US Monetary Monkeying Around.

 

BEGGAR THY NEIGHBOR NOT, REWARD THE SAVERS, AND PLAN AHEAD.

(All policies the USA is NOT presently following.)

***

Abstract: I explain why the ZIRP (Zero Interest Rate Policy) of the USA makes no sense, for several independent reasons. It robs US savers and retired people, feeds the robber barons of Wall Street and giant banks, causes an intolerable, and perilous devaluation of the US Dollar, a Beggar-Thy-Neighbor policy. But the worst of all is that the ZIRP implicitly says that the economic policy for the USA is the law of the Wall Street jungle. Not the best way to conduct civilization and to drive a modern economy, I assert, following countless economists ever since the French economy and finance minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert (August 29th, 1619 – September 6th, 1683).

***

 

As the destruction of the racist, plutocratic, fascist regimes of Italy, Japan and Germany was winding down, a conference was held at Bretton Woods, in New England (July 1944, with 44 Allied nations present, not just two or three Americans, as Barack Obama brazenly claimed once: it was not an all American thing, it became so, because of American dishonesty).

The democracies were at Bretton Woods, but also the fascist Soviet Union, and the Chinese regime. The problem considered was to institute a better financial system. No one could forget that the German republic became fascist in 1933. The Great Depression of the 1930s had been mostly an American piece of work, but the countries that had paid the heaviest economic tributes in the 1930s had been Germany, and, even worse, France.

France had clung to gold to value its French Franc. The idea was that money ought to keep its value. This basic idea was shared by the top economic powers, but, as the economies got obviously starved of enough money to keep going, countries went off that "gold standard".

As Paul Krugman, who I am going to criticize in depth, for a change, puts it:

"If there’s one overwhelming lesson from the Great Depression, it is that putting a higher priority on stabilizing your currency than on domestic recovery is utterly disastrous. Barry Eichengreen pointed out years ago that major economies went off gold in the following order: Japan, Germany, BritainBritain, Germany, US, France. [screwed it up in the first draft: the correlation between going off gold and recovery is in fact perfect] And here’s what happened to their industrial output:

All that glitters went off gold…

The Wall Street Journal may not realize it, but it wants us to be France in the 1930s. Let’s not."

This is of course not the main lesson that, I, personally, extract from the Great Depression, although it’s an important one, I agree: it’s better to have unstable money, rather than no money. It is true that France suffered from the gold standard (although this lowering of currency measured economic activity in France was compensated by a three year military service for all French males and the heavy defense works of the impregnable Maginot Line, and may have been partially caused by the dearth of new French males, caused by the lowering of the French birthrate from the butchery of WWI).

In any case, it was felt that the monetary system ought to be made to work. The prestigious British economist Keynes was put at the head of a commission to fix it (Keynes had advocated government command and control of the economy, allowing to win WWII, when the Nazis clang to old fashion for-private-profit capitalism, hence his prestige).

Keynes commission came up with recommendations, but the USA, instead, connived to make the US Dollar the world’s ("reserve") currency. Keynes tried to block this twice, and, on the third try, the USA modified secretly the final document that the states signed. Hence the Dollar-as-world-currency was the result of a fundamental dishonesty. That insured the financial supremacy of the USA, thereafter. And also deeply imprinted American elites on the feeling that bullying the planet was the way to go. The American public, not anxious to know the details, to this day, could only approve.

***

Fast forward to 2009. The US Dollar is close to collapse, and what does some of the American economical elite do? Speak about China’s currency.

China’s bad behavior is posing a growing threat to the rest of the world economy. The only question now is what the world — and, in particular, the United States — will do about it.

Some background: The value of China’s currency, unlike, say, the value of the British pound, isn’t determined by supply and demand. Instead, Chinese authorities enforced that target by buying or selling their currency in the foreign exchange market [...]

There’s nothing necessarily wrong with such a policy, especially in a still poor country [...]The crucial question, however, is whether the target value of the Yuan is reasonable[...]

From 2001 onward, however, the policy of keeping the Yuan-Dollar rate fixed came to look increasingly bizarre. First of all, the dollar slid in value, especially against the Euro, so that by keeping the Yuan/Dollar rate fixed, Chinese officials were, in effect, devaluing their currency against everyone else’s. Meanwhile, productivity in China’s export industries soared; combined with the de facto devaluation, this made Chinese goods extremely cheap on world markets.

The result was a huge Chinese trade surplus. If supply and demand had been allowed to prevail, the value of China’s currency would have risen sharply.[...]

Although there has been a lot of doomsaying about the falling dollar, that decline is actually both natural and desirable. America needs a weaker dollar to help reduce its trade deficit, and it’s getting that weaker dollar as nervous investors, who flocked into the presumed safety of U.S. debt at the peak of the crisis, have started putting their money to work elsewhere.

But China has been keeping its currency pegged to the dollar — which means that a country with a huge trade surplus and a rapidly recovering economy, a country whose currency should be rising in value, is in effect engineering a large devaluation instead.

And that’s a particularly bad thing to do at a time when the world economy remains deeply depressed due to inadequate overall demand. By pursuing a weak-currency policy, China is siphoning some of that inadequate demand away from other nations [...]

The point is that with the world economy still in a precarious state, beggar-thy-neighbor policies by major players can’t be tolerated. Something must be done about China’s currency.

***

In the preceding passage, Krugman is right on everything. But one can be right on one scale, while being wrong, on a larger scale. The truly most crucial point is that the People’s Republic did not start this " beggar-thy-neighbor policies". The USA did. So now the USA does not like its own medicine. Too bad, really.

I agree that China should let its currency appreciate. But the same can be said for the US Dollar. The USA is not a poor beggar whose only hope is to devalue its goods and services, if it wants to survive a desperate world. It’s still mighty Uncle Sam, with military bases all around the world, the world’s biggest GDP (OK, behind the EU), the world’s number one industrial production, the mightiest dens of gentlemen robbers (Goldman Sachs, etc…), and the hubris of delivering asinine lessons to everybody.

So why is the US Dollar 50% down on its very long term value against the French Franc? (The Franc established the value anchor for the Euro: on the very long term one Dollar was worth 6.66 Francs, or so.). Has the USA lost so much value and hope recently? Or is the USA using, once again, an unfair devaluation to gain worldwide advantage?

I say:"once again", because it happened before. Under Nixon, the USA unilaterally devalued. The US Treasury Secretary famously said to the Europeans: "The Dollar is our currency, and your problem." Well, maybe the 96% of non American residents of the planet should fix their problem.

Part of the conceptual framework for valuing higher interest rates is that the Euro was made to equal one Dollar (from looking at very long term valuations of the French franc versus the Dollar). It was not made to equate two Dollars. And if two, why not three? Or four? Both Germany and France went down that road of devaluation before, and it proved to be the valley of tears among those fake, shimmering lakes that are called mirages, reflecting the sky in vain, and quenching only the thirst of wishful thinkers.

At some point the USA has to face the fact that long term American policies have been more favorable to malignant growth rather than sustainable growth. This has happened because short term profit directed selfish individuals worrying about their own personal, selfish individual profits were allowed to direct the ship of the state, for decades. Technically it is caused mostly at this point by the ZIRP (Zero Interest Rate Policy) of the USA. Krugman is all for it, until the unemployment rate goes below 7%, he says. European powers, though, have had, in the past both higher unemployment, and higher interest rates, for years, and came out OK, with societies with arguably much fewer imbalances than the economy of the USA.

Some pain of the American populace and elite maybe the way to get psychologically motivated towards deeper cognition of the economic and social realm. As I insisted upon many times, the economy is not just about private monkeys doing their private thing. Civilization has greater worries, and corresponding to these worries, a greater economy to take part in, than just private, greed obsessed monkey business.

A real economic stimulus is compatible with encouraging Americans to save. Why to always depend upon China’s surplus capital to get stimulated? (France is trying to do just that, with a national investment plan into long term valuable objectives, from private savings.) Higher interest rates in the USA may …interest Americans in the USA more, as they should.

Meanwhile, the Europeans grin and bear it, because both the French and the Germans fear hyper inflation more than anything else financial. The great losers of the Zero Interest Rate Policy of the USA are the American savers, and the great winners are the usual suspects, the American gentlemen robbers, and their big banks and investment dens, which can borrow at 0% and then leverage themselves. In short: this is no way to conduct an economic policy. At least, China has one such thing: for example, China intends to become number one in renewable energy, next year, or so. Meanwhile it is bringing up the taxes on gas. Can the USA even look half as serious? What about joining the metric system?

So it will be easier to take the USA seriously, once the USA becomes serious. First.

Patrice Ayme

Anti Government Rage Is Self Contradictory

IN A DEMOCRACY, ATTACKING THE GOVERNMENT IS ATTACKING THE PEOPLE.

Many influential Americans accuse the "government" of many problems of the republic. This accusation cannot be resolved democratically, through elections: the affliction has got metaphysical.

The "government" is accused of being intrinsically evil. No attention is paid to the fact that the government, in a democracy, is the expression of the People. Actually, its rule. The government is the rule of the People, and accusing the government to be evil is accusing the People to be evil.

Now, granted, that can happen, and that did happen, for example, in Nazi Germany. The German People became evil, by letting itself be completely overrun by the Nazis (it was a mental overrun, not a physical one). But is it what patriotic Americans draped in the American flag, are now saying? That the People of the USA has become Nazi like?

Here is a typical example of excess. As Sherry Jarrell puts it: "Private spending is the essence of the freedom of choice… Government spending, on the other hand, involves a huge middleman who first decides that they do not approve of our spending choices.  If they did, there would be no need for government spending. (Reflect on that because it is such a fundamental point.)" [http://learningfromdogs.com/2009/10/10/government-spending/#comment-382.]

This means no army, no public anything… Is that what conservative Americans are saying? Sherry Jarrell, following Reagan, says that it is not so for the army. Why not? Are private citizens choosing to fund the army? Why is the government interfering, as a hated “huge middle man”, with private military spending choices?

Would that be, because there are none? How many of the crucial functions of the republic does the private spending not get involved in? And why?

It is simple: because the most basic functions are common and necessary, not a matter of choice, so they happen, whether financially rewarded or not, so there is no reason to reward them financially. And excellent reasons not to. For profit economists have naturally overlooked this observation, since they had an excellent reason to do so (they are privately paid, so they want to thank their private gods for having created the universe, in the hope of getting more crumbs for themselves).

A systematic confusion has been cultivated and entertained, by some of the American upper classes, for short to be thereafter called "The Rich", between the government of the People, and the private economy, one of the activities the government of the People oversees. This confusion naively forgets that there is such a thing as a government sponsored economy, the public economy. THE PUBLIC ECONOMY IS THE ESSENCE OF THE DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC: IT’S ITS SKELETTON. The fireman is public, the policeman is public, the soldier is public, the judge is public, the notary is public, the taxman is public (this side of the French revolution), the banker used to be public (but now it is private, and privately finances the president), and all the basic functions of the republic, even when now private can be requisitioned by the government of the People, and become public by decree (in a national emergency).

Civilization requires organization, and that is called the government. The Khmer Rouge tried (most of) government dissolution, an expansion of the same idea, the "Cultural Revolution" of Mao and his Gang Of Four. Both failed spectacularly, and millions died (in the case of Cambodia, a huge part of the total population).

When the going gets real tough, only command and control can deliver. This was demonstrated most recently in WWII. The fascist USSR of Stalin had a public economy strong enough to build enough excellent tanks and planes to swamp and destroy the capitalist economy of the fascist Reich of Hitler.

Meanwhile, the USA was also running a command and control economy more similar to Stalin’s than to Hitler’s. The very fact that Hitler all too long ran the sort of Public-Private economy much too friendly to private initiative led to a military disaster; hundreds of different plane prototypes were made, for example. The UK, USA and USSR instead mass produced only a few not very remarkable, but stolid equipment, in their command and control economies.

The command and control economies won the war by out-producing the private initiative Axis economy enormously. The height of comedy happened when a Germany wide, American style charity, was established to persuade civilian Germans to give personal clothing for the German troops fighting in cold Russia. Some of Hitler’s finest had to fight to death the commies, dressed in woman’s clothing…

When the Islamists invaded Francia in 731 CE, the Premier of the Franks, Charles "Martel", organized a command and control economy: he nationalized the Rich, namely the Christian Church. Ironically, the first move against the Muslims was to deprive the Christians. (It actually had philosophical coherence because the Franks viewed Muslims as a variety of Christians, which, well, they are… The Franks loved Christianity, as long as it allowed them to command and control anything in sight, in their quest towards a better civilization.)

With the profits he made, Premier Charles rose a huge professional army, the largest since the heyday of Rome, seconded by the world’s  heaviest cavalry. The world’s finest steel was expensive at the time. And so it was that, for the second time ever, and for the second time at the hands of the Franks, the Muslims knew an ominous and terrible defeat, when they were devastated near Poitier (in the middle of France), 732 CE. The largest army of the West since the heyday of the Roman empire had done it, but that army would not have come into being without command and control of the government on everything, and everybody, including wealthy religious monkeys.

Some goods and services are NOT provided by the private sector, and cannot be provided by the private sector, because they do not interact with the private motive, or because they interact NEGATIVELY with the private motive. As simple as that. Another case is when other forms of institutional organization perform better than private-profit or government motivated institutions. (The latest Nobel prize in economics was given to professors who showed some of this in detail, but as I have said for years, such type of organization are 1,000 years old in Western Europe, and crucial links in the machinery of democracy).

Maybe I should explain to the obtuse the self evident concept of negative interaction of the private motive with the public good.

We would not like the President of the USA to work in a private capacity, and according to the profit motive: that was what most Roman emperors were all way too much about. This was found to be the road to hell. In other words, highly negative to the search for better outcomes.

We ought not to like the Senators of the USA to work privately, and according to the profit motive: that was what the Roman Senate was all about for more than seven centuries, and both republic and democracy died from it.

Nevertheless, clearly, US Senators work privately on an astronomical scale; the case of senator Daschle was exemplary: as soon as he was un-elected, he made millions from health for profit companies, and then turned around to ’serve the country’ by banking on all his political friends, and for-profit connections.

The Rich would say with glee that Daschle did this when he was a private citizen. This is just a technical detail. Technical details are often fig leaves: Roman emperors, for centuries only called themselves "First Man In the Senate" ("Princeps"). Later, much later, the position of “Senate President” was created. In the meantime emperors had decided they represented God on earth (a generation later, they embraced Catholicism, best suited for that crowning achievement).

Rome also tried the concept of privatizing the army of the republic, and it led quickly to the death of the republic.

Health is another activity that does not respond well to the profit motive (disclaimer: I both profited from and used the private health sector, but also public health, with different goods and services targeted). Public health was invented as a service to the commons, way back, and developed on an industrial scale in Rome: aqueducts were not privately operated. Nor was the system of Roman roads built for private profit. It was built for the common good, through public financing, by the Roman army. Nor so in the USA, where the Interstate System was government financed, and decided under republican President Eisenhower, for motives somewhat similar to the Roman ones. Economic public solutions are more than 25 centuries old (Athens built with its fleet in a huge government program).

You sure would not like the firemen and the police to service you because they got amply rewarded, financially speaking, and made higher profits that way.

So the concept that :"Government spending, on the other hand, involves a huge middleman who first decides that they do not approve of our spending choices. If they did, there would be no need for government spending. (Reflect on that because it is such a fundamental point.)" is not universally appropriate.

The government is also here to prevent the return of the law of the jungle. Actually part of the government is the judicial system, another sector of the economy immune to the profit motive in advanced civilization. Or at least, supposedly.

Now that government spending is close to 50 % of GDP in major European powers is a statistic that would look less frightening, and misleading, when it is considered that entire sectors of the economy of the USA are only private in appearance.

For years, and powers to that, NASA research benefited American aerospace private companies (hence the name National Aero-Space Agency). Still does.

(By the way, Europe’s ESA does not distribute its research generously to European companies, it does not do technological research directly usable by commercial operators… this makes Boeing’s cries about Airbus subsidies more than hypocritical… Ironically, NASA even cooperates with European commercial operators, and powers to that too: technological research is a moral positive, even when it leads to unacceptable technologies, because knowledge, even of hell, is always a positive.)

