Austerity: As Wild As It Gets!

AUSTERITY BENEFITS THE FEW BY STRANGLING THE MANY:

 To fully understand the austerity drive, one has to go fully prehistoric, at the dawn of Homo Erectus. For at least a million years, Homo has known how to profit from fire, and, thus, a scorched earth strategy. That, itself, belongs to an even deeper instinct of apparently wanton destruction. Apparently, but not really.

 The austerity drive has gone further than simply dismantling the welfare state. Austerity has attacked the very heart of the solution to get out of the deep economic, energetic and ecological crises we are getting into. Scientific research and education themselves are getting slashed, in Europe, or the USA.

 For civilization, austerity has become the equivalent of banging one’s head on a wall, in the hope of improving one’s mental faculties. For conventional wisdom, it should make no sense at all, considering the grave catastrophe it’s bringing along. Yet, it makes sense, when one realizes that man has always fought man, even more than the ocean has always fought the ocean.

Even Oceans Fight

 In places where oceans meet and struggle, giant rogue waves often form. They can destroy even super tankers. (One such place is along the south-east African coast, off Mozambique).

 Some pontificate that class struggle is quaint. They are generally paid by the plutocratic system, that made the upper class a subsidiary of evil itself. Yet structures appear through struggles. Austerity itself is a rogue wave from such a struggle.

 The notion of structure is not fully explained: thorough explanations have to go through Quantum Physics. Yet the transition from Quantum Physics to Classical Physics is not part of Twentieth Century science (this is the essence of the debate on the foundations of Quantum Mechanics, and why the last Nobel Prize in Physics was given to students of this mysterious transition).

 The Honorable Paul Krugman lists a number of reasons for the austerity drive, while, correctly, decrying it (See Note). Paul credits humanity, or more exactly its leadership, with too much goodness. The most obvious reason for austerity is the one less talked about: benefiting the few by strangling the many. A master idea of the oligarchy is that class structures are no more. Yet, structures are all over: morphogenesis makes up the universe.

 I wrote against austerity many times before (see Note), explaining in particular that it was the proximal cause of the fall of Rome.

 This Fall is very striking, because it shows that plutocracy will sell its own country to make a buck. Indeed, there was no more money to pay the legions, from lack of taxation of the hyper wealthy. Thus evacuation, from sheer Will-To-Austerity, by the legions of Britain and of the “limes“, throughout the entire north-west corner of the empire.

 Defense was entrusted to the Franks; the idea was that the Franks came for… free. The Franks had no choice, but to ferociously fight, as they were mostly peasant-owners, and needed to defend their land, thus, indirectly, the Roman cities and villas. However, the enemy, knowing the legions were out of the way, got lucky (frozen Rhine) and broke through at Chrismas 406.

 It’s amusing that the “Fall of Rome” is always presented as a deep mystery, when it can be explained by exactly two battles, one lost by Valens at Adrianopolis, and the other as just related. In any case, austerity caused a tremendous military disaster within six years of its fiercest implementation!

 Austerity always favors the rise of plutocracy, and the neo-feudalism we can observe blossoming today; when there is not enough money to employ the many, what needs to be done is still done. But it’s done only by what becomes an indispensable oligarchy.

 Even those criticizing it are feeding the austerity machine: watch the Honorable professor Stiglitz in his palatial office at Columbia University, teaching economics by the People, for the People, while employed by a school that charges, 58,000 dollars a year, namely 20% higher than the median household income of New York City surrounding it. OK, let me explain. The austerity machine is the other face of the luxury machine. By thriving in the luxury machine, and making it thrive in turn, Stiglitz himself is a clog in that giant machine that made We The People irrelevant to the Luxury Tower of Power.

 The deepest reason for austerity is also the simplest, and most shocking. Austerity is not just incidentally causing the strangling of the many by the few. It’s all about benefiting the few by strangling the many.

 Most of the public has been well indoctrinated in Christian like ethics (see Nietzsche below about slave morality). Thus the naïve public will accordingly reject that such an inclination for a final solution of the public problem makes sense. And yet, it does. Thus, the very outraged denial of an inclination to the final solution has allowed it to happen many times before.

 The Final Solution does make sense, once one realizes that ecological imbalance has been the greatest enemy of humanity for two million years. Ecological imbalances caused by an (over-) abundance of people. Thus, as the Romans put it, Homo Homini Lupus. Man is a wolf for man.

 Thus, all the proximal, technical reasons given for austerity act as a cover-up for the deepest drive: making war to others, especially when it feels that there are too many, or at least too many of a kind one does not like. Thus the insistence that only a few should be served.

 Reagan and others of his kind, speaking of government, said that “the beast should be starved“.

 According to what I am saying here, they really meant, what they really wanted to say, as their wild, basic instincts told them, was that the beasts should be starved. Thus ultra hard line conservatism is as mean as the eons have had it. And as mad, as mean as the older evils had it: racism, colonialism… in all cases, it was all about the war of the few against the many, that war that never ends, the war of man against himself, killing, not just because that’s a force that gives us meaning, but because that’s the culling, that gives us a world.

 We could, of course, do differently now. But, instead of insuring the luxury of a few individuals, as the greatest good, we should then strive to make understanding of everything our greatest luxury. And that’s start

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Patrice Ayme

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Notes:

 1) On preceding remarks on austerity: I wrote nearly a year ago, “Why Austerity?”. That listed detailed causes for the austerity drive. “Why Europe Lays Supine” addresses the peculiar European case; Europe credited humanity with too much goodness, too, and believed, that, by being virtuous, the world would follow. Instead the world used European naivety to its advantage. Now Europe finds herself on the verge of an obvious depression, and is finally throwing overboard its ecological drive to lighten the ship: it refused to support its carbon price system, the world’s most advanced mechanism to control CO2 emissions.

 2) Sade agreed with the Romans that man was up to no good. In particular, Sade observed  that politicians had to be among the worst individuals, and relished inflicting their “sadistic” powers on others. And that much of their “politics” was motivated that way. he wrote about it as outrageously as possible, including Prime Ministers torturing the innocent, just to relax. Accordingly, Sade was jailed for decades by the Ancient dictatorship of Louis XVI.

Sade was freed during the Revolution of 1789. He had been one of its main instigators, directly and indirectly. He found himself in some of the highest responsibilities, and advised strongly against imposing the revolution by force throughout Europe, precisely because he was aware of the calculus of violence of man against man, the inclination to commit violence, while covering it up  in noble fashion.

 3) Nietzsche pointed out that there were two moral systems in force in Europe. Christianity, officially enforced, was the morality for the slaves, imposed to the slaves, and they did not know any better. Slaves had been made to believe that Christianity was the only morality in existence. Whereas European aristocracy ruled according to its exact opposite, the rule of the strong. Nietzsche’s analysis is still true today.

Yet, from my more cynical viewpoint the “aristocracy”, is not just admirable, literally a “rule of the best“. Instead, it’s a vile plutocracy at heart. So, instead of embracing the masters’ race, as Nietzsche seems to inclined to do, I reject it, when it’s just a vulgar plutocracy, just as I reject slavery, as another form of the Dark Side. I basically believe that the double morality system goes on today, with the same sort of results: that’s why financiers get to pay taxes at a much lower rate, from complicities in government… While preaching the free market and meritocracy (the moral system for the Plebs, precisely the one plutocrats are violating).

 4) In light of the preceding, Paul Krugman’s remarks, although well meaning, are rather meek. Said he:…”calls for a reversal of the destructive turn toward austerity are still having a hard time getting through. Partly that reflects vested interests, for austerity policies serve the interests of wealthy creditors; partly it reflects the unwillingness of influential people to admit being wrong… a further obstacle to change: widespread, deep-seated cynicism about the ability of democratic governments, once engaged in stimulus, to change course in the future.”

But Paul, of course, has to be published, and thus appreciated enough, by Very Serious People  Very Sadistic Plutocrats.

Indebted To Lies Plutocracy Is

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

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

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

Harvard: We Lie, Therefore We Thrive

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

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

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HARVARD CROOKS LONG GUIDED THE WORLD INTO THE ABYSS:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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HARVARD CROOKS STILL GUIDE THE WORLD TO OBLIVION:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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PHILOSOPHICAL METHOD SAYS: OBVIOUSLY WRONG IN ONE CASE IS ENOUGH

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Patrice Ayme

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

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

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

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

Elite Censorship

Abstract: In the guise of “moderation”, the New York Times decides what is fit to know. Some data threatening established lies crucial to the established order are systematically censored therein. And that’s worse than dumb.

Human beings are knowledge creatures. Manipulate what they know, turn them into pigeons, and they will come eat in your hand. Main Stream Media knows this all too well. Distortion of data is why the clear and present “Greater Depression” is turning into something worse than the “Great Depression” of the 1930s.

The refusal of looking at reality is what enabled the catastrophic, ongoing, austerity drive. In a self reinforcing loop, much of the austerity is now directed towards the cognitive part of the economy.

Austerity Exploding Up

“Europe’s recovery in the real economy has taken hold and is becoming self-sustaining.” (European Commission, 2010.)
In truth, what do we see? What the graph above shows: unemployment in Europe is exploding up. Yet, in truth, providing jobs, is the primary object of economy. An economy does not exist only to make financial capital happy.

Progress has to start with truth, in full, thus reality. That’s why censorship is a bad idea, be it in Pyongyang, Beijing, Moscow, or New York. In states of law, the law ought to be enough. The rule of little chiefs has no place in republics, wherever practice has given institutions a fiduciary role.
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GARBAGE IN, GARBAGE MINDS OUT.
Paul Krugman, main New York Times editorial, Mars 1, 2013:
“We’re just a few weeks away from a milestone I suspect most of Washington would like to forget: the start of the Iraq war. What I remember from that time is the utter impenetrability of the elite prowar consensus. If you tried to point out that the Bush administration was obviously cooking up a bogus case for war, one that didn’t bear even casual scrutiny; if you pointed out that the risks and likely costs of war were huge; well, you were dismissed as ignorant and irresponsible.

It didn’t seem to matter what evidence critics of the rush to war presented: Anyone who opposed the war was, by definition, a foolish hippie. Remarkably, that judgment didn’t change even after everything the war’s critics predicted came true. Those who cheered on this disastrous venture continued to be regarded as “credible” on national security (why is John McCain still a fixture of the Sunday talk shows?), while those who opposed it remained suspect.

And, even more remarkably, a very similar story has played out over the past three years, this time about economic policy.”

In 2010, Olli Rehn http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olli_Rehn declared that
“Europe’s recovery in the real economy has taken hold and is becoming self-sustaining.” For a reality check, see the unemployment rate above. It seems to be sort of exponentiating. But the bankers are safe, don’t worry.

The Rehn of economic terror is currently serving as European Commissioner for Economic and Monetary Affairs and the Euro and vice president of the European Commission. Such people are intimately tied to the plutocratic system. Many of these worthies go back and forth with the likes of Goldman Sachs. They never had it so good.

Jack Lew, just named treasury secretary, inventor of the “Sequester” was a great chief at Citigroup where he proceeded to help lose about 50 billion dollars, and was compensated for his troubles by seven figures of taxpayers’ money.

Mario Monti, unelected Italian PM went, with most of his government, to report to his wealthy masters at Davos. It was obviously deliberate: elections were coming, the Italian people were encouraged to acknowledge their masters too, just like their PM. Instead, to general surprise, they voted massively for Beppe Grillo, an outsider critical of the powers that be, once condemned for manslaughter. When going to the slaughterhouse, better to chose an expert.

Back to Krugman’s editorial. The Iraq war has been an unqualified disaster in slow motion. The computation of the neofascists (aka “neoconservatives”) had been that the conquest of Iraq would pay for itself, as the conquest of the West and other parts had.

This did not happen, because the British and American armies were unable to win. Instead they had to give power to the Shiites and agree to leave.

The only positive, for the West, has been that any potential enemy now knows it should not assume that the West would always behave in a civilized, or even in a predictable, manner (that was one the miscomputations of Hitler: he had claimed, loud und klar, that the democracies could never decide anything tough, so he was stunned, literally speechless, after he received the war declarations of Britain and France).

Actually many of the American neofascists explained that such was their computation: make the USA look crazed and dangerous. Recognizing now that the Iraq war was a mistake would be rejecting that last “positive”.

In economic policy, Krugman is rightly indignant of the disaster in Europe (that friends of the wealthy are anxious to duplicate in the USA, see the “Sequester” that started today).

Major economic indicators in some countries, such as Spain or Great Britain, are already worse than in the Great Depression of the 1930s, and are pointing down further (except in tax havens such as Ireland).

UK Flat Line GDP: Greater Depression Today

Britain is doing worse than in 1930s. Cameron is blossoming into a total failure.

