, self oppressing stupidity.

Back to “Django Unchained”. The movie is the occasion of making important points about civilization:

1) civilization comes and goes. The movie opens with two cow boy types mounted on horses brandishing big guns, while half dozen characters stumble between the riders, shuffling like hobbled penguins, all day long, and then deep in the freezing night of Texas. They are black slaves, their chaffed and bruised ankles, chained together. The grotesque spectacle is long depicted, as it is telling of the cruelty of slave traders. Slave traders were allowed by law over much of the USA in 1858.

2) when civilization goes, the degeneracy that follows hides below a veneer of the opposite of what it is.

The enslaving South was in the habit of fancying itself as somewhat French in taste. Masters called each others “cavaliers” (French for “riders”), and affected French manners. (A modern equivalent is Hitler, always talking about peace, and posing himself and Germany as victims; in truth the opposite of what was happening.)

As Tarantino points out, the upper society of the South did not know any French. It was offended to be reminded of this fact. Hiding behind a French veneer was how to fake civilization, when that enslaving society was just the opposite.

Under Merovingian queen Bathilde, an ex-slave, in 658 CE, slave trading had been outlawed in the gigantic Merovingian empire.

The slave trading depicted in “Django” happened exactly 1,200 years later. In other world, the upper society of the Southern USA was primitive, and offensive… By Merovingian standards!

Revealingly, I have met the same sort of character in the present day Silicon Valley. They waxed lyrical about French cheeses and wines, while flaunting their French ways, until, well, I hinted that the real thing, the real French culture, was about rationality, emotional, or not, first. Then, they hated me, without any limit, the exact effect Tarantino warns about in his movie. Over the decades, I had the dubious pleasure to experience this effect with 90% of the upper society people in the Bay Area who know where France is located.

Let me say in passing that, whereas the movie is fiction, the ambiance it describes in the enslaving South is not so. The World Socialist Website found the movie “miserable… pointless and stupid”. But, unfortunately and revealingly, that is just how it was in the USA then.

The ambiance depicted by Tarantino is a historical fact, and that is why the Secession War turned into the bloodiest civil war in the history of Western Civilization. Yes, plutocrats owned and whipped “niggers” and, to this day of today, if one has a drop of African blood, in the USA, one is black, that is “niger” in Latin. And yes, the oppressed themselves cooperate with that scheme, to this day of today, when they dutifully call themselves “niger” (“black”), when they are multiethnic, as much of humanity is.

Tarantino has no time to give a lecture on why the south fancied itself as French, precisely because it was the exact opposite of the spirit of France. But it is a historical fact that it did. However Tarantino gives an explicit pointer that this pseudo-French veneer is both fraudulent, and very important (and this pseudo French dashing incited arrogant Southern plutocrats to launch the Secession War):
The second main character in Django Unchained, a charming (and humanitarian!) bounty hunter, endowed with the power of law, points out to Mr. Candie, a plutocrat played by Leonardo DiCaprio, after seeing a black slave being torn by dogs:

“You name our main fighters after Alexandre Dumas’ characters, but Dumas would not have approved what you did today, to give a black man to dogs… You see, Dumas was black.”Candie has nothing to say to this. That Dumas, the very epitome of the Cavalier Spirit, was black would have been shattering to those who believed in racially justified slavery, had they known of the fact. And the truth is even worse: Dumas’s father, a mulatto, was one of the top general of France, and one of the most dashing “cavalier” who ever was.

3) Plutocrats of the South of the USA believed that their immense brutality and disregard for human life, including their own, would always allow themselves to dominate. This illusion was shattered with the tremendous cavalry charges of the Secession War. Top Southern generals, full of bullets, draining of their blood, kept on riding proudly as their boots filled with blood, giving orders. But, ultimately, they died. And the likes of them was never seen again.

4) Tarantino got somehow accused of the Newton primary school shooting, on the ground that Quentin depicts violence, so he is bad, and the shooting was bad. That, of course, is logic worthy of slightly unbalanced two years old, who can’t distinguish contemplation from participation.

Tarantino movies have long dialogues to expose this sort of demented, quirky two year old logic, upon which our world rests. Those who don’t like to think in depth find these dialogues deeply upsetting, because that is precisely how they think.

The great decisions to make war in Iraq and Afghanistan rested on two year old logic. And there may be hell to pay about them, because, not only were perfect defeats engineered at enormous cost, but the triumph of two year old logic was elevated for all to see. The problem with the latter, is that it can then be used by terrorists, or even other states (North Korea, China?).

Actually Pakistan, in its preceding attack against India used two year old logic for all to see. (To paraphrase: “We have nukes, so we know India will not attack us, whatever we do, so we may as well do whatever we want.”; this plutocratic logic will be unbounded, until the day comes when India prefers to risk nuclear war).

Another class of demented logic is the pseudo expertise, from complicated argument resting on imaginary data. We see a lot of this with today’s economic experts (“austerity was a panacea,” they said, until it bled the economy to death…)

In “Django Unchained”, Di Caprio makes a beautiful demonstration of demented pseudo-expertise, as he gives a lesson of phrenology. Phrenology was a 19 C pseudo science that explained the mind by looking at the geometry of skulls. There is nothing to it, it’s nearly completely false (I say nearly, because the Incas had found out that, by compressing foreheads tremendously they could create humanoid killing robots).

What DiCaprio wants to demonstrate, is that Africans are submissive and non creative. The rest of the movie is about demonstrating, with facts, the exact opposite. Django becomes immensely creative, and totally rebellious, as he proceeds to annihilate the entire estate of Mr. Candie.

It did not start this way. Initially Django is playing an Obama like character, silent, guarded, keeping to himself, somewhat motivated first by not making waves. Then he reveals himself to put justice above anything else, even his own safety (or that of his family, that is, his wife).

So is Mr. Tarantino saying that Obama could turn into somebody re-establishing justice? Is Tarantino hoping that Obama is going to turn into a real life Django? I sure hope so.

Fat chance? Obama seems still affected by playing the part of the Stephen character in “Django Unchained”. If I were president, at this point, I would drive the plutocrats crazy (French cooperation would be automatic, and other important European leaders would follow; the rest of the world could be forced into squeezing out plutocrats, or join Depardieu in Siberia, to be used as Mr. Putin’s carpet).

Yet, forcing the Plutos into submission is not what Obama is doing. He speaks as if he were, but… Obama solved the fiscal cliff by rising the taxes of people making less than 100,000 when he repelled the repel of the payroll tax. Also those with income of a few hundred thousand dollars (barely enough, say, in the Silicon Valley to buy a two bedroom house) saw their taxes augmenting by 10%.
But what of the true rich, the real plutocrats? Those who are not on salary, and can claim, through tricks, that they have no taxable income? Nada. They go on as before, using all the tricks that allow them to pay very little tax, or not at all.

I worked massively for the first Obama campaign for two years. I spent a huge amount of time and money (compensated by smiley photos with dear friend Obama).

Yet, by the time of Obama’s victory, in 2008, a pattern came in full evidence, and I wrote about it on my site, even then. The pattern was to talk one way, and act the opposite, at least in finance and economics. Thus, strangely, I have felt terrible for more than four years, as I contemplate the duplicity of the leaders, and the naivety of the masses bleating their approval of the shepherd.

So there was the fiscal cliff. It was proclaimed to be a victory of the People because taxes were raised on salaried income, and the payroll tax was cranked back up. Guess what? Plutocrats don’t have salaries and they are not on someone’s payroll.
And guess a bit more: all the tax evasion mechanisms of plutocrats and corporations were left intact.
Obama foams at the mouth about China manipulating its currency. But that’s not the problem with “China”.
“China” is just a Trojan Horse used by (mostly USA based) plutocracy.

On a $600 iphone, only ten (10) dollars go to China. But then Apple washes, cleans and rinses its giant profits through various tax havens (such as the British Virgin Islands), and the plutocrats, with various other tricks, such as borrowing instead of earning, escape taxation further. In the end, said plutocrats, now mimicking wise men, advise Obama to go on with his boy, Lew, and the USA becomes a generalized heaven for plutocrats. Thanks to havens the USA is becoming a heaven for plantation owners, satanic style.
Do you think the big donors who sat with Michelle Obama last year for the State Of The Union pay tax? No they don’t. Yet, every year they become richer, and thus more influential.

When he announced the “fiscal cliff” “compromise”, President Obama claimed that upper-income Americans would be paying their fair share. But he failed to fulfill a campaign promise to change part of the tax code that benefits some of the richest people in the country.

Some of the wealthiest Americans – such as private equity managers, hedge fund managers and venture capitalists – will continue to enjoy the tax code that allows them to avoid paying billions in taxes.
As the San Francisco Chronicle puts it:”In the Bay Area alone, employees of top money firms donated $6.7 million to federal candidates and political committees during the 2012 election cycle.
An analysis was performed for The Chronicle by MapLight, a nonprofit that analyzes the effects of money and politics… said Daniel G. Newman, president and co-founder of MapLight. “Millions in political contributions brought billions of tax breaks for some of the wealthiest people in America.”

More than four years ago, Obama promised that he would end the practice of taxing carried interest as capital gains instead of as regular income. Such a change could raise an estimated $13 billion to $20 billion over the next decade, and impact 36,000 to 65,000 people.
But Obama failed to live up to his 2008 promise, according to the nonpartisan fact-checkers at Politifact.com who recently rated it a “broken promise” of his first term.

What is even more worrisome is the would be nomination of Jack Lew as Sec. of the Treasury. Lew has an atrocious track record, as he was one of the instigators, under Clinton, of the deregulation of the financial derivatives. That diverted money creation to the exclusive profit of the bankers themselves, violating their fiduciary mission (which is to create money FOR the real economy, instead or for just themselves).
Lew is connected in a major way to worldwide plutocracy, that he served as director of wealth management at Citi. No less.

Lew got enormous bonuses, even after his bank had (just) been bailed out by the public.
Those are the people blocking the taxes (on them, plutocrats) which would alleviate the deficit. Remember that president Eisenhower, a republican, brought up the tax on millionaires to 92%. He did this, Ike said at the time, extinguish the World War Two debt. Why can’t Obama ask the hyper rich to pay 50% tax? I understand he cannot be as much of a leftist as Ike, but why not go half way?

Obama not only does not propose to do this. Not only did he augment taxes for the working stiff. But he left all the tax avoiding tricks of the plutocrats intact, those tricks that guarantee the blossoming of plutocracy at an exponential rate.
What’s the computation here?

Well, most often, plutocracy grows so fast that it overwhelms the resistance of the majority of the People, and it then rules without sharing much. This is what happened to Rome, what happened in all of Europe during the Middle Ages, etc.