So some US military spending hides blatant subsidies. Why else would every single subsonic, rain sensitive, B2 bomber cost more than a billion dollars? (Answer: because it was a socialist program for Northrop.)

The B2, of course, as the Raptor, F22, have proven useless in war (B2’s were used once or twice in Afghanistan, F22s, never; ever since it has been back to well tested planes that make sense: sixty years old B52s, B1s, F18s, F15s, etc… Which have run thousands of missions. Not that I approve of all of these missions, far from it, but that is another subject).

A lot of the "private" health care system in the USA, and the "private" banking system are government supported. And it’s not all Obama’s fault, far from it. Don’t forget that the USA long has had the only full mortgage deduction program in the world, which is a subsidy of the US government to construction, housing and banking. I could give pages of examples such as these…

At this point the USA is in bad straights, precisely because so much of its main GDP-contributing economy, until 2008, WAS government supported. Obama has had to desperately support what’s left of a hopeful future with government subsidies. It’s a tragedy most of the money had to go to private banks, because they lost all the public’s money (put inside those banks, by the public, in trust, beforehand). So Obama had to save the banks, as PUBLIC institutions.

I do NOT contest that the big banks should have been saved. There was no choice. But those private banks were a government supported program, TO START WITH. That simple truth should have been observed, and the conclusion should have been drawn that the myth of them being private enterprises working for the public good ought to have been dispelled. Appropriate measures should have ensued.

Banks should have been saved, as PUBLIC institutions, and condemned as PRIVATE institutions. Next their size ought to have been reduced, or they should have been made part of the government, as the army is.

Some of Obama’s stimulus was excellent and necessary. Fact is, though, it was puny (it’s 700 billion spread over three years (once the AMT is removed), and with the states’ financial collapses, much less, and in particularl less than the French government’s own subsidy, although the later government is right wing). Hence the screams of the republicans against Obama’s stimulus are idiotic.

To be sustained, democracy cannot be put for sale, and cannot be managed privately. It can only be managed publicly. Private enterprise is a luxury organized in its broad scheme by the government, not a due. In particular currency creation ought to be controlled by the government, and not by private individuals, as it is presently.

Far from being a problem of having too big a democratic government, a lot of the problems in the USA come from having too big a private sector plotting with an unrepresentative government. The later appeared, because elections, de facto, can be bought.

Democratic rule without competent democratic institutions is only ruin of the City, as Athens’ fate proved it to be. And also Rome’s. And also Tsarist and Soviet Russia, and to a great extent various incarnations of pre-1945 Germany.

Nowadays a further twist is that undemocratic rule with incompetent private institutions is the ruin of the world.

Some will say: where are the ruins? Well, go to Yucatan. And when the Mayan world started to collapse, just as when the World Trade Center started to collapse, it was too late. The best ruins are not those one can see, but those we do not need to see. Time for action is before scrapping along the iceberg at full speed.

The entire view of government, and its interaction with private initiative, has to be changed.

 

Patrice Ayme

Friendly Climate Reminder

 

[This is just a reminder, easy to digest; a more elaborated post with graphs and more logical back-up will come soon.]

***

Subtle is the climate, but it can be cruel.

A known danger in climate change is the so called methane gun. Buried in cold (roughly freezing and often under pressure) ground are found giant deposits of methane imprisoned in a sort of water ice. There is roughly more methane there than the entire deposits of other fossil fuels, worldwide.

If the temperature rises, the deposits of frozen methane will explode out. Many are in the Arctic, in shallow, so far frigid seas. So, if temperature rises, as Mr. Goshn, the president of Renault-Nissan puts it, "the planet will explode" (that is why he is developing massively electric cars, betting the 7 million car a year company on it). This may literally be true: BOOOM! Frozen methane hydrates (to give them a more complete name) have exploded before, creating massive tsunamis.

Now the infrared blocking power of methane, CH4, in the short run is 100 times that of carbon dioxide, CO2. Over a century it’s like 20 times. Right now the CO2 is 385 parts per million (ppm), but, with the CH4 and other greenhouse gases, we produce ever so generously, we are above 430 ppm in "CO2 equivalents". Antarctica gets covered with glaciers at 425 ppm. In other words, Antarctica is now UNSTABLE: parts of it tipping into melting would stay free of ice, for ever.

Speaking of this frozen continent, it is well known that the icy belly of the Western Antarctic Ice Shield (WAIS) is below (sea) water. Maximally dense, 4 degree Celsius water will ultimately slip below it, and melt it (because it is not only the densest, but relatively warm). Interestingly an even more ominous situation may develop with sea water intruding below the ice basins of East Antarctica, the icy bellies of which are well below sea level. The frontal contact with the (presently freezing cold) Antarctic ocean is at very high latitude (as north as Iceland is south). When the same situation that is developing with the WAIS (where satellite radar shows that the water is slipping below the ice) happens with the Ice Basins, sea level will rise tremendously (25 meters?).

And the ice basins could melt fast. Sedimentary records show that Hudson Bay (which used to be below a similar ice shield) melted in about two decades.

The USA and its industrial center, China, are producing 40% of the world CO2.

Paleoclimatic studies show that Earth can switch to her hot regime really fast. Oh yes, because, and it’s little known, Earth has a hot mode, with temperate poles, and Earth has spent much more time in the hot mode than the present glaciated stage. Alaska with palm trees is the rule, not the exception.

Once the great melting starts at high speed, since the poles are the refrigerator, and we are starting by busting them, there will be no coming back. Let’s not forget that 12,000 years ago, sea level was 135 meters lower (450 feet). The potential rise now is about 75 meters.

But what to expect from the only major country on Earth, the USA, so focused on its little self, that it is the only one still using illogical and INCONVENIENT measuring units that date straight back from the Middle Ages? The inconvenient truth is that the USA can’t think seriously anymore. Trading and leverage and viewing wealth from Wall Street clowns as serious are supposed to be the only conveniences worth fighting for.

It is another inconvenient truth that, the more of a mess in the world, the more it had proved profitable for the USA. So far. Thus, helping with the world getting messier has become a new, all American, hidden faith: let’s not cooperate, and the more we do not cooperate, the more awesome the bounty will be, for the USA.

Of these kind of faiths, as congealed as old limestone, great calamities arise, when reality tips over, and yesterday’s hubristic certainties become tomorrow’s disastrous ignorance. Yesterday’s Titanic, fast, sure, and impervious to logic. Today’s wreck.

***

Patrice Ayme

http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

FRAYING IN AFGHANISTAN

 

The difference between the public’s take on Afghanistan and what NATO’s top leadership is up to is stunning. I have argued before that this ominous abyss is caused by a lot of non-said arguments: the real causes for the NATO leadership behavior are hidden. Otherwise why would they persist in a war they -we- are sure to lose? OK, they are not the ones dying, and the taxes they pay, if any, will be very well compensated by various consultancies, honorary speeches, book contracts, and invites all over the political leadership uses as a retirement plan.

But let’s play their game for most of this essay, and let’s enter the logic officially offered to us. The line of NATO leadership is that they have ordered us into Afghanistan, killing people, and interdicting they main source of income, to fight Al Qaeda, and, they say, save civilization.

Never mind that Al Qaeda is an emanation of Wahhabism, the official religion of Saudi Arabia, a two centuries old variant of Salafism.

What is Salafism? It is the religion of the "old ones", an Islamic movement that emphasizes strict, literal, interpretation of Islamist religious texts such as the Qur’an and strident opposition to non-Islamic influences. “Literalism” (as it was called) was long outlawed when, and where Islamic civilization was at its peak. So, paradoxically, when Osama bin Laden celebrates Al Andalus, Muslim Spain, he is celebrating an Islam which was as anti-Salafist as possible; but let’s glide over this, since the aim of this essay is to exhibit the contradictions and lies of NATO, not the confusion, ignorance, criminal naivety, and self contradictions of Al Qaeda (and any Salafist inspired Islam, which is a lot of Islam nowadays, since rich Saudis financed it all over, generally with the complicity of American secret services (which enjoy to sow discord and division).

Never mind that Al Qaeda is not in Afghanistan, right now, and was put there, to start with, by the American and Pakistani secret services, with the direct, enormous financial and technological help of the US Congress. (Thus, one would deduce that when Americans and Pakistanis do not want Al Qaeda in Afghanistan it’s not there anymore, and that is what is observed.)

Never mind that the civilization we are supposedly saving in Afghanistan is a typically degenerated Salafist inspired superstition, thus tyrannical, corrupt, hopeless and regressive.

As I have argued before, to win a war, one needs first to know what one is fighting for. And the reason(s) better be good.

Or then, if one does not have good reason(s) to fight a war, one needs to have an immense military superiority. We do not have the later in Afghanistan: scaling up what the French military was allowed to do in Algeria to the population of Afghanistan, we would need 500,000 [number of French soldiers at the time] times 36 [population Afghanistan] divided by 6 [population of Algerians in 1958]. The result is three million men.

In Vietnam, although the Americans deployed 535,000 on the ground (plus much more in Thailand, Philippines, etc.), they did not have enough soldiers (proof: the Tet offensive). The population of South Vietnam was just too large. The present population of Afghanistan is even larger. So, to lose as in Vietnam, the Americans would need to move one million soldiers, airmen, support personnel, etc., in Afghanistan and around it (but the neighbors, nowadays, are unlikely to be as welcoming as Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia and Australia…)

The French won militarily in Algeria, and, although "Algeria is France" (as used to be said), the French left. They were just plain tired of waging a very nasty conflict, and argue about superstition and colonization. De Gaulle thought France would be weaker if she stayed entangled in Africa. He argued secretly that France should pull out by selfishness. That argument was also made by the socialist opposition: it was understood that France could not pay for a hospital every 100 kilometers across gigantic Africa. (Of course the greedy American plutocrats, and the imperialist Russians obsessed by Saharan oil and gas, had pushed as much as they could to get the French out, but that is another story…)

The French pull-out from Africa shows that even with huge military advantage and a few very good reasons to fight to death, sometimes even more is needed. (By the way, France and Britain withdrew from most of the countries in Africa not even because they were asked to: Algeria and Kenya were exceptions, and in Algeria, all possible and imaginable mistakes were piled up on the French side, to make the situation as difficult as possible: whereas millions of people living in French Algeria had interest to keep some sense of “French” rule, Paris, and many a secretly racist metropolitan French was not too anxious to keep sharing a fate with Maghrebins…)

But back to the present struggle in Afghanistan: to win militarily there as the French did in Algeria, are we going to send three million men to dominate 36 million Afghans? So we can give it all up a few months later? (Because that is what happened in Algeria; by the way, as the French pulled out, they did not evacuate all the Harkis, those Muslim Algerians who had fought in the French army: 150,000 Harkis, at least, were massacred after the French army had been treacherously pulled out, followed by millions of French colons and various Jews and other non Muslim, some of them implanted in North Africa, from before the Muslim invasion of 700 CE.) [Disclaimer: part of my family is from North Africa, and got killed in the conflict.]

Unlikely. Unlikely that we will find the treasure to send three million naive souls to occupy the 40,000 villages in Afghanistan, to prevent them to grow forbidden plants of the type Obama used to abuse of personally 20 years ago. [Disclaimer: I have never done drugs, not even alcohol or tobacco, so I am perfectly relaxed being scathing with the hypocrisy that is flaunted there.] Those who can’t obey the law at home, should not enforce it overseas with killer robots that fly around.

Obama does not know what he is doing in Afghanistan, as shown by his completely self contradictory statements about Islam there. What does Islam have to do with it? Well, the American strategists, in their depth and wisdom, allowed the Constitution of Afghanistan to be Islamist. Never mind the fact that Afghanistan is one of the world’s most backward countries, and that a conflictual situation developed when the progressive Afghans decided to send little girls to school, which was view in contradiction with Salafism (but clearly Muhammad loved educated little girls, since he married one, aged 6, Aisha! And there is a law in the Qur’an saying that little girls should not be killed; that used to be a tradition in Arabia, Muhammad put an end to.)

By so doing, by supporting the side of Salafism, American strategists chose the ideology of one side in the Afghan war they had themselves organized for two decades. They chose the ideological side of the Pakistani Inter Service Intelligence (itself a product of Muslim Fundamentalism), and that was also the side of the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and worldwide rabid Wahhabism. Part of these deplorable creatures were created by the American strategists themselves.

At this point, then, the American strategists, for whatever reason they held, had LOST THE IDEOLOGICAL WAR WITH SALAFISM. Ever since NATO and company have been fighting for Wahhabism in Afghanistan, getting about a thousand soldiers killed in the process (not only Americans are dying in Afghanistan, proportionally to their population, Canadians are dying more).

So here comes Obama, and first he repeats Bush’s mantra: ‘We fighting Al Qaeda in Afghanistan’. But there is no Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Al Qaeda has settled next to Pakistan’s warm nukes, calmly preparing for Armageddon there. Plus, there is extremely active and nasty Al Qaeda in North Africa: why does not Mr. Obama invade there? [Technical detail: it's often known not as "Al Qaeda", but as "Salafism"].

So Mr. Obama, apparently aware that it was silly to claim that what was clearly not, was, corrected his own logical posture: in Cairo, he celebrated good Islam, and quoted the Qur’an, while condemning the "extremists" (in Islam). Always playing Muslim on TV, he informed us that transforming women into jail-tents was good, and most welcome in the USA: never mind that anybody knows that this is the most exterior mark of Salafism, thus Al Qaeda. Never mind that any honest to goodness Muslim Fundamentalist with a vigorous disposition knows that there are 178 calls to lethal violence in the Qur’an (they have counted them, out of the 400 pages of the Qur’an).

However, our new Islamist scholar, Obama turned around, and said that he did not like the law about raping women, and forcing them to enjoy it officially, which is straight out of Salafism, and thus the Taliban.

That rape fantasy is the law in Afghanistan, though, and, thus, the law honest to goodness American boys are dying to defend. Therefore Mr. Obama is completely confused ideologically. He wants us to die for Afghanistan’s Islam, while celebrating it, and, moreover, condemning it.

If one wanted to really win that war, one would have to go back to how it started, and correct the mistake in ideological positioning that were made initially.

So how did the war in Afghanistan start? On one side there was progress, that wanted to send little girls to school. The USA’s secret services labeled that "socialism" (back in 1973), and connived with the Pakistani secret services, the ISI, to crush the idea of little girls going to school. The great strategists of the USA were ecstatic to create a mess on the USSR doorstep. nothing like giving to the adversary a very good moral reason to fight a war it could not win. A member of the Royal family had made a coup to establish a more progressive regime. A whole panoply of Salafists and shady characters was paid and organized by the USA to prevent, with bombs, to let little girls go to school.

Fast forward thirty years later. So now here we are: Pakistan is full of thermonuclear bombs, and is building very officially another nuclear plant to make even more thermonuclear bombs. The risk there? World War, of the nuclear type, starting with 200 million dead. The solution? Talk about Iran all day long. True Iran is officially a non proliferator (having signed the NPT), and Pakistan is an official proliferator that was paid by Bush 100 million dollars for making better nuclear weapons (!)

The better way out of the Afghan mess is to change the ideology of what we are fighting for, namely to officially embrace progress, and only progress (meaning not Salafism, as we presently do). Once we have done this clearly, maybe enough progressive Afghans will be found for the Afghan army, especially if we pay them well.

This is where my remarks about the Harkis in Algeria come in full: the Harkis fought in the French army not just because they loved the law of the republic, and liberty, equality, and fraternity. They also fought because it never came to their minds that France would, unbelievably, outright leave Algeria. Indeed France leaving Algeria made no sense in so many ways (and, if some day some Algerian regime pointed thermonuclear weapons, France would have to be back, or probably, die). Millions of families of Harkis suffered ever since, and as I said 150,000 were outright assassinated (and very cruelly). So, of course, this sort of things is in the back of Afghans’ mind: why would they die for Obama, when tomorrow Obama can organize another rescue of Wall Street, leaving with no money to pay for his own troops? So Obama will find soldiers for his Afghan army, but the crafty ones will have some guarantees with the other side.