I commented on the Krugman editorial. As Krugman had dared to evoke the Iraq war, so did I. Here is what I said:

“Wealth from monopoly and ridiculously low taxes for the plutocrats, austerity for everybody else, is bringing massive cuts in education and science. Having cut to the bone, plutocrats, their servants and sycophants are now sucking the brains out. Hey, if the rabble is stupid enough, it will salute its masters smartly!

Examples of this disaster abound: the European Union elected leaders, led by the right wing, the regressive Cameron and Merkel just cut the EU science budget by 13%! In the name of austerity. In the USA, the sequester promises cuts to science (NSF, NIH) of 5.1%. Over the next 6 months. In the name of austerity.

Cameron, before becoming PM of the UK promised that Britain would regain technological leadership. But Cameron, is, truly, fundamentally a very wealthy heir. Truly, he wants a richer elite, and a poorer plebs. So what did he do? Besides introducing astronomical tuition to British “public” universities, he reduced the science budget of the UK by 7.6%. In the first year.

Austerity is just the latest Trojan Horse of those who brought us run-away banking. It’s just the power of a small class of people who know each other, worldwide, and are preying on the rest of humanity.
No morality stand in their way, not even putting the entire biosphere in danger. The only way we are going to save the planet is through great advances in science and efficient technology. Otherwise mayhem is guaranteed. Among other nefarious consequences.

Donald Rumsfeld used to shake Saddam Hussein’s hand, when the former used to manipulate the latter, in the 1970s. The USA decided a secret war in Afghanistan in 1979, on July 3. See what president Carter’s National Security adviser, Brzezinski, declared:

http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2013/01/21/usa-attack-against-afghanistan/

A consequence was 9/11. Three million Afghans dead, another. Bad actions can have terrible fall-out.”

These observations of mine were censored by the thinkers at the New York Times. Nothing really new here. I have been sending comments to the New York Times for more than a decade, more than 1,000 of my judicious observations were censored. I knew that, by evoking the early history of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, I exposed myself to traditional New York Times censorship. In 2003, overall, the New York Times was for the Iraq war (with the exception of Krugman).

The official line about 9/11 is that the sky was blue over an unsuspecting USA, and suddenly planes jetted in, piloted by very bad men from Afghanistan.

Never mind that 15 out of 19 were Saudi Arabs, and none from Afghanistan! That qualifies as irrelevant details.
Any data contradicting that idyllic picture is indeed viewed as deeply anti-American. Apparently reality has an anti-American bias.

The day following that act of censorship, Krugman wrote a related post about European elites pontificating in 2010 that austerity worked, and the European crisis was over. By then I knew I had been censored, so I re-sent the exact same comment, omitting the last paragraph about Rumsfeld, and Carter’s attack on Afghanistan. It was immediately published.

So what happened to “the truth shall make you free”? Why is the New York Times so authoritarian? Why to censor me systematically when I mentioned that the debt of the USA, according to the government of the USA, the IMF, etc, was 111%?

The NYT’s official line is that the Federal debt is less than 80% because it has decided that the Social Security Fund is NOT a creditor of the government of the USA. In other words the New York Times is part of a vast conspiracy that deliberately masks the fact that more than 5 trillion dollars is owed to CREDITORS, the Social Security Trust Fund and Medicare. Then the establishment turns around and say Social Security is going to get broke!

This is confusing, to say the least. Until one realizes that there is one, and only one elite, and that it is the effective arm of the plutocracy. This is why Obama was so ineffective in the first two years: he had to depend upon a Congress and Senate, let alone a Main Stream Media that was as much part of the same elite as the Koch brothers, the Rockefellers, Bilderberg and Davos conferences circles.

I often read pathetic wishes from small destitute people, for the return of Nancy Pelosi, the professional pseudo-progressive elitist, to head Congress. Drinking Pelosi’s Napa wine, skiing at Pelosi’s Sugar bowl resort (cost: $85!) Something to excite progressives, if elite enough!

In truth, the TRUTH SHALL MAKE YOU SMART.

Smarts are what the pseudo left elite fears most. The truth, from smarts. To be found out as those who speak one way, and act just the opposite. And that is why the New York Times has censored me more than 1,000 times, but the Wall Street Journal (where I commented more than 1,000 times) has never censored me. Not once. Nor did “The Economist”, ever.

Official progressives are afraid, because avowed progressivism is their business, whereas in truth they just belong to the elite, and the elite, right now, means the worldwide plutocracy. That’s why massive austerity cuts are implemented when billionaire financiers are taxed less, relatively speaking, than janitors (this is an allusion to so called “carry interest” used by hedge fund managers and the like).

Can one be truly progressive when one is truly afraid of reality? Of course not. Progress comes from the manipulation of reality, and that requires to know what reality is. First. So one can make one’s mind about it, before bringing one’s mind to bear on the problem(s) .

Manipulating histories about hostilities in the Middle East informs energy policies and macro-ethics, looking forward. It also exculpates, as Krugman said, the bad actors of past policies, and, worse, exculpates some cognitive and logical methods used by past, present, and future mass criminality. it is certainly not the way to progress.

If the New York Times wants to keep on pretending it is about reality, its censorship bureau should be put out of business.
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Patrice Ayme

Why Austerity?

AUSTERITY IS PLUTOCRACY’S BEST FRIEND.

We are in a giant ecological crisis, the collapse of the biosphere. That’s new. We are also in the midst of the silent coup of global plutocracy. That’s nothing new, plutocracy has ravaged many a civilization.

Collapse and plutocracy are entangled, they always have been. The economic crisis is only an appendage of a catastrophe of antediluvian proportions.

Krugman pointed out in “Reagan Was A Keynesian“, that, by the fourth year of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, because the economy had faltered, total government spending was augmented 130% more than in the comparable period under Obama. Thus confirming that Obama is to the very far right of Reagan (especially considering that the economy is now in a grave depression, the Greater Depression, not just a Federal reserve engineered recession, as it was under Reagan!)

President Ronald Reagan caused in part, through his military built-up, a built-up in high tech. That was highly profitable, in the end. The ecological and energy crises can be solved by such a technological built-up. They can only be solved by such a much greater built-up. Such a built-up would then prove very profitable. For all of humanity, yet again.

Austerity is the enemy of technology. Superior technology asks for a measure of irrational exhuberance, as does, even more, its fertile ground, new science. Indeed, if we knew how it worked already, it would not really be new.

So why all the austerity now? Why undermining what can save the biosphere, and us?

Because austerity advantages the plutocrats, in the coup they are conducting, silently.

Such a phenomenon, a coup by the richest, under other guises, happened several times in Roman history: the situation was dire, and the plutocrats in control of the Senate tried their best, including sometimes mass assassinations, to reduce spending. In the end, austerity reigned, and reigned so much that plutocracy killed Rome.

Why is austerity favorable to plutocrats? Because, when one has it all, as plutocrats do, the best way to keep it, is to make sure that the others get ever more impotent. And when one has it all there is to be had, one can only get more, if one makes sure that others get less.

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Here are a few elaborations on the preceding, justifying the aphorisms above:

AUSTERITY IS THE ENEMY OF TECHNOLOGY:

Time and time again, Roman inventors, under the empire, presented drastic inventions, which could have changed the flow of history. They were squashed. Because plutocracy has no interest to change the flow of history, or even to have one. (As imperial Rome did not progress technologically, but the barbarians and the ecological difficulties did, irresistibly. The plutocrats heading the Roman state, cornered, became weirder and weirder, calling ever more to the fascist instinct to enforce a fanatic war against imaginary enemies, while, naturally, ignoring the real ones, namely themselves.)

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THE BIOSPHERE IS APPROACHING A TIPPING POINT:

An article in 07 June 2012 issue of Nature considers that the entire planetary biosphere may be close to a “tipping point”. Indeed. The two essential observations are that;

a) the biosphere has undergone dramatic “phase shifts” in the past, and

b) that the present stresses on the biosphere are the greatest in at least twenty million years.

In a phase shift, typically the gas content (more or less CO2 or oxygen, O2), or the temperature change abruptly, and for many million years. Such events seem to be associated with ultra-massive volcanic events (core volcanism, for want of a better expression: Dekkan, Siberian Traps), or possible asteroid impacts (Yucatan, Chesapeake Bay, Siberia events).

The article concludes:”It is also necessary to address root causes of how humans are forcing biological changes.” “Root causes” have to be addressed. If they are not, the problems fester. Rome did not address the “root cause” of its problem, so the Roman empire went through a succession of catastrophic tipping points. See below.

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THE GIANT COUP BY THE LORDS OF FINANCE: has been made possible by its stealthy character. The flies have not seen the spider web in which they are englued.

The civilization sized coup of the Lords of Finance, has been in the making for at least half a millennium, ever since bankers financed Francois I and Charles V, so that they could ostensibly make war against each other (circa 1520 CE). At least, so it looked, officially. War is a reason that gives plutocracy meaning.

Well financed war between France and Spain, for 150 years or so, allowed oligarchies of the splendid, on both sides, to have an excuse to make said war. War was a distraction, that diverted the People from revolution. The exploits of the knight Bayard may still mesmerize the naïve, but when men of war turned their traditional expertise to religious wars, it was distinctly less funny.

The silent coup, has thus unfolded over five centuries. It has consisted of several phases and elements:

a) LEVERAGING THE WAY MONEY IS CREATED PRIVATELY. Money mostly created by credit lines made possible by the fractional reserve system (privately managed, but set-up by the public government).

The fractional reserve system is highly technical and non linear. It allows private individuals, the bankers, to create 99% of the money. The complexity of the fractional reserve system hides it from democratic scrutiny. However, president Jackson, a great, extremely brutal and macho general and duelist, understood enough of fractional reserve and bankers to prevent its establishment in the USA in connivance with the state. Jackson called that his proudest achievement. On his deathbed.

Jackson’s  hostility to the Rothschild was amply justified by fact and theory. The Rothschilds (Red Shield in its original German) were feeding both sides of the so called Napoleonic Wars. Napoleon certainly did not start them: the Rothschild were out there financing wars, even before Napoleon was born. Maybe the Napoleonic wars should be called the Rothschild wars.

Alluding to the fractional reserve system, the Rothschilds had been crowing about their control of nations:

Mayer Amschel Rothschild: “Give me control of a nation’s money and I care not who makes the laws.” 

(In other declarations, Rothschild boasted that he “issued” the nations’ money.)

Tellingly the theoreticians of class struggles of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries missed out that angle entirely. Marx vaguely complained about the banks’ “monopoly”. He forgot to say that it was monopoly in money creation. That private individuals could monopolize money creation would have floored the leaders of countless polities in passed millennia. Leaders, in the past, knew that striking coinage, that is, in practice, Fiat Money, was the prerogative of the state. That state monopoly was backed-up by military force.

However, president Roosevelt was not fooled: he “welcomed the hatred of money changers“.

(“Money changers” was the old derogatory term for financiers used during the Middle Ages’ great age of independent republics and cities: Roosevelt knew history.)

b) THE METASTATIC RISE OF FINANCIAL DERIVATIVES under Clinton and complete deregulation of finance (London’s “Big Bang, etc.) Derivatives were initially a way to insure farmers (say rice farmers in Japan 16C, or corn growers in Illinois 19C). They have their place as a form of insurance for commercial operators. But a distinction ought to be drawn between those and speculators. Moreover, when there is no insurance connected to the bets (as has been the case with CDS), then one obtains A CASINO INSURED BY THE PUBLIC, ALBEIT OWNED  BY SHARKS. Thus a welfare system for plutocrats set-up by the public.

c) MAKING THE STATE SERF TO PLUTOCRACY: The French law of 1973 passed by Rothschild banker Pompidou forbade the state to create money. Instead the state had to ask the richest men for money, and they were free to make as much money as they wanted from this begging. It was generalized to all of Europe by dim witted or treacherous socialists (Delors and his crew).

d) THE BANKERS STOLE THE ECONOMY, GIVE THEM MORE: The crisis of 2008 (Subprime, etc.) was “solved” by throwing trillions of public money (“monetary base”) to (private) banks. The bankers had lost that money, to themselves, and their friends.

That “solution” made private financiers more powerful than ever. The same is done in Europe, with the same result. The 100 billion euros “rescue’ for Spain is more of the same. Breaking up Europe would make the financiers even more powerful, that is why they are trying their best to do so.

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SUSTAINABLE ENERGY IS UNSUSTAINABLE WITHOUT STORAGE:

Only very much higher technology will solve the present crisis. Sustainable energy, in particular could work, with storage systems… That we do not have: the best are dams, but dams cannot go in every backyard. (Dams allow to recover 80% to 90% of the energy, by working turbines in reverse to bring the water up, when there is excess energy; the method was inaugurated to serve nuclear plants, which never stop producing, night and day, month after month…) -Denmark better start building dams, to stop depending upon coal (as it does now). In the case of Denmark, a flat country, that means elevated lagoons.