In 2008, the USA voted for Obama, because it thought he would turn into Django Unchained. Instead Obama became all too friendly to the likes of Mr. Candie (Di Caprio).

Mr. Candie’s faithful servant, Stephen, is played, with great subtlety, by Samuel Johnson. Stephen has completely turned to the Dark Side, although he believes he serves good (“Candie never killed a nigger” he says, when enjoying knees shattered by Django’s bullets). Although black like charcoal, Stephen is whiter than the whites about white supremacy. Obama’s soothing words about having achieved tax fairness, just because he is taxing more salaried people reminds us of the sort of hypocrisy and non factuality with a straight face those who collaborate with the Dark Side are expert in.
One of the main property of Hades-Pluto is invisibility. A tradition pursued throughout the Middle Ages, when Satan was called “Le Malin”, “The Crafty One”. This means that the disguise of reality is fundamental to the Dark Side. Not only does it allow to mislead the innocent, but also to excuse, and enable the guilty.

We The People of the USA needed a Django in 2008. Some say we got a Stephen. Somebody who can sit in the rich back room, talking peer to peer with the plutocrat, thinking he does good by changing things as little as possible, as plutocrats get to know and appreciate him.
The Civil War started a couple of years after “Django”. The immediate reason is that the South seceded and fired on Federal forces, as any history book will say.

However why that happened has to do with a collective psychology in the South, that embraced Armageddon in an orgasm of hubris. That, in turn happened for reasons that have to do with plutocracy growing exponentially. An exponential growth of plutocracy is not just a blossom of riches and power, in ever fewer hands, but also, consequently, a blossom of madness. Plutocracy refuses their humanity to most, hence puts into question the human nature of those who undergo it.

Alexander (so called The Great) was very bold in battle. No wonder: he had adopted Oriental metaphysics. once he got hurt and blood flowed from his body. “Is that the blood of a god?” he wondered. his Greek companions laughed. No wonder Alexander became ever closer to the Persian (ex-)Royal family.
It is not just because excess makes mad, that plutocracy makes people mad. But the crazier the plutocracy, the crazier the justifications for it to keep on rolling up. If one is Stalin, and one kills millions of peasants, a lot of comrades and generals, one may as well keep on going, lest a new opposition gets empower, and that’s also why Mao got ever crazier. The “100 Flowers” were followed by the even nuttier “Cultural Revolution” the latter allowed to get rid of the opposition the former had created.

As readers can see I take seriously my general definition of “plutocracy”: a leader fond of the Dark Side is a plutocrat, and that goes all the way down to Mr. Candie and all his attendants and family. That’s why Django shoots Candie’s sister, in spite, but rather, because of her impeccable education and sensitivity (it’s a low dimensional sensitivity: it does not extent to “colored people”). So Django insists that proper goodbyes be given, before he cold bloodedly gives he r the hot lead she deserves in her midriff, as it is clear to him that polite formalism is all the depth these people have, and thus that superficial formalism is an enabler that should also be executed.

The hubris is explained by the necessity to be ever more cruel, brutal and arrogant as plutocracy augments, and singularizes itself. It becomes the pleasure of getting away with those sins, and even inverting all values, and exhibiting them as virtues. This mechanism shows that hubris is intimately related to the Dark Side.
The American South lived a collective madness. A madness so great, it could not have been conceived before; the Romans had slaves, but Roman slavery, although just as bad as American slavery, was not founded on the (crazy) concept of race.

Rome’s Severian dynasty was founded by Septimus Severus, a Libyan of Libyan descent from a Libyan senatorial family, who rose to supreme military command in Illyricum, before he re-established order to Rome with his legions (by stopping the chronic coup and circus of the Praetorian Guard).
The paradoxical result of the South’s hubris crisis was that, at the very end of the Civil War, slavery got outlawed.

So will Obama become Django, and unchains himself? Executive orders about the gun insanity in the present day USA is a good start. OK, the weapons of war madness is not as bad as the plutocratic insanity, but, as I explained in a previous essay, they are related.
And overall, they are supremely related by the metaprinciple of insanity being honored, unchallenged by reason, as if it is the supreme politeness to learn to respect it, no questions asked 9this politeness to insanity is one thing Tarantino targeted in his movie, as I explained).

Obama should go Django and start shooting liberally executive orders to explode the existing order. What does he have to fear? Nothing.

In the alternative, if Obama does nothing, and just sells himself like Clinton, let me tell him what’s going to happen. Plutocracy will not blossom for long. It will lead soon to disasters so great that today’s leaders will end worse than Dante ever imagined.
Ultimate wisdom for the human species is ultimate fighting, because only ultimate morality gives ultimate reason, thus terminal domination.

Such is the paradox of humanity. Love blossoms out of blood, when peace comes too short to allow a decent, comfortable enough existence.
***
Patrice Ayme

***

De Par Dieu: World Plutocrats Unite

The richest Greeks are buying the most expensive apartments in Berlin and London. “Shameful” says the president of the European parliament. The president of EU parliament, Martin Schultz, a German SPD member, calls attention to the breakdown of Greek society, with the poorest dying of lack of food and health care, while the richest and mightiest Greeks do not pay taxes (but the Germans and the French certainly do to back-up the European Central Bank Quantitative Easing, and various direct loans to Greece).

One week in December 2012, French actor Depardieu established residency in Belgium. Belgium is a country very friendly to plutocrats. The world’s fourth richest man, Arnault, another Frenchman, owner of all sorts of luxury brands, established residency there last year. The day Arnault announced it, there was a demonstration below the windows of his private residence. By thousands of enraged Belgians.

Reason? Plutocrats are spared taxes on capital gains and inheritance in Belgium. This is only normal: after all this plutocratic status is enjoyed by members of the Royal Belgian family, who are corrupt, and inherited this disposition, free of taxation.

Yet, someone has to pay for the state. Salaried Belgians pay some of the highest taxes on income in the world. This is directly related to others paying nothing: the hyper rich don’t pay taxes, because salaried persons pay them on their behalf. Such a system can perdure. After all, the plutocrats did not pay taxes in Europe for more than a millennium. They called themselves “the best who rule” (aristocrats).

This lack of taxation in the upper reaches brought ever more powers to the powerful. In the end, even when the king and government of France used everything in their arsenal to make the wealthiest pay taxes, they failed.

That unbalance at the top is why all of Europe underwent a succession of serious revolutions, among which those of the Netherlands (16 C, and a 75 year war against Spain) England (three revolutions and civil wars in the 17 C), the North American colony (1776-1791 + Secession War 1860-65), France (1789-1792 + 1830 + 1848 + 1871), Russia (1917), Germany (1918).

Perhaps suddenly aware of this problematic Belgian situation, Depardieu met in a private dinner the Czar of All Russias, Vladimir Putin in his gigantic palace (with TV, microphones and interpreters present, recording the very familiar tone). That was in Sotchi, a ski resort on the south side of the Caucasus. Sotchi and Putin have been officially celebrated by international sport authorities. A bit as Hitler organized the 1936 Olympic Games, in Berlin, to celebrate Nazism, Putin is organizing the next winter Olympic games, to celebrate Putinism, a crow’s flight from where he is waged heavy war in Georgia, and exerts mighty military occupations of many a country of the Caucasus.

Pontificates Depardieu: “Ceux qui disent du mal du president Putin ne sont jamais sortis de chez eux, ils sont restes en arriere depuis lontemps” (“Those who say bad things about president Putin never got out, they stayed stuck in the past for a long time”). Sorry that we confuse Stalin and Putin. Both are ending the same.

Putin gave Depardieu Russian nationality, and a Russian passport. Such is the power of the Czar. “Czar” is a deformation of “Caesar”. But Caesar could not make an alien into a Roman citizen overnight. Putin has more powers.

Depardieu has been protesting high taxes in France. His father was a French Communist Party member. Depardieu himself was a truant, delinquent and drunkard, who left school at 15. He was saved by the French movie industry, which is heavily subsidized by the French state, hence French taxes. Depardieu is a first class ingrate.

Now Depardieu, who made perhaps half a billion dollars in France alone is peeing on France. Literally so. Not only does he drive the wrong way on one way streets while cameras are rolling, but he actually peed in a plane, and not in the toilet.

Hey, who needs France when you can sing with the daughter of the dictator of Uzbekistan, do business with the Castro brothers, cheer for the dictator of Chechnya, enjoy payments throughout the dictatorships of Eastern Europe?

5403 French cheaters, a few thousands Germans, 1831 Italians, according to Eurostat, have become Russian citizens in 2010. Most of them are wealthy tax evaders. Rushing to take advantage of the Russian 13% flat tax rate on income and capital gains, a dream come true for plutocrats. Ironically the 13% rate was instituted to induce wealthy Russians to pay taxes. It is understood that it will be phased out in the future. Putin recently said that, as in France, taxes on luxury items ought to be introduced soon.

Depardieu was offered by Czar Putin a vast terrain to build a mansion, a car, and a job of minister of culture. As a quasi billionaire, Depardieu is happy to accept these free gifts from the Russian people. His residence will be next to where the Pussy Riot protesters are imprisoned. He immediately left Russia for Switzerland to encounter the head of the international soccer association to promote Russia for some world cup.

And yet, the glorious Depardieu vacation in Sotchi and Switzerland could not be all what it could. Not only is Depardieu obviously too obese to ski, but he has a justice convocation on Tuesday, 2 days after getting Stalinist citizenship.

French justice ordered Depardieu to appear in Paris regarding a charge of driving under the influence of alcohol. He actually got into an accident, with nearly four times above the legal alcohol limit. Here is the Dark Side reappearing again.

Depardieu used to be the darling of the French left (when that was profitable to both parties). Now he has become satanic for all to see. How come? This is a particular example of the genesis of the plutocratic effect, in the case of one individual’s psychology. The same happens to entire classes of individuals.

Basically, the persons affected get seduced by the Dark Side, and then so thoroughly enjoy it, that they want more, ever more. Being a leader, and enjoying the leadership status is one of the main component of the Dark Side. Nietzsche used to call that the Will to Power, and deify it (an idea Hitler followed single-mindedly).

The Will to Power is old, very old. It is even older than when it made baboon style, war-like primate societies possible, by perfecting fascism into a world conquering superior psychobiology. So it is completely ingrained in human psychology.

But there are many ways to lead. The ultimate leadership being, of course intellectual, as this is what the species is. Yet all forms of leadership call onto the Dark Side. Hence the fierce battles in academia. Hence the nomination of Stalin and Hitler to the Nobel Peace Prize. All humans confusedly sense that, without the Dark Side, nothing of consequence ever gets done (as Mahatma Gandhi, or Barack Obama, found out). The unfolding of the exact reasons of why this happens is quite elaborate.