Right now though, we are de facto engaged in a fake civil war inside Islam: we are fighting for Salafism/Wahhabism, against the Taliban, whose main ideology is a mix of just that, plus national resistance. The soldiers in the Afghan army do not have to make a clear ideological choice. [Thus to progress we would have to clearly impose a secular, socialist constitution on Afghanistan: it's the only way to win.]

As it is, the drain of this grotesque war on treasure, morals, morality, and logical coherence, let alone lives and limbs, cannot be sustained…

As I have argued before on my sites, in truth the war is waged not because of Al Qaeda, or the Taliban: these are just pretexts. But the truth can only be left unsaid. One cannot tell the NATO populations that they are fighting because of a pipe line, and because it is nice to have a pretext to occupy Central Asia indefinitely as one prepares for the inevitable thermonuclear conflict headed by the thermonuclear Salafism that festers in Pakistan…

Patrice Ayme

http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

ETHICALLY AT SEA.

 

SOME ETHICAL LESSONS ON THE HISTORICAL ECONOMY, AND THE RISE OF BANKSTERS. Or why Obama needs to be a quick study. And why the reforms on bank bonuses pushed by France are not enough.

***

Abstract: After an undistinguished rant describing a situation everybody is pretty much cognizant of, the thievery known as Wall Street finance, and how the salaries of Wall Streetists are related to the increasing diversion of world capital from being to nothingness, I proceed to non trivially evoke the entanglement of ECONOMY and ETHICS.

It’s the Franks that outlawed slavery (660 CE), and why Western Europe rose in all ways (by opposition to the Orient, and its slave regimes, Constantinople and Islam). Wall Street financiers, just as the masters of Constantinople, Islam, and pretty much the rest of the planet, in the past, are diverting increasingly vast and extravagant resources to themselves, starving the rest (into submission, they hope).

Perhaps they have to do so, because otherwise, they could go to jail. Hence they have to keep on paying politicians, lest the hypnosis fails. They have to be stopped before they can terminally distract us with a war, as they did in the past (wait…).

I offer a series of explicit suggestions about the minimal reforms to make to the world financial system. Bonuses are just the tip of the iceberg. The diversion of nearly all the world capital to an imaginary casino has got to stop: no more derivatives. Leverage has to be kept under control, and bankers have to respect the basic values of our civilization, under penalty of law. That should break the mesmerization they exert on naive people such as Mr. Obama, and free the minds to address the immense problems spaceship Earth will confront in the next few decades.

***

WHEN THE CHIEF CLAIMS TO UNDERSTAND NAUGHT:

Here is Obama’s ethics in September 2009. Two quotes from two different places. a few days apart:

"[Health] Insurance executives don’t do this ["treat their customers badly"] because they are bad people. They do it because it’s profitable [...] insurance companies are not only encouraged to find reasons to drop the seriously ill; they are rewarded for it. All of this is in service of meeting [...] Wall Street’s relentless profit expectations… Why is it, that we’re going to cap executive compensation for Wall Street bankers but not Silicon Valley entrepreneurs or N.F.L. football players?"

Ethic is the word, pathetic is the feeling. In the following we will attempt an historical meditation and deconstruction of these thoughts.

Obama asks why is it that Wall Street bankers should be capped as they try to starve us all, and "drop the seriously ill" because they left no money for anybody else?

Reminder: the total losses to the taxpayers in the USA and the EU are evaluated, so far, to be 8,000 billion dollars, at least. Just in the USA, the amount of gifts, loans and guarantees to the bank holding companies is about 24,000 billion dollars (about twice GDP). Those who took the money caused the very disaster that forced the governments to give them the taxpayer money. Now they are paying themselves bonuses, with taxpayer money. And their immense properties were not expropriated: why don’t they pay for their losses, with their money?

Does that have to do with them giving money to politicians? For all the talk of small naive little silly people sending money to Obama, the greatest contributor to Obama was Goldman Sachs, and now its executives sit in the White House. (Disclaimer: my family and me sent what was for us a considerable amount of money to Obama. Still waiting for the thank you note.)

Why the huge bonuses? Did they invent something, those financiers? They claim they do: that is why they talk about “financial innovation” all the time. Indeed derivatives of derivatives of options are no doubt an innovation. So was Zyklon B of Auschwitz fame).

Another reason the bankers evoke is that they, and only they, have talent, they say. Indeed. By that token, Hitler, himself nurtured early on by the top Wall Street financiers, both directly and indirectly, also had the same sort of unique talent, of slicing the throat of the sheep, after having shorn it already. Diverting most of the world’s capital is a major moral situation, as we will see.

Obama does not ask why is it that bankers are not entrepreneurs. He knows. Obama does not ask: "why is it that bankers do not really create anything?" Obama knows the difference between a bank and an enterprise: the former has made his uneducated chief of staff very rich, instantaneously, the second probably cannot employ his uneducated chief of staff.

***

THE CASINO DERIVATIVE WAS SET UP TO JUSTIFY BANKERS’ INCOMES:

So why is it that bankers need to be capped? Would not that make Obama’s chief of staff less rich than he could be, in the future?

Is all the money going to bankers somehow related to unemployment going up? Obama did not ask the question directly, but let me tell him why: because the bankers took too much capital for the rest of the economy to function as much as it used to. Some of the money was taken to pay for bonuses and extravagant "compensation".

MOST OF THE MONEY STOLEN BY THE BANKS, THOUGH, WAS USED TO RUN THE OTHERWISE WORTHLESS CASINO OF "DERIVATIVES" THAT SUPPOSEDLY "JUSTIFY" THE BANKERS’ EXTRAVAGANT COMPENSATIONS AND BONUSES.

So it’s not all about how big the bonuses are. It’s about the enormity that was created to justify the bonuses.

The bankers wanted huge money, but they needed an excuse to get it. To get that excuse, they invented bell and whistles, and smoke and mirrors, enchanted castles and tall tales, a whole menagerie of innovation of insane contracts with each other, twenty times larger than the entire world economy, out of which come imaginary profits (40% of the profits of the USA, they claim), to justify their all too real bonuses.

Why is it that civilization did very well without such bankers until the last few years? Because entrepreneurs had the money, and the bankers did not. Why is civilization doing less well? Because the bankers have too much money, and they use even more gigantic amounts in a worldwide, immense casino system they set up, called the derivative system, an army of robotized gambles that has devoured the world and its economy.

Why is it that Franklin Delano Roosevelt, an aristocrat of the higher reaches of society, called bankers, "banksters"? Why is it that Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and his Congress took strong measures in the Banking Act of 1933 (so called "Glass-Stegal"), to limit the freedom of bankers to mess up with society? Why is it that American banksters supported Hitler and German fascism, even setting up the major chemical world monopoly of IG Farben, in the early 1920s? IG Farben was central to the extermination program. Why were its investors and inventors not punished?

***

WHAT MOTIVATES THE BEASTS AT THE TROUGH?

Why is it that Larry Summers and his accomplice, the now immensely wealthy Bill Clinton, demolished the Banking Act of 1933? OK, let’s try to explain.

Bankers create (most) money: they decide who spends what, who gets what, and how much. Thus they control everybody who takes the decisions in representative democracy.

But who controls bankers? At this point, nobody. What controls them? At this point, nothing. The market has proven to be a myth, at least as far as big bankers are concerned.

Markets do not control bankers, because, when they lose all their money, common people have to pay the bankers. The bankers are masters of their destiny, and of ours too. They are out of the law. They are out-laws. Why? Because bankers make men, markets and presidents. When the markets fail the bankers, they put a gun to the head of the world financial system, and they ask the social system for money to support their casino-markets, and themselves.

Because Obama is in theory the boss, and he does not want to cap bankers, neither men nor markets can.

Bankers have privatized profits, socialized losses, and ordered their beggars the politicians, to herd the cattle people to pasture, so they can produce more. When the markets do not bring fortunes to bankers, bankers just rise a giant tax, and their errant boy the president, and the other children in Congress, give them all they want. More than bonuses, they want to go on with the fake financial system they set up.

It was obviously not enough of a warning that Wall Street financed IG Farben in the 1920s. We are back in the same scheme. But please no more whining about Auschwitz: stop feeding, and feting the source, if you do not like the human smoke.

***

ECONOMY ENTAILS ETHICS, AND RECIPROCALLY; SLAVERY IS NOT THE BEST ECONOMICALLY:

Ethics matters economically. In turn, economics is central to survival. So ethics is not a luxury, but ethics is about SURVIVAL.

The question Obama asked in his naivety, is then: ‘Why is it that insurance executives and Wall Street contribute so much to survival that they should never be capped?’

An example from the past may help Obama: in the distant past, slavery was common and usual. However, it is now outlawed, worldwide. Obama should have asked:

"Why is it, that we have capped slave traders’ compensations, but not Silicon Valley entrepreneurs or N.F.L. football players?"

Well, the answer, dear Obama, is that slavery was bad, in more way than one, and that Silicon Valley, in first approximation, is good. Slavery was bad economically: the empire that outlawed slavery produced a much more performing economy, than the one which had preceded it, where slavery was ubiquitous.

***

THE WEST ROSE BECAUSE IT CAPPED THE SLAVE MASTERS:

In turn that better economy gave that empire a better technology, more wealth, better food and health, and finally the world’s most performing military, since it beat the Arabs, who had just defeated everybody, including Romans, Persians, Indians and Chinese. The name found for that empire was forged at Poitier, in 732 CE, when superstition was crushed by progress in what many view as the most important battle of history. The land of the Free, not to say the Frank, named itself Europe, in an allusion to free Greece, and the corpses of the enemy were left to rot in the sun by the thousands.

The Franks had outlawed slavery three generations earlier, and it was not to become slaves to God, or to the would be descendants of the mythical Sarah (hence the name “Sarasin”).

OUTLAWING SLAVERY was not just better ethics, from the modern viewpoint, but also better economics, from the absolute point of view.

That is why the Imperium Francorum (now known as "The West") rose militarily, technologically, and economically (in this order).

Outlawing slavery was pretty much what the Franks had been about from the beginning. Initially their ire was directed at the invading Romans, and then, after coming to a modus vivendi with those, Frankish ire was directed at the Catholic fanatics (that they themselves had contributed to put in power, by helping emperor Constantine). After trying to defeat Catholicism on the battlefield, the Franks changed strategy. One hundred thirty (130) years after having directly confronted the fanatical son of Constantine, the Franks opted for the craftier scheme of "joining", and then leading Catholicism (by the muzzle).

***

ROME, CONSTANTINOPLE AND ISLAM WENT DOWN BECAUSE OF SLAVERY:

It is not just that all the Franks rose because they were all masters, instead of many of them being slaves. Among the Franks and the Goths, men were free, and the kings elected. This was in sharp contrast with the Holy "Catholic Orthodox" Roman empire next door, where slavery was common, usual, and expected by God and its servants.

Slavery considers that some men are lower than beasts (domestic animals were not tortured to death on a regular, or legal basis). By contrast, some other men were at the opposite extreme, higher than common men, and next to, or identified with God. For example Jesus, and thus, the emperor, and his chamberlains, were above the commons, and closer to God. Christianity was used as an instrument to prop fascism. And one can prove it, because the great emperor Diocletian invented that trick when Constantine was a toddler (~ 295 CE). Diocletian hated Christianity, so he used the conventional Greco-Roman pantheon, propping Sol Invictus as main God, and Himself as His Prophet, Peace Be Upon Him (that’s where so called Christmas comes from, as Sol Invictus replaced the Saturnials at the end of the year, in an enormous celebration).

Thus, by that metaphysical trick, the Roman emperors had invented the status that the Arabs would later call a "Caliph". In Imperial Christian Catholic Rome, the hierarchy was strict. Contradicting the emperor meant, in practice, death. And there were no Roman elections: from Constantine on, for 300 years, there was no even one illegitimate succession: Christianity had solved that eternal Roman imperial problem of succession, by painting Jesus all over the emperor.

By contrast, the Germans, who did not run, as the Romans did, an imperial system administering dozens of millions of people (a quarter of humankind), had stayed democratic (most Franks were peasant owners). As Rome decayed in fascist, pro-plutocratic, superstitious, whiny, rabidly anti-intellectual Catholicism, it became obvious to the Germans that they had to get in charge.

Theodoric’s Ostrogoths did this rather well in Italy, until Theodoric made the terrible error of having the president of the Roman Senate, Anicius Manlius Severinus Boetius, a philosopher of an extremely prestigious family, executed (this was a case of the Ostrogoths having adopted too much Roman fascism). The Visigoths did less well, as they spent a lot of time fighting each other to be elected king (not enough Roman style fascism in this case).

The Franks, trained and educated by Roman generals for three centuries, found the best balance between fascism and democracy, half way between Germania and Roma. They replaced, and became, the Roman army, and reestablished a centralized rule, all over Gallia (Gaul), by ejecting the Visigoths from their capital of Toulouse, and bottle them in Hispania (the Visigoths would keep on arguing with each other, until the Islamized Berbers of Tarik would invade them, 710 CE). Soon the Franks re-conquered Germania in the name of Rome.

***

GOD, EMPEROR, MASTER AND SLAVE:

Christianity, the servant of Roman plutocratic fascism, was friendly to slavery: all Christians are supposed to be more or less the obsequious servants of the omnipotent, jealous God in the Sky, a heavenly parody to teach the respect for the all too real omnipotent, rabid emperor on the ground. Unsurprisingly, Jesus Christ has nothing much to say against slavery. Bishops were the largest slave owners by 420 CE. The Muslim parrots would harp further on that theme, outright proclaiming that man was a slave to God, and had to obey his superior as if he were God, or the Prophet (Quran’s fascist principle, Sura 4; verse 59, later to inspire the Guide Adolf Hitler).

***

SLAVERY AND THE REIGN OF PROFITS WORKED IN AMERICA:

In a stroke of genius, the immigrant, naturalized queen of the Franks, Bathilde, an ex British slave, outlawed slavery (~ 660 CE). The history of the West proceeded from there ever more gloriously.

This date, 660 CE, which should be the most important in the history of slavery, is scrupulously neglected, because American plutocrats do not want to have to explain why they reestablished slavery 1,000 years later. Let’s say it in a nutshell, nevertheless, in the hope of embarrassing them. Slavery was profitable in America, because it was not impeded by human rights.

According to Barack Obama in the quote above, profits are the most important value. In America, according to this spirit that Obama loudly celebrates, slave traders were not bad people. And so it was for 250 years. Slave traders were just trying to make a profit: not bad. And, always according to Barack Obama, those profits ought not to have been limited.

***

AMERICA’S NEW PHILOSOPHY: STRAIGHT BACK TO SAVAGERY.

In other words, the philosophy of Barack Obama is strictly, genuinely all American, and fundamentally adverse to the founding philosophy of the West, which holds that there are deeper and higher values than profits.

The principle that there are greater values than profits and life itself is fundamental to Ancient Greece, and Ancient Rome, or even Ancient Troy. Even fascist Sparta made the point that freedom was more important than life. Sparta threw the arrogant Persians ambassadors down a well, so they could find down there what they were asking for, earth and water.

Troy made the point that the freedom of women was more important than peace. So the Franks, who claimed (as the Romans did) to come from Troy, did not invent the principle that there are higher moral principles than making profits, or even life itself, contrarily to what the sleek talking would be leader of the West gladly insinuates nowadays. That PROFITS DO NOT FUNDAMENTALLY MATTER IS THE VERY PRINCIPLE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION ITSELF. How tragic that it is not taught to American children enough! Obama went to the very best schools in the USA, and he has no comprehension of it.

What the Franks did was to introduce two new principles that had been refused by Ancient Greece (Crete knew them, to some extent, so it was a refusal, probably consecutive to the Dorian invasion: after all Sparta, the most uncivilized of Greek cities, with an atrocious slave system, was pure Dorian).

Both of the principles the Franks reestablished were about freedom: 1) women should be free. 2) men should be free: no slaves. Then the Franks demonstrated that not only one could restart civilization with these two principles (contrarily to what Aristotle explicitly stated), but that civilization then worked much better that way.