More advanced storage are possible. Fuel cells have high efficiency (but they have proven finicky, expensive, and even dangerous). On the island of Corsica a private-public partnership with the local university, is building fuel cell systems connected to the grid.

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ROMAN PRECEDENTS:

Roman history is very instructive, and deserves much better, to be so instructed, than the parody of it taught right and left (last example: the May 2012 book “Why Nations Fail“).

Rome knew several plutocratic and debt crises. The first one, the rise of plutocracy, put an end to the republic; the next one was solved radically by Tiberius, by massive public refinancing; the following one set the roots for the collapse of the Principate, and even the empire: the plutocrats refused to pay enough taxes to keep the barbarians off the gates… Already under Marcus Aurelius! It got only worse and worse in the following three centuries, or until Roman armies were replaced by Frankish armies… Which were paid by Frankish taxes… Or nationalizations.

The present crisis is a combination of the three Roman financial, economic and social crises.

Europe, always more inventive, has found still another crisis to add to the mix.

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EUROPE, OR WHEN THE STATE ENTRUSTS THE COUNTERFEITERS WITH CREATING MONEY:

Europe has entrusted the plutocrats with money creation. In ancient Rome, as in any state worth this title, it’s the state that created money. It is still like that in the USA, Japan, China, Britain, Mongolia, or Argentina. But not in Europe’s European Monetary Union.

Part of the problem of Late Third Century Rome was that, precisely because the plutocrats refused to pay taxes, and they had the means to refuse, the Roman empire ran out of money. Diocletian corrected that with an economic command and control system that worked obviously very well, and was sustainable…

Until the Vandals cut the food line between Africa and Rome in the Fifth Century: there had not been enough money to pay a sufficient army, or navy to stop 10,000 or so Vandal warriors!

Thus command and control in the economic realm, had not fixed the fundamental problem, the disconnection of the plutocrats, and the resources they commanded, from the rest of society. The plutocrats could afford (private) armies, precisely because the state could not afford the PUBLIC army. Plutocrats did not care that cities needed walls to protect themselves; they had their own armies to defend themselves.

Present day Europe has hyper linked to that condition of the Later Roman Empire, at warp speed.

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HOW ROME FELL, SHORT VERSION:

Plutocracy makes stupid, and stupidity was the proximal reason for the fall of Rome. Rome swung from general to general, as a gibbon from branch to branch, and finally the fiercest of them all, Constantine, allied himself with the army of the Christians, a state within the state, resulting in the establishment of full blown theocracy.

Plutocracy, plus theocracy, makes for a doubly stupid leadership, hence really stupidly conducted wars, and the consequence was the successful invasion of the Roman empire by the Goths. In comparison with the Franks, who were deeply romanized, the Goths were savages. It took 130 years for the Franks to beat the Goths, and re-establish a military successful Roman state (the Imperium Francorum, which took officially the title of Imperium Romanum, “Roman empire” only in 800 CE, when both the Pope and the Roman imperial state in Constantinople agreed).

When Rome fell, that means, when the giant Roman socio-economy collapsed, most of the population could not get to food, nor even drinkable water. Most people died. We are even more vulnerable now.

The mushrooms of plutocracy, such as austerity, can appear beautiful, but they are most venenous…

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Patrice Ayme

Slaying A Few Austerity Myths.

BRITANNIA WAS LATIN & WESTERN. JERUSALEM WAS NOT.

When Austerity Is Too Great Even Reason Shrinks:

Abstract: Austerity can go way too far. Austerity in finance, austerity in military matters, austerity in logic, or in one’s emotional system (“Puritanism“), can be a disaster. For individuals, or civilizations.

 Austerity is why Britannia collapsed, 16 centuries ago. Austerity in logic is why one prefers to cover that fact up, by denying the evidence: English is a  Latin language. Not a Germanic one. The latter “fact” is sheer propaganda.

 A similar situation one tries to cover-up was the take-over of the Greco-Roman world by the Jewish religion, and its criminally sectarian aspects. Making us believe Jerusalem was a “pillar” of our civilization is a form of austerity of evidence.

 Whereas the wealth of evidence is that Christianism was the cross on which civilization got nailed, and that there is nothing loving about brandishing a cross, let alone threatening to kill a child.

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WHEN MENTAL AUSTERITY ALLOWS MYTHS TO DOMINATE:

 May First. A celebration, a remembrance in honor of workers killed in a conspiracy in Chicago. (Modern Americans will tell you there are no conspiracies in the USA. They have been trained to say this.)

A conspiracy involving the police, judges, industrialists. A conspiracy long forgotten in the USA, but not in the rest of the world. Someday, maybe the Americans will realize how they were led where no dignity deliberately goes… And that they stayed there, because that was the lazy thing to do. The austerity of little minds, in full evidence.

 Visiting Rome was enlightening. I am writing essays on the subject. The first one breaks new philosophical ground. It has proven difficult to write. A kind critique told me to rewrite it before publishing it, and I have been obeying ever since she grated her teeth in a persuasive way.

 In the meantime, let me handle a few tidbits. They are apparently unrelated, but the misfortune of righteous empires unites them.

 They are erroneous ideas, one should actually say, erroneous moods. Grown from austere, all too austere, minds.

 One of these lies has to do with the myth that there is something as a purely Anglo-Saxon economic model. Verily that model is half Dutch. Great Britain is a Dutch plutocratic fabrication.

 Twelve (12) centuries before, Britannia, left by Rome to its own instruments, collapsed in all ways, as it fell victim to Anglo-Saxon invasions. That was a real holocaust that killed most of the population. England was created by a French counter-strike, much later.

 Another myth is that the West has three pillars: Rome, Greece and… Jerusalem. Please don’t laugh. What does that forsaken small city in the middle of nowhere have to do with great civilizations? Verily, the West has more pillars than that: Sumer, Egypt, Crete, Phoenicia, Greece, Rome, and Germania (not to say Francia!). All these places created ideas we use to this day. But Jerusalem is not of them. A pitfall is not a pillar. A primitive mother of a prehistoric child could not be sure that a turtle did not support the world. But she sure would have told you that a guy called Joshua did not invent love. How come so many people are not that smart? Do they have an agenda?

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WHY A PLUTOCRATIC INVASION IS CALLED  “GLORIOUS”:

 I have long subscribed to several British media. And it riles me up when I read disinformation emanating from London, that speaks of Britain as if it were on the other side of the Earth. Many English media deplore the unthinkable “Eurozone crisis“, decrying anemic growth, and huge deficits.

 Meanwhile Great Britain enjoys negative growth (it’s in a recession), and has at least twice the deficits. It is intriguing that English media fail to notice that the conditions on planet Britain are strangely similar to those on the rest of the same continental plate, 30 kilometers away.

 But the credit rating agencies, owned by Obama’s guru, Mr. Buffet, give a triple A to Britain, presumably because Britain is their friend, just like Buffet is friend to Obama. And that no doubt would come in handy, should Obama go the way of the crazed Sarkozy rushing to hell in his Sarkophage. Friends take care of friends, that’s what friends are for. Each Obama needs a buffet to splurge, like a Sarko, his sarcophagi.

 What are these misinformators trying to do? Hide the total failure of the “trickle down“/plutocratic model, by insisting instead that the Eurozone is disaster. (OK, right, the Eurozone is a disaster, and it needs to grow out of it, as Mr. Hollande, to be elected France’s next president in 5 days, insists).

 This is part of a general mood that the world’s largest continent is isolated, while Britain and the plutocratic model thrive.

 In truth, Britain thrived, because a highly leverage financial system entangled with the Royal Navy and the Bank Of England was imposed by the Dutch, three centuries ago. Nothing very glorious about being successfully invaded. So to prevent examination of this sordid affair, the term “Glorious Revolution” is used to depict the invasion and usurpation.

 Ironically, the aim of the successfully invading Dutch republic was to use the British bulldog to attack France (France was the Netherlands’ creator, it is another case of ingrate child). But that cost a huge amount of money and effort on part of the Dutch, and by 1712 CE, a quarter of a century later, the Netherlands was a shadow of its former self, and stays so, to this day. Britain, though, profitted.

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ROMAN  BRITANNIA FELL, & SO DID EUROPE TO THE NAZIS, BECAUSE OF AUSTERITY:

 Britain was a part of the Roman empire that was cut-off, without a battle, as part of an austerity program! I hope the word “austerity” sounds familiar. That is what is evoked much nowadays. Nowadays that the banks have spent all the public money in the world on themselves and their friends, especially the ones in white houses.

 This observation is nothing really new: for decades in the last century, or so, the defense of the West has been pretty much reduced to France, Britain and the USA. Some will say it does not matter anyway. Wrong. Remember Auschwitz?

 Europe fell to the Nazi invasion in 1940 in part because massive austerity throughout the democracies had left the entire West with just 110 French divisions to face 153 fanaticized Nazi divisions.

 The USA and Britain had basically no armed forces, because they were practicing austerity. The Netherlands and Belgium were even more stingy on defense, as they believed that France would protect them from much admired Germany… And it was most profitable to contradict neither the German, nor American, anti-French drives.

 The “Occidental Part” of the Roman empire fell without a grand battle.

 Whereas in the Orient the Roman army suffered catastrophic defeats at Adrianopolis (Eastern Thrace, presently, European Turkey) against the Goths (378 CE) and against the Arabs at Yarmouk in Syria (636 CE).

 The defeat against the Goths allowed them to roam the Western empire, until the Franks and the Romans bottled them in Spain. The defeat against the Arabs allowed the latter to quickly seize two-thirds of the Roman empire, before they were mauled by the Franks (721 CE to 748 CE). The Franks did not practice austerity: they nationalized the church, and rose the largest army since republican Rome, complete with professional soldiers.

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ENGLISH IS A LATIN LANGUAGE, OR, MORE EXACTLY, A TYPE OF FRENCH:

 The old Britons, like other old Celts, learned to read and write… From the Romans. Mostly. This explains why the Roman civilization was accepted so well, and so durably (it lives on in these lands, to this day).

 Indeed, the Romans taught much of higher civilization to common Celts, such as how to read and write, and why law was better than gods. The Celtic religion had forbidden that dangerous knowledge to the People. That was a deliberate trick of Celtic oligarchies, as the Celtic civilization was very advanced in other important ways, for example in metallurgy, or ocean going ships.

 One reason for calling English a Germanic language is pure propaganda. Many common Brits talked, read and wrote Latin for at least four centuries, no Jutes, Angles and Saxons involved. Those savages did not read or write.

 The smashing of the Oriental Roman army by the Goths in 378 CE had far reaching consequences. The legions of Britannia were soon withdrawn, to save money. Fascist Catholic terror was cranked up by a new emperor (a Spanish general), throughout the empire, in the hope of stopping the Goths.

 Learning that Britannia was defenseless, the Angles and Saxons crossed the North Sea in ever greater numbers. Civilization collapsed in Britannia, war blossomed. Most people died. Finally, in the mid-Sixth Century, many Romans from Britannia fled to Gallia (Gaul) giving its name to Armorica (now known as Bretagne). 

 In fact 70% of English words are of French (a third), Roman (a third) and Greek origin. The same words of Greek and Roman origin are also found in French (French is degenerated Latin, where much of the efficient Latin grammar was replaced by little prepositions, German style; meanwhile the Franks latinized the Germanic language’s grammar).

 Hence the common content of French and English is roughly 70%. (In truth much more than that, because French and English have many words of common Germanic, Celtic, Arab, Indo-European, Semitic origin, for example algebra, algorithm, amen, etc.)  

 This is a second reason not to call English a Germanic language. English is Anglo-Norman, one of the three languages of the French middle ages… It’s not because the language of the Parisians, the Langue d’oïl , came to dominate, Langue d’Oc, and Anglo-French, through the most brutal means, that we should pursue the oppression.

 This point of view refutes the Franco-French bigotry of viewing English as the enemy. The correct point of view is to use English for what it is, a French language, to foster one of the oldest and most complex civilizations.

 Another myth, another lie, is that, somehow Jerusalem brought something positive to the West. If so, what? Believing in something that never was? How come historical records don’t mention Jesus, how come his bible is full of horrors?

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 JERUSALEM BROUGHT NOUGHT: 
Some say “monotheism” is a pillar of the West. But a close inspection shows that most religions had a principal god. Moreover, Christianism and Islam use several super natural entities that god is unable to submit (Satan and the Djins in the case of Allah… Besides the Moon, and entities in the Satanic Verses).

 Monotheism was invented in India and Egypt, well before Jews appeared on the scene. Vishnu, is the supreme god with many Indian avatars (26?). For example Krishna. 1,000 years before some Jews wrote some book in Baghdad.
Before Indian and Egyptians, there was Cybelle and the cult of the Great Mother. For 10,000 years. The Christians have (re)produced “Mary” from this fundamental religion. A religion which is, altogether, more natural, than the “jealous” god of the Bible (that god is “jealous” is revealed in the second commandment).
 