One of these reasons: the Dark Side makes tribalism possible. Tribalism is central to humanity: it evolved from it. Tribalism makes human institutions possible. Including science, medical associations, or dignified philosophical societies.

Some will scoff: and how do I dare seize the noblest human institutions, and tie them to the Dark Side? But look at the Catholic church, or whichever Muslim hierarchy: in the fullness of history, although peace is their mouthpiece, they caused, directly, the death of dozens of millions of dead, and more than a millennium of terror.

And the case of Gandhi is famous: he brandished non violence against the British, while infuriating the Muslims, thus causing the partition of the subcontinent, leading to maybe ten million dead, while waiting for the great Indian subcontinent thermonuclear war.

By the way, Martin Schultz, a perfect anglophone and francophone, may well be elected head of the European Commission by the European Parliament after the next European elections. And why not? Listening to him, in French, one has more the impression of listening to a Frenchman more than when listening to Sarkozy the American, or Depardieu the Stalinist.

What is sure is that the European parliament will elect the next head of the European Commission, as per the Lisbon Treaty.

So why the English Europhobia? Very simple: up to 15% of English (in contrast to British) GDP is from financial services. And more than that is directly tied to plutocracy, if one includes English tabloids (controlled by the likes of Murdoch, a newspaper heir initially from Perth, Australia, in the lineage Maxwell, a scientific publishing tycoon, riding the public purse). One now knows that PM Blair got brainwashed into the Iraq War. And why not? left to himself, Blair was nothing. Murdoch was an empire, a sort of monarch who already told PM Thatcher what was up and what was down.

Instead, Blair was a good boy, as PM John Major had been before him. Major became a major at major USA based hedge funds. Blair “retired” and made 50 million dollars in just one year.

So now, exposed to continual disinformation, the majority of British stupidly attribute their problems to the European Union. Verily, their problems are not caused by the EU. Great Britain barely belongs to it; it has opted out of mostly all European institutions. it is not the EU that explains why Italian industrial production is vastly superior to the British one. It is rather finance supreme.

Britain blocks European construction at every turn. 25 countries have engaged the European Monetary system, three more are associated to it, 17 countries belong outright to the Eurozone. However, British vetoes block European construction, including that of a banking union. While everybody can see that a private banking speculation crisis caused the European financial crisis (the states got dragged into it while trying to save the private banks with public money).

Britain is like Depardieu: rendered grossly insane by the plutocratic phenomenon. meanwhile in the USA, health insurers are starting to crank up their rates by up to 22% in 2013. Poor Obama found a fancy name for his health care: the AFFORDABLE Care Act. However, in his naivety, he forgot about cost control of those he entrusted with the care of Americans as the farmer entrust the hens to the wolves (a well known method in Hawai’i). When I write “naivety”, I am charitable. A more ominous explanation is that Obama played golf with the wrong people.

Something that happens to people who live in big mansions paid by taxpayers, surrounded by armies of bodyguards, and they believe their minds extent to the end of the universe.

Satan is very crafty, and very cruel. Therein his strength and virtue. It’s the only god some deserve.

On January first 2013, the French government decided unilaterally to tax those of the 5,400 French citizens who pay very low taxes in Switzerland while earning their living in France. Excellent. The Swiss authorities are livid: after all the Canton de Vaud (capital: Lausanne) alone makes 300 million dollars from such tax evaders. No more free ride, no more living like a vampire, sucking French blood, Suisse!

Not that this new found will to resist tax evasion by the wealthy exclusively French. The USA has put increasing pressure on Switzerland, encouraging Italy, Germany and France to do the same. (This is one of the rare sectors where Obama has acted as a real democrat instead of a playing as dead as a plutocratic carpet.)

PM Cameron, the lazy and cowardly Europhobe, did something like this in Jersey, an island tax haven, a few Weeks earlier. He insisted that some Brits in London who insisted to pay (no) tax in Jersey, ought to be taxed in the UK (that can be up to 50%).

Some Jerseyists (?) spoke of independence (from Britain). A problem easy to solve by sending a few Royal marines, or French gendarmes. Who do these parasites think they are?

Why can Belgium or Switzerland, and many other banana haven countries afford low taxes? Why does France (or Britain or the USA) have high taxes? Well, very simple; in 1939, there were only four large modern armies in the world: Hitler’s, Japan’s, Stalin’s, and France’s. Only one democracy, and three dictatorships were well armed. We know what happened next: more than 70 million dead, nearly 5% of mankind.

The situation has not really changed. If we reverted to the military situation of 1939, with only the French republic with a serious army, the result would be quickly the same.

This is in no way surprising. The Roman legions were withdrawn from Britannia, Germania, and Gallia, for budgetary reasons in 400 CE. It is not that the economy was collapsing. The plutocrats were refusing to pay enough taxes to keep the dozen legions concerned.

The Roman state left the Franks in charge of defending much of Western Europe. Although the Franks were initially successful in Germania, they then ran out of luck, and massive invasions followed within six years. Then, and only then got the land ravaged in Britannia, Germania, Gallia, Iberia, and 4 years later, in Italia itself, and soon enough, Africa when the vandals made it there.

Thus one has to conclude that taxes are not just about fairness, and preventing the plutocratic effect. They are also about preserving the appearance of a republic.

France, the USA, Britain, Germany, and Italy have used increasing force to combat tax evasion and thus plutocracy, in recent years. They should not hesitate to use maximum force. After all the military force of France is about a billion times greater than that of Switzerland.

It is not just a question of defending democracy, or civilization. It is a question of not being dominated by the Dark Side. Without the rule of love supreme, humanity cannot go on. It’s love who has to tell the Dark Side what to do, and not the converse. Therein true goodness and wisdom.
***
Patrice Ayme

No Rice, No Lice, No Dice

Unexpected happenings all over. UN Ambassador Susan Rice, reportedly involved with genocide and corruption for twenty years, is considered for Secretary of State. Does that beat Obama outlawing the European Carbon Tax? Reality is always spicier than fiction.

Transparency International produced a classification of countries according to (SELF) “perceived” corruption. Netherlands, Switzerland, Belgium, Luxembourg, Singapore, Hong Kong, are six tax havens (some with triads!) proclaimed to be less corrupt than France, or the USA. Tax havens are, like corruptocrats, parasites. Parasitism can kill a civilization.

There are 3,000 species of lice. Parasites can’t create civilization. We should not look up to them.

Trying to evaluate corruption, worldwide, and to attract attention to corruption is a good thing. If done honestly. Transparency International says that Finland is one of the three less corrupt countries in the world.  In reality, the Finnish director of Transparency International, himself the director of the Confederation of Finnish Industries, decided that.   

One can only conclude, in turn, that Transparency International is itself corrupt. Or at least mentally corrupt, like an old fish left out too long rotting in the sun. TI is another of these international pretentions, which international finance, and its globalized media, are keen to advertize for, as they serve them well.

The drive is always the same: the big states, the pillars of democracy, are bad, small states, where plutocrats can reign supreme, and lovely tax havens, are good. If the small state is the window of a big bad plutocracy, China, full of triads, as Hong Kong is, that ‘s even better! It’s not corrupt at all!

Just as tax havens are the best places to be born (said The Economist), tax havens are also the less corrupt, as far as international plutocrats are concerned. Similarly rotten rich plutocratic universities, propagandizing watered down values, are the best in the world, and the French ones the worst (hey, is not the Islamophobic Voltaire taught there?).

Corruption tends to be in the eye of the beholder. Transparency International, just as countless elite private universities, “liberal”‘ or “left wing” “think tanks”, are just plain tanks that the plutocrats finance to roll over the People, starting with their minds.

If Transparency International were serious, it would use objective criterions. The Gini Index, which measures inequality inside countries, would be a main ingredient. It’s obvious that any country where an extremely rich elite reigns over an uneducated rabble is intrinsically corrupt.

New indexes need to be created to judge corruption objectively. The Gini index is objective. We need more objective indexes, rather than to depend upon crooks to inform us on how corrupt they are.

One learns best through explicit examples. Here we will mention two cases, one that of an American politician who is a professional democratic party apparatchik. Starting from nothing, on government salary, the lady built a fortune… and part of this fortune is psychologically incrusted in the most determined pollutocratic corporations. (Yes, pollutocratic and pollutocrats are neologisms we will, unfortunately, find useful, looking forward, as the influence of those such as Ms Rice, and her puppet masters, seems to know no bounds.)  

One such index would rest upon how rich politicians become (the Pure Corruption Index). Presumably, the acquisition of otherwise unexplainable awesome riches comes from plutocrats paying them under, or over, the table.

Just add how rich those politicians (and their families!) have become, and divide by how much they officially earned, during their official tenure. Then integrate over all politicians of that country, to get a global index. So my proposed index can be used both individually, and globally. It seems that Susan Rice, Obama’s friend, UN ambassador with cabinet rank, and potential Secretary of State scores very high that way, on the Pure Corruption Index. That Obama defends her ardently tells volumes on the sort of state that we are supposed to admire, as we are supposed to admire Ms Rice’s political-financial genius. Such is the main axe of this essay.

Nietzsche used to crow that he “made philosophy with a hammer“. But the planet needs to be defended with a battle axe.

Another index would take into account how rich politicians are (Pure Plutocratic Index). The Pure Plutocratic Index is not as bad as a criterion to chose our Lords. For example, Senator Kerry, who would make a much better Secretary of State than Ms. Rice, is very rich. But it’s clear how he became rich: he married an extremely rich woman, from Mozambique, herself heir to the Heinz fortune. Kerry does not owe anything to pollutocrats, or plutocrats. It’s unlikely he would pass laws to construct ketchup pipelines across the world, to please his sponsor (namely his wife). Whereas as we will see, what dirty Rice proposes for her pipelines is hard to swallow.

Much of the American deficit (in the last four years, it was a trillion dollars a year) comes from legal, or tolerated tax evasion (the home mortgage interest deduction comes to mind, and the 975 employees at GE in charge of tax evasion, who allowed GE to avoid taxes all together more than once).

Amazon has a multi-billion dollar business in each of France, Britain, and other countries, and it pays basically no tax, while the local bookstores it is killing do. France presented Amazon with a tax bill of $252 million, for unpaid taxes, 2006 to 2010. France presented Google with a tax bill of a billion dollars (I use Google for search rarely, as there are many alternatives).