***

"PROFIT AS ULTIMATE VALUE" ALREADY FAILED IN AMERICA: IT WAS CALLED SLAVERY:

Even in America itself, with its profits uber Alles morality, ultimately, slavery did not work. Repeating the experience of the Franks on a smaller, more anecdotal example, outlawing slavery and the advantageous consequences thereof, is also why the North beat the South in the Secession war.

And of course the expectation of universal slavery in the holy books of superstitious Islam go a long way to explain why what was the cradle of the world’s most advanced civilizations for 5,000 years has become, in the last millennium, the one of Islam, the sinking ship of stagnation.

Right now the West, and in particular its mentally confused leader, the USA, is ethically challenged. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s crack down on banksters has been reversed by the very advisers Obama put back in power.

***

PUBLIC MONEY MAKING IS NOW THE MONOPOLY OF A FEW:

Present day banking and health care the American way are modern forms of slavery. Banksters were already behind Hitler and other fascists, but, next time, they could do worse. And next time may even be now.

In recent decades the states of the West have given up on the control of money. They now control just one fifth. It is an amazing development.

It used to be, as it ought to be, that the money used by the public in the realm was created by the sovereign, for use by the government, and the public.

The system we have now is completely different. The state has farmed out money making to a few private individuals. This weirdness, and obvious abuse of power, is called "capitalism" by the stooges of the banksters. But it is not capitalism at all, it is the confiscation of capital by an oligarchy (Stalin, who had confiscated all the USSR’s capital, in that sense, was the ultimate Wall Street style bankster, in the present sense of Wall Street).

***

HOW BANKING BECAME ALL POWERFUL:

Banking developed differently when the King of France, Francois Premier, became heavily dependent upon his (Italian) bankers. Funny for someone self baptized as "French First". Francois I, "emperor in his kingdom", could not tour said kingdom without the bankers picking up the bill for his immense retinue. His adversary, Charles Quint (also a native French speaker born a few miles away), elected Spanish and Holy Roman Emperor, came to depend upon the New World’s gold and silver. There was more of the latter, so Charles made Francois prisoner in Italy (1515 CE). The war went on for several generations, involving England, and resulting in the victory of the bankers (normal history concentrates on the victory of France, and secondarily of England, and the Netherlands).

The final phase of the 478 years long "100 years war", a dynastic quarrel between the provinces of England and France, involved creative (Dutch inspired) financing on the British side, and comforted the assent, not just of the "House of Rothschild", but of bankers in general.

***

MODERN BANKING AS CIVILIZATIONAL DEVOLUTION:

In the present fractional reserve system, one fifth of the money is created by central banks (often under the form of gifts to banks in the wee hours of the morning). The rest of the money is created and lent (given) by private individuals called bankers. Those bankers lend, or give money to whoever they like (and they like themselves first).

Thus, money creation, long the definition of the civilized state, has become the province of the privately controlled fractional reserve system.

In recent decades the states of the West have given up on the control of money. They now control just one fifth. it is an amazing development. It used to be, as it ought to be, that the money used by the public in the realm was created by the sovereign, for use by the government, and the public. This system is called "capitalism" by the stooges of the banksters. But it is not capitalism at all, it is the confiscation of capital by an oligarchy (Stalin, who had confiscated all the USSR’s capital, in that sense, was the ultimate bankster).

When one says something against bankers, the bankers and their agents, or their gullible admirers, foam at the mouth, and scream that one is against capitalism. That would be funny, were it not so tragic and outrageous a statement.

In truth, in the present system of fractional reserve private banking, capitalism is not public anymore, but the province of the few, the oligarchs. This private capitalism is not sustainable. It needs to be changed, and how to do it is pretty obvious. We are not talking about a revolution here, but just making obvious ethical modifications with a huge economic impact. But it is not in the pecuniary interest of Mr. Obama to understand this. In his books, Obama has explained that self navigation is the ultimate compass.

***

WHEN OBAMA IS ASTONISHING:

Let Paul Krugman tell the truth: “Why is it,” Obama asked, “that we’re going to cap executive compensation for Wall Street bankers but not Silicon Valley entrepreneurs or N.F.L. football players?”

Paul Krugman finds "that’s an astonishing remark — and not just because the National Football League does, in fact, have pay caps. Tech firms don’t crash the whole world’s operating system when they go bankrupt; quarterbacks who make too many risky passes don’t have to be rescued with hundred-billion-dollar bailouts. Banking is a special case — and the president is surely smart enough to know that.

All I can think is that this was another example of something we’ve seen before: Mr. Obama’s visceral reluctance to engage in anything that resembles populist rhetoric."

On the face of it, Krugman does not want to upset who he is condemned to socialize with. I can easily think of something else to explain Obama’s incapacity to understand civilization: while there is little evidence that the president understands the fact that the West rests on deeper values than profit, for the last 27 centuries, there is also evidence that the President does not want to see a future cap to his own compensation [In France president Chirac has been under examination for several years by federal judges about how much money he really made in politics, and from where; Obama does not want to see this happen to him anymore that it happened to the extremely rich Bill Clinton.]

***

CROSSING CIVILIZATION WILL NOT BE PROFITABLE:

In his joint session of Congress Obama said: "Insurance executives don’t do this ["treat their customers badly"] because they are bad people. They do it because it’s profitable." By proffering this, Obama broke the tradition of honoring the human spirit that the Athenians at Marathon, and the Spartans at Thermopylae, among other countless heroes of the West in other battles, died for. Obama says: profits make good. The great say: those who only look after themselves are bad. Successful navigation is the ultimate value only for sharks. Even crocodiles defend their young: they have higher value.

At Thermopylae, Obama, if he had followed his logic, would have joined the most profitable side, and it was not the 300 Spartans. Because Xerxes was making bigger profits, he was not a bad person, according to Obama, so why to fight him? Why so partisan? Xerxes would have loved Obama, he employed plenty of those; good looking, sleek talking, obedient.

***

WHAT TO DO:

1) Cancel the derivative casino. Replace it by a very regulated system with special allowances for commercial operators, and outside investors under stiff taxation, limit of leverage, etc..

2) The fractional reserve system is here to stay. But it has to be put under stiff control of leverage. As I suggested implicitly above for one currency unit created by central banks, there should be a maximum of 4 created by banks (that boils down to 10% reserves, if I remeber my own math correctly).

3) Bankers have to operate under a strict deontology, under oath, as officers of the state (as lawyers, public notaries, and various health and police or administrative professionals already are). Right now private bankers monopolize way too much of the available capital, and have made capitalism into their own private garden, starving the real economy from capital.

***

THE ABSOLUTE POWER OF BANKERS HAS POLLUTED THE YOUTH:

We have now an entire generation of youth, and Mr. Obama is a magnificent example of this, from his own words, for which Greed Is the Ultimate Good. One cannot operate our civilization sustainably with such ideas in command.

Obama asks why the compensation of banksters ought to be limited. So that, among other things, some money would be left for others, and other activities than splurging in luxury, debauchery and usury.

The compensation of banksters ought to be limited, so that, among other things, they do not have the clout and corruptive power, on politicians, of setting up a giant world casino, of derivatives of derivatives, with a total nominal value heading towards a thousand trillion dollars (more than ten times the world’s worth of material property, from oil to castles, to entire countries). Why is it that Goldman Sachs has officers at the White House, while distributing 20 billion of bonuses, after getting 38 billion from taxpayers? Is that what is called grand larceny? Or a conspiracy?

The compensation of banksters ought to be limited, so that, among other things, they do not have the money to buy those who teach the youth to debase civilization. Debasement, or why profits are all the base we need. Debasement and profits, or how we ended up with fascism. Debasement, or the road to hell already travelled before.

Patrice Ayme

http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

***

P/S: Christianity and slavery: Christianity, the servant of Roman plutocratic fascism, was friendly to slavery: all Christians are supposed to be more or less the obsequious servants of the omnipotent God in the Sky, a parody of the all too real omnipotent emperor on the ground. Unsurprisingly, Jesus Christ has nothing much to say against slavery. Bishops were the largest slave owners by 420 CE. The Muslim parrots would harp further on that theme, outright proclaiming that man was a slave to God, and had to obey his superior as if he were God, or the Prophet (Quran’s fascist principle, Sura 4; verse 59, later to inspire the Guide Adolf Hitler).

IS THERE AN AMERICAN LEFT?

OR IS IT ALL A CIA FABRICATED, PLUTOCRATICALLY SUPPORTED ARTIFACT?

***

A personal story.

***

What is going on with the “American left”? One cannot escape the impression that Obama is waiting desperately for a republican majority so that he can be "bipartisan", all he wants. As Clinton was before him, when that democratic president let Goldman Sachs’ Rubin, Summers and Geithner demolish the great work of Roosevelt and his Congress, while hiding behind the republicans and the brouhaha related to Clinton’s pastime.

Although always polite and respecting the rules, and adorned with impeccable left and Obama credentials, I was banned from the "Daily Kos", an American left “community” of great renown (Obama wrote in it). I had noticed that my "diaries" had been modified, and I asked the technical department of the "Kos" for an explanation. Some extreme right wing words and names had been added, other aspects of my posts modified. Commentaries favorable to me were removed.

This story started a few months ago. I had been publishing some essays on a site grandly called the "European Tribune". I liked the site because of the occasional smart graph or contributor, and the European perspective.

Things changed, though, when I talked about Adolf Hitler’s financing, a fascinating subject. A German company such as Siemens did not give a dime to Hitler. But many an Anglo-Saxon Wall Streeter or American plutocrat gave countless billions of dollars and crucial support to Hitler. The historical evidence is blatant. Nevertheless I was screamed at, by people who knew very little about Nazism, and did fast internet searches to prove me wrong, by misinterpreting what they were trying to quote, or by quoting from ludicrous and, or Nazi sites. I was asked to provide “proof” of many basic facts of Nazism. Among many  Internet simpletons, a “proof” is a link. In many cases, it seems that it does not matter to what.

I was told that believing that some Western bankers could have financed Hitler was hateful. Immediately afterwards, I got two angry and threatening emails from someone called "Jerome a Paris", banning me from the European site. It turned out that this Jerome, Mr. Jerome Guillet, is a banker based in Paris. He is a real banker, complete with bonuses and dissembling discourse. For some reason, at the time mysterious, he is very popular on the Daily Kos, although he seems representative of the sort of people who created the financial crisis.

On Monday August 24, this banker, Jerome Guillet, wrote a long article in the Daily Kos, about why he deserved a bonus, and that the financial crisis was over, and that bankers saved civilization, once again. Hundreds of sycophantic comments from admiring Daily Kos members followed. I was going to comment on Guillet’s outrageous flaunting of his wealth and caste, obviously too juicy a target to ignore, when I discovered to my amazement that I was barred to do so on the "Daily Kos". I had been “banned”. Just in time.

The founder of the Daily Kos had written: “Screw Them” about some US contractors burned and killed in Iraq. I was apparently put in the same sort of bag. I found the violence and nastiness, and the hidden way in which my writings were manipulated  hard to believe. I was shocked. This were the people I thought had at heart the betterment of mankind, as they claimed. Instead, well, call me naive.

From this and the systematic refusal to dig deep into the social problems, my conclusion is that the Daily Kos is an anti progressive plant. For example the founder of the Daily Kos is against the financial reform of the US electoral system. I am of course for it.

Greatest contributor to Barack Obama? Goldman Sachs. Greatest profiteer of the presidency of Barack Obama, so far? Goldman Sachs. In the latest news, Goldman Sachs is distributing 11 billion dollars of bonuses for the first six months of 2009. This is taxpayer money. All of it.

Motivated by my sad fate of public enemy of the so called “American left”, I searched the internet for “Daily Kos and CIA”, and I found that the founder of the Daily Kos worked for the CIA (of his own admission). Not just this, but he was involved with the agency for several years, during which he founded the Daily Kos.

The CIA is an agency with a painful past: after WWII, the CIA used, and protected many Nazis, and set up dubious self financing through drug and arm trafficking (or at least so do many important people who were in good position to know claim; some are Pakistani generals, others are CIA officers). French justice established without any doubt connection between the OSS (Overseas Secret Service), the predecessor of the CIA, and many war criminals (for example launching warrants of arrest against three IBM directors who had helped to manage the holocaust).

I worked, with huge personal and financial sacrifices on the Obama campaign since 2006. I have a special, deep connection with Obama himself. But now it is starting to smell bad to me. If I had known what I know now, I would have done differently.

The absence of a true left in the USA is becoming more acute every day. The bipartisan model of Obama seems to mean half democrat, half republican. Obama is embarrassed, though, because his republican half has no support. Besides, unfortunately for the well being of the USA, and of the world, the American left is right of the European right. For example German Chancellor Merkel and French President Sarkozy, who have long careers as right wing European politicians, want to crack down on the fiscal heavens, but Obama (or is that Summers?) does not want to. Not at all. Why? Why is Obama liberal with tax cheats? Or is there even more to it?

In one sentence: The law is local, the plutocracy is global. Therein the way the later navigates around the commons. Navigation is a concept that Obama values highly. He seems to present it to the youth as the ultimate value.

The present world plutocracy originated in the USA. It is an extension of the power of the USA. Just as me on the Daily Kos, or the European Tribune, others are welcome to share in its wealth, as long as they sing along with the same exact song.

The fiscal heavens are a part of the worldwide power of the American based plutocracy. So they are sacred. Thus, although the tax code of the USA loudly claims to prosecute all those American residents who do not declare the money they have overseas, to a great extent, this is just a sham contrived to hide the truth. Besides really rich people have more than money overseas, they have investments. Those fiscal paradises are apparently viewed as central to the security of the USA.

This looks improbably base, dirty, unlawful, in other words a conspiracy of the worst type. But those have happened before. When the CIA used SS commander Barbie as a special agents, one of many organizing drug and arm trafficking across the planet, that was even more far out. The French wanted Barbie for having tortured to death 5,000 people. They also wanted him for crimes against mankind: the killing of small children of Jewish ancestry. But the CIA employed and protected the mighty Barbie for decades in Bolivia. Barbie did not even bother to hide. Using special agents allowed the CIA to deny any (direct) involvement.

So Obama is protecting the hyper wealthy network which are where American power really resides. How, otherwise to justify the reluctance of Obama to go along with Merkel and Sarkozy (who have impeccable right wing credentials)? Why else is the European right way too left for Obama?

It is not that Merkel and Sarkozy were born yesterday. Sarkozy’s brother is head of the Carlyle group, a notorious plutocratic, influence and arm trading outfit. Merkel had a front seat when it was revealed that her mentor, the right wing Chancellor Kohl, had been apparently secretly financed by his friend, the left wing French president, Mitterand.

Things, of course, will unfold. As Obama the bipartisan waits for his fig leaf, his republican majority, he does not take crucial measures which are needed, although they could be popular if done right. The trick would have been to make them on a small scale initially, as a foot through a door, explaining the truth, as FDR did in the 1930s.

So Obama is not truly addressing the energy and greenhouse crises, which are entangled, and which cannot wait. Also the banking crisis is not solved: the rotten mentality of bonuses reigns, the banks, at least in the USA made profits from a sort of giant insider trading scheme organized this winter by the US government (that can work only that long, so soon the banks will go down again). Another thing not addressed is that some things are traded that ought not to be traded (under the pretext of "liquidity").

Even the partial reserve banking system ought to be called into question, and the fact that bankers, although not public officers, create public money (more exactly 4/5 of it), mostly for their own purpose. And so on.

We do not know what will happen next. The Principles of Morality and Precaution call not to deliberately engage in practices violating either for no reason that the government could defend in public. It is one thing to carpet bomb Tokyo (an immoral thing, on the face of it), for a good reason (wining a nasty war against nasty generals and various fascists, ASAP and at a lesser human cost than any other alternative).

It is another thing to engage deliberately in publicly unjustifiable practices. Obama cannot possibly justify the 11 billion dollar bonus to Goldman Sachs forcefully taken from taxpayers, when Goldman Sachs would not exist, but for the taxpayers. (I have studied what Obama would say, and it’s indefensible; craftily, he avoids the subject.)