 ”Deus” by the way has the same root as “Zeus”. By the time Jews wrote the Bible, the Greeks considered there was one main god, a version of the 15 centuries old Ahura Mazda.
 
  I do not see what Judaism brought to the antique civilization that was sorely missing. The biblical Jews claimed they stole the land of their enemies the Canaanites (that is the inventors of the Western alphabet, the Phoenicians). However, archeological and textual evidence shows that early Jews were actually Canaanites. So they are liars.

 When one examines the situation in 70 CE, during the great war of Judea, it is clear that the Greco-Roman civilization is completely formed, universalist, tolerant. OK, it’s also a bit fascist, but not as much as the fiercest of the Jewish leaders, such as Simon (who is also completely crazed besides; he was later whipped to death in Rome).

 The enormous population of Jews in Alexandria, next door to Jerusalem, thought the sectarians in Jerusalem were crazy to have treacherously assassinated 600 legionnaires. They did not take part in the revolt… which killed one million, many of them Jews at the hands of other Jews. During the siege of Jerusalem, to make fun of Jewish superstition, Roman artillery bombarded the city with thousands of ripe pig heads…

 Josephus, the most competent and supreme Jewish general, came to the conclusion that the Jewish revolt he had himself led, was not wise. He retired in Rome, where he wrote his extensive memoirs, which provide ample indirect evidence that Jesus existed only in Saint Paul’s head (as the latter admitted).

 The contribution of the Jews to the antique civilization, was, roughly, nought. Okay. the followers of one of their sects, Christianity, have acted as if said sect had discovered, invented and promoted love, first to do so, ever. And there are some naïve, or cruel enough, to believe them. When, obviously, altruism is the essence of civilization. Civilizations had existed for millennia before Jews were invented. (Yes people are invented: Romans, Gauls, Celts and Germans are example.)

 But the doctrine of the “Chosen People”, chosen by jealous (and murderous) god, no less, central to Jewish tribal theism, has caused a havoc. See Fourth and Fifth Century Christianity, busy exterminating, in the best Bible style, everybody, as if everybody were a Canaanite. See Auschwitz. The coup of the apprentice sorcerer? What is Nazism, but for the cult of the Chosen People? “Gott mit Uns”, said the SS, fundamentally.
 
 The Christians say Christianity discovered love and altruism, but it is not the Christians who outlawed slavery.

 Instead it is the “Merovingian” Franks (Imperium Francorum) in the year 660 CE under the “regency” of (English born) queen Bathilde who outlawed slavery. Christian bishops were from the richest families, and they were very appreciative of their armies of slaves.

 Meanwhile, the Christians had burned books, libraries, philosophers, free thinkers, “people who had made a choice” (“heretics“), academies, science, etc. … All this made directly the bed of Islam, another religion that celebrates the myth of Abraham, the guy who ties up his son to cut his throat to please his boss!

 OK, Abraham was right say those for whom exploitation is the highest value. Indeed bible god then gave Abraham the land of the Canaanites. So the fact that Abraham was willing to kill his child was highly profitable to Abraham. And for those who believe profits should overlord it all, have there, all the god they want.
 
 I categorically refute the myth of the would be slaughterer of a child as foundational for our civilization.

 OK, that perverse foundational myth obviously explains why so many priests imitate Abraham, and engage in child abuse. But is this the civilization we want? A civilization where daddy ties up the child, threatens him with death, so that he can satisfy his boss’ strange desire. Is that a civilization we can afford?

 Oh, some say they did not look at it this way. Sure. Willful blindness is most profitable. Mental retardation is the ultimate soporific. Austerity of thinking, indeed. No emotions involved.

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Patrice Ayme

To SAVE The WORLD, Please DEFAULT!

GRAB CAPITAL & RENT BACK FROM THE CONNIVING PLUTOCRATS!

[Sep. 14, 2011.]

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Abstract: The Greater Depression keeps unfolding, propelled by the deliberate stupidity of the best leadership plutocracy could buy.

In constant dollars, the income of men in the USA has fallen to the level of 1978, shortly after the USA started its covert, but massive attack against the republic of Afghanistan. This is not a coincidence: the unconscionable instrumentalization of Muslim fanatics to destabilize a progressive republic so as to grab its resources demonstrates that various plutocrats had seized control of the USA to an extravagant extent by the mid 1970s (under the democratic administration of Saint Jimmy Carter, worthy follower of the morally insane crusader Saint Louis).

This stagnation of income lasting 33 years is unrivaled in any 33 year period ever since the American English colony was born. Thus, it’s a new phenomenon.

There were never three decades of stagnating incomes in English America, including in any period straddling the so called French & Indian Wars, the Independence War, the Secession War, and the Great Depressions of the late 19th century and that of the 1930s.

This remarkable stagnation confirms that the present Greater Depression is worse than the one of the 1930s. Indeed the GDP graph is now doing worse in Britain than it did during the 1930s. And we are just getting started. Why? Why just getting started? Because the leaders of the West have adresseds none of the gathering causes of the depression, yet. (By contrast, FDR, ordered a flurry of astounding decisions in the first few days of his presidency in 1933.)

Can we get out of the unfolding disaster? Yes, with judiciously implemented inflation (as Turkey, Argentina or China have decided to do, so far successfully) or with default made so carefully that it will defang the plutocracy (the occasion presented itself in 2008 and 2009, but Bush and Obama declined to do so, although it was their fiduciary duty to do so). Once plutocracy is defanged, some of its contrived connivances, such as plutocratic globalization enabled by plutocratically friendly localized laws in tiny places, the tax havens, could be easily addressed.

A good place to start to dismantle plutocracy is Greece. The only reasonable resolution to the Greek sovereign debt crisis, is actually to default in a well organized, carefully measured manner (I have long advocated strategic default as a panacea since at least 2008).

Letting Greece out of the Euro, as dollar supremacy propagandists insist Greece should do, would be an utter catastrophe, for all concerned, except for U.S. supremacists. A Eurozone exit would be especially a disaster for the Greeks, contrarily to what Paul Krugman pretends, and the reasoning is so elementary, that Krugman ought to be ashamed of himself. Massive devaluation would solve nothing for Greece. True Greece lives off tourism, and that would improve, but Greece has to buy everything outside…

And especially Greece has to buy all its energy from outside sources. Energy is something the economy is fundamentally about (a notion which eludes most professionals paid for telling economic lies, and quite deliberately so).

Greece’s situation is completely different from that of demographically tiny, resource wealthy Iceland, the terrible financial crisis of which is still unresolved, especially in the matter of outstanding bills and criminal activities still unrevealed, and unpunished.

Iceland is often brandished by the enemies of the euro as a demonstration that countries which have their own currency do better. However Krugman and other europhobes always forget the few facts I just mentioned, when they laud Iceland and its brazen, 100% default (so far), which caused a major, still unfinished crisis.

There are many types of default, indeed. The sort of default which happened in Iceland was very peculiar, quite terrible, it is not duplicable, and I do not recommend it (and, as I said, it’s not over!) When I say that Greece ought to default, I speak of a completely different sort of default. Quite different from the grand theft which occured in Iceland. (A theft which will be fixed someday, a detail Krugman does not seem to be aware of: there are actually assets in Iceland set aside to reimburse the European governments which paid for Iceland.)

Why so much hateful hysteria on the part of the plutocratically connected Americans against European institutions? Because American plutocracy is collapsing the USA, and it is trashing around to keep controlling the world reserve currency, just as the one who drowns grabs whatever and whoever.

Paying fossil fuel in euros would be the end for the USA, as it would find itself in a similar situation to that Argentina found itself in, a century ago. However, and paradoxically, it’s in the interest of the USA to keep the euro high enough to make the European Union industrially uncompetitive. The goals are opposed, so the situation is unstable.

Default here and there would precipitate instability, overall. However, that would be a good thing, after the fright. It would allow to put banksters where they belong: if not in jail, then at least to pasture, after repossessing the property they connived to steal. In other words, high time to do what was not done in 2008!

The real truth is that Greek debt is only 300 billion dollars, a fifth of the subprime debt in the USA in 2008. So what’s the real problem? Well, Spain, Italy, and, soon, France. Of course a French default of some sort would be a world cataclysm. But a cataclysm is what is needed to get rid of the predator on our back, the world plutocracy.   

So let’s bring it on! Better this than Greater Depression forever.

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GREECE IS EVERYWHERE, WE ARE ALL GREEKS:

Some will say: “Europe again? Who cares? Is not that the OLD continent?” Well, as I will show, we, all of us, who own anything, own some of Greece. Even Americans, all Americans, own French and German banks, and, thus, Greece.

Second, Europe in the biggest socio-economic sense is nearly one billion people. Yes, some lunatics, like the Swiss, speak delusionally as if they were not in Europe. In some metaphysical sense, obviously, because Switzerland occupies a third of the Alps, a mountain range installed in the exact geographical center of Western Europe. As I predicted in the past, last week the Swiss National Bank pegged itself to the euro. The SNB promised to buy “unlimited amounts” of Euros each time it takes less than 1.20 Francs to buy a Euro. In other words, now Switzerland has jumped in the Eurozone.

Is Suisse not getting its orders from Washington anymore? Is Krugman going to cry a river? And Polanski is going to receive a prize in Zurich next week! Only the naive would feel all of this to be unconnected.

Little known to the rabid anti-Europeans, countries such as Norway, Ukraine and Iceland are already part of various European unions. There are, inside Europe, unions of free travel, unions of free commerce, even unions of usage of the euro while NOT being in the Eurozone, plus an union of countries economically assimilated to the EU, while not being in the EU, and even other countries admitted to candidacy to the European Union.

Those unions are far ranging. For example the economic might of Turkey is greatly explained by this republic being an associate member of the European Union and its predecessors since 1963. By the way, many a European problem would be lessened if Turkey joined the EU much more. Why not include Turkey in the Eurozone? (That could help Eurozone financing.)

At the center of Europe is the Eurozone, and its core is bicephalic Franco-Germania (however it may hurt all the nostalgic of francophobic Keynes and Hitler).

Not forgetting the rich Franco-Germanoid fragments of the Benelux, which are in between, and inseparable from France and Germany, one contemplates in Franco-Germania a super power with 180 million people, and the most advanced technology. OK, French and German private banks have lent a lot to Greece, and now they are threatened by a Greek default, because they lent so much to the Greeks, that the Greeks cannot possibly pay back. Right. So?

Same with Spain, or Italy? So? Are not the Germans happy that Spain bought from Siemens, that is, from them Germans, very high speed trains? Would they have preferred Spaniards to buy trains from French Alsthom instead?

Many cautious Americans will scoff that they have their money in American money markets, so they have nothing to do with Greece. However, the truth is, all large banks, especially including all large banks of the USA, have a piece in Greece, and a fortiori Spain or Italy. Even the Chinese are deep in the Greek picture. Hence the (well justified) dressing down of the Chinese Premier to the most advanced countries: “We have been concerned about the difficulties faced by the European economy for a long time and we have repeated our willingness to extend a helping hand and increase our investment,” Wen said. In exchange China wants WTO membership.

Americans who think they are out of Greece do NOT know how money markets work. What is a money market? Well, a market of very short term bonds. Some of these bonds are Greek bonds, some of these bonds are bonds of banks which have lent money to Greece, or bonds of institutions which lend money to companies which invested in Greece, or have “swaps” with such. And so on. Thus all Americans, and actually the entire planet, are entangled with Greece and company. If a black hole develops in the middle of that system, much will be swallowed.

Third, and more importantly, a terrible paradigm is created in Greece; the innocent are made to pay for the crimes of criminals, as these criminals still have access to all the levers of power. As long as this is not addressed, the crimes, and the crisis, will keep on rolling.

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UNREAL BANK RESERVES, REAL AMERICAN WAR:

How the banks are threatened by lenders unwilling to pay back the whole gamut of what they owe is a bit convoluted. Banks are supposed to have some capital reserve requirements, and are supposed to stop operating if they don’t. European regulators are fiercer on this than American ones. Oh, yes, because American banks would already to have to stop functioning if correct financial requirements were applied to them. So the funny thing is that the panic is about French and German banks having fewer reserves, but still much more than their American competitors. (But of course, perception becomes realization; so the hysteria has real effects, positive for the hysterics!)

In truth, the bottom line of the whole problem is that the USA is trying its best to keep its supremacy. So Americans are running around in a panic screaming that Europe is sinking. Whereas the truth is that European banks are still in much better shape than the banking-Federal Reserve-U.S. government complex in the USA.

Right now, the one year Greek Treasury Bond carries an interest of 111%: an investor in that vehicle will double her/his money in 5 months. Such an investor will bet that other European states will keep on forking money over to keep the Greek state afloat.