Massive tax evasion undermines the French welfare system. And also the French military, the world’s most interventionist. It is France who made war in Ivory Coast recently re-establishing democracy, and it is France which is putting the heat on the Islamists who conquered half of Mali (roughly the size of California), and may go to war there soon. This French war activities, in defense of civilization, in the end also protect the tax havens (example: if France had not declared war to Hitler in summer 1939, Switzerland, ultimately, just like Austria next door, would have been conquered by the Nazis).

I have not been following closely the fumbling about Ms Rice as Sec. Of State to replace Hillary Clinton. I knew nothing much about Ms. Rice, except that she is a professional politician, her career having started under Bill Clinton.  I don’t trust professional politicians. They are parasites within a tyrannical system, representative democracy. OK, some are sincere (Chavez, Gov. Brown of California, Hollande and Merkel come to mind; some may be sincere, although slightly deranged; Putin comes to mind.) However, in general politicians thrive from corruption, and thus politics attract those who want to thrive from corruption.

Nobody can accuse me not to be cynical. However, I was stunned to learn that Susan Rice, 48, holds between 300,000 and 600,000 dollars of TransCanada. Reality is indeed much more crazy than fiction.

TransCanada wants to build a pipeline across the USA to find a buyer to the horrendously polluting Tar Sand Oil (British Columbia has refused such a pipe). This fact, by itself, clearly disqualifies her as a potential Sec. Of State. Even if she divested herself, it would remain that she took side against the biosphere, and that she had to be violently separated from an investment who brought her $25,000 last year. And, to top it all of, she has so little judgment that, although she knew her good friend Obama would try to nominate her, she clang to her monstrous money maker. 

It gets better:  Ms. Rice and her husband, an ABC News producer, own at least $1.5 million worth of holdings in Enbridge, a Canadian company that transport Tar Sand oil across the USA. In other words, Ms. Rice will be viewed by dedicated ecologist as satanic. (Ecologists do not seem to worry Mr. Obama very much.)

Where do these people get that kind of money? A quick scan of Ms Rice’s career shows that she was employed a bit in (fake) “liberal” institution such as Brookings, and something called Intellibridge. Intellibridge was a front for selected investors, financial organizations and other corporations, a conduit for plutocratic money, to pay off the servants (and an outshoot from Kissinger Associates, the extreme right wing organization).  Ms Rice’s father was a governor of the Fed, the private-public device to funnel public money to private banks. 

So now Ms Rice is rich, filthy rich, she is fully blossoming as a servant plutocracy can trust. A full time leader of the democratic party. Filthy rich, literally, as Tar Sand oil, which is twice cooked, is very dirty.

So ecological organizations have meekly suggested Rice should divest from her polluting investments. It’s a human equivalent of grabbing a piece of meat from a lion: Rice may give up her reward, but she will resent those who forced her to do so. and the fact is, she was rewarded, enormously, by those who wanted to reward her, and will go on defending them, if she has any sense of decency.

Decency among scoundrels is part of the tribal instinct. Fundamentally, killing is a social activity (as killing en masse requires allies) so, paradoxically the more the killing, the higher the team spirit. Even among Nazis, decency to each other was high: they called each other “Kameraden” (“comrades”), spoke of “we” all the time.   

Rice has made clear, with her obscene investments, who her team is: the team of those who, literally, want to burn the Earth.

On September 16, 2012, Rice went on five major news channels to pontificate about the attack in Benghazi:

“our assessment is as of the present is in fact what began spontaneously in Benghazi as a reaction to what had transpired some hours earlier in Cairo where, of course, as you know, there was a violent protest outside of our embassy–sparked by this hateful video. But soon after that spontaneous protest began outside of our consulate in Benghazi, we believe that it looks like extremist elements, individuals, joined in that– in that effort with heavy weapons…We do not– we do not have information at present that leads us to conclude that this was premeditated or preplanned…”

in other words Rice says that it is free expression, the First Amendment, that is culprit in causing the Benghazi attack. Nowhere does she mention that an enormous Salafist base was tolerated, or known to be, close by.

This is wrong in several ways. First the concept that a “hateful video” can “spark” deadly protest.

Second and more importantly, it is wrong to believe that there was such a thing as a “hateful video“. There was a grotesque video, the “Innocence of Muslims“, true. But the pathetic video just faithfully illustrated what is, incredibly, said about Muhammad in the Qur’an, and the most sacred Muslim texts. To wit:

Muhammad married a girl, Aischa, who was 6 years old, and had sex with her when she was 9. Yes, Muhammad killed much more than a thousand men, yes, he did not know how to read and write (differently from his first wife, a rich business woman), yes, the cousin of his wife was a professional Christian monk, and he told Muhammad that it’s Archangel Gabriel that met him in the desert, yes, God had allowed Muhammad to marry as many women as he pleased, and that pleased him a lot, including with Jewesses (and a furious friends’ wives). More can be said that is highly distressing, and the short video did not say.

OK, the video represented a sexual practice that is not alleged in the sacred Muslim texts. Thus one can only conclude that those who protest about the “hateful video” protest about a precise sexual practice, benign between consenting adults. Curious that they do, as they find completely normal that the great Prophet Muhammad had sex with nine year old girls. The only conclusion is that they are sexually obsessed (one way, they love pedophilia, at least when the Prophet does it, and another, they find licking bushes so abhorent, they call it hateful, denigrating of Islam, surely the prophet of child molesting  would not do such a thing!)

It remains that when Rice, and those excited Muslims in Pakistan, call the video “hateful“, they call the Qur’an “hateful”. Outrageous company between Al Qaeda’s theses and a member of the cabinet? Not that much. The USA has long instrumentalized Islam, because Islam, thanks to its Fascist Principle (Qur’an Sura 4, v 59), is friendly to dictators and dictators can be made friendly to those who own the USA. Result? Lots of oil trading is controlled by the USA and its associated plutocrats (many based in Switzerland!), and the profits get recycled through New York and London.

So what is it with Rice? She is rich, and Rice was obviously made rich by the likes of those who want pipelines carrying the most polluting oil to be built, and Tar Sands to be exploited.

The battle about Rice is a small symbolic and pragmatic move in a vast picture.

The essential strategy of the USA in matter of energy used to be that it did not matter how dirty one got, as long as one provided the USA with cheap oil. That was the sense of the pact between F. D. Roosevelt and Ibn Saud in 1945. It was the time of dirty dirty: the USA had left France and Britain fight Hitler alone in 1939, while helping the later not so discreetly. Then at Yalta, the USA had given half of Europe to Stalin, knowing perfectly well that Stalin had massacred at least 22,000 of the Polish elite at Katyn (that the USA knew was revealed very recently). In the end, Europe was hopefully lethally wounded and certainly half crushed.

Thus the Uncle Sam was in better position to free the Middle East, and the Arabic countries, from Franco-British control. It needed an ally, and that ally was Muslim Fundamentalism. Carthage used to do this kind of things, with mercenaries. It famously backfired, as the mercenaries rebelled. Similarly, the USA has been facing a rebellion of Al Qaeda, a formation it basically created to wage war in Afghanistan against republican socialism, starting in the 1970s.

Co-existing with the likes of bin Laden has proven an embarrassment. Although the American people still seems unawares that Bin Laden was a product of the CIA (and its Saudi alter ego), the war against Al Qaeda has spread ever more, leading to Al Qaeda like formations all over, from Mali to Indonesia. OK, right it’s good for the military-industrial complex. However the deficit is too big to support the latter any longer, that extravagantly.

Way out? Well, the USA could have done like Europe, and chose the road of higher energy prices, deploying more advanced technology. But it did not, as it refused to take part in the Kyoto Protocol. Now in Doha, Qatar, Kyoto was just extended. It boils down to 15% of humanity doing all the efforts. 15%, yes. Mostly made of Europe, a heavy burden.

If Europe wants to let itself be exploited, that’s fine with the USA.

Europe was ruled by various philosophies, with the liberal-let’s-throw-money-to-the-rabble-and-especially banks presently in power. The USA itself is ruled by several philosophies, but the hierarchy of those is easier to figure out. Long mercantilist (a technical term), as a practical governmental policy, it has now become increasingly, since Reagan, plutocratic max. The magically rich Rice is another symbol of that choice: if the plutocrats have chosen Rice, it does not matter if Rice is obviously corrupt for all to see.

It’s actually even better, that one can see that Rice is on the take. It flaunts that the way to get ahead, is to become lice. Because Rice becomes the symbol that money rules, and so it can, assuredly, buy itself ambassadors, cabinet ministers and Secretary of State. It can buy the highest government officials, and then flaunt that fact, and people have to kneel and submit. As Sec. of State is the third authority of the state, in the USA, to contemplate something more absurd than that, one would have to observe the president of the USA invest with several of the world’s top pollutocrats.

Hence the American rush to fracking: it brings energy and autarky, yes, but it’s also symbolic of the rule of the exploitative philosophy. Ten years ago, the USA was planning to import Liquid Natural Gas. Now, in a sudden reversal of fortunes, it’s planning to export it. The USA has so much gas, from fracking, that the USA price of the stuff has collapsed 80% below world prices (the gas is hard to transport, although a desperate Japan had the Ob River inaugurate the North East passage, in winter, to bring in at least ten Hiroshimas worth of semi clean gas energy in).

USA oil production is supposed to pass Saudi Arabia within 7 years. A resource, energy and food independent country with state of the art tech does not have to worry about its currency. It could live in autarky. In this light, the will to appoint Rice can be viewed as the will to make still another pact with the Devil. For those who are real dirty, the fact that Rice is dirty, makes her clean.

After World War Two, many people who should have known claimed they had no idea the Nazis were so dirty. And how could have anybody guessed. Well, that’s why it’s called guessing, I guess. How dirty could Rice be?

During the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, Rice, a well connected arrogant know-nothing, hungry to serve powerful, crushing masters, leveraged her dad, well connected as he was, in plutocratic finance. She is, like Geithner, a princeling (same idea as in China). Ms. Rice advised the Clinton White House to stay silent about the genocide in Rwanda. She claimed to be afraid that doing so would have an electoral impact. How come a girl who knew nothing about Africa, could advise to let millions of Africans die? (I have been raised in Africa, mostly Black Africa, so I care more about that subject!)

The dirty business of the USA in the region, involves high tech minerals such as Coltan. It is still going on. The resulting wars have killed at least 6 million. (If six million Africans die in a forest, does that make any noise in Washington?)

And Rice is directly implicated. Ms Rice may have had deeper motives than electoral ones in 1994, such as helping along Mr. Kagame (master mind of the guerilla that triggered the holocaust in Rwanda twenty five years ago, now dictator of Rwanda, and also master mind of the Coltan war that killed five millions, while feeding with weapons and money the M23 force invading Kivu, in Congo!) 