Obama was described before his election as the most "liberal" member of the Senate. The world may soon draw an unexpected conclusion from this. Meanwhile, we are still waiting for one single progressive decision by the president. To be treated liberally obviously does not mean being treated to progress. This does not mean that all the decisions of Obama were bad. Parts of his stimulus, especially the parts supporting new science, were excellent, and not to be neglected. (Nominating Bernanke as Fed Chair is a good decision too, although I strongly disapproved of many of the decisions that Bernanke had to take, they had to be taken, a bit like the bombing of Tokyo.)

But, overall, the USA seems increasingly to be an unbalanced right wing regime, hiding below false pretense. No wonder, when some of the most vociferous left wing opposition is the product of unlawful undercover operations from the CIA. No wonder so many on the left bark a lot, up the wrong trees. They have been misled.

Ah, to answer the questions in the title. An independent free press with its own means of research is a crucial institution of democracy. Democracy cannot function without. At the limit, the financial support of a free press should be legislated.

Many of the Main Stream Media newspapers and magazines are fixing what ailed them. Thus, although I am now highly suspicious of many outfits on the Internet not being truly being what they claim to be, I salute the open mind exhibited by many in the MSM. Many have allowed others who strongly disagreed with their editorial boards to contribute nevertheless to their commentary.

And what of the “left”? Does it exist? Well, the concept of “left” has been in trouble, all over the world: the left is local, the plutocracy is global (the preceding statement of the same type was a corollary).

In Britain, Brown is where Obama may end up some day: reviled for long term right wing policies of his own creation, that he is now trying to revert. In France, the left is a sorry spectacle as it can only contemplate a president Sarkozy who seems to be both on the left, and the right, trying to implement the best of both (in the crucial area of scientific research, where Obama is very good, Sarkozy, though, seems at best mediocre, though).

The term “progressive” ought to be preferred, to the word “left”, with the understanding that one ought to progress towards sustaining the noblest human instincts.

For example, making official the rationing of medicine is not a form of progress anyone of the true left should wish.  In Europe, everybody would remember the last time this sort of rationing was tried: it was called Nazism (or more exactly it was the foot in the door the Nazis started with). The Nazi solution to dementia was to terminate the dements  actively. The adviser of Obama, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel has suggested to let dements die instead by withdrawing treatment.

Right now, humankind has never been so rich, and so powerful. But we are next to the fall, when we have to read such lines again. Human lives are priceless, that ought to be a basic principle.

But here is the American liberal, Obama, in the New York Times, May 3, 2009:

“Whether, sort of in the aggregate, society making those decisions to give my grandmother, or everybody else’s aging grandparents or parents, a hip replacement when they’re terminally ill is a sustainable model, is a very difficult question. If somebody told me that my grandmother couldn’t have a hip replacement and she had to lie there in misery in the waning days of her life — that would be pretty upsetting.

So that’s where I think you just get into some very difficult moral issues. But that’s also a huge driver of cost, right?
I mean, the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health care bill out here.

Well, I think that there is going to have to be a conversation that is guided by doctors, scientists, ethicists. And then there is going to have to be a very difficult democratic conversation that takes place. It is very difficult to imagine the country making those decisions just through the normal political channels. And that’s part of why you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance.”

Question for Mr. Liberal In Chief:

Once you have removed people who are “toward the end of their lives” and those who are “chronically ill”, what are you left with?

Answer: those who are healthy, right. Thus, private health care insurance ought to be paid only by those who are healthy, and, preferably between the ages of 15 and 40, as the good Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel suggests. This way cost would be minimized and profits maximized. The American “left”, for you.

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Patrice Ayme

TEACHING NAZISM AT HARVARD

 

HITLER MAY BE DEAD, BUT PLUTOCRACY HAS TO RESUSCITATE HIS IDEAS: HERE COMES THE FERGUSON…

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Abstract: The “historian” Niall Ferguson used his clout to try to discredit Obama’s economic stimulus. Some believe that Ferguson’s work is highly original. But it is enabled by Godwin rule: mention Hitler, and you have lost the argument, whatever it is. Holocaust deniers love that rule.

Thus a whole generation does not know much of Hitler’s pronouncements. Thus, it is not know that Hitler’s party ran on an electoral platform, made mostly of Harvard’s professor Niall Ferguson’s ideas. Never mind that Ferguson was not yet born: Harvard is apparently full of giants escaping human understanding. Or then has a high tolerance for plagiarism, as long as it is of the fascist kind.

Hitler was closely tied to Harvard, because he was an instrument of Anglo-Saxon plutocracy, and one of its centers is Harvard. The plutocracy has perdured, because so did its ideas, and Ferguson’s job is to make it so, by teaching them to the youth.

Such invented knowledge confuses common People totally, obscuring the plutocratic tracks. Hitler hid that he marched to war, hand in hand with his special American plutocratic friends. Instead he claimed to be attacked by the French, stabbed in the back by traitors, the rat like Jews, the Versailles treaty, and perfidious Albion.

Ferguson’s pose is not just a cover-up for Hitler, but, more fundamentally, a cover-up for the plutocracy that gave rise to Hitler and still rules.

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PUTTING FASCISM UNDER A GOOD LIGHT, AS FERGUSON DOES, HELPS PLUTOCRACY:

How does the plutocracy procreate in the realm of ideas and emotions? By making the fascist and plutocratic atmosphere the best one known to elite youth. To do so is simple enough: promote those expounding the plutocratic body of "knowledge" by endowing them with the most prestigious university chairs and the power of mass media.

A case in point is Niall Ferguson, a young and famous professor at Harvard. He is famous because he is handsomely published by the best editors, besides enjoying Harvard’s clout and media presence.

The reputation of Ferguson is awesome. As "Freakonomics" has it: "When giants like Paul Krugman and Niall Ferguson start to argue, they both sound compelling." Krugman, generously, reports about Ferguson that:"I’m told that some of his straight historical work is very good."

Well, not that I know of. Ferguson’s main body of ideas is outright dangerous on a civilizational scale. Ferguson’s ideas, none of them new, are of the utmost importance for the persistence of plutocratic rule. We heard them all, echoing back from the 1930s.

Ferguson’s most important ideas were exactly the ideas which Hitler embraced, as he headed for World War Two. Many of these ideas were not invented by Hitler either. I have traced one of them, in its earliest manifestation, to "Colonel" House meeting with the Kaiser, in May 1914.

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THE TRUE CAUSES OF WORLD WAR ONE:

"Colonel" House was the closest adviser and the envoy of president Wilson of the USA (a guy of pacifist repute). House’s big idea was an attempt to create a wedge between Britain and France. Britain and France had, by far, the world’s two largest empires, whereas the USA and Germany suffered from very small ones.

At the time, a serious problem was looming, related to the frantic built -up of the Kriegsmarine. Because Germany had twice the GDP of Britain, Britain was in danger of losing her military supremacy at sea. Britain was export dependent, and would have died if Germany had blockaded her. So Britain was getting increasingly upset.

The other large democracy was the French republic. After losing during the war of 1870-1871 a huge portion of her territory, including crucial coal beds and some of its most heavily industrialized areas, France was fully cognizant of the imperial fascist German danger. That danger was extreme.

Imperial Germany was dominated by an oligarchy outrageous enough to the point of fascism. Her top leaders viewed with increasing alarm the entangled French and Russian economic build-up. Russia was democratizing, and France helped it with huge credit. The German generals believed the clock was ticking in their disfavor. They felt surrounded by a French and democratic coalition, with its three main actors: France, Russia, and Britain.

Plans originating with Bismarck and the Prussian General Staff called for the eradication of the French republic. So France had been condemned to pay "reparations" to the German empire that were supposed to break her economically. Never mind that the empire had been created in Prussian occupied Versailles, and that the war was on French soil, and had ravaged France (not Germany).

But France paid the "reparations" in five years. Bismarck was dismayed. That was not supposed to happen. Not only that, but France reinforced her overseas empire considerably, and the German imperialists realized too late that the empire was an immense source of republican strength, not just from commodities and markets, but also from manpower that, all over the world, came to identify with the republican ideals of the French revolution.

"Colonel" House proposed a deal to the Kaiser: stop the Kriegsmarine build-up, and, in exchange the USA, Britain, and Germany would rule the world, excluding the French. Clearly, the British Cabinet had not been consulted: it would have found the proposition delirious, as subsequent events showed. But the dim witted Prussian generals and the nutty Kaiser may have swallowed the bait of the ludicrous proposal, which it was not the USA to make, anyway.

In any case, the Archduke of Austria, a stern and determined partisan of peace, heir to Austro-Hungary, and a close friend to, and calming influence on, the Kaiser, was unfortunately assassinated. The fascist Prussian generals out maneuvered the Kaiser, who, being unstable, and, after all, the grandson of Queen Victoria, may have changed his mind at the last minute. They sent him away, as they prepared their infernal plot.

***

FASCIST SURPRISE ATTACK ON DEMOCRACY, 2 AUGUST 1914:

Roosevelt called Pearl Harbor a "day that will live in infamy". But Pearl Harbor was little relative to what fascist Imperial Germany’s top generals did on August 2, 1914.

The Prussian General Staff knew Britain had no army to speak of, and knew that the antique Russian army took weeks to mobilize. Their plan was to destroy France quickly, with the entire might of the imperial German army. Then they would carry by train the army across Germany, and take care of Russia. Germany’s army, although not as large as Russia’s, was equipped with the latest equipment. Russian best rifles fired 15 times a minutes, the same rate as French 75mm field guns (!).

But the German equipment was state of the art, and Germany had two hundred fifty-one divisions strong. Yes, 251 divisions.

To avoid the insurmountable French border fortifications, the plan called for the two million man German army to sweep down from the north, not the east. There was a slight problem: the triumphal Teutonic march was to go through neutral Belgium. Implicit in all of this was the thesis that Britain would stay out of it, and stay friendly, as promised by "Colonel" House, the grotesque dream that the Prussian generals wanted so much to believe in.

Never mind that Britain was a guarantor of the Belgian democracy. Never mind that France and Britain were the two largest full democracies, and had a deep affinity that way (the USA was on its way to give nearly everybody civil rights, although the so called "blacks" would have to wait for the 1960s). Never mind that England had been created by France, and that, after 485 years of "One Hundred Years war" civil war, France and Britain had been reuniting for a century in all ways, including going on joint military invasions of China and Russia (Crimea).

The most educated British leaders had arrived to the conclusion that the British intervention in the French revolution of 1789 had been a deep mistake, and that Britain should have stayed neutral, as France had in the British revolutions a century earlier (PM Lloyd George would assert this). France and Britain, for centuries had tried to progress towards democracy, and rights, and the betterment of mankind, more than any other important countries, and, clearly the Prussian generals were heading in the exactly opposite direction.

The Prussian generals understood none of this. Nor does Ferguson. When people are depraved enough, they do not understand what they do not have interest to understand.

In light of the preceding, the main thesis pushed by Ferguson, that Britain ought to have betrayed her sister democracy, France, is grotesque and deeply offensive to the spirit of democracy.

The day after Imperial fascist Germany attacked several democracies deliberately (becoming the first country to fire a shot in World War first), Earl Grey, the British foreign minister, delivered an excellent discourse to the Commons explaining why Britain had to get into the war. Earl Grey explained that civilization was at stake. People like Ferguson scoff at the notion. But the imperial German army committed mass murdering atrocities inside Belgium, days after assaulting it, after deliberate threats to do so (hence with premeditation). By comparison, no other European, American or British empire army involved in WWI has been (to my knowledge) accused of any atrocity during WWI.

Imperial German barbarity was not an accident, but a system. Imperial fascist Germany had engaged in a systematic holocaust in Namibia (led by Goering, father of Herman). White supremacists loved, and still secretly love fascist Germany just for this general inclination of being willing to free vast swathes of the planet for the white "Western" man of the Germanic variety.

It is not that Britain was anxious to go to war, foaming at the mouth. As the Secretary of State for War, Field-Marshal Kitchener, pointed out with relish: "I am proud to stand with such courageous men as my colleagues in the Cabinet. They have no Army and have declared war against the mightiest military nation in the world."

Nor were the French anxious to go to war. The French government was enjoying extensive summer vacations, and all important officials were far away. Only a minor government secretary was left in Paris, and he alone had to recall everybody, and start French mobilization to answer the imperial German march to war.

So WWI was the old struggle of fascism against democracy, the one of Greece against Persia, and the one of the "Europeans" against the Arab and Berber Muslim armies (starting after those religious fanatics invaded Spain in 711 CE, and France in 721 CE, and which is pursued, somewhat idiotically, in Afghanistan to this day). Ferguson does not understand this.

Just as with Pearl Harbor, fascism struck by surprise.

Ferguson is in good plutocratic company as far as playing dumb with WWI. Earl Russell, the philosopher, one of the top aristocrats in England, did not understand either that France and Britain were democracies, under attack, and fighting for democracy, against fascism. Russell was put in jail for 18 months, to shut down his treacherous propaganda (I will not honor it by calling it "pacifist").

As the war progressed, most democracies joined France and Britain (cynics will say that they were flying to the rescue of victory: as a result of a successful offensive in South Europe led by the French army, Germany was bound to starve for the winter of 1918/19).

Who has real reasons to be upset by the Franco-British rapprochement? Here is a hint: Churchill and the British Cabinet proposed an unification of France and Britain in 1940. De Gaulle accepted, and Churchill lent him the British equivalent of Air Force One to make the sale’s pitch. Who declined? The bastards who were busy setting up the non constitutional Vichy entity (that fascist entity was immediately recognized by the French hating Roosevelt administration).

OK, another hint. The few British divisions in existence played a role in the crucial (first) battle of the Marne. The Chief of the French army, Joffre, his center deeply penetrated by the German main body, had decided to counterattack from the side, Hannibal style, from the Paris fortress, appropriately held by the African army. That was all the reserve he had, and the move would leave Paris unprotected.

Fortunately, suddenly, the eight highly professional divisions of the British army showed up. Joffre used them as a flying reserve. British troops joined flank attacks by the Fifth and Sixth French armies. The counter attacks were highly successful: on September 9, 1914, just five weeks after their fierce assault on civilization, it looked as if the First and Second German armies would be totally destroyed. Tellingly, the British commander under the orders of Joffre, was called French.

This is how Germany lost WWI. This fact did not escape Hitler, an exceptionally courageous soldier, who saw all his comrades killed in fighting against the French, and was himself gazed (becoming hysterical in the process, the doctors said).

What Hitler took away from it, is that, had the few British divisions not been there, the French would have been less fierce, or would have run out of forces for the counter attack, or… In any case it was clear to Hitler, and many fascist white supremacists, that Britain, by helping France had chosen the wrong horse.

After the war, massive plots were engaged by many elements of the Anglo-American plutocracy, to profit from fascist German anger. Now, instead of being just angry and afraid of France, German fascists were irate about the resurrection of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and even Denmark recovering territory.

The Weimar republic, instead of admitting France was right, tried to pacify German fascists, thus undermining itself and the republican principles (Obama follows the same method in all things with his right wing opposition). Some German, American and English plutocrats promoted, financed and organized the Nazis. The relationship between France and the USA became terrible after Hitler came to power: France prepared for war, and the USA, thus, viewed France as a war monger. The USA took military and diplomatic measures against France: the influence of the plutocrats on the US government was great, and US plutocrats viewed Germany as a their latest frontier.

And all along the idea now adopted by our great Harvard professor, Niall Ferguson, was hanging around, in fascist circles: if only Britain had not helped France in WWI!

Hitler tried to make sure this would not happen again. He tried to build an alliance with Britain, and that worked until 1936. But then democrats in Britain understood the danger. The young pro-Nazi king was abdicated (he would betray horrendously in 1940: privy to the ultimate French military secrets, as inspector general of British forces, he would personally tell Hitler where to break through!).

All along, plutocrats reassured Hitler that Britain and the USA would not oppose him, and France would be left alone. By 1938, it looked like that at Munich, but by then Britain was rearming massively and secretly, building a superb Air Force. By 1939, Britain had given quiet insurances to France that she was on board, whatever France decided to do. France allied with Poland (Britain was in the fine print). In a last gambit, Hitler allied with Stalin. Sweating at the brow, but his dictatorial prestige on line, Hitler attacked Poland (thirsty for Polish oil, hungry for old "German" lands). France and Britain declared war.