So why am I for a Greek default, as I have suggested forever? Actually I was also for the default of the Too-Big-To-Fail banks in the USA. Within a month of the election of Obama, I was enraged that Obama had decided to send to the banksters all the money in the world, no questions asked (TARP was just a small portion of the money lent, or given to the banksters). I saw the criminality of it all, very clearly. See: http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2009/02/24/time-for-rico/.

I was for the nationalization of the Too Big To Fail banks. Instead of just giving them the money, many times over what they were worth, as Bushama did. If nationalizations had been done, the economy of the USA would have restarted by now, and the future, even of the deficit, would be rosy. By the way, nationalization of banks is what Iceland did.

Much later, the Tea Party was created, and adopted the same line that the Too-Big-To-Fail banks ought to have been allowed to fail. Whether its partisans understood that meant nationalization of a big chunk of the financial system of the USA is another matter entirely (they are too busy being mystified by the theory of evolution, having dinosaurs galloping all over their little minds…) A dreadful possibility is always that Chinese (say) banks would swoop and acquire all the failed banks in sight. Nationalization avoids that.

So, yes, I am for the Greek default. For the same reason. That will allow to avoid in the Europe Union, the treacherous, unjust slope into the abyss, of using most available public finances to support the very men who have caused the crisis, and the very exact systems they have created and lead, and brought us all to the pauper house, where we will be to stay in residence if, and only if, we become slaves to the Chinese dictatorship (yes, I am not insulting China, it’s officially a dictatorship).

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THERE ARE MANY SORTS OF EUROPEAN UNIONS:

Is Turkey in or out of Europe? Those who say out, know nothing. Why to talk about Turkey? Because, actually Turkey has very different strategies and capabilities which have not been tapped. And, by the way, the unaffordable Greek military budget is naively aimed at Turkey, an unacceptable situation both economically and between NATO members.

The question of Greece leaving the European Union has nothing to do with a financial crisis, even a sovereign financial crisis. Even leaving the Eurozone and having a sovereign debt default are completely different notions.

Anti-Europeans, strong and strident in the USA, deliberately confuse all these notions: they are paid to do so, making them what they are. Sexual prostitutes provide a service, and, if everybody comes ahead, it’s all for the best and a legitimate business. But when famous economists use the bully pulpits they are paid to bellow from, to tell complete lies, they are definitively turning into public enemies. What do they want, besides money? What do they do besides spewing hatred?  Do they want war with Europe? Well, that’s what they are doing.

Even the head of the bosses’ union in France said so. She said there was a deliberate, organized, orchestrated effort by “the Americans” to destroy the European Union. And the confusion of all the notions is part of it. I would not be surprised that Stark, the chief economist of the ECB who left in a huff 5 days ago, were to be found, someday soon, to have been paid by “the Americans”. Watch carefully who his next employer will be. Mr. Orszag, the Obama budget director, helped send 60 billion to Citigroup, and is now employed there, earning giant amounts of money in compensation for his gracious service.

Suppose California were bankrupt: would it leave the Union? No. And guess what: when California paid with “IOUs” (“I Owe You”), do you think California did that just for fun? IOUs are little pieces of paper supposed to replace the Federally official little pieces of paper known as dollar bills. Guess what? It happened, because California had literally run out of money of that currency union, the USA!

And no American suggested that California ought to leave the Union. Where was Krugman when Anti-Americans needed him? Anti-Americans would have loved hearing that California had to leave the Union, as straightforward Krugmania would have it. Did I misunderstand something? No, Krugman’s reasoning for Greece somehow does not apply to California (although California is endowed by a massive indigeneous energy production, from oil to hydro).

Some fear that Greece may sink that low in next few months, if Sarkozy and Merkel can’t figure it out. As low as California: a terrible thing, that would be, indeed, for the land of the Parthenon!

But then, if Greece were to sink as low as California, pro-Europeans will not fail to notice that Greece does not have anymore reason to leave her Unions than California had to leave the USA.

Thus the hysteria of Paul Krugman and his unfortunate kind against Europe and the Euro is painful to watch: is this the best the USA can produce in the way of deep thought? Merkel, and several French politicians seems thoughtful relative to Paul losing his marbles about the euro. Krugman does not realize that a fast driver can go in five hours or so, from Spain to Italy, through France. And when the Very High Speed lines presently in construction will be finished, one speaks of less than 2 hours. The time to go from London to Paris, by rail, center to center. Why does not Krugman propose a currency in Washington, and one in Boston, another in Chicago, and one in Detroit. Would not that help Detroit’s depressed economy, according to full blown Krugmania?

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FRANCO-GERMAN UNIFICATION MEANS MONETARY UNION OF ALL: 

True some German loud mouths seem to have understood nothing since Hitler was consumed by gasoline next to the Reichstag. Hitler started his career hating France and her Versailles Treaty (still hated by many a Nazi nostalgic to this day). He ended it, defended by SS and their officers, who were native French speakers SS. The irony ought not to be lost on europhobes.

The loud mouths dream to reconstitute a larger, Aryan version of the Deutschemark. But those fools have not understood the first two things:

a) Germany has surpluses to a great extend because the south has deficits. Germany can leave the euro, fine. The Greeks will buy Peugeots and Renaults instead of VWs and Mercedeses.

b) The euro union is about unifying France and Germany. Right now France has extracted herself from the demographic black hole she was in for two centuries, and especially around 1870. French demographic growth is now strong and internal. It does not rest, as in the USA on demented immigration and the growth of non integrated recent migrants (a large part of the population of California has, technically passports from the USA, but is truly Mexican; I know some, they are charming, and I prefer them to white, racist, narrow minded Americans, but they are no such thing, precisely; in particular their value system is different, and access to higher education is barred to them, by price, as much of the public education system in the southern USA is being privatized, so their children will also be Mexican!)

To come back to France and Germany: France is, in many important ways, the superior partner. It is the result of a determination of France to never find herself in the situation on 1940, when it was defeated by the unholy union of the plutocratic USA with the USSR and Nazi Germany.

The French have carefully made themselves world masters of all the superior technologies. Germany’s superiority rests on high tech Mittelstand, family enterprises which master the middle, but not the highest. France is the spider at the center of Europe’s highest technology: look at EADS and Arianespace, etc. Giants such as MBDA, the world’s largest nasty missile company are not even on the radar of the close minded, rabidly anti-euro, such as Paul Krugman.   

Of course French spending in ultimate high tech costs a lot: look at the inertial fusion facility built in Bordeaux, which will be the world’s most modern and powerful when it comes on line within two years. It has only one equivalent, worldwide: the National Ignition Facility at Livermore, California (with which France cooperates semi secretly; NIF has made 300 shots so far; an inertial thermonuclear fusion plant will have to make 300 shots every minute to become a productive power plant…)

France gave, and is giving, herself the means: total government budget is more than 56% of GDP. As a French politician quipped in the 1990s: “France is a USSR that has succeeded”.

Germany’s government is 47% of GDP (already basically 50% more than the USA). But Germany is not building its own massive thermonuclear project, and does not make its personal supremacy stealth fighter, and personal strategic nuclear submarines, with personal city pulverizing rockets, capable of taking out 50 million people. True, France is much less efficient with its goverment: she would save a lot if she were as efficent as Germany, with much fewer civil servants.

Not that renewable energy is neglected in France: there are a lot of problems with wind, so France is late in developing that. However, the giant utility EDF has started to install giant “hydrauliennes” to capture tidal power at the bottom of the sea. A world first. If those work, France will have basically resolved its energy problem. OK, it’s a big IF…

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KEYNES WAS A FRANCOPHOBIC PROTO NAZI:

It’s not just Murdoch’ media machine. Even the American economic left has a strange anti-French bend. This is of no small consequence, because it has made Americans incapable to point at France, and similar socio-economies in Europe, which is pretty much all of Europe, as positive examples for American politicians. The result is that economic ignoramuses such as Obama come to power, and they are advised by dedicated servants and members of the plutocracy, such as Larry Summers, somebody who should have actually been prosecuted for visiting socio-economic hardship on billions of people. As he was the dismantler of FDR’s work, and one of the main agents of the reinstauration of a worldwide plutocratic order, same as before, just worse.

Obama thinks that if forces NASA to give billions to his plutocratic pals, or to whoever wants to make something renewable, he has caught the future. All he has caught is the hope for a shinier toy in the playground. It’s infantile. Also, completely corrupt: what’s the meaning of forking public money, through NASA to a guy who is not an engineer, and laughs as a goat bleats? Or to a non engineer such as Musk, just because he looks good. Musk, like Murdoch is not really an American, just a plutocrat hitching a hike on the back of American taxpayers. 

The Europeans, in striking contrast, have given a lot of very deep, professional thought to improving their socio-economy. They did not just become fascinated by proto or pseudo Nazis telling them, a few generations ago, what they wanted to hear. (Allusion to Keynes and the so called “Austrian school of economics”.)

Where does that American francophobia comes from? Well, the key is that left, “democratic” economists in the USA admire Keynes, and therein, a contradiction. Germans who dream they can do it without France, are just pursuing a dream that KEYNES started, and Hitler implemented. OK, a Keynesian nightmare that Hitler tried to implement.

Yes Keynes, Nazi in disguise. Keynes: Nazism’s own professor of anti-French science. I just read “The Economic Consequences Of Peace” Keynes is famous for. What a piece of Nazi trash! Keynes calls the re-creation of Poland, Romania and other occupied nations in the east “scatter brain”. Why? because it would deprive Germany of economic power! Is teaching Keynes teaching hate speech?

The glorious Keynes whined that it was “victorious France” who wanted to impose what he viewed as a monstrosity, the independence of those previously subjugated nations, the freedom of Germany’s former slaves. And the great man moans. Soon Hitler would foam just the same. Did Hitler read Keynes? Many of his criminal co-conspirators certainly did.

Keynes was afraid that France, having, according to him, unlawfully, unwisely, unjustly recovered Alsace and Loraine, occupies German land which have been German for more than 1048 years, he says. What an idiot! Imperial Germany was founded in Versailles in January 1871, 48 years before Keynes put his Nazi ideas on paper.

No wonder that, after being instructed with such trash, Hitler was completely surprised that, after all, Great Britain joined France in declaring war to him in 1939! Did not his advisers read Keynes?

If one wants to go legally technical, and constitutional, “Germania” was certainly part of “Francia” by 800 CE. The Carolingians even invented German (and not just the Carolingian minuscule which even Keynes used, making him another victim of “victorious France“).

The division of the Frankish empire in three pieces was viewed as another case of the standard way to handle inheritance among the Franks. Something they had done for 5 centuries. It was not viewed as definitive. It was made explicit, at the time, that the Western Franks were to stay prominent (they were supposed to elect the eastern king, or emperor, something which soon bored them to death!)

Having many kings was also standard among the Franks: kings were elected, in theory, and having many kings was like having many presidents. However, it was viewed that the king of the western part was “emperor (in his kingdom)”, due to the fact the Franks in Francia (“Salian Franks”, or salty Franks) had fought hard for 4 centuries to unify all of Germania to Francia (Julius Caesar’s old project) .

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NATIONALIZATIONS A EURO SOLUTION, PLUTO THE WAY OF THE USA:

To come back to Greece; a Greek default has nothing to do with Greece exiting the Eurozone.  True, the Drachma was converted at too high a rate, because of misplaced national pride: one has to live with it. True, the Americans want to break the European Union, and they may as well start with the Eurozone.

A Greek default may leave some major French and German banks with insufficient “tier one capital” to operate according to international regulations, and the markets indicate that they will be unwilling to provide them with it. So what? If it cost little to buy BNP, the French government can find what it takes, before China does, as the German government was able to find enough money to buy Hypo Real Estate. Hypo Real Estate was among the 30 largest companies in Germany. It was fully nationalized in 2009.

Great Britain and Belgium also chose to nationalize banks consecutively to the 2008 crisis. The friends of plutocracy, Bush and Obama, the greedy Bushama, instead offered to their banksters friends as much public money as they needed, without taking possession of their banks in the name of the American public they were so generously offering all the money of. But that is the problem of the USA: no more money for anything else. Bush and Obama, real friends of the Tea Party have not followed down the Marxist, government friendly path traced by those far left liberals known as presidents Reagan and Bush Senior.

Now Dimon, head of JP Morgan Chase, who Obama called repeatedly “my friend”, in his pro plutocratic penis envy, says that the bank of international settlements is “anti-American”. So not only Paul Krugman is going on a pseudo hyper nationalistic pro American rampage. They should be reminded that there is nothing nationalistic at going crazy. Hitler, too, posed as a nationalistic, but he was anything but. In truth he turned into the destroyer of Germany. Anti Hitlerian French were better German nationalist than all of Hitler’s supporters.