As the United States’ representative to the United Nations, Susan Rice worked hard last year to block the release of a U.N. experts report detailing Rwandan atrocities in the Congo. To go around Rice, the report was leaked. Question: did Ms Rice get money from high tech companies or African “new leaders“? It certainly looks like it. She certainly did not get all this money from her government salary.

In September, Rice paid fervent tribute at the funeral of the late Ethiopian dictator, Meles Zenawi (who died unexpectedly at a relative young age). She praised the bloodthirsty plutocrat unreservedly as “uncommonly wise, able to see the big picture and the long game“. “Long game“, really? By long game, she apparently made a distinguished reference to all the dissidents and journalists who disappeared after being hunted down. In Polynesia human game was pudically called “long pig“.

We are very far from a proximal, global solution such as a worldwide, global carbon tax, right away. Instead the world has been put on a somewhat similar strategy to the one the USA followed in the 1920s and 1930s: have the USA pose as neutral, isolationist, while making a bad situation ever worse, in the hope that the ultimate cataclysm, just as in the 1940s, would turn to the advantage of the USA. Dream on.

For the sake of civilization, it is better not to nominate as Secretary of State someone with genocidal connections. If nothing else, it just looks so bad, that it boosts the prospects of Pluto. Indeed the more satanic behavior is in full view, fully rewarded, the more “We The People” gets used to be led by Satan. So it would be, by making the apparent queen of genocide the third in succession to the throne. Now, of course, this is exactly what plutocrats want, it would be another important step in habituating the commons to be overlorded by the Dark Side. 

Many Tibetans feel, and it is arguable, that China is conducting a genocide in Tibet (there is a technical definition of “genocide” that seems to fit very well). The pain is so great that, this year alone, dozens of young Tibetans have killed themselves by fire, burning alive. How could China take seriously a Secretary of State that was, herself, involved with genocide? How could any other nation?

***

Patrice Ayme

***

Practical conclusion: Senator Kerry who is superbly qualified, and would have been elected president in 2004, but for G.W. Bush’s dirty tricks, should be nominated Secretary of State. BTW, differently from the conniving, conspiring Rice, Kerry was elected many times, and is senior senator of Massachuset.

Note: Starting in 1990, France intervened several times in Rwanda, trying to blunt the violence. Under UN mandate. In 1994, France evacuated civilians in Operation Amaryllis, and finished the Rwandan civil war with Operation Turquoise.

Bash France On WWII, Hades Rules

LESSONS FROM WORLD WAR II LOOKING FORWARD: [Nov 18, 2012.]

Questions: Why persistently misrepresenting what happened in World War Two? Especially in the initial roles played by France and the USA? What are the vital lessons looking forward? Answers in the conclusion.

***

FRENCH BASHING; A COMPANION TO NAZISM:

Some internet sickos claim that, if one use notions pertaining to Nazism, one has lost the argument. They are often found to hate Jews.

Rotterdam Burning, 14 May 1940. When Nazis Threatened Same For Utrecht, Netherlands Surrendered.

To help the Netherlands and Belgium, the big hearted French and British armies left their prepared positions, and moved north, enabling the Nazis to cut them from behind. Hitler cynically had hoped to play that bleeding heart attitude like a violin, dashing through the unbuilt Belgian portion of the Maginot Line (unbuilt, thanks to the USA’s perfidious influence).

Those who hate to mention obvious notions are generally dependent upon them, either materially, or psychologically.

Circles worshipping financial kleptocracy, and white racism, naturally hate France: this started in 1934 when the French leaders visited Washington (!). France, a creditor, wanted austerity in economic & political matters, in full opposition with the USA, which favored Hitler’s line: stimulus, no matter what.

In the case of Hitler stimulus meant stealing from the Jews to redistribute to his supporters, while re-arming crazily in all ways; in the case of the USA, or the UK, stimulus meant not getting ready to fight a world war on the side of France, by keeping military spending low, favoring consumption. Ironically the inversion of that proposition during WWII led to an economic boom in the USA… and a debt crisis in the UK (as the USA used usury against a desperate Britain to lend her, for example, 100 old destroyers).

The first hysterical French bashers were the Nazis. Besides the painful fact that half sized France had defeated the Second German Reich in 1914-1918, they had a more recent point. Indeed, France had started the world war (in the sense that a world war was the only way to stop Nazism). Nowadays French haters have turned this around. They pretend that the French Republic was full of collaborationist cheese eating surrender monkeys. Confronted to the fact that it was the French Republic that launched the world war against Nazism, French haters do not have enough humor to claim that it was just to better surrender.

Instead they prefer to focus on the French self flagellations about the 75,000 Jews who were deported by the Nazis and died. (Never mind that most of them were Central European refugees who the USA had refused to accept, and never mind that the armed French police who effected the initial arrests had to be armed, allowing it, 2 years later to fight the Nazis with weapons!)

Never mind that the French empire lost nearly FOUR (4) million dead in the 1914-1945 World War: such enormous losses are assuredly not understandable to most contemporaries.

By comparison, the USA suffered 186,000 dead on the European theater in WWII (while the USA had 3,3 times the population of France); and 117,000 dead in WWI, for a grand total of 303,000 dead. The same numbers for Canada are: 45,000 dead (WWII), and 65,000 dead (WWI), for a total of 110,000 dead. However Canada had 8% of the population of the USA, and declared war to Nazi Germany on September 10, 1939, seven days after France and the UK did (and two years three months and one day before Hitler declared war to the USA, the most celebrated heroic gesture of Uncle Sam, hiding below its bed!).

As I always say, all the USA had to do, at that point in time, in 1939, to win the war, against Hitler, should it have wished to win it, was to declare it. The German generals would have joined, and done most of the work, by getting rid of the Nazis. (Hitler was not as powerful as usually depicted; although he knew the head of the army, Beck had led a plot to get rid of all the Nazis, on the ground that they endangered Germany, it’s only in 1944, 5 years later, after Beck did it again, and again, and again and again, that Hitler could have him suicided!)

The French Republic ultimately won the war in the deepest way imaginable, turning the German state in a genuine sister republic and democracy of France.

Think about what would have happened if France had followed the British line of 1935, and let Hitler free to do whatever he wanted in the East: the few surviving Slavs would be enslaved, all the Jews, Gypsies, etc., exterminated, and the Grosse Reich all the way to Japan!

French haters generally hate to mention Hitler, and some of them (say Buchanan, famous writer in the USA, and a past presidential candidate), to this day, make no mystery that they hate France, because France attacked their cherub, Hitler.

In a way making Germany in a republic and a democracy was a reunification of the Germans, as the Franks were total Germans, and the secret of France, and, actually, the West, was the philosophical unification of the Greco-Roman ways with the Celto-Germanic ways.

(Ironically, in some respects, Germany is now more democratic than France!)

***

WAR ON TERROR WILL NOT END, AS LONG AS THE USA IS TERRIFYING ENOUGH.

I wrote this partially in jest. Partially so, because much of the trouble of the Middle East has to do with a religion that has instituted, and promoted, militarized plutocracies, that is, the rule of a few devils, complete with abject submission to the lowest instincts. That the USA instrumentalized this Islamism perfidiously is its own problem.

However, this joke of mine failed, as usual, to amuse my friend Chris Snuggs, a Europeanized Brit, who has long resided in France and Germany. Complained he:

“The USA liberated the whole of Europe, most of Asia, Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan and helped with Libya, which would not have happened without Sarkozy, for which I forgive him all his other nerdish irritations. Just compare North and South Korea if you want to see the real heroism of the US soldier. Incidentally, while US marines were dying to liberate France the French elite was collaborating with the Germans to send Jews to Auschwitz. I think, therefore, that this endless slagging off of the USA is very silly.

The invasion of Afghanistan was provoked by the murder of 3,000 innocent people of over 60 nationalities in NY. The utterly insane depravity of fundamentalism Islam is the root problem, not the USA, many faults though it may have.”

Answer: Chris, I agree with some of what you say, but disagree strongly with some too, especially with the naive end. You should study my writings more, should you desire to stick to the truth. The USA aggressed Afghanistan in the mid 1970s, through the CIA, on its own, and a secret order of full attack was given by Carter on July 3, 1979. Within months bin Laden was recruited in Turkey, because of his plutocratic connections with Saudi plutocracy, and his naive Islamist beliefs, prone to manipulation. Later bin Laden led an enormous Muslim Fundamentalist army (mostly made of Arabs, but also Chechens, etc.).

Did I forget the slight detail the USA was de facto allied to Hitler in 1936-1939? Let’s talk first about first things first.

To call the “milice“, a criminal organization the ‘French elite‘, shows oneself to be a fascist. My family took huge risks and made huge sacrifices to save more than a dozen Jews during the Nazi Occupation.

Food was rationed, throughout France. So it was very difficult for a family of 4 to find food for 16. Besides, running away from the German speaking, Gestapo. The Gestapo was full of Germans, not full of French. De facto, the Gestapo ruled France.

Barbie, head of the Gestapo in Lyon killed, it was determined, through torture, around 5,000 people. One of his tricks was to set a dying resistance fighter on one of his armchair in his office. He did that to Jean Moulin, in particular (an artist and French prefect who was nominated head of the resistance in France by the Free French government). 

BTW, my family, having been denounced, was warned by an informer, inside the Gestapo (!), and ran from it in a forest. There they stumbled into an American GIs’ patrol. This explains my mother’s devotion to the USA (which has become more nuanced under the withering fire of my fact propelled critique).

Many of the French who lived through WWII were thus, intensely devoted to their American liberators. And, no doubt, the GIs deserved the devotion. The effect was augmented by the fact that the million man French army converging from Normandy and Provence was fully equipped by the USA, so the French populace often took for Americans what were in truth French troops. Most of the major French cities were mostly delivered by French army units, which tended to be much more experienced than the Americans, more relaxed, and much quicker on the hoof.

And yet, a careful examination of what happened in World War Two, needs to go beyond the 11 million citizens of the USA who were drafted in WWII. A careful examination of how a criminal such as Hitler came to kill 50 million Europeans points directly to Washington and the plutocracy of the USA. If not for the American plutocrats, first of all, Hitler would have had no fuel to allow his armies to go anywhere (and Hitler would have had no planes flying, his Luftwaffe grounded in 1939, as I am always keen to point out).

Not that the USA is sole to blame: without Swedish high grade iron, Hitler would have had no tanks. And the French Army, in cooperation with Britain, was poised to cut Sweden in two on May 10 1940, just when Hitler applied that method to the motherland at Sedan.