***

SEARCH FOR WHOM THE CRIME PROFITED TO:

Once again, it was democracy against fascism. In a first phase, American plutocrats went into high gear, selling whatever to Hitler, sending him battle supplies as needed, managing for him what he needed, etc… In a second phase, American direct investments took a low profile, discreetly expanding with the Nazi Reich, under Nazi disguise. In a final phase, they remade their Nazi companies into American companies, having liberated (AKA conquered) the world. All together, it was an excellent operation for American plutocrats, but not so for anybody else, namely the rest of mankind.

The American People mightily profited, because the European empires were gone (with a final American shove), and the USA moved into the vacuum. The USA moved in, with the grossest methods, and they worked, because there was no alternative. Uncomprehending, for example, the USA manipulated Muslim extremism, believing it could always outsmart the religious primitives and their allies (the French and Brits had known better). Manipulating Muslim fanatics worked for the generation of Ibn Saud, Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Shah, and the dictator Zia. But it is not working with the next, smarter generation, that of bin Laden, Khamenei, and the ISI. (Trying that old trick in Afghanistan will not work either.)

Now, of course the interpretation of history I sketched above is mine, it is not in history books. But it will gain in acceptance, because it is correct, and it seems clear that many influential characters have figured it out all by themselves. For example, some of Muslim terrorists seems to have joined fanatical Islam to use it as a weapon, as the USA had done before. But back to Ferguson.

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NO NAPOLEON, NO HITLER?

Ferguson is a historian in the sense that Hitler was a historian too. "Mein Kampf" starts with a recall and reinterpretation of history, with the French as very bad guys, executing German freedom fighters. Hitler’s facts were not wrong. What was wrong is the weight he gives to those facts. It is true that the dictator Napoleon did not thread lightly in Germany. But it is also true that Napoleon contributed enormously to the construction of imperial Germany: he may have been the most important factor.

Napoleon united Germany, and created an imperial fervor (so, in a sense, it is Napoleon who created the modern Reichs!). Running out of Frenchmen to die on battlefields, Napoleon filled up his Grand Army with enthusiastic German and Poles, to attack Russia. The Nazis were obsessed by what happened next, namely that Napoleon lost, although he had won. The Nazis were determined to rise to the challenge, and do better in the next try. Ironically, they fell to exactly the same or similar factors to those which had befell their mentor Napoleon (although they analyzed them carefully, they were not careful enough, and the same bad luck with an extreme winter struck them too).

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ON THE HISTORICAL WORK OF HITLER AND HIS PARROT FROM HARVARD:

Adolf Hitler was an idiosyncratic, but shallow thinker. He had many theses about World War One. No doubt that Harvard students know them well. Most of them are repeated verbatim in Ferguson’s "Pity of War", and his other works. Because few scholars know Hitler’s ideas, Ferguson sounds original. But, in truth, Ferguson plagiarizes Hitler most of the way including in the most absurd details (such as imperial Germany being intrinsically weak, peace loving, and democratic).

Hitler and Ferguson claim that Germany waged a preventive war in 1914.

[[Counterfactual: nobody was attacking Germany, nor planned to, or was capable of doing so; instead Germany pushed Austro-Hungary to go mad about the Sarajevo assassination; days after millions of German soldiers were already pouring into other countries, killing and ravaging, Austro-Hungary had still not attacked anybody, in spite of a huge pressure to do so from the Prussian generals.]]

Hitler and Ferguson claim that irresponsible British diplomacy tricked Germany into war, with a bait and switch.

[[How do you trick imperial Germany to attack the world for no apparent reason??]]

Hitler and Ferguson, following B. Russell, accused London of unnecessarily allowing a regional war in Europe to escalate into a world war.

[[This is beyond grotesque, because after attacking Russia, France and Belgium, while forcing Austro-Hungary to attack Serbia, the war was already all around the planet, as the French and German empire sprawled all around. Moreover, due to its deep French origins, in the most important ways, and what happened before, and the fundamental principle of democracy, Britain was never going to let France be destroyed by a foreign power. Russell did not understand this, because he was a top plutocrat at heart; later, when he was impoverished, he understood worthy causes much better.] ]

Hitler, the Nazis and Ferguson love to claim that the British maintained an ambiguous attitude to the question of whether Britain would enter the world wars by the side of France or not, and thus confused Berlin over just what was the British attitude towards the question of intervention in the wars.

[[Ferguson makes the argument in particular for WWI; this is counterfactual: one week before German troops crossed the borders, when the Prussian General Staff had given the final orders, absolutely nobody suspected, in France or Britain, that war was eminent; Britain was devoured by the Irish problem, and the entire French government was, literally, at sea. So nobody could have been ambiguous: nobody expected the top Prussian generals to be planning a worldwide attack. Nobody was talking world war, except the plotters of the Prussian General staff, and they were doing so secretly: attacking France by surprise was the most important part of their world domination plan. The “Entente Cordiale” between France and Britain was more than an alliance, it was obviously a process of reunification. By the way, it is now stronger than ever. British subjects are now regularly elected to French government jobs.]]

Ferguson denies that the origins of the Third German Reich can be traced to the Second German Reich.

[[ Why does Ferguson think Hitler called it the "Third" Reich, then? many of Hitler’s closest collaborators and street fighters were prominent Second Reich personalities. For example, during the Hitler’s “Beer Putsch”, troops fired on the Nazis. Ludendorff, second in command of the Prussian WWI army, and the most important general, kept on marching as the Nazis who had not been killed fled.]]

Instead Ferguson embraced Hitler’s thesis that the will to invasion of Nazism can only be traced back to the First World War and its aftermath.

[[This the famous Nazi propaganda that Germany was stolen and mauled at the Paris 1919 conference, and lost territory which was properly German; there are some elements of truth in it, but small truths can hide a much bigger lie. And this is the case here: the "aftermath" of WWI liberated the nation of Poland. According to Hitler and Ferguson, that was a crime. Go ask the Poles.]]

Hitler and Ferguson claim that Germany was peace loving before 1914, and Ferguson claims that Germany was the most anti militarist country.

[[Hitler used that argument constantly during his march towards WWII, and generalized generously to himself. According to himself, Hitler was the most benevolent person; amazingly, his entourage believed this, and the USA, while boycotting France, which was Hitler's enemy, kept on feeding the Nazis with all sorts of direct investments and diplomatic support. The argument on the face of it is most grotesque; Germany had the world's most powerful army in 1914 and 1939; with its 251 divisions, it may have been more than 100 times more powerful than the US Army. Imperial Germany was a war machine.]]

Ferguson, bizarrely, claims that Britain was driven into alliances with France and Russia as a form of appeasement due to the strength of those nations, and an Anglo-German alliance failed to materialize due to German weakness.

[[The relationship of Britain with France was an increasing form of unity, there was no need for "appeasement": France and Britain were in love; the relationship of Britain with Russia was excellent, a smaller form of the French massive investment in democratizing Russia. Economically, militarily, industrially, Germany was the world's strongest nation, occupying half of Poland, a most important part of France; Germany's only weakness was the fascist nature of its regime, which created an increasing internal anger, of the average German against the oligarchy on top. Distracting from that anger was an obsession of the oligarchs. starting a good war was a good distraction; moreover, it was a necessity, according to the top Prussian generals, who recognized that the Russian and French empires collaborating in democracy, would bury fascist Germany; instead of deducing they ought to have democratize Germany, they decided to gamble. Why? Because they were deeply tied to the Prussian aristocracy (they were the Prussian aristocracy), and they did not trust what they viewed as the German rabble…]]

Ferguson, the one who compares Obama to a lucky black cat, claims that the British fears of Germany were due to irrational anti-German prejudices.

[[As I said, the Brits worried about Ireland, the British newspapers, a week before Germany went berserk, were full of Ireland, and neglected Germany completely.]]

The rest of Ferguson ideas are so idiotic, I am not even going to bother with them. They closely follow some of Hitler’s most demented myths, and Russell’s lunacy that, had Germany crushed France in September 1914, the European Union would have been founded early.

This amazingly philosophically, civilizationally and historically naive stance neglects notions such as plutocracy, fascism, racism, brutality and extermination. Although Ferguson claims that the British were killing routinely German POWs (an invention), he forgot the systematic killing of Belgian civilians in some areas where the imperial German army was passing through. Auschwitz would be no accident: the German fascists trained in Belgium. If you can exterminate innocent Belgian civilians, doing the same to the French, the Russians, the Slavs, the Poles, the Jews, etc… is as easy as pie.

That the Imperial Second German Reich committed a war of aggression in 1914 is totally self obvious, and strongly promoted by German historians, such as Fritz Fischer; besides the document establishing the military plot was found in a cellar.

But Ferguson is a so called "counterfactual" so called "historian": he makes up entire world of facts, histories that never happened, and reasons from there. Harvard should be ashamed of itself. What can be taught there is pure non sense, not history.

***

RECAPITULATION: MOST OF THE IDEAS OF FERGUSON CAN BE TRACED TO HITLER.

Such ideas have their use. They were standard main Nazi propaganda. They allowed the Nazis to be elected, and allowed them to pose Germany as an innocent victim they were set to defend.

OK, so it is clear why Hitler invented Ferguson’s body of work. But what is Ferguson’s motivation? Well, one has to go back to the fact that Hitler was a manipulated manipulator.

It did not dawn clearly onto Hitler, that the generous American plutocrats that helped him so much, could have their own subconscious agenda. After all, a treacherous slave owner such as Jefferson, not satisfied with sleeping with a totally underage slave who was a very close relative, and having children with her, did much more than that. Jefferson lied to his under age mistress, who was his wife’s half sister. She and her brother wanted to stay free in France, where slavery was unlawful. Jefferson told them he would set them free, when back in the USA. He gave her many children, but not freedom.

This pitiful jerk wrote lofty discourses, probably copied from the British and French master thinkers, while re-enslaving Sally. However, he is viewed by many Americans as America’s top thinker (President Kennedy boasted that Jefferson was more clever than 40 Nobel Prizes put together). Top liar, cheat, pedophile, treacherous, morally disgusting to a point that would have disgusted an old Roman : meet America’s best mind. The American soul is complex and tortured.

In the end, as France and Britain went to all out war against Hitler, Hitler, unable to subdue Britain in the instant, had to attack the USSR, to avoid war on two fronts (somewhat paradoxical, but the fascists were not too bright; this is the exact reason that Hitler gave to the assembly of all the top German generals; Herren, we have no choice…). Then the stupid Japanese generals attacked the USA (which intended to get in the war in 1943, at the earliest, to come to the rescue of whoever was going to win). That freed 250,000 crack Siberian troops from the far east, which Stalin quickly brought to bear in the battle of Moscow, onto the frozen solid Nazis.

At that point the American plutocrats realized that Hitler was the wrong horse, and they changed tactics. Down with Hitler, up with the liberation of half of Europe with American capital. The other half, they gave to Stalin to chew on (not so much to pacify him, than to weaken Europe)

By insisting that bad British blunders created the 1914-1945 war, Ferguson achieves the following:

a) Fascism is innocent, actually there is no such thing as fascism.

b) Oligarchy is innocent, there is no such a thing as oligarchy.

c) Racism and lethal racial hatred was never practiced by enraged fascists, the Shoah is a mystery.

d) Britain and France may have been democracies, but democracy is not an important notion. Actually, neither France nor democracy are observable concepts.

e) Nazism is deeply innocent. Never mind that it was all highly predictable: Friedrich Nietzsche had warned, around 1880, that the German racist nationalist fascist madness was going to soon ravage Europe with abominable wars, during the following century. Exactly what happened.

That somebody as Ferguson is allowed to teach the young in the most prestigious places is testimony to the power of plutocracy, and the fact that it is racist and fascist at heart.

So, let me repeat: it is not France and Britain, the two and only very large democracies in Europe, which created the terrible war of 1914-1945. France (with Belgium, Luxembourg, Russia) was attacked. Everybody knew that Britain and France had been in the process of getting reunited and operating as a unit for a century, and had an explicit alliance ("Entente Cordiale"), that led them to joint military operations (invasions of China and Russia, among others).

What created that world war was the fascist, racist spirit that penetrated imperial fascist Germany.

The failure of the intervening Weimar republic was partly due to the fact that it conceded all the main points to the fascist opposition, preferring to accuse France and create gigantic inflation, rather than standing on principle in the internal German debate. (A bit similar to Barack Obama conceding to Big Pharma and eschewing the public health plan before even starting negotiations on health care.)

Ferguson says that civilization would have been improved by accepting that fascist, racist, mass murdering spirit. It is a misunderstanding about what civilization is. Civilization is about democracy, not oligarchy. But then, Ferguson is an oligarchic product (elite private school, etc.), and therein his bread and butter. He does what he is paid for.

***

Patrice Ayme

http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

***

Notes: COULD THE FRENCH HAVE WON WITHOUT THE BRITS?

Technically, perhaps. After the French counteroffensive of the Marnes, when the First and Second German armies were barely saved form encirclement and destruction, Moltke, the head of the German command, coming out of a depression, is said to have reported to the Kaiser: “Your Majesty, we have lost the war.”

To give an idea of the scale of the French effort versus the British one, during this particular battle, the British lost 1,700 soldiers killed, whereas the French had 80,000 soldiers killed, 47 times more. The Germans had 220,000 casualties.

***

 

PART OF THE ENTANGLEMENT BETWEEN FRANCE AND BRITAIN:

Many people of the Anglo-Saxon persuasion, when they are not educated enough, do not realize that France and Britain were long part of the same polity (and are back into this state). So a bit of background:

Francia and Britannia were long important parts of the Roman empire, and were united that way.

For centuries, Britannia was a major, and rich province of the Roman empire. Then, because the plutocrats did not want to pay taxes anymore (I was going to speak of Goldman Sachs again, and stopped just in time), there was not enough army in crucial parts of the Roman empire, and the legions in Britannia were recalled.

Seeing that Britannia was defenseless, the north western Germans, the Angles, the Saxons and Frisians, never successfully defeated by Rome, attacked that juicy target.

The Britons organized a desperate defense, but were defeated. However, the empire of the Franks was sprawling over Western Europe , representing a new style of Roman power. The British army fled to Armorica, in such great numbers that the later became known as "Bretagne".

The counter attack occurred in two steps: Charlemagne, born two centuries later, conquered Northern Germany, christianized and domesticated Angles, Saxons and Frisians (Christianity is a massive weapon that the Franks used with relish against pagans).

Another 270 years later, a French army led by the Duke of Normandy counter-invaded Britain, and reestablished Roman rule (the French king, king of the Franks, suzerain to William, being "(Roman) emperor in his own kingdom"). In any case modern England was thus founded by the Franks: slaves were freed, and, to ingratiate themselves to the population, while stealing the properties of the noble Anglo-Saxon lords, the French introduced a litany of democratic reforms.

The 485 year war (the so called "100 year war") started as a civil war between Paris and London, French against French, Isabelle de France (queen of England) against rotten lawyers in Paris. It was a civil war between two French houses located near each other, Anjou and Normandy.

But some have never graduated from the supposed Franco-British enmity. Never mind that an English king as Richard the Lion Hearted, was born, raised, lived and died in France (some say he spent only 18 months in England, in his entire life). In truth, France and Britain are getting reunited. Whereas the invasions of Crimea and China, were more of a courtship ritual, their common front in WWI and WWII were part of a genuine unification, something traceable not just to Rome, but to the Celts even earlier.

EVOLUTION AS INTELLIGENT DESIGN.

GODS AS MENTAL ABDICATION.

(Driven By Evolutionary Reason; Often Lethal)

***

Abstract:  The Gods correspond to the intelligent design of our brain evolution made, always asking for causes, and providing answers, even when there are none at first sight. This thirst for answers has progressively exiled the Gods ever further out, at the boundary of reason. And so it ought to be, as intelligence progresses.

But it is possible to go too far in this attitude, thus leading to facile hubris. An aspect of this is the grave problem of the attempted resolution of deep differences through exalted lethal violence grounded on the God phenomenon in one’s head. The Obasama phenomenon is rolled out as exemplary.