BNP is as big as the biggest American banks, but the French republic will nationalize it in a flash, if needed. France, as a state, will also make a lot of money that way (nationalizing very big banks is always profitable, it seems). And then what?

A nationalized BNP will be directed to lend more to people and projects which can pay for themselves, not just to cheating plutocrats they are conniving with. The connivance between banksters, plutocrats, and their servants in government (Obama) is ongoing in the USA, so the economy is falling apart there. Does Europe want to join the USA on the plutocratic road down to hell?

In the 2008 banking crash, banks, and not just in the USA, but also in Europe, got money from the states. Instead of replenishing their cash reserves, as required by International regulations, they paid their managers fortunes, paid large dividends to fellow plutocrats, etc. Now the cash reserves of American banks are 3%, just a bit more than what Lehman Brothers had in 2008 before it failed. They should have 8%, according to regulations, and common sense. And they are supposed to go to 10%. Swiss banks have 20% in reserves (explaining a lot the rush to Alpine gold!)

In other words, the banksters were treated with immense generosity last time, even in Europe.

So will Europe force the People to give money to the rich, so that they can become even richer as in the USA?No. Enough is enough: been there, done that. Thus Greece has to default. The Greek people ought not to pay while its plutocrats, and untaxed, wealthy church, keep on cheating.

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NOT ENOUGH EUROPE YET TO AVOID A GREEK DEFAULT:

How could Greece avoid a default? Well, Greece could avoid a default only with the help of not-yet-in-existence European structures.

An example of such a structure would be treasury bonds for the European Union, or, at least, the Eurozone. But they do not exist: there is no European Treasury, no European Treasury Bonds, no European Federal debt. Of course, there is no Federal Europe. At least fiscally speaking.

France has 1.6 trillion euros of French treasury debt, Germany 2 trillion euros of the German equivalent. The USA has around 14.5 trillion dollars of U.S. federal treasury debt (but that does not count more local debt).   

It is because there is a U.S. Treasury and U.S. Treasury Bonds, and a transfer system, that California, and several other states, have avoided default. So far. But, of course, at the rate of augmentation of the deficits in the USA, it should not take much longer…

Some Germans, stuck in the Prussian-Hitlerian model, may want to build a greater Germany. They would not end up exactly like before, because Germany’s power is not what it used to be. In France, however, more than ever, the political class knows that salvation lays in Union. France has basically a discrete union with many African states, Francafrique, and it should be boosted. This is the deep reason for the Libyan adventure, as the oil propelled Khadaffi dictatorship messed up much of Francafrique: whereas he spent not much on Libya, Ghadafi was lavish with those in other countries who he wanted to influence.

Another obvious French idea is the Mediterranean Union. Here, Libya again is an obvious centerpiece. Right now France is pushing hard on dictator Assad, while writing the Palestinian state proposal. The Americans are going to be all astonished when they find themselves pushed out of the entire Middle East… which will happen if they don’t cooperate with France (because French leadership on the question is gathering lots of followers).

To come back to Greece, the concept of “Greek bail-out” is misleading. if one wants Greece to be bailed out, Greece has to pay less in interest on the money plutocrats lent it. The so called “bail-out of Greece” is actually a bail-out of the existing plutocratic structure in Europe, or, even, in the world. But plutocracy is not as strong in the EU as in the USA, as the British, Belgian, Icelandic, and German bank nationalizations after 2008 showed. So let’s nationalize some more.

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EUROPE INTO THE ABYSS, INSPIRED, & ASPIRED BY THE FREE FALL OF THE USA?

I did not even watch the Obama speech. Sometimes a human being has seen enough. How many times does one need to go at the zoo, and see the chimp throwing excrements at the public? Ok, nowadays, most zoos are better designed, and just as there are teleprompters, and human beings can be selected, who make excellent robots, chimpanzees are behind bullet proof glass.

Obama and his handlers have got crafty. They sent early versions of Obama’s teleprompted speech to a number of people, who went all pink and warm inside from receiving the favor of what they feel is a great man. So Krugman admitted that was the case for him, and, flattered to no end, in spite of himself, he fell into celebrating Obama’s speech. In a colossal flourish of naivety unbound. Thus the pundits are also prompted at a distance (tele), for all to see.

Colossal naivety? Indeed, Obama is the bipartisan president, so, in particular, the president of the Tea Party, which is the one controlling Congress. His ridiculous propositions do not impress me except as more of what is burying the USA. As usual most of what Obama proposes is tax cuts. This time he is busy undermining the financing of Medicare and social security, to give a bit more money to those already employed now, so that they will have diminished Social Security and Medicare tomorrow.

How does that help the unemployed? Where are the jobs? Oh yes, president Tea Party will ask the Tea Party to raise taxes to pay for a little bit of needed construction. Obama is intelligent enough (I hope!) to understand that will never happen. So, by suggesting to do something he knows very well will never happen, he is lying to the People. OK, pundits are paid to not notice this so loudly, that it gets reinforced.

On the other hand, he should be able to spend many happy vacations in Bali again in the future, with many domestics. Obama is not, and never was, an average American. I used to think I lived like an aristocrat in Africa, because we employed a cook and a house helper. Then I read Obama’s books, and I was left with a weird feeling: something did not add up. He presented himself as poor, but he did not think poor. Interviewing plenty of people who knew him when he was 10 confirmed the weirdness. Young Obama behaved more like young Bush than young me.

Then the New York Times finally did his job and enquired about Obama’s childhood. In Indonesia, his mother was married to a millionaire, a well paid Indonesian front man for big American corporations to hide behind. According to the NYT, Obama lived in a mansion with four lived in domestics in  secondary housing on the premises. That explains a lot, especially in the conjunction of posing as a victim of the system in one’s fictional biographies.

So, as even Maureen Dodd of the NYT asserted, Obama’s motivation is to join the highest plutocracy. He does not mind if he betrays all his supporters: for him, they are just suckers, too bad for them that they sucked the wrong tit. As he said in his books, and in unguarded speeches, it’s all about navigating.

Those who play to the “adult in the room” have always reminded me of chimpanzees playing with tuxedos with utmost seriousness.

In truth, the wise know that navigating is about a journey, and the journey to a destination, and those who eat part of the crew are unwise. All of this escapes the small men.

In the district of the (republican) speaker of the house, Mr. Boehner, there are 89 “structurally deficient bridges“. Ryan, leader of the republicans in Congress, has 95 “structurally deficient bridges” A virulent blonde republican has 192 structurally deficient bridges. And she is still hysterical against public spending. She cannot even understand that the private sector does not own these bridges.

Some of these bridges carry more than 50,000 cars a day. It has already happened that one even larger bridge with a giant interstate freeway on top collapsed. More is to come. Obama says: let the banks play with each other, faking profits with their electronic casino, so they can keep their mansion, yachts, private jets, tax heavens. Boehner says:”We should not spend.“But the banks do spend, to, and with, each other, in their derivative universe.

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TIME TO RESIST, AND REBEL: “INDIGNEZ VOUS!”

In France last year an Auschwitz survivor, Stéphane Hessel, published “Indignez Vous!“, a small book advocating that it was high time for common people to rebel against the plutocracy. Mr. Hessel is 94 years old, full of life and youth. Many of those who are young today are, instead mental dead wood, as they confuse feeling good inside and having a moral system. See David Brooks’ editorial in the NYT, “If It Feels Right…” Says Brooks: “The rise of moral individualism has produced a generation unable to speak intelligibly about the virtuous life.”

“Indignez Vous!” has become the banner of the indignant ones who demonstrate throughout Europe.

Here is Stéphane Hesselin his own words, last year:

“Ninety-three years. I’m nearing the last stage. The end cannot be far off. How lucky I am to be able to draw on the foundation of my political life: the Resistance and the National Council of the Resistance’s program from sixty-six years ago…

The motivation that underlay the Resistance was outrage. We, the veterans of the Resistance movements and fighting forces of Free France, call on the younger generations to revive and carry forward the tradition of the Resistance and its ideas. We say to you: take over, keep going, get angry! Those in positions of political responsibility, economic power and intellectual authority, in fact our whole society, must not give up or let ourselves be overwhelmed by the current international dictatorship of the financial markets, which is such a threat to peace and democracy….

We must realize that violence turns its back on hope. We have to choose hope over violence—choose the hope of nonviolence. That is the path we must learn to follow. The oppressors no less than the oppressed have to negotiate to remove the oppression: that is what will eliminate terrorist violence. That is why we cannot let too much hate accumulate….

To you who will create the twenty-first century, we say, from the bottom of our hearts, TO CREATE IS TO RESIST.

TO RESIST IS TO CREATE.”

Hessel is generous to speak of the “financial markets”. In truth the plutocratic class is more like it. There is an important difference between retirement funds and those manager-owners managing them, and conniving banksters of the financial system. Much more, if it is really much more, is completely different.

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GREEKS ARE NOT LAZY, BUT AMERICAN TAXPAYERS ARE NAÏVE:

The Greeks work much more than the Germans, so why should they work even more while being admonished that they are lazy spendthrifts?

According to OECD.org, in 2008, Germans worked in the average 27 hours a week, 1492 hours per year, while the Greeks worked 41 hours, 2120 hours per year (French work 30 hours a week, 1542 hours per year, Americans USA: 35 hours per week, 1792 hours per year. The British work 32 hours per week, South Koreans, 44 hours per week; philosophers work all the time, 140 hours per week!)

Greek GDP was down 5%, two years in a row, increasing the relative size of the Greek debt. So austerity, per se, is not working. The same will happen in all countries which try that “austerity as prosperity” trick, worthy of lost chimps.

G20, G7, G whatever, have not done anything about banksters: after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brother, American plutocracy saved itself by harnessing American taxpayers, and the entire American money creation machine.

Multiple rounds of deliberately obscurely and misleadingly named “Quantitative Easing” directed trillion of dollars towards the very bankers, and the very banking system which had created the crisis. Banks got short term money for free then turned around, and  invested it long at a higher interest rate, with the government, generating fake profits. Armed with those, they could keep on playing the derivative markets, and fake some more profits. Indeed, as they play with each other, it’s a zero sum game, no economic value is created, as money is just a symbol, not a reality.

There is a lot of misinformation going on. As a rule, American economists, even of the leftist, pro-government sort, are hostile to the European construction, even when they are esteemed advisors in Europe (Krugman has advised Spain), or teach there (Stiglitz, another economy Nobel, teaches in Paris). They always say that they love Europe, and want it to succeed, but then hates the fact Europeans want to have just one currency. What’s next? Just one flag? Are not only Americans allowed to have flag and currency, as the Very Serious Country it is?

There again, they follow Keynes, who used to rage that so many nations had been freed from German imperial subjugation in 1919. How can these American economists be received nicely in Eastern Europe, knowing that, following their racist master, they would like it subjugated?

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ICELAND VERSUS GREECE:

Could Greece exit the Eurozone? Sure, that is what the USA want. And the USA is doing its best to make it so, having unleashed its plutocracy (why have the Europeans not yet brought warrant of arrest against Goldman Sachs’ executives?) And its wolves howl that way.

Paul Krugman, disingenuously claim that all Europeans are different and they should all have their own currency from Malta (population: 400,000) to Germany: population 83 million. Does Krugman know how many nations there are in Europe? Or all luxury hotels feel the same? Does Krugman know that poor Europeans, now that they have the euro, male comparison shopping among countries, to buy, say, a cheaper car? I don’t think the plutocracy cannot even imagine how the commons live.

Krugman lauds the default of Iceland, and its massive devaluation. He forgets, or rather, refuse to consider that, after Iceland basically stole billions to millions of EU citizens, their governments stepped in, and that those powerful governments are still determined to recover the money. In case Krugman does not know, Great Britain is 200 time larger than Iceland, and, ironically is (partly) in charge of the… defense of Iceland. 

In the second quarter 2008, Iceland’s external debt was 9.553 trillion Icelandic krónur (€50 billion), more than 80% of which was held by the banking sector, mostly in 3 more or less private banks. By comparison, Iceland’s 2007 gross domestic product was1.293 trillion krónur (€8.5 billion).

Krugman is always saying that the fact Iceland has its own currency and so was able to solve the crisis by devaluing its currency. This is deeply dishonest. A glance at the Wikipedia article shows that Krugman’s view of the situation is an affabulation. That is Iceland has improved, but not because of the currency dropping. Actually, Iceland was so desperate that its currency was going to the bottom of the ocean, that it went on its knees to enter the Eurozone.  It was told it had to enter the EU first. Since, arguments have blossomed about whale killing, and the negotiations are ongoing.