Of all these things it is good to reminisce, as war, and an anti-democratic ideology extends throughout the Middle East. The bottom line is that the USA had betrayed its parents, France and Britain.

Democracy was divided in 1939. On one hand, there was France leading Britain and many courageous countries of the Commonwealth into the ultimate war against Nazism (they were belatedly joined by… Norway in 1940). And then there was a whole panoply of pseudo neutrals, led by the USA, most of them collaborating with Nazism.

The defeat of France in 1940 was caused in great part by a positive interference of the actions of many of these pseudo neutrals (under USA influence, Belgium refused to extend the Maginot Line, allowing the Panzer Army to pass; Holland played victim and led stupidly the French High Command to come to its rescue with the seven armored division quick deployment mobile reserve, the absence of which then allowed the ten Panzer divisions to sickle behind).

Fortunately, Obama has this lesson at heart (just as G W Bush, grandson of perhaps Hitler’s most interesting collaborators, was just the opposite, and came into the crosshair of the French elite!)

***

PLUTOCRACY IS WAR, & THUS TO BIGGER WARS LEAD:

The Chinese deputies met. Together, their worth is 83 billion dollars. The richest, a woman, is worth 6 billion dollars. Real estate. The next one is worth about three billion. Plutocracy is doing well, nowadays.

How did the great war of 1914-1945 start? When (German) plutocracy imagined its tremendously rising trajectory would face a worrisome future (the German Socialists did not see why they could not get all the advantages their French colleagues enjoyed, and thus live in a republic with less plutocracy). To make matters worse, other plutocrats, in Britain and the USA, tried (and succeeded for the later), to leverage the situation to their personal advantage (especially after 1919).

It goes without saying that the same psychological mechanism will apply to the Chinese kleptocrats when the Chinese people gets angry from the way it is been exploited. Just as the German plutocracy tried to save itself with the distraction of a war, so will the Chinese plutocracy.

What would hold it back? Just the certainty that the democracies will go to war, and stop, only when they have achieved victory, no matter what.

Some, of course, will agree that it is not what the French Republic did in 1940. But some of the leaders who grabbed power in 1940 obviously felt France was fighting the world basically alone in June 1940, and it was better to cease-fire, while the other two democracies, Britain and the USA were getting their act together. (Surely, Nazi collaborationist regimes such as Sweden or Switzerland, did not qualify as genuine democracies.)

In the end, French armies started to fight again the Nazis, even before the USA did, and to more effect (Bir Hakeim, probably World War Two’s most crucial battle with the prior Battle of Moscow).

Wars are not over. The argument can easily be made that we are one great world war away from world peace. Yes, that argument has been made before.

Hundreds of rockets are fired again on Israel. The sophisticated “Iron Dome” anti-missile system intercepts and destroy more than 90% of those heading towards protected cities. It is impressive to see rockets flying in a volley being exploded one after the other, up in the air, by Iron Dome.

On the ground, Islamist Fundamentalists from all over Muslim Medievalistan [neologism] have been pressing Hamas for more action. The Egyptian Prime minister visited Gaza, so did another minister from Tunisia. Turkey’s Erdogan visited Turkey’s old subject, Egypt, and expressed support for its other old subject, Gaza.

Israeli PM Netanyahu said that the terrorists were targeting Israeli children, while taking refuge next to Palestinian children. He declared, as he had to, that the Israeli government would do “whatever is necessary“. To stop the rain of rockets. This evocation of the Dark Side can only mean an escalation.

Indeed Iron Dome fired hundreds of its interception missiles (officially very cheap, at only $50,000 a piece, an interestingly mythological number). The anti-Israel fighters have thousands of rockets (although the Israeli Air Force is trying to take out launch sites and storage facilities.) I doubt Iron Dome has thousands of missiles, and the AM batteries are not covering all of Israel. (Let alone that Hezbollah to the north has more than 10,000 rockets.)

Meanwhile more than 100 people a day are killed a day in anti-Syrian airstrikes by the Syrian Air Force. Turkey followed France, and recognized the Président de la coalition nationale syrienne, M.Moaz Al-Khatib as the only legitimate representative of the Syrian people (“pour nous le seul représentant légitime du peuple syrien”), as Hollande put it in the Élysée Palace.

The Élysée Palace was closed in June 1940. So much for having a French State after that (there was no National Assembly, nor Senate, nor most of the institutions of the state after this; demonstrating, by the way, how idiotic were Chirac’s excuses in the name of the French State: how can one present excuses in the name of what did not exist?).

The French president had been against a cease-fire in June 1940, but was overwhelmed by a coup from a few men (“soldats de rencontre“), while the Nazi panzers were reaching Bordeaux. The Élysée reopened in 1946 for Vincent Auriol, President of the provisional government, then first President of the Fourth Republic from 1947 to 1954.

Those who claim that “France” had a legitimate government in Paris after June 21 1940 know nothing. Why do they think it’s called Vichy?

***

Chris Snuggs replied in turn to my observations:

“Most countries are made up of millions of people. Of course, one is led into generalisation, and I have no wish to denigrate your family. I was in a German doctor’s surgery a couple of years ago and read a moving homage to Jean Moulin of the Resistance. However, the point is, France’s political elite – the establishment, which is after all what counts in politics – was at that time fascist, and Europe had to be liberated by the Yanks. Yes, it was a long time ago and Yes, their industrial-military plutocracy today has a lot to answer for, but if it is right for Germany to still feel some guilt about WWII (which they do, irrational through it is) then the USA can still get credit for the multiple countries it has liberated, even many decades ago. There is an eternal struggle between morality and greed, and in sucking up to nasty family kleptocracies in the Middle East, the USA has gone too far – as is Cameron in trying to flog stuff out there, but when it comes to the crunch and you are threatened by a dictator and fascism, the US will eventually try to bail you out – or has done so in the past, but many must be sick of the eternal slagging off by Europeans. “Go to hell.” might be my reaction were I American. “You only want us when you need liberating.”

Politics is not black and white. Sometimes you have to support a lesser evil. Maybe the kleptocracies of Saudi, Kuwait and Bahrain are better than the outright fascist lunacy of the Iranian regime. Maybe. After all, in WWII our sailors died taking convoys to help save the USSR, which actually murdered tens of millions more than Hitler.

As for the election in the USA, let’s see how Obama deals with the fiscal cliff. Let’s see if he increases the number off drones killing many more innocent families in Pakistan (as he has so far) or whether he will supply weapons to the Syrian rebels to overcome yet another fascist, family despot. All I know is, were I a desperate revolutionary fighting a despot family kleptocrat I wouldn’t put much faith in Obama, and his claiming credit for killing BL was nauseating bollocks. The man is a pontificating academic patrician who has never run a business and most likely couldn’t. His only real asset is slick talk from an autocue.”

Answer: Totally ignoring that the British and French military intervened in Bosnia, under a UN mandate, well before they succeeded to drag the USA in, is apparently fashionable among Washington sycophants… Yet, without France and Britain firing back first, the USA would have never showed up.

 To elevate the Vichy collaborationist group into the French political elite – the establishment is a logical mistake. I have gone over this many times. Several of the leaders (including Petain) were among the fiercest fighters in WWI. Several of them got condemned to death (and some were executed) after France re-established a legitimate political authority (led by De Gaulle) in august 1944.

In truth the FRENCH political elite – the establishment execrated Hitler, but had been stuck since 1934 from engaging in all out war against Hitler, due to the collaboration, and entanglement of much (not all) of the British, American and German elite with the Nazis. This is the part of the Second World War that is extremely pertinent to this day, and widely, even wildly, ignored.

The collaboration with Hitler went as far as a treaty between the United Kingdom and Hitler, in 1935, that violated the Versailles Treaty, officially. So how could the French political elite – the establishment then attack Hitler for violating the Versailles Treaty? Such was Blum’s quandary. Blum, as a Socialist and a Jew, part of the French political elite – the establishment, could not be suspected of being a collaborator.

I also know for a fact that the son of another French Prime Minster, Daladier, was wanted very badly by the Gestapo (as my family hid and sheltered him, the only non Jew for whom my family did this).

In 1939, after the Spanish Republic fell, the French republic finally persuaded the UK to go to war against Hitler. A trap was set in the French-Polish defense treaty, where an appendix signaled that the UK would join France in providing Poland with needed assistance. (The Washington political elite – the establishment gave Poland to Stalin at Yalta in 1945.)

When the French Republic and the UK declared war to Hitler, the USA reacted with sanctions against them, passed by the US Congress, signed by the president, FDR. Meanwhile the USA sent 500 tons of lead tetraethyl, a crucial anti-knock compound, to Hitler, so that his aviation could stay in the air.

If not the French and British would have had instant air supremacy over the Nazis, a situation only achieved in June 1944…And not earlier, because of the TREACHEROUS AMERICAN HELP TO HITLER.

***

COMMON MYTH: FRANCE AND BRITAIN DID NOT FIGHT IN 1940:

The Battle of France in 1940 was a very serious event: it was the fiercest battle of the western front in WWII. Nearly 200,000 soldiers died. Officially 50,000 Nazis, most of them elite fighters and officers, died. And probably more.

In pitched massive tank battles of May-June 1940, the Brits and the French won.  

It is estimated the French lost 1,274 aircraft destroyed during the campaign, the British suffered losses of 959 (477 fighters). The battle for France cost the Luftwaffe 28% of its front line strength, some 1,428 aircraft destroyed. A further 488 were damaged, making a total of 36% of the Luftwaffe strength negatively affected.

So how come the Nazis won? Simply by cutting the superior French and British from behind. And that was the result of Hitler’s crazy gamble, to put his entire tank army on a single road in the mountains, knowing full well, as he did, that he did not have a chance otherwise.

Morality: do not underestimate desperate men with too high an opinion of themselves.

***

COMMON MYTH: THE USA SAVED THE DAY ON D DAY.

The holocaust of 50 million Europeans (including up to 6 million Jews) happened because the USA did not rush to the help of France and Britain as it was its duty in 1939 and 1940.

When the US General Infantry landed in Normandy on June 6 1944, they were not exactly alone. Actually there were more Brits, Canadians, and other Commonwealth troops, Poles and French, than there were Americans. Besides Canadian soldiers had landed in France in 1940, and 1942 already. Verily, the Americans had been brilliant from their absence in the first three years of the war, and finally got involved only because the fascist Japanese and Germans attacked them.

As the USA never had more than 64 divisions on the Western Front, American combat troops stayed a minority in 1944-45 (although USA supplies and equipment were dominant).

***

COULD FRANCE & THE BRITISH COMMONWEALTH HAVE WON WITHOUT THE USA?