***

The fact of biological evolution has pushed the God hypothesis further out in the suburbs of knowledge. However, the exile of God(s) into irrelevance had started well before. It is essential to Western civilization, because it corresponds to the advancement of intelligence.

The first powerful counterattack against superstition, specifically the bloodthirsty God of Abraham, happened when the Franks finally vanquished the Catholic Romans, and took control (in the preceding 150 years, the Franks had tried to vanquish the Christians, but were defeated). By 486 CE, the Franks changed tactic, and claimed to convert to Catholicism. The bishops were satisfied, because the Francisque was a gigantic double battle axe, and that was just one of the weapons of the Franks, the primary military force of the Roman empire.

The Franks proceeded to undermine Catholicism in all ways, except the few they viewed as worth encouraging.

Next the Muslim invasion forces showed up. The Franks did not claim to be Christians, because they thought the invaders were fanatical Christians descending from "Sara" (hence "Sarasins"). The Franks christened themselves "Europeans", namely continental Greeks, pre-Christian rationalists. 

The Europeans fought the Muslims with the same mentality as the Spartans fought at Thermopylae: to death and extermination. The bodies of thousands of Arabs and Berbers were left to rot in the sun. The Muslim called that the "avenue of martyrs". Three times the Sarasins invaded with all the might they could muster (721, 732, 737 CE), three times they were crushed and killed. Its armies exterminated, the Arab Caliphate so dear to Osama bin Laden fell, then, never to rise again: the Persians took control. (So don’t panic, Obama, the Arabs are not coming back from the caves, and tremble, little Bush, because by undermining Saddam the Arab, you made the bed of Khamenei the Persian fanatic!)

Next secular education was mandated to all religious establishments. Then Frankish philosophers under Charlemagne beat down on Christianity some more (their works were condemned during the crusades, five centuries later).

When the Renaissance started for good, Abelard demonstrated that Church Fathers did not know what they were pontificating about, having a yes (sic) and a no (non) about 158 important theological questions, in his work, "Sic et Non". (1120 CE.)

The mathematician and physicist Laplace broke new ground, metaphysically, when the dictator Napoleon asked him where God was in all his astronomical computations. Laplace replied haughtily that he "had no need for that hypothesis". (That was an inside joke, physicist to physicist, because Newton had claimed he did not find hypotheses, a blatantly ridiculous statement, all the more since, perhaps prompted by problems with his own semi-miraculous obscure computations, Newton evoked God a lot in later life.)

So, before Laplace, the God(s) were needed to operate the planets. After him, a few axioms of physics, and a lot of mathematics, were enough. No need for God(s). God(s) had a serious problem: it/they were not needed for planets, one of the main justifications for their alleged existence.

Fortunately, there was the problem of life, to save the superstitious. Life had been obviously created by the God(s).

Unfortunately for the simple minded, around 1800 CE, one of the first professional research biologist paid by the State, Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de la Marck, (chair of botany, Jardin des Plantes, 1788, Zoology professor, Museum d’Histoire Naturelle, 1793) discovered, by studying mollusks carefully, that they had evolved enormously, and that obviously, over long periods of time (mollusks not being known for speed, to put it amusingly).

Thus Lamarck became the "primary evolutionary theorist" (Gould). At the same time, he revolutionized geology, by showing the earth was immensely old, and not a few thousand years young, as the beyond silly superstitious had claimed (Hindu metaphysicists had got it right, with enormous ages, long before the Bible was written, and Abraham felt like stabbing his son).

In any case, Lamarck pushed down God(s) into microbes. All the rest was the effect of "forces" (as Lamarck theorized).
As the Scottish geologist Lyell, mentor of Darwin, put it in 1827: "I devoured Lamarck… his theories delighted me… I am glad that he has been courageous enough and logical enough to admit that his argument, if pushed as far as it must go, if worth anything, would prove that men may have come from the Ourang-Outang. But after all, what changes species may really undergo!… That the Earth is quite as old as he supposes, has long been my creed…"

Of course Lamarck made powerful enemies. Wrote Lyell: "If I had stated… the possibility of the introduction or origination of fresh species being a natural, in contradistinction to a miraculous process, I should have raised a host of prejudices against me, which are unfortunately opposed at every step to any philosopher who attempts to address the public on these mysterious subjects."

Later on Darwin came, and repeated Lamarck’s work in a more constrained setting: one place (Galapagos) a short time (a few million years), and one species (a particular finch). Because he wrote in English, he became much more famous than Lamarck. (Although Wallace pointed out Lamarck did most of the work.)

The amusing Dawkins emphasized the idea that evolution had nothing to do with teleonomy (following the French speaking Nobel prize Jacques Monod), by claiming that we were all submitted to ’selfish genes’.
Although we have some rough idea of what "genes" are, we do not have the final story. The only certain thing is that anthropomorphizing genes by giving them emotions is an error. Verily, Dawkins’ real point is the exact opposite: genes don’t care.
(There is some validity to the emotional content of Dawkins’ selfish gene idea… Some, but far from as much as the fans of Dawkins would have it. The extravagance with which Dawkins pushed his selfish gene point of view is self servicing.)

In any case, Dawkins’ attack against the God hypothesis was nothing really new. Can we say more?

The state of the art picture in the biology of inheritance is that it consists of inheritable more or less self reproducing, extremely complex geometrical structures (genes, prions).

Let me give an example that illustrates Laplace’s point (Kernsatz, to put it in German), and which has the advantage to be all too real.
We do not need a God of the Volcano to explain a lava flow. Even religious fundamentalists know enough today to realize that there is no God-of-the-volcano. No Pele’ needed.

But the ancients were less knowledgeable, they knew little about the volcano, except that it was very complex, unpredictable, life giving, etc…

Thus the ancients felt that all this complexity could only be explained by a God of the volcano. For millions of years, our ancestors were certain that the Volcano was a God. We could never have changed their minds; their brain circuitry was set up that way.

The Volcano God was even deeply connected to their morality, like the Moon is connected with the morality of the Arabs for millennia (and thus of the Islamist superstition).

Our ancestors believed in the God-of-the-whatever, somebody who, like them, got it all organized. It was physics and morality for the ignorant, all wrapped up in one. Now we know more, and see the volcano, and the tsunamis, and the storms, and the planets, and the stars, and the climate, and the seasons are all self organizing, or helped along by other causes. No need for an ‘animus in machina’.

There are plenty of real mysteries, of course. A few star scientists were arrogant, a few generations ago, and thought they had the sun all figured out. An uncle of mine, a top solar scientist, was more modest, and knew we did not. Sure enough, now that, in the heat of the greenhouse, solar output is a crucial data feed, we cannot predict it, and the proximal impact of this lack of knowledge maybe a few billion dead.

It is only natural and suitably un-hubristic to presuppose that the same phenomenon will occur in other realms of thought, and that immense complexities that we do not presently suspect will explain all and any further mysteries. Whereas the sadistic madness of the God of Abraham is easy to figure out, out of the old explanatory box of the primitive, the present toughest mysteries of evolution or physics are not, and will require a new explanatory box, or two.

So, NOT to believe in the God-in-the-machine has the interest of turning us into humble creatures who ask ourselves further questions.

Whereas the unbeliever is fundamentally un-hubristic.
Instead the believer has it all figured out, and now can go to sleep, at peace with the God in his head.

One can see God in the head at work with Christian Obama. That mental condition has deadly consequences. The definition of hubristic is Obama telling us what God and Islam are, and going to kill people all over South Eurasia, in the name of his narrow understanding of Islam.

Osama, of course, does the same as Obama. But Osama quotes surah, verse and hadith, whereas Obama thinks he can get away with wishy-washy, hopeful pronouncements abounding in certainty as deep as Osama’s. We have an Obasama problem: those who kill in the name of God, crusading and mooning all over, because God told them so. And the psychological problem known as "God" has everything to do with it.

(Although the Muslims of the Middle Earth have the excuse that, being under attack, they can grab whatever metaphysics comes in handy to justify their rage and hatred for the ongoing oppression and killing they are submitted to.)

When the believer tells us that God is, and what he had for breakfast, the believer is fathomlessly hubristic. The believer also relinquishes the emotional set-up to exert his brainpower more, and in the correct way, that is bottom up, not top down.

The believer, fundamentally, far from being humble, is ultimately hubristic: he knows God better than God.

This ultimate mental blindness is not what this world needs. It is what Obama needs to go kill people in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and what Osama needs, for the same reason, killing strangers, and that is why they have it. It’s the same mental condition; blind and enraged enough to kill. But ultimate blindness is not what the planet and humanity need. It is what the planet and humanity need to avoid.

So I have faith that we need to think, and I have faith that Gods, whether inside the volcano, or up in heavens, have nothing to do with it, quite the opposite. I have faith that God is anesthesia for the higher human mental capabilities. I have faith that yesterday’s superstitions will not solve the problems at hand, and will not provide with the needed moral boost. I have faith that obsessing about God(s) is a mental condition, with a poor prognostic for all concerned, and first of all, the unbelievers.

Gods have long been a mental abdication: they are short circuits of the mind, indispensable when there is nothing else. An intelligent design of the mind. An evolutionary consequence of the principle of man, finding reason where none can be seen at first sight.

So, ironically, evolution came first. Evolution is all the intelligent design there was. In the end, the evolving human species learned to evolve in his head, making imagination even more important than knowledge.
***

Patrice Ayme

NAZY TALK.

 

Abstract: In light of many of his declarations, and pursuant to the crushing of Nazism in 1945, president Obama should remove Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel from any role in government, informal or not. Otherwise said, Emanuel’s abysmal opinion that reforming health care through rationing life deserves to get an “attenuated chance” (to use Emanuel’s semantics).

For those who do not have the time to read all what is below, let’s put it in a nutshell: Emanuel believes that some people are less worthy, to the point that they deserve less medical treatment, so that other people, what he calls the “participating citizens”, can live better, and so that profits may be enhanced. This is the talk that the Nazis did not dare. 

His choice of an adviser that shoves the entire basic principle of Western civilization down the toilet, leads to broader questions about Obama’s deepest convictions.

***

ABOUT THOSE WHO HAVE NOT LEARNED THE MINIMUM FROM FASCISM.

Paul Krugman makes fun of Investor Business Daily, quoting it as saying that: "’People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn’t have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.’”

And Krugman to add: “That would be Stephen Hawking, British professor, who was born in the UK and has lived there for his whole life."

All right. Very funny. It is always pleasant to point out that the pro-plutocratic party is short on knowledge and brains.

Now for the meat of the matter. I am as much for Public health care as possible. I view health care as a fundamental right, and think that HEALTH OUGHT TO BE AN INSTITUTION, just as justice is. I think that only death, not man ought to limit health care. 

I think maximum health care is good for the economy, society, man, the planet and the evolution of intelligence. I despise the world’s richest man, Warren Buffet, for having made billion of dollars in health care insurance and managed “care”. In other world I am a health care fanatic. But of course I see that concessions have to be made, at the present time.

But this is not what I see coming from Obama. I do not see in Obama someone who believes that health is the right. I see rather the obverse. I rather see someone determined to manipulate us with cost calculus

After rushing people into accepting what turns out as his bloody certainties about Islam, as expressed by his blind worsening of the Afghan war, after his outrageous support for a few hundreds of conspiring financiers, ruining the country in the process, and after his refusal to let the sword of justice come down on a handful of officials who may have violated national and international law about torture, I have become suspicious of Obama’s fundamental lack of a moral compass, beyond using a miniature version of morality to serve his obvious self interest.

Morality ought not to be just what serves to be elected by faking it rhetorically.

Thus, to my revolted dismay, events have led me to become highly suspicious of Obama. On health care, Obama made a lot of noise, as he were campaigning. But where were his concrete proposals? Why so lost? As I explain below, it’s not so hard to start the reform of health care.

Then I encountered Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel. I knew of him vaguely, putting him in the outside moral fringe, out there with murderous animal right activists. In other words, people who advocate to kill for no good reason. It never even came to my mind that Obama would have made him into one of his health advisers.

One thing I know is that the crazy stuff Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel has been saying would not go down well in Europe. And in particular Britain, France and Germany.

Giving "attenuated chances" to "persons not being, or not capable of becoming, fully participating citizens", "not giving access to full medical services to people with dementia", Dr. Emanuel wrote all this, and in many places, over many years. Dr. Emanuel’s ideas would remind Europeans of the euthanasia program the German government put in action in 1938. After a few years, it became so unpopular, it had to be stopped.

There is no way to paper over such talk. Dr. Emanuel also wants to do away with the Hippocratic Oath: he whines that it costs too much. Dr. Emanuel should not come anywhere near the White House. He ought to resign ASAP, As Soon As Possible. Like tomorrow. Emanuel as health advisor is on a par with taking Dr. Goebbels as an adviser for humanities. The Nazis never said such things, as Dr. Emanuel said, so many times, or at least the Nazis never said such things in public. Of course, the Nazis did worse, but they were given the opportunity. Their official intent was less, though. Dr. Emanuel’s intent is worse. Given the opportunity, he may well do worse.

There is a colossal contempt and condemnation, in Europe, for such crazy talk about making some people die, so that others can, supposedly, live better. That is what Dr. Emanuel talks about, again and again.

Europeans have seen it all before, from Benito and Adolf, not to say Stalin, too: they all had the concept of lessening the human status of some people, to improve (supposedly) the lot of the rest. This is the meat of Dr. Emanuel’s train of thought, repeated again and again.

Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin each had their own concept of "fully participating citizen"). So does Dr. Emanuel.

Such deeply criminally insane violation of civilization comes from people who have lost a modern moral and philosophical compass. Inasmuch as the Bush administration crossed ethical canyons towards the savage past, this is well beyond.

Dr. Emanuel thinks that young humans and old ones, all those outside of the 15 to 40 year old age bracket, are less valuable, and should be sacrificed first, for business (I feel embarrassed to have to report this: the abyssal hole in basic morality of this Obama adviser is so enormous, it makes Sarah Palin appear to be a humanistic intellectual of an incomparably higher caliber).

To crown it all, Obama made a secret deal with Big Pharma, corporatist style, as somebody called Benito Mussolini used to make.

***

WHY NOT JUST IMPROVE MEDICARE & STOP SUBSIDIZING PROFIT?

To improve health care in the present USA was simple: Obama just had to improve Medicare, first by opening it to those who were willing to pay for it. That would have helped with Medicare long term funding, and solved the contradiction between private insurance and providing health care.

Secondly, Obama also had to allow Medicare to emulate the giant insurer "Assurance Maladie" in France, by giving it the ability  to negotiate drug prices with Big Pharma (in France, even without any reimbursement, American drugs cost less than co-pays in the USA).

Instead, Obama did the exact opposite. In a secret conspiracy with Big Pharma, he assured Big Pharma that this would precisely not happen. In exchange, Big Pharma was going to be nice. Maybe they would reserve plenty of these hospital and pharmaceutical board seats people around Obama love so much.

Instead of boosting Medicare, Obama boldly asserted that he would not "cut Medicaid" (a different program from Medicare, entangled with the states). The fact that Obama did not answer the question about Medicare, whether he intended to cut it a bit, which was asked stridently all over the land for weeks, speaks volumes. The fact that Obama systematically refused to answer that question, and opted instead for cheap red herrings shows that, indeed, Obama did intent to cut Medicare. That is what it means. (It’s unlikely he will succeed, now that he has been detected, though… So now the Obamammoth is lost in the taiga, with all those pesky hunters around.)

What is going on in the Obama mind? With G. W. Bush, it was easy to see: a son of the plutocracy came to reign, enough said.

Krugman links to somebody called West, that he views as "wise".

West wrote a post in the Huffington Post, entitled "What Obama needs to learn from Sarah Palin." (Notice that the notoriously brain challenged Palin once again is evoked as an intellectual giant, ever since the Obama administration has undergone mental collapse.)

In it Ms West laments that: "… in order to close the intensity gap Obama needs to re-discover the moral fervor that imbued his campaign during the Democratic primaries. Then, he successfully equated voting for him to transforming America into a better, finer place. With an assured moral authority, he addressed voters’ fears and conflicts over race, meeting them in their place of discomfort. Now, Obama seems to have lost that certainty in himself, unable to carry his moral energy beyond his own political dreams. Rather than continuing to appeal on the basis of reasonableness and logic, Obama needs to have a frank, heartfelt discussion with Americans about their fears over health care reform — over things like rationing, affordability, and loss of control."