And, by the way, fixing the root of the crisis was just differed. Countries such as Great Britain, who reimbursed her 300,000 stolen depositors (as many as Iceland has inhabitants), have evoked the anti-terrorist act against Iceland, and are still determined to recover their losses. Other aggrieved  countries are the Netherlands and Germany, or Norway. French veteran magistrate (and presidential candidate) Eva Joly was named by Iceland to head a serious economic crime unit of 20 detectives to find out the causality (hence culpability chain) of the whole thing.

If Greece had its own currency, it will have one positive consequence: tourists would flood to Greece, because that currency would be worth very little. Krugman would say:”I told you so”.

However Krugie boy forgets that Greece basically makes nothing, so Greece would still have to buy everything outside, and that would be very expensive. then Krugie boy will jump up and down, and squeak:”How did Iceland do it, then? Nananana!”  

Well Iceland has giant geothermal resources, and also mountains, with a very wet climate. Over 80% of Icelandic electricity is generated by hydro power. Whereas Greek energy has to be fully imported. And with a collapsed currency, that would be ruinous. So there would be tremendous inflation, and the Greek central bank would have to raise interest rates very very high.

In other words, Krugman panacea is just an absurdity. Hopefully the Europeans will be able to resist the American plutocratic conspiracy, its siren songs of the mentally undeveloped, and not fall into the abyss.

***

WHEN THE USA FIGHTS FOR ITS LIFE:

A default for Greece would not mean that, as Iceland did until now, and Krugman always fail to mention, Greece would run away with all the money. Far from it. Wiping out 50% or so of the Greek debt ought to be fine. Next time the banksters will have to be more careful, or more brazenly conniving.

It is clear to me that huge banks and their bankers try to become more influential, more Too-Big-To-Fail, by lending more. That was clear with the subprime madness in the USA. Madness for the victims, crafty for the biggest bankers, the banksters.

How do plutocrats operate, when they have achieved plutocratic sustainability?  They extract a rent from the multitude. Such individuals are who, historically, the French called “rentiers“. Tellingly, the meaning of the word “renter” in English is the exact opposite (inverting meaning is a good way to confuse). Paying rent of own’s life is close to the idea of serfdom: one does not own anything, and one spends all of one’s life paying rent to the overlord. This is basically how Americans live. And then they have been imprinted to feel proud, insuring they don’t understand a thing about what ails them.

American propaganda says most Americans “own” their homes. Instead Americans actually rent their homes to banks. The average American homeowner now has 38 percent equity, down from 61 percent a decade ago. Thus in truth, American own only 24% of their housing market: they rent at most than 75%, and most of it at a totally overvalued rate. The money is sent to the friends of Obama such as the daemon Dimon, who then live in mansions, and buy the president (who loves to be bought so he can live in mansions too! Even “The Economist” has started to make fun of Obama’s luxury bed!)

Well, it’s high time to stop paying rent to the plutocracy.

As I write this, hordes of armor clad American sharp shooters are fighting on roof tops inside Kabul, killing Afghans who are stupid enough to believe American propaganda and feel they own their country. I have live access to both foreign and United States media. It was amazing how much the attack was downplayed and misleadingly represented in the media of the USA, which said things one could see were blatantly not true: non American TV showed clearly hordes of Americans fighting, contrarily to what was said in the USA, where it was falsely claimed most of the fighting was made by Afghans, and giant American helicopters turning around the battle were just sightseeing.

Well worth spending lots of money, treasure, lives, and brains on it, indeed, this little adventure in Afghanistan, designed to show that, like Carter, Obama deserved his Nobel Peace Prize, because, like Carter, he attacked Afghanistan much more. Thus the dollar has to stay both strong and weak, and the euro better disappear from sight, as its rise could mean that other countries could follow Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and switch to the euro for oil payments.

For the same reason that switching to its own currency would be ruinous energetically for Greece, for the dollar to lose its solitary reserve currency role would be energetically ruinous for the USA. Hence it would be ruinous for Paul Krugman. The energy budget for heating and cooling the mansion in which he lives would become considerable. Let alone the fact that his sponsors would be disappointed that he did not deliver a demolished European currency. Funny how it all makes sense.  

“Indignez Vous!”

***

Patrice Ayme

Krugman, or Crudeman?

 

HIGH DEBT = HIGH PLUTOCRACY.

Abstract: President Obama has been getting atrocious economic and financial advice, all across the spectrum, from Summers to Krugman.

This abominable advice reinforced the plutocracy, with tax cuts, and a giant spigot of money creation directed at giant banks and their demons. While the banks are getting nearly all the money, the rest of the economy has been weltering. The government is obsessed with throwing money at bank holding companies to save its friends, while accusing everybody else.

The main architect of this quiet coup, Summers, and his demoncrats and democrats, is supposedly on his way out (see Note1). That may be just a ruse to escape the sword of justice and positive change.

Another Reagan adviser posing as a democrat, and a progressive, Paul Krugman, has been more in evidence recently, as some of his advice has obviously gained traction.

Krugman’s advice: accusing China, with GUSTO (while sparing the American plutocracy of much blame), and augmenting government spending, BLINDLY. It does not matter if said spending is on foolish things: just spend. Keynes, the Jesus Christ of Krugman’s religion, said so, so it ought to be right. A detail: said augmented spending goes through… the friendly giant banks. Friendly to them oligarchs (see Rahm Emanuel’s 17 millions from one bank).

After accusing China, whatever China does, Krugman has also targeted European austerity programs, from Ireland to Lithuania, blaming them for the difficulties of the USA.

Krugman’s latest attacks are against the British government austerity program (some of which was started by Labor before the election in Spring, so there is real tripartisan support for it).

China and Europe are trying hard, in many ways, to change their economies and societies for the best, though, whilst the USA is just forking more money to its greedy plutocrats, calling that dismal masquerade "recovery and reinvestment" (a lot of these huge transfers of money go through hermetic notions such as "Quantitative Easing”, or buying toxic garbage from the banks, as if it were worth anything: it’s done through the banks… the private banks).

Let me repeat slowly. The advice of Krugman is dressed in leftist garb, but it is nothing of the sort. It’s like getting currency advice from Soros: dangerous at any speed.

The policies Krugman promotes, such as Quantitative Easing 2 (flushing the biggest banks with money), and xenophobia, are deeply pro-plutocratic (unsurprisingly Soros advises QE2 too).

This essay will rectify some of Krugman’s massive disinformation. Whether he is fully conscious of it, or not, is irrelevant: Krugman gives bad advice to the government of the USA. The USA needs to engage in Colbertism, as Europe and China are doing, and the defense department of the USA does.

Sending more money on the ravenous world manipulating financiers, as Krugman suggests to do even more of, in practice, amounts to feeding more poison to the victim, throwing more gasoline on the fire, breeding more black mambas inside the house, while screaming that more insanity will bring strength. And lying about other countries, from China to Great Britain, does not help. It’s internationalism at its worst.

***

***

DEBASING CHINA:

According to Krugman, China is bad, Europe is bad, whilst the hard working USA is good, as it tries single handedly to pull the entire world economy out of the slump it itself created. But the USA’s goodness is not quite enough to master the foreign devils. So sad. This is apparently Krugman’s latest New Trade Theory: USA sinks, because big bad aliens did it.

Nothing to do with reaganomics, Obama’s admiration for Reagan, Clinton’s dismal selling of democracy and the future to plutocracy, and Krugman’s work for Reagan, hand in hand with Summers. This is all the past, we don’t need to ruminate it. Krugman would rather talk about…1937. (Not to tell us about American plutocracy supporting Hitler, while undermining democracy, as what was going on then, but to talk about FDR overenthusiastic support of… interest rates!)

One has to know that Krugman is viewed as one of the authors of “New Trade Theory”, NTT, a sophistry which basically boiled down to claiming that trade is good, no matter what. NTT did not work for the common folk, thus apparently Paul Krugman is now down to trading insults with reality, in the apparent hope that this will distract enough simple common folks. Thus New Trade Theory has revealed its true nature: adding insult to injury.

New Trade Theory faltered by ignoring the enormous leverage American plutocracy would get by going global, while no legal strings were attached, and conspiring with local dictators (the later a good source of Bill Clinton’s prodigious income). Plutocracy could drive at any speed, carry whatever cargo it wanted, including the most precious good: people’s employment.

The result is the unfolding economic and social disaster in the USA (and a lot of the world). Krugman may be trying to change his spots to cleanse his soul. And Krugman liberally attacks all foreigners, all over, most of the time, thus diverting attention to the root cause of the problem, already clear with his old boss, Reagan.

Last week Krugman was furious because China had lifted its short term interest rates up to 2.5%. That should lift the Chinese currency, which is one of the obsession of Krugman. So Krugman gets what he wanted, but that makes him even angrier (because, as expected, it changes nothing).

Meanwhile the dollar of the USA is returning a colossal .18% on short term maturities (Fed Funds rate). Yes that is about zero percent. Yes, that is about 13 times LESS than the return on the Chinese currency! In other words the USA is trying to lower the dollar as much as possible (Obama said he wanted to double USA exports in the next five years. But he forgot the slight detail that the USA is becoming a banana republic. I cannot believe he will find so many bananas to sell, even if they come super cheap, not everybody wants to splurge and become obese on American bananas).

So Krugman accuses China to debase its currency, but the USA is debasing the US dollar thirteen times more (this, what I just uttered, is a parody of what plutocratic economists call a model, full of sophisticated mathematics, the sort of things Krugman claims he does. but it’s little more than smoke and mirrors, and silly graphs which mean nothing, except that plutocracy is hiding behind them).

In truth China has something like four giant infrastructure projects running concurrently, in education, trains, biology, clean energy, etc. China builds universities, and China builds Airbuses (yes, from the company headquartered in Toulouse). Just the Chinese High Speed Rail infrastructure project amounts to 500 billion dollars or so (it uses basic European HSR technology).

China has even offered to finance and build the High Speed Rail in California. That is because all the American money goes to American plutocrats, and none is left for mundane activities. As Stiglitz pointed out a few days ago:

“The US Federal Reserve may make funds available to banks at close to zero interest rates, but if the banks make those funds available to small and medium-sized enterprises at all, it is at a much higher rate.”

The banks keep the money, making risk free profits, feeding their bonuses, and their power.

And don’t worry: Silicon Valley plutocrats use private planes, and do not want to see 250 mph trains in their backyards, for many reasons, so it will not happen, for a long time (except if American sheep wake up and turn into combative Europeans, which is unlikely, because they have been brainwashed into believe that it is cool to be as cool and politically minded as barnacles).

***

WRONG IS WRONG:

Krugman, Stiglitz, and also myself, would be viewed, by many as critics from the left. As the last British election unfolded, I was more in support of Mr. Brown, who had long aggravated me, but changed his spots, once he became Prime Minister. However, I hold that the truth is the truth. It is not because one overall disapproves of the general drift of the new PM, Cameron, that one should then support invented data inimical to Cameron. But that is what Krugman has been doing.

When the sheep invents data to support its cause, it invites the wolf to do the same, and the wolf will do it better, with more drastic consequences for the sheep. 

In a remarkably misleading editorial, Krugman says the following (see full quotes in the notes):

1) "Fiscal austerity is the fad of 2010. That fad is fading, but the damage is done." (False: successful Europeans nations, such as Sweden and Germany, have been at austerity for arguably 20 years. Let alone France in the 1930s…)

2) Krugman asserts that austerity does not rest on careful analysis (False: not only it rests on careful analysis, all the way from the High Middle Ages, but austerity rests on careful experience: Europe is made of more than 30 nations, and some went austere, and came out ahead, while the profligate ones are down in the dumps.)

3) Krugman claims that austerity has been justified by the hope of gaining confidence. (False: Europeans and Chinese don’t give primacy to market and business confidence, due to the fact that there, in China and Europe, the state rules, rather than the plutocracy. In the EU around half of the economy is state.)

4) Krugman claims that "The sensible thing, then, is to devise a plan for putting the nation’s fiscal house in order, while waiting until a solid economic recovery is under way before wielding the ax. But trendy fashion, almost by definition, isn’t sensible — and the British government seems determined to ignore the lessons of history."

(False: the sensible thing to do is to do what has worked several times in Europe, let alone China: re-establish fiscal, economic and social order, FIRST. Don’t wait for plutocracy to toll for thee. There is no evidence that the other way around ever worked.)

-So what history is Krugman alluding to? Just the relevant, but specious case of the 1937 USA, when FDR squeezed "liquidity" (that is, money creation by private banks, in financial jargon) too early, reverting a nascent recovery of the PRIVATE economy.- This a special case, irrelevant to the present Europe and China. And, of course, irrelevant to the present USA where short term interest rates have long been put at zero by the government (and other rates have been made very low, by same government, to HUGE opportunity cost for the rest of society)-

5) Krugman compare incomparables by claiming that "Both the new British budget announced on Wednesday and the rhetoric that accompanied the announcement might have come straight from the desk of Andrew Mellon, the Treasury secretary who told President Herbert Hoover to fight the Depression by liquidating the farmers, liquidating the workers, and driving down wages." Krugman confuses here the private sector in the USA in 1931, with the public sector in Great Britain in 2011. So many words, so many ideas, so many concepts, so many years! It can all go zoom zoom in one’s head!