The role of Stalin was, first of all, self interested. He helped Hitler considerably. The last giant freight train from the USSR crossed into the Reich while the Nazis attacked the other way. Hitler’s forces suffered heavy losses in the Fall of 1941, on their way to Moscow, where they were crushed by Christmas, after reaching the end of a metro line (literally and figuratively).

That was the first severe Nazi defeat, with a huge loss of equipment, men, and opportunity. Long live the Russians? Not so fast. The Nazi offensive against the USSR was delayed 6 weeks, because the Greeks had defeated Mussolini’s fascismo. Those six weeks, plus the ensuing enormous Nazi losses in Crete prevented the Nazis to seize Moscow, and break the USSR in two.

Fascinating subject, that deserves its own essay. In one sentence, though, yes, the French and the British could have won without the USA. After all, the USA had nothing to do with Bir Hakeim, Al Alamein, and the defeat of the Afrika Korps. Or the defeat at Moscow (although USA supplies helped by the time of Stalingrad). However the outcome would have been assuredly very different, and much slower unfolding. No “American Century” though.   

***

Conclusion: FRANCE WAS CIVILIZATIONALLY & MILITARILY CORRECT TO DECLARE WAR AGAINST HITLER IN 1939. THE USA WAS EXTREMELY WRONG TO HAVE SUPPORTED HITLER IN 1939, thus undercutting not just democracy and its parents, but also the numerous sane elements of the German military.

France was momentarily defeated in 1940, due to a combination of unlikely factors. (Hitler ran out of luck within weeks of the fall of France, though.)

Why Germany acted the way it did in 1914-1939, has a lot to do with why the USA supported Hitler in 1939: a persistent mental super storm, where the Dark Side was allowed to guide the reigning plutocrats.

The same sort of factors are still ruling in many parts of the world today: Russia, China, the Middle Earth. That they would coalesce as the “Axis” did in 1935-1938 is a gathering possibility, with offensive intervention by the leading democracies the only safeguard (the safeguard that failed in 1939, as the USA went Dark).

The World War that tore apart Europe in 1914-1945 was not just a form of collective madness, tribalism, militarism, imperialism as last stage of capitalism or a logical extension of the sort of exploitative racism Europeans had demonstrated worldwide.

The plutocratic phenomenon was the main cause of WWI and its aggravation into WWII, Yet, plutocracy has been the cause less studied, as the notion does not enjoy the prominence that it should have.

Keeping accusing the French to be surrender monkeys is a lie to mask the atrocious role that the plutocracy of the USA played in WWII, all the way from taking sanctions against France and Britain in 1939, until Yalta, and actively collaborating with Stalin to let him crush half of Europe in 1945.

This attitude serves the interests of the plutocracy of the USA, by focusing attention away from reality towards an American Dream that exists mostly in the mind of the beholders. This is why anti-French racism is a crucial link in the chain of resoning supporting the established order in the USA, as I showed in a number of essays on the origins of Anti-French sentiment. 

Oligarchies in the UK and the USA long used Hitler as a tool. Britain abruptly switched from collaborating with Hitler to collaborating with France in 1938-1939. The USA, though pursued an ambiguous policy, not just with Hitler, but also with Stalin. The bottom line being that, playing hyperpower, the USA displaced and replaced the European powers thoroughly, by leveraging World War Two.

In case the French and the British did not get the message it was repeated loud and clear in 1956, when Eisenhower, who had collaborated with Stalin in April 1945 (over Patton’s objections), collaborated again with his butcher, Nikita Khrushchev, to impose his will at Suez… and in Hungary.  

Now that the effects of fascism in Europe have faded away, the intellectual, judicial and economic power of the European has grown. And so it has been in the rest of the world. The USA’s 200 million white very developed people have found themselves less and less capable of imposing their will by force and conspiracy on the entire planet. Thus the realization by the USA that an alliance with the European Union would not just be more profitable, but necessary.   

The French Republic’s point of view that Nazism was a cause worth fighting against, proved, in the fullness of time, most progressive.

This is to avoid this message, that the French were right in 1939, the USA were extremely wrong, that the Wall Street types and their sycophants keep repeating that “France” did something wrong in WWII. Yes, right, from their point of view, and the source of their indignation is not what they claim.

After all, among many other things, if the USA has a brown president, it’s because institutional racism was demolished in the USA in the 1950s and 1960s. That certainly would not have happened if the racist vision of the world of the Nazis had triumphed in the 1940s. And Nazism would have won if no country had declared war to it. And definitively, it’s France that opposed Nazism (with the UK, with not much of an army, in tow). So France showed the way. Obama 2008 was made possible by France, 1939.

That not only enrages those still nostalgic for racism (think Tea Party), It also enrages American liberals, since after all, they did not amount to much.

Once again, if the USA had declared war to Hitler, instead of flying to his rescue in 1939, German generals (led by Beck) would have killed Hitler and the top Nazis, and that would have been it: no American Century. Oops.

As a USA born citizen told me recently in Paris: “World War Two was a win-win for the American elite”.

And thus a paradox: if Hitler was so good to the USA, should not a patriotic American have followed its Congress and President in 1939, and support Hitler? The question is not quaint: as the USA is poised to become the world’s greatest oil producer within a few year (again!), it does look as if, again, the Dark Side is on the side of the USA. Should not thus patriotic citizens of the USA support it?

Such is the quandary: American progressive have to be regressive, it seems, for the USA to progress better.

Thus this past instructs the present. Rome and Athens started to lose the day they resigned themselves to fixed borders militarily, and intellectually. Naturally they then turned to the Dark Side.

Neither the West, nor actually the planet and its biosphere can afford the same mistake again. Thus democracy has to remember that progress is its best friend. That does not mean that the legions ought to march all the time (as they did when Republican Rome was rising). Sometimes one can be crafty and multipronged (as happened with Burma, aka Myanmar, where the local military plutocracy was seduced by the West into resisting the Chinese temptation).

Putin, Chinese plutocrats, and Muslim pluto-theocrats may look picturesque, but do not underestimate the temptation they feel, and the ability they have, to coalesce. A chain of viciousness goes from enraged, or all too innocent, Muslim Fascists, to Hamas, Hezbollah through Syria, to Iran, Pakistan, China, with the moronic Putin lurking, and messing things up. If that chain is successful for the elites that profit from it, it will extend, and may even exponentiate, causing a world war.

Time for a philosophical Iron Dome.

***

Patrice Ayme

“Obama” Lost Already?

GIVING CHANGE WITH NO CHANGE GOES ONLY THAT FAR?

Lost Because There Is Not Enough Advocacy For Progress In The USA.

The president of the USA is usually presented as the “most powerful man in the world“. This is disinformation. “Weakest leader in the world” is more like it. The presidency of the USA is a weak office. Why? Because not only is the business of the USA, business, but the government of the USA is business.

I have been making the progressive case against Obama‘s policies. For four years (minus a week). Before he became president, Obama prevented Hank Paulson to force banks to cram down house mortgages. Result:

Obama Inflection Point; Corporate Profits Climb, Salaries Dive To New Lows

Plutocrat Paulson, Bush’s Treasury Secretary, ex-CEO of Goldman Sachs, understood that banks had to give something commensurate in exchange for the enormous public money they were getting. Otherwise, it was theft. Obama did not want to understand that.

Obama spent the next four years singing the praises of bankers, banksters, and financial criminals (latest in 2012; an ode to love for Buffet, famous for destroying Greece, in Newsweek, and Dimon, head of JP Morgan, on “The View”). Not cramming down the mortgages allowed the banks to keep on having “tiers one” capital they did not have, thus keeping on with their derivatives’ casino, starving the real economy, while getting 8,000 billions of “monetary base”, from the Fed (that forced the EU to join the game in 2011).

I am not focusing here on other grave ethical failings, such as worldwide killing by death panel ordered drones, a new high for the devil, a very dangerous precedent for fascist regimes.

That establishment of a “Terminator” like world is comparable, as an ethical jump, to the jump accomplished when extermination camps came to be viewed as a measure of progress.

That many “democrats” agree to killing people by robots without due process reminds me of German Socialists approving of Hitler because Adolf called himself a socialist. Just as Hitler focused on “will” (he was singularly deprived of it after 1942), Obama focused on “navigation” as an overall metaprinciple (now his “navigation without an ethical compass has led him into the shoals of public opinion). Being a full human leader requires to focus on full human ethics, not naked procedures (will, social navigation), as a suitable end to political means. 

I am focusing here on the economic side, and the ethics connected to it. As Matt Stoller puts it:

“Under Bush, economic inequality was bad, as 65 cents of every dollar of income growth went to the top 1 percent. Under Obama, however, that number is 93 cents out of every dollar. That’s right, under Barack Obama there is more economic inequality than under George W. Bush.

Financials Make 40% Of Corporate Profits

[Blue line: corporate profits, red line: main worth USA families, home equity.]

And if you look at the chart above, most of this shift happened in 2009-2010, when Democrats controlled Congress. This was not, in other words, the doing of the mean Republican Congress. And it’s not strictly a result of the financial crisis; after all, corporate profits did crash, like housing values did, but they also recovered, while housing values have not.

This is the shape of the system Obama has designed. It is intentional, it is the modern American order…”

The plutocracy is amplified by the desire of government officials, who are typically in the middle class, to join the 1% (who do not just live much better, but safer, with better… local government and services).

The third debate Obama-Romney was uneventful. After his huge win in the first debate, when Romney presented himself as the candidate with a plan, while Obama sounded like an apologetic butler, seemingly worried about blemishes on the floor, Romney needed just to not make mistakes.

The news though, as far as I am concerned, were made by Obama, when he brazenly announced, in passing, out of the blue, that “sequestration is not going to happen“.

This was an astounding statement. The problem is not just that sequestration is the law. And that it is becoming effective in eight weeks or so. The problem is that:

Sequestration is a liberal’s heaven: it cuts down a huge chunk of the defense budget, and remove the Bush(-Obama) tax cuts for the rich. The deficit and (some of) the inequity disappear overnight.

Why would Obama be against it? If Obama is the “liberal”? (“Liberal” that is left, democratic, in USA semantics, the opposite of European semantics.) Why would Obama want to denigrate a law he helped passed, and that institutes a liberal’s heavens?

Is Obama a double agent?

Is he not a liberal then, and all the hysterical liberals who want us to vote for him just naive sheep rushing behind their shepherd as they enter the slaughterhouse?

So Obama is losing that election. If not in the votes, surely with his head. Surely losing his second term, if any, before he got started. Lost his head in an accident called democracy.