Notice that Ms West "assured moral authority" is basically equated with "voting for him". So, now that he has been elected, having thus effected what apparently passes for him as moral success, why would Obama re-discover what he does not need anymore?

People always have morality. Even the Nazis did. Hitler would talk about peace all the time. But his idea of peace meant war.

Just, the Nazis’ idea of morality was different. And also it varied severely from Nazi to Nazi (as demonstrated during the "night of the long knives"). Morally though, Nazism was a salad made of some characteristic ingredients. Some were poisonous. Nazism was made possible by financing from elements of the plutocracy (Bush, Harriman Brothers, Dulles, etc.), and some corporations (not Siemens, but certainly Thyssen, Krupp, Standard Oil, IBM, Ethyl Corp. of America, Ford, etc.). In turn, Nazism, anxious to please, adopted the moral pursuits of these plutocrats and corporations. Trade exists also in moral matters.

Hitler, for example, initially just hated the French, then the Jews, and finally came to believe that his mission was to fight for these corporations, which had made him possible, following in this the Duce, Mussolini.

Which brings us to the greatest donor to Obama. Question: who, or what legal person is the greatest profiteer of the last year? Anybody can guess. Yes, the Gold Man who Sacks. Goldman Sachs, the one with officers always in the government, like the pilots in a ship approaching port. That is obviously where morality lays.

When one reads Ezekiel Emanuel carefully, one sees that he wants to insure profits, and, because of this, he will ration. Even if it means killing people (because that is what restricting health care amounts to, and Emanuel makes it clear that it is all about killing people). Emanuel is the one who would have “attenuated the chance” of Stephen Hawking, if he had been in charge.

This makes the screaming of some on the left against Rush Limbaugh deeply disingenuous: why don’t they read Obama’s good doctor Emanuel instead?

 

In France, it would be inconceivable to institute rationing in health care. Far from it, the present right wing government has proposed to extend much further the emergency treatment of cardiac disease, a very expensive proposition. As the case of Hawking shows, socialized health care in Britain can be immensely expensive, and very long term. Britain and France are motivated by health, the Emanuel brothers are motivated by profits. Therein their morality: I take, therefore I am. Is it how the American left is supposed to lead to a better world? Is that progress? No moral compass, but profits?

The fundamental reason the Nazis killed the Jews was to steal them (or so several modern scholars have determined). It is ironical that the Emanuel brothers are motivated by lucre too, as the apparent foundation of their moral system. Their father was in the Irgoun, a terrorist organization that was ruthless (it did most of the killing to establish Israel), but not without principles far removed from money…

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Patrice Ayme

***

Note: Background on the Obama health advisers:

Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s Chief of Staff" called "fucking stupid" the progressives that doubt Obama. Emanuel’s brother is Ezekiel Emanuel, an oncologist, a specialist of ethics (he has a PhD in philosophy), and health care fundamentalist. He is assistant to Obama’s budget director. New ethics does not always mean progress, or compatibility with Western morality. The Nazis had new ethics.

Dr. Emanuel is not silly. He see through the Obama talk: "Vague promises of savings from cutting waste, enhancing prevention and wellness, installing electronic medical records and improving quality are merely ‘lipstick’ cost control, more for show and public relations than for true change…" (Health Affairs Feb. 27, 2008).

DR. EMANUEL: A REVOLUTION ABOUT HUMAN RIGHTS, LEAVING THE NAZIS THEMSELVES IN THE DUST:

Dr. Emanuel reassesses the human condition, nothing less:

“True change must include reassessing the promise doctors make when they enter the profession.”

According to Emanuel, the Hippocratic Oath is partly to blame for the “overuse” of medical care: Physicians take the “Hippocratic Oath’s admonition to ‘use my power to help the sick to the best of my ability and judgment’ as an imperative to do everything for the patient regardless of the cost or effects on others.” (Journal of the American Medical Association, June 18, 2008.)

“Savings”, he writes, “will require changing how doctors think about their patients: Doctors take the Hippocratic Oath too seriously, “as an imperative to do everything for the patient regardless of the cost or effects on others” (Journal of the American Medical Association, June 18, 2008).

Doctors should not take the Hippocratic Oath "as an imperative to do everything for the patient regardless of the cost or effects on others" (Journal of the American Medical Association, June 18, 2008).

Under Emanuel’s plan, Medicare and Medicaid would be phased out, and all Americans would be given a voucher that could be exchanged for medical coverage, funded by a value-added tax. "[Health services should not be guaranteed to] individuals who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens. An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia."

Emanuel has a notion he calls "complete lives system. As he puts it: “When implemented, the complete lives system produces a priority curve on which individuals aged between roughly 15 and 40 years get the most substantial chance, whereas the youngest and oldest people get chances that are attenuated.” This is justified because “broad consensus favors adolescents over very young infants, and young adults over very elderly people.”

This is not a new notion. The National-Socialists had exactly the same concept of "participating citizens". First they concentrated on a program of phasing out "individuals who are irreversibly prevented from being participating citizens", as Emanuel puts it. This program became increasingly controversial in Germany. After a few years, due to increasing protests from the German population, the Nazis had to stop it. (They recycled the extermination into a, this time secret, and now more notorious extermination program of Poles, Jews, Gypsies, French, Slavs, bad Germans, etc…)

But let’s listen to the cold Dr. Emanuel, he is much more scary:

“Strict youngest-first allocation directs scarce resources predominantly to infants. This approach seems incorrect. The death of a 20-year-old woman is intuitively worse than that of a 2-month-old girl, even though the baby has had less life. The 20-year-old has a much more developed personality than the infant, and has drawn upon the investment of others to begin as-yet-unfulfilled projects…. Adolescents have received substantial education and parental care, investments that will be wasted without a complete life. Infants, by contrast, have not yet received these investments…. It is terrible when an infant dies, but worse, most people think, when a three-year-old child dies, and worse still when an adolescent does.”

Dr. Death has something for everybody, young or old, it does not matter, it’s all about their “resources”. If they are poor, and have none, it’s a “concern”:

“The ‘complete lives’ system also considers prognosis, since its aim is to achieve complete lives. A young person with a poor prognosis has had few life-years but lacks the potential to live a complete life. Considering prognosis forestalls the concern that disproportionately large amounts of resources will be directed to young people with poor prognoses.”

Hearing all the preceding, Sarah Palin naturally came out screaming that Obama "wanted to kill her Down syndrome baby". She is not crazy, but Obama sure is for having a Nazi talker in his government. Or then what he means by taking care of people, is what the mafia means by it.

Now what happens if we feel that "Zeke" Emanuel is "demented"? Shall we not guarantee health services for him? The Nazis located the Auschwitz camp in the worst, most swampy and insalubrious place in Poland, in the soon fulfilled hope, that if badly fed and taken care of, inmates would die as flies. That was a way to kill Poles in huge numbers without obviously violating international law.

The Nazis had no qualms killing people they did not have use for, because they saw them as not truly human. Here is Emanuel again: "Unlike allocation by sex or race, allocation by age is not invidious discrimination; every person lives through different life stages rather than being a single age. Even if 25-year-olds receive priority over 65-year-olds, everyone who is 65 years now was previously 25 years" (Lancet, Jan. 31).

Talk about a poor, deeply demented idiot who cannot even see that if he kills young people, who are not “fully participating citizens” (do children fully participate?) and people he does not like, like Sarah’s baby, these people, precisely will not “live through different life stages”.

But there are other demented idiots in the Obama administration ready for “attenuation” under the deadly hands of Dr. Ezekiel.

Dr. David Blumenthal, another key Obama adviser, is national coordinator of health-information technology. Blumenthal charges that medical innovations as being responsible for fully two-thirds of the annual increase in health care spending. His solution is to limit expensive innovations.

Let’s point out the idiocy: ever since the Romans were conducting advanced surgery on condemned criminals, pioneering medical work has been very expensive. The Roman field surgery manual was used up to W.W.I. Anyway, basically, Blumenthal proposes to stop improvements in medical care, in the name of the profits. In the name of profits of Buffet and Goldman Sachs.

Obama appointed Blumenthal to a job that involves making sure that doctors obey electronically delivered guidelines about what care the government deems appropriate and cost effective.
In the April 9 New England Journal of Medicine, Blumenthal predicted that many doctors would resist "embedded clinical decision support" — a euphemism for computers telling doctors what to do.

Enough said.

***

Patrice Ayme

Big Government Yes, But Only If Justice Is Strong.

 

DEMOCRACY IS MADE IN THE OPEN, NOT SECRETLY.

Abstract: The USA is lost in an entanglement of corruption, and the government is making the situation worse. Obama’s latest gyrations are a case in point: turning around the democratic process, as he admitted doing, is beyond the pale.

The paradox is that Big Government saved the economy from a death spiral, so far. That is a European method, but, in Europe, there is the safeguard of a strong independent justice system.

There is an intrinsic problem with whom manages the creation of money. For millennia, it was the government, for better or worse, depending whether the government was good, or bad. But then, an innovation imposed itself. Even Marx did not notice it, although it happened below his eyes (so call me worse than Marx, if you wish).

The fractional banking system was introduced. Fractional banking made peculiar, special bankers into supermen. They created the currency, most of it, and they gave it to whom they pleased. After the crazed out 1920s, and the resulting crash, the ‘banksters” were held back by the great financial architecture that Roosevelt and his Congress elaborated.

But then Rubin, Lord of Goldman, came onto the scene, and his hyper genetically connected assistant, Larry Summers, busily dismantled all and any device that could hold back the few and superior ones who create money (circa 1998). The effects were felt worldwide. A world corruptocracy reached, higher than ever before. It became a giant storm towering over the land, and it is still gathering clout.

Meanwhile, let’s notice that the approach of Obama, to make secret deals behind the back of democracy, is not new. It is called “corporatism”, and it was, with an overseas war, the main element of Mussolini’s fascism.

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BIG GOVERNMENT, WELL DONE, IS THE BACKBONE OF THE ECONOMY:

Paul Krugman observes that: "The economy has backed up from the edge of the abyss, with the government’s stabilizing role preventing a replay of the Great Depression." (NYT, August 10.)

The economy is made of trillions of contract: you do this, you get that. Currency is used as an intermediate to go from one contract to the other. Thus, the profit motive has nothing to do with the basic pattern of economic activity. The government can set the entire system up, as long as water, food and energy can come in, in a sustainable fashion. Hence, if the government so decides, the economy can go on, by sheer command.

What went wrong during the Great Depression? A succession of accidents managed by the government(s). In the early 1930s, the US government, by rising tariffs 50% in July 1930, set up a trade war with its main trading partners. The USA was the world’s biggest exporter (now it’s, or used to be, Germany). The industry of the USA, already in a recession, saw the demands for its goods collapse, when European governments retaliated to the rise in US tariffs. Industry collapsed in turn. Loans could not be repaid. When banks failed, US law prevented the central bank to create money to support them (money had to be backed up by gold). (Although the USA, and the UK, were the main perpetrators, other countries were not innocent: France and Germany clung to the "gold standard"… Even as Hitler gave it up, France kept on with it…)

As Krugman points out, big government, well done, can only be helpful (and for the reason I gave). The government can do it all, but it has to be above any suspicion.

Unfortunately for the USA, the entanglement of money for corruption, and government, is extensive. There is something very wrong with Obama’s boast that: "In addition to the ongoing work in Congress, providers have agreed to bring down costs. Drug companies have agreed to make prescription drugs more affordable for seniors."

"In addition to Congress": People, democracy is being ‘augmented’ under your eyes… Big Pharma is going to cure your minds. Students of history will be reminded of what happened after "corporatism" became the rule in some European countries nearly a century ago…

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BIG GOVERNMENT WORKS WELL IN FRANCE, BUT SO DOES BIG JUSTICE, AND IT STRIKES DOWN POLITICIANS:

So far it would seem that, of the large OECD countries, France is handling the financial crisis of 2008 the best. France has also the largest public spending as a percentage of GDP.

One thing, though, about having the government order a lot of the work: it has to be honest. In France, judges are independent. So they are free to get on the case of politicians. The preceding French Prime Minister is on trial: he is suspected of abusing some of his powers. Chirac, the preceding French president, is also under examination: he is suspected of having enriched himself by trafficking his influence. The maximum sum involved is a small fraction of Bill Clinton’s wealth (although Chirac is much older than Clinton, and was in politics, and at a much higher level, much longer).

The preceding mayor of Paris, the conservative Jean Tiberi, from the reigning majority, got a jail sentence. So did his wife: she got nine months in jail for being compensated $30,000 for a 40 pages report. The court viewed this "work" as an obvious corruption. Both Tiberis are now elderly.

In France, the millions of dollars in total compensations for Michelle Obama and Valerie Jarrett, for playing doctors in an hospital, would have certainly attracted the attention of some judges. Ibidem, of course, for Bill Clinton’s extravagant fortune, and that of hundreds of American politicians (Daschle, etc.). French judges do whatever they want, and they don’t like the filthy, corrupt rich.

I have a friend who heads two doctors’ hospital groups. As a doctor, he does not understand why lawyers are put on board of hospitals by politicians, to great cost and enormous meddling. (He is a democrat, and was born in Hawai’i.) A million here, a million there, and before you know it, one talks billions. Worse: such people are friendly to corruption.

Once French judges ordered the arrest of the entire higher hierarchy of what was then the largest French bank (Credit Lyonnais). At home, in offices, all over. At 2 am. One can see right now the official theft of hundreds of billions from the so called taxpayer, and no American judge is doing anything about it.

Obama just struck a deal, behind the scene, with the big pharmaceutical industry, straight out of Benito Mussolini’ s playbook. This is not a small deal: it’s worth much more than 80 billion. Who all the profiteers are, we do not know.

As Robert Reich, economy professor and tops in the Clinton administration, a long time opponent of Goldman Sachs just put it: "… when an industry gets secret concessions out of the White House in return for a promise to lend the industry’s support to a key piece of legislation, we’re in big trouble. That’s called extortion: An industry is using its capacity to threaten or prevent legislation as a means of altering that legislation for its own benefit. And it’s doing so at the highest reaches of our government, in the office of the president." (Aug 10, 2009.)

In Italian fascism, the government worked hand in hand with big corporations, mostly behind the scenes. In the end, the people revolted, and Mussolini and his notorious mistress were hanged by the feet at a huge ESSO gas station in Milan (ESSO used to be the old name of EXXON: Italian partisans viewed Mussolini as a puppet of big American corporations). OK, they had already been shot.

Business, big business, be it governmental or not, has to be as clean as can be. This condition is not met in the USA (apparently in health care, the best performing services are the Veteran administration and Medicare).

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WHY CORRUPTION IS INTRINSIC TO THE PRESENT BANKING SYSTEM:

One word about currency: right now, in contrast to the past few millennia of civilization, it is created by private individuals, the bankers. This is a situation that has never occurred before in history, and which is incompatible with justice or fairness. It is unlikely to be compatible with civilization, and that is the deep sense of the present financial crisis.

Bankers have to be made into officers of the government, in the same sense that doctors are officers of the government, per their respect of the Hippocratic oath. This is a loose sense of the word government, true. But institutions are part of the democratic governmental process. Justice is an example, Medicine is another, so are Public Notaries. I propose to add bankers. They should feel honored, but they will not, because they prefer no honor, and sky high honoraries.

Bankers cannot go on enjoying privately the misguided trust the public is forced to put into them, even if they never have any direct business with a bank. Therein the Achilles’ Heel of the whole financial system. Although a worldwide problem, it is more acute in the USA, and can only be cured at the G20 level, once Obama has been made aware of its gravity.

But I am probably late and naive: methinks Obama may have struck a secret deal with what he calls the "financial system". The deal with Big Pharma was ferreted out by the LA Times, a few days before Obama presented it as a new elegant way to go around democracy. Somebody who is caught striking a secret deal, can be presumed to have struck more…

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Patrice Ayme

http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/