6) Krugman then observes that Great Britain’s debt is below "historical average". He disingenuously forgets to say that historically average debt, contracted in World War One was what the boom of the 1920s was engineered to fix (causing Great depression II). And that historically average debt, furthered by World War Two, and the USA financially perfidious behavior, ruined Great Britain durably thereafter. As a good American patriot, Krugman wants Great Britain to be historically indebted, so it can keep on being the USA’s poodle. Fortunately the present British government has no docile canine temperament, and has figured out American perfidy.

7) Sanctimoniously, Krugman gives the usual preaching about learning from history. But the preceding shows that as he threatens Great Britain with Japan’s fate, he forgets that Japan has a total state debt above 200% of GDP, nearly double that of Greece (itself much larger than Britain’s). Among dozens of other important facts he conveniently forgets to mention as true.

Paul Krugman forgets to say that, overall, the British government spending will keep on augmenting. UK government spending is planned to be UP by 6% in nominal terms by 2014. (Down 3% in real terms with inflation taken into account.) So much for the gloom and doom. Oh, wait…

Why so many spectacular cuts while spending increases? Because the payment of the interest on the British government debt is exploding, and the government has to budget it. It is pretty telling that Krugman does not mention the rotting elephant in the bathroom: what a jolly sight, what a happy surprise!

The problem of exploding interest is not exclusive to Great Britain. In France the entire national income tax is used to pay for the interest on the national debt. French national debt is still augmenting as more debt is piled up to pay for retirees, some retiring at 54 (as in the railways, as if we were still in the age of steam and coal). 10% of the French retirement is paid through more national debt.

***

KRUGMAN IS RIGHT (OF THE PLUTOCRATS), EXCEPT FOR ALL THE FACTS:

I reacted to Krugman’s "British Fashion Victims" with the following reply that the honorable Krugman and his New York Times had the kindness to publish:

In truth, Europe knows what it is doing, and Krugman, with all due respect, does not know enough about what he is talking about, to be cogent, as we will presently demonstrate by deconstructing most of his remarkably erroneous essay.

An example: Prime Minister Cameron program will reduce government employees by 490,000 (much of them through attrition, as employees retire with their expensive pensions). Krugman says that’s terrible, and it will depress the British economy.

However, Great Britain has six million civil servants in 2010. Proportionally to the population, it is as if the USA had 30 million civil servants (the UK has a bit more than 60.5 million citizens, the USA a bit more than 310 millions).

But how many civil servants do the USA have? Krugman forgot to point that number out. The USA has 18 millions employed in government, three times as much as in Great Britain. Three times as much, for five times as big a population. Thus, to have the same relative number of civil servants as the USA, PM Cameron would need to fire more than two million British civil servants.

Thus the situation is much different from what Krugman depicts it to be. Different times, different countries, different situations.

Krugman compares Prime Minister Cameron in 2011 to Hoover in 1931. In truth, by letting banks close, Hoover was destroying the private economy. Cameron and his government are cutting what they view as government fat. Education and defense are basically untouched. Nationalized health care is left completely untouched (as promised in the campaign).

Cameron’s and Clegg’s idea is to increase high technology plus innovation. Tories and Liberals are singing the praises of Airbus (a major employer in the UK, as it builds there Airbus’ wings). This is very far from what the Americans expected, as it behooves them that Britain would be anti-European, that is, against itself. The British government wants to make economies by sharing aircraft carriers with France. What is there not to like in this no non sense approach to the real European economy?

Indeed, the analysis in Britain is that the UK has fallen behind France and Germany in high technology industry (after centuries of leading, or being equal), and that this is the root of Great Britain’s doom, should it be not fixed immediately. The aim is to do whatever it takes to catch up in industrial high technology. This is a major insight of Tories and Liberals. It is of course a major rapprochement with the main line of France, first, and Germany, second.

This line of progress was the line of the Franks: instead of enslaving men, let technology do the work… And let’s keep the government small. After five hard centuries of using that method to pull out of the Dark Ages imposed by the Christian obscurantism and fascist theocracy, by the year 1000 CE, the Franks (basically the present Eurozone) had achieved the world’s highest GDP per head.

So it is not surprising that Europe is going back to the tried and true. All of Europe is reigning in state spending. Even Norway (which is more than twice richer, per head, than the USA). Even Sweden, the temple of social democracy, richer per capita than France, or Germany.

Even in Germany, the world number one exporter (even beating sneaky China, most of the time).

In France, more than 10% of the present retirement spending is paid by further borrowing by the state. This is unsustainable, thus unacceptable. Most of the French population (more than 60%) believe that it is unacceptable (while, paradoxically a majority supports the strikers according to the sacred French principle that loud protests are the only religion worth having… as long as it does not interfere with the All Saints vacation).

And the stingy Europeans are right. Those who have borrowed money are owned by those who lent it to them. The last time there was really major borrowing in Europe, it came to be called serfdom. This is indeed what happened in the High Middle Ages.

The debt had to be piled up, then, because the Imperium Francorum was invaded from all directions. First Charles Martel nationalized the church, to pay for the army. But that was not enough.

The terrible Muslim invasions were very expensive to fight as the attacking fascists had harnessed the resources of more than half, and the richest half, of the Roman empire to feed and equip their jihadist armies.

Thus, although the Franks had outlawed slavery, overspending, caused in great part by the necessity of rising the greatest armies since the heydays of imperial Rome, and the cost of reconstruction once the ravaging Muslim armies had been pushed out, brought them right back down into a system where the average person was indebted… And being indebted means being indebted to the rich.

The first European Prime Minister who came to understand that government spending had to be cut down was the Swedish PM, and he was a Social-Democrat. Social democrats had put in place the all controlling Swedish nanny state. That Swedish PM, as progressive a liberal as they come, embarked on a savage austerity program who made him very hated.

At the time, the Swedish economy was collapsing, so there was no choice. The PM started very crafty changes, replacing a lot of costly central state functions by cheaper local citizen initiatives, for example in health care ( midwives and other non MD medical personnel were allowed to make a lot of medical procedures, and lots of health care is conducted on the phone, making Sweden the best health care system, even ahead of the 2% of GDP costlier French health care, which is more gold plated).

Now, but for oil rich Norway, Sweden is doing better economically and socially than all other European countries. And Sweden is in the EU, and it has no oil. The Swedes are proselytizing, and the rest of the 26 EU countries are inspired by it.

In general, Scandinavia has long cracked down on the imperial state. Scandinavian politicians pay for all their private expenses, and do not fly business on flights less than 3.5 hours. One is far from the Imperial Roman state based in Washington, with a First Man ("Princeps") and a "First Lady" who make Nero and Caligula look like misers, relatively speaking.

***

IMPERIAL USA, DOWN THE PLUTOCRATIC ROAD: I SELL, THEREFORE I RULE:

Why does this all mean? Trying to boost the economy through throwing money at the people was done during the worst centuries of Rome. It led to success only in the sense that the fascist imperial degeneracy kept on going.

Of course, some will say that those days are back. Imperial Rome was at its most grotesque when the Praetorian Guard put the imperial throne for auction. Yesterday, Barack Obama came to the San Francisco Bay Area. Plutocrats paid $30,400 per person to come to events where the president was acting up. Two months old plutocratic babies paid their $30,400. Then, to have your photograph taken with the president, it would cost you another $6,500.

Yes, $30,400 is more than half the average family income in the USA. And yes, Barack Obama visited several plutocratic homes. Meanwhile the Praetorian Guard is building bases as if it were going to stay a century in Afghanistan. Never mind what Obama says, he will do as the plutocrats say. As long as they pay. A Silicon Valley plutocrat spent more than 100 million dollars of her money to be elected governor.

***

LEVERAGING STATE SPENDING FOR THE TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCEMENT OF THE ECONOMY:

I am as progressive as they come. I am for central state spending in health, education, etc. I believe in Colbertism, the invention, earlier, by King Henri IV, of the high technology, legislated advancing economy to provide every family with a hen in the pot, at least once a week, as he put it.

However, this government investing in a valuable future works better when the spending is similar to what is done with money creation through private banks (the fractional reserve money creation system). The state brings in 10%, of the money, the privates do the rest. So the privates leverage on public money. For example in Europe, 250 mph, High Speed Rail is financed and built by private companies, leveraging governmental input. The USA used to do this, for example when railroads were built in the USA in the 19C. But for that government has to have available money to spend. This is highly relevant: 1.2 million construction workers are idle, and they could be put to work on conventional railroads, making them faster, safer, more efficient. But of course that cannot happen as long as the money goes to the corruptocrats and other plutocrats.

To borrow for current spending is unacceptable, in a family, but even more in a country: a family can die, and escape debt that way, but not a country…without great mayhem. Actually this is exactly how debt leads to war.

Cautious spending, investment spending, is the way to go. Unfortunately, Obama’s spending, deluded by Reagan advisers, and their plutocratic masters, has been neither. What British PM Cameron is doing is risky, but it may well work. What has been done under Obama, so far, cannot work.

***

Patrice Ayme

***

Note 1: STIMULATING PLUTOCRACY, NOT JOBS: First there was Larry Summers, who used to be a Reagan economic adviser, at the inception of the plan to put the plutocracy in power much more than it already was ("trickle-down economics"). Summers advised to write as many big checks to the banks as needed, to save their owners and managers.

TARP was put in evidence, but was only a small part of the (on-going) support to the giant banks and their giant owners. A grandly called "stimulus" was also put in evidence. But it was nothing of the sort. More than half of it was made of tax cuts (yes, a la Reagan!), and most of the rest compensated for the states’ financial collapse. A tiny proportion went to creating jobs (mostly of the menial, non multiplying type, such as improving trails in the middle of national lands).

This meant that money creation was mostly directed at Wall Street. Money was created, to serve Wall Street, not industry. In 2 years Obama stimulated jobs for 50 billion dollars (the trails above, and a few potholes), while Wall Street, in bonuses alone, distributed to itself 300 billion dollars. The source of the money is the same: taxpayers. To create these 300 billion dollars of bonuses, about four trillion dollars were spent.

How? Through Quantitative Easing. Basically the government lent short at zero interest to the giant banks, which were then allowed to reinvest with the government on so called longer maturities, at much higher interest. Many other tricks were used, such as having nationalized companies (FHA, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac) buy at outrageous prices worthless mish mash of over-valued mortgages. said nationalized companies are broke.

The other of ex-twenty something Reagan adviser, Summers’ alter ego, at least in the Reagan White House, was Paul Krugman. He seems to be listened to recently (considering the USA’s aggressive dollar devaluation, and all azimuths attacks against other countries).

***

Note 2: HOW THE QUR’AN CREATED MIDDLE AGE SERFDOM: One way the Franks beat the Muslim armies, aside from sheer intelligence, was with very heavy cavalry, and its giant armored horses. The cost was tremendous, but a cavalry charge by European knights would go through Muslim horse like a hot knife into butter. More generally a highly specialized military aristocracy, training itself from early childhood was created (under Charles Martel). But it put all of Western Europe in debt. On the positive side, the savages from the north (Vikings), from the east (various types of Huns), and the south (Muslims), were thereafter domesticated, once their armies had been defeated and chased out (which took more than 12 centuries in the case of Europe itself, and various Muslim theocracies).

Note 3: American ignorance is an astounding marvel: The other day, Fox News’ Neal Cavuto, one of Fox’s stars, who thinks he is a business genius, was interviewing a BRITISH European Member of Parliament in Strasbourg, France (the Euro parliament sits in Strasbourg, part time).

As he interviewed the British European MP, Cavuto idiotically insisted, again and again, that "Great Britain had to be happy not being part of that club". Meaning that Great Britain had to be happy not being in the European UNION. First, the EU is not a club, but an Union.

Secondly Cavuto was interviewing a British Euro MP, knowing very well that the gentleman was British, and a Euro MP, but apparently, Cavuto was congenitally incapable of drawing the conclusion that this meant that Great Britain was part of the European Union.

This is the degree of ignorance of Americans about Europe, in full evidence. And it’s not just Fox’s Cavuto: Krugman and Stiglitz, and smart, for American economists, are both deeply ignorant of European politics, history and economics, to the point that the advice they give about Europe reminds of the advice of Huns about Ukraine.

(Stiglitz, as Krugman has long been anti-European; in the last few days, Stiglitz wrote an essay in the Financial Times along the lines I have long held, of doing what one could call an investment stimulus… by opposition to a current account debt pile up, advocated before. So some are learning… Hopefully such knowledge can reach Obama…) 
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