I forecasted as much little bit less than 4 years ago. Surely the old liberal Obama face had lost to the neoconservative Obama reality, immediately after he was elected. How did I know this?

The first thing is that Obama was mesmerized by Larry Summers, the financial derivatives’ enabler. Summers is a notoriously, officially delirious misogynistic bully, who, knowing no advanced science or mathematics, claimed women were genetically inferior at it (there are plenty of top women in science and math, up to the very highest level, for example Emmy Noether, who, sponsored by the mathematical giants Hilbert and Klein was spurned forever at Göttingen. Finally Hilbert had to get angry, and point that: the faculty is not a toilet. Noether’s work was very deep and some ot it is used for the very basics of quantum Field Theory).  

The day after his election as president, Obama went to work in the offices of a hedge fund in Chicago. November 5, 2008. That was an astounding fact. Hedge funds and their financial derivatives were front and central causative in the 2008 financial crisis. It was as if Obama understood nothing, nor did his advisers. Or maybe he wanted to make a blatant wink to the plutocracy, to the greatest sharks of the financial world, that he approved of their world, entirely, front and center, for all to see.

His apparently lobotomized supporters were completely clueless and celebrated all over like nice drunk maniacs. They are still celebrating, four years later. Michelle Obama asks: “Are you in? Tell Barack you are in!”. Simpler than that, no way: politics reduced to sexual allusions, or something equally primitive. We are in? Into what? Masochism? With Michelle as whip yielding dominatrix? OK, she obvioulsy fits the role quite well.

What hope could we have, when Obama embraced evil, and his supporters did high fives all over? With hedge funds’ managers?

So now, here we are, four years later; most of the money went to banks. 8 trillions (mostly from Quantitative Easing, which was used to “reimburse” TARP!). Total deficit added: 4 trillions, most of it from tax cuts (to the rich!), not from investment. The so called Bush tax cuts were legislated religiously by 4 year by the democratic Congress (led by plutocrat Pelosi).

Why don’t progressive call those cuts the Pelosi-Obama tax cuts for the rich? Because we are not rich, and it’s safer not to tell the truth?

Here are two comments of mine that the New York Times had the kindness to designate as “picks” (although most of my comments on Krugman’s blog are censored; I view Krugman’s policies as causative of much of the Obama’s faulty socio-economic program.)

***

The first comment was subsequent to Krugman’s editorial in which he said: “The U.S. economy finally seems to be recovering in earnest…it will still take years to restore full employment — and it has been a very long time coming. Why has the slump been so protracted?

The answer — backed by overwhelming evidence — is that this is what normally happens after a severe financial crisis.”

In other words Krugman still understands too little, too late. I sent this:

Oct. 21, 2012 at 8:46 p.m.

We are in the worst crisis, ever.

There is a fundamental employment crisis. There is an ecological crisis, without precedent in 65 million years, that puts the biosphere in question (and gasoline above $4 a gallon).

What is happening right now is just the beginning of the beginning of said crisis. Obama was called in to deliver change, and, thus stop the steady march behind the same old errors. However, a chorus of sycophants and plutocratic servants insisted nothing much had to be done… And Obama went along.

Right now the USA has a huge, primary deficit (Italy does not have a primary deficit), and the debt to GDP ratio of the Federal government is above 100% (only Italy and Greece, and of course Japan have higher debt to GDP numbers). Many on the pseudo-left say it does not matter. How come it matters anywhere else? And what is the plan to deal with those?

Guess what? The public wants change again, any change, as long as it’s not the same old same old: all the money to the banks, none for commoners.

***

Not surprisingly, Mitt Romney is claiming to be the one to bring change. The worst being is that he may right, frighteningly enough. It’s easier to bring more change than no change.

Krugman and company claims Obamacare will change everything, but I just don’t believe it, as it was written by the sharks themselves, the health care plutocrats, and it does not set-up what they fear and all other advanced countries have: a public health care core.

The markets have broken national sovereignty, all over. Obamacare eschewed that lesson, all too long.

The last case being rolled out this week: Mr. Clean, Close-To-The People, humble Prime Minister of China, the guy with the glasses and the modest white shirt, turns out, according to the New York Times, and not  to my surprise, to have accumulated, through various members of his family, including his elderly mother, a fortune of no less than 2.7 billion dollars.

The dictatorship of the People has turned into the dictatorship of the Plutocrats. The New York Times just got censored in China for pointing out that this supposedly clean PM was a plutocrat hiding behind the rest of his family, a trick massively used in the USA! Ironically the New York Times censors me about denouncing plutocracy, and gets censored in turn, for the same reason! What goes around, comes around, just like hurricane-north-eastener…

***

Krugman again: “Mitt Romney … has a five-point plan to restore prosperity. And some voters, alas, seem to believe what he’s saying. So President Obama has now responded with his own plan, a little blue booklet containing 27 policy proposals. How do these two plans stack up?

Mr. Romney is faking it. His real plan seems to be to foster economic recovery through magic… So, is Mr. Obama offering an inspiring vision for economic recovery? No, he isn’t. His economic agenda is relatively small-bore — a bunch of modest if sensible proposals rather than a big push… The point is that America is still suffering from an overall lack of demand, the result of the severe debt and financial crisis that broke out before Mr. Obama took office.”

I sent the following comment (also a NYT pick, as that august paper seems to be about two minds about me!)

Most probably, Obama’s “plan” is too little, too late. Progressives ought to have protested strongly as soon as Obama had selected his economic team, led by financial derivatives advocate Larry Summers. But they did not.

According to the sycophants of the democratic party a la Obama, there were at least 14 weeks with a supermajority in the Senate and 4 years of majority in Congress (in 2012, the French Socialists have taken enormous decisions in 14 weeks, including 75% tax margin and a financial transaction tax!)

So Obama had, and has nearly no ideas, in any case, very small, that’s why he could not do anything with his supermajority, not even removing Bush’s tax cuts. And the lack of ideas is throughout the progressive establishment. Maybe Romney’s plan is impossible and scary (it sure looks this way). However it does something that allowed Obama to be elected four years ago: it makes people dream of change.

The essay below suggests non trivial ideas of the progressive type:
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2012/10/17/ideas-for-democrats/

The main idea is to push Research and Development massively. Take an example: Infra Red Photo Voltaics. They exist already in the lab, but are extremely inefficient. Having them would augment enormously the efficiency of photovoltaics (I think about 40% of the sun’s energy comes as infrared). Make a crash program. A fundamental, basic research crash program. Not something perverse like Solyandra, Space X, Tesla, Fisker, A123.  

And protect the basic research by extremely fierce protection of Intellectual Property.

***

WILL DO-NOTHING PRESIDENT SNATCH VICTORY FROM JAWS OF DEFEAT?

We don’t know what Obama wanted to do, when he embarked on his exalted adventure. As a candidate, four years ago, he ran in full compatibility with this site. I was happy. However Obama governed, mostly, against this site, breaking my sensitive little heart. I cried a river, and now the seas are rising faster than ever.

So it is with human destinies: one wants to do one thing, and often one ends up doing the opposite. For the best reasons, which turned, in the fullness of time, to be the worst.

Obama’s main metaprinciple, as explained in his best selling memoirs, and re-iterated since, is “navigation“, rather than haughtier principle. However a civilizational leader does not just navigate, but creates. When an elected leader is backed up by serious philosophers, such as Pericles, that gives results (the “open society“) one remembers.

Obama wanted to become a president who did great things. But that was in total contradiction with his navigational metaprinciple. Great leaders don’t just navigate, they force destiny.

What Obama implemented, in practice, was Bush III (except in foreign policy, where, by espousing Franco-Britannia in Libya he has been much smarter, and sharply opposed to the treacherous Bush). we do not want to be naive like Paul Krugman: “Think instead about the 45 million Americans who either will or won’t receive essential health care, depending on who wins on Nov. 6. “

Krugman is rich, he lives in a mansion, he shuttles all the time first class around the world, he is big time. It did not dawn on his teeny tiny brain that soon hundreds of millions of “Americans” will not be able to afford that health care, because, like the captain of the Titanic refused to think about icebergs, the Oblablablists refused to think about cost. the reform that mattered for health care was cost, first: make health care cheaper, then the state could afford for everybody to have it. For that one just had to allow the (three) public health care systems to bargain with private providers, fully (as in other countries).

In “the Progressive Case Against Obama”, Stoller argues, as I long have, that the election of Romney would wake up the opposition to the Bush-Obama-Romney order exemplified by Krugman: 8,000 billions to the banks, and the likes of Elon Musk (Tesla, Space X), 4,000 billions of supplementary debt in 4 years.

It is not a question of being anti-capitalist. Civilization is entangled with capital. No capital, no civilization. That’s why I distinguish between “capitalism” & plutocratic phenomenon

The progressive left got completely anesthetized by their brown guy’s accession to power. It was a case of racist intoxication:”Look Obama is black, he does miracles!” In truth, Obama is not even black, but brownish. The progressive left did not help Obama, the USA or the world by falling asleep, or going crazy in the Oblabla personality cult. Quite the contrary.

Now the den of thieves, Wall Street is getting a foretaste of its own medicine, by threatening to go under water, what it wanted all along, in its secret desire for self destruction. A North Easter is meeting a hurricane. Never happened before.

Obama’s policy, just as that of all his predecessors, and Romney’s is hell bound to make the USA stay on top, as the world’s greatest CO2 polluter (much of China works for the USA). The latest idea from the American hyper exploitation mood, is to export USA coal to China. Washington and New York will keep on going that way, and only them going deep under water will stop them, apparently. Admittedly, the progress of hurricane Sandy is a good sign of the Biblical flooding to come. Probably too complicated for their ethically deprived tiny brains to comprehend.

But there is a much better case to be made than Obama’s ignominious defeat. Unfortunately it would depend upon another “Obama” than the one we got to know, suddenly rising from his ashes.

In that progressive and optimistic case, Obama wins, and then a suddenly liberal Obama comes to his senses, and refuses to negotiate about “sequestration”. By January 1, 2013, a progressive paradise would dawn. The Bush-Obama tax cuts would disappear, and there would be savage cuts in defense. The rich would be taxed a bit more, the deficit would disappear overnight.

Even the hurricane-North-Easter “Frankenstorm” is giving an occasion for Obama to pose as commander in chief. Obama saved by god. The least god could do, after being evoked so many times. Hey, maybe the hurricane could wake up the citizens of the USA to the fact that they have been ecological pigs.

Of all the possibilities, that is what I would prefer. By far. That, and Obama sequestering the right in its own contradictions.

Dream and hope never dies…

***

Patrice Ayme