No Euro Crisis, No Debt Crisis.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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EURO = FRENCH INVENTION:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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WHY THE EURO IN A NUTSHELL:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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SO WHY DID FRENCH YIELDS JUST COLLAPSE?

The yields were high because of two reasons:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is what I have been saying for years.

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

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

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

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

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

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THANK YOU Jérôme:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Patrice Ayme

Indebted To Lies

LIVING IN DENIAL ABOUT DEBT A PLUTOCRACY MAKES:
Abstract: Too many illusions governing, and a civilization dissolution guaranteed. A vast conspiracy extending from the financial right to the self conscious “liberal” elite, including the honorable conscientious liberal, Paul Krugman, claims that there is not that much of a debt problem in the USA.

Yet, a careful examination of the numbers and concepts involved shows that the esteemed pundits who howl urbi et orbi that there is no debt problem, coolly propose to steal Medicare and the Social Security Trust Fund.

This is pretty typical of the eerie manipulations that the powers that be engage in. Official progressives living in mansions end up in total solidarity with the plutocracy. One shudders at the possibilities.

Servicing Our Lords

Servicing too much debt is servicing plutocracy too much, and denial is its prophet.
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UNDERESTIMATING DEBT IS AN ECONOMIC DRAG:
Why did the presidency of Obama bring only change that we can’t see? Bush has been gone more than 4 years. Yet, the giant tax loopholes for the hyper rich are still in place (including “carry interest“!).

Not to worry, say many of the self proclaimed liberals and progressives opinion makers. In their latest tactic, they claim that there is no debt problem in the USA. They observe contently that interest rates have never been so low, that the deficit has disappeared from places such as the state of California, and that Obama’s reforms have been the “f… big deal“, as the robust Biden said, and Krugman confirmed.

What that self satisfied elite omits is that interest rates are low because the economy is not recovering. In a self amplifying loop, total debt (also called “leverage”), so easy to acquire with low interest, so stifling to serve later, is obviously a factor.

Because debt is accompanied with interest, too much debt means too much interest paid. At the limit, the debtor owns nothing, the debtor pays interest all day long, and the debtor becomes a serf.
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WHEN DEBT EXPLODES INTO SLAVERY:
Servitude from debt did not just happen in the Middle Ages. And it does not just happen to individuals.

In 2011 and 2012 Italy’s real economy was doing rather well: a bigger industrial sector than Great Britain, and no PRIMARY deficit (the USA primary deficit is 7% of GDP). Yet, Italy was engulfed in a catastrophic debt crisis.

How come? International investors asked for unsustainable interest to renew Italian debt.
Why they got in that mood, pouncing on Italy instead of Britain, say, is very complicated; but one of the factors is the madness of crowds; another, of course, is that the plutocracy has had a multi-generational conflict with France, and the Eurozone, or even the EU, is viewed as a dangerously French amplification machine.

During that crisis, Italian deficit (that is how much debt is added each year) came to be caused entirely by added interest on very old debt. (Total Italian debt was 121% of GDP when the interest rates charged to that country exploded.)

Greece went through something similar, just way worse (some Hellenic interest rates went above 100%).
Long ago, I advocated that Greece should default. This is what was done, in the end, because there was no other choice (although the default involved most of the governmental debt, Greece still owes hundreds of billions of euros, something that will have to be reduced further).

The European debt crisis abated in the second part of 2012 thanks to three factors. The most important factor was that unambiguous signals were given that France and Germany would do whatever it took to preserve the European banking system.

Thus the European Central Bank (ECB) was given a green light to stretch its mandate, and resort to USA style “Quantitative Easing” (QE). (The Europeans use another term than “QE”, in the hope that one does not feel they are just Americans infeodated to private finance as the government of the USA is!) QE consisted into sending a trillion euros to private banks, in the hope that they will show a profit. In the USA, QE has given to the banks more than 8 trillion dollars (about half of the yearly GDP). (See note on liabilities.)

The other cause of the abatement of the European debt crisis has been a ferocious crack down on deficits. Italy has no primary deficit, Germany has no deficit whatsoever. Even France is breaking hard to try to bring her deficit around 3% in 2013. Spain’s unemployment, now at 26%, keeps climbing, but the government helps ever less (after years of a delirious construction binge).

As Europe imports much of its energy, the climb of the euro, a consequence of these healthier finances, is viewed positively (it forces European industry to excell, a ball Switzerland and Germany got rolling, to great success.)
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WHEN DEBT CUTS INTO THE BONE:
Many countries are overdoing the austerity: Germany has no deficit, but it’s interior demand has long been very weak, as it rested on the likes of Greek and Iberian madness. Now the German economy is contracting. In Great Britain, savage cuts are proving self defeating: the deficit is still above 7%, the country is rolling again in recession, with long term GDP numbers worse than in the depression of the 1930s.

David Cameron, an extremely rich scion, Britain’s chief, thinks smart to duplicate the degeneracy that afflicts the USA, ever since Reagan imposed Voodoo economics. Thanks to Cameron, it can cost 10,000 euros to attend public university in the UK. Such cuts, should they stick, guarantee that the historical strength of the West, intellectual power, will sink in England, as surely as the Titanic.

California does not have a deficit, Paul Krugman boasted. Sure. Because of horrendous cuts, through the muscles, into the bones. Say in education: the, supposedly public, University of California charges California residents more than $12,000 in tuition, about a quarter of the median USA family income. Another sneaky deficit fighting measure is to let children enter primary school a year later. Meanwhile health costs considerably more to the public, thanks to genial Obamacare.

No more education, no more health, while Paul Krugman, self proclaimed “conscience of a liberal”, extols California as an example. The hyper rich have something to celebrate, many of the richest of the elite still pays no taxes, thanks to loopholes that the media never talks about (while the working stiff pays nearly as much tax as in France, without any of the free stuff there).
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LET’S LIE ABOUT FEDERAL DEBT: WHAT COULD GO WRONG?
Paul Krugman, much of the New York Times and much of the official left, claim that there is no debt problem in the USA: the debt is only 73% of GDP (less than France or even Germany). This chorus has recently been joined by the Congress Budget Office (CBO) and the Wall Street Journal.

And yet… The debt ceiling has been broken through. The ceiling was at 16,4 TRILLION. Total debt is now crossing $16.5 trillion. The USA GDP is around 15 trillion. Thus the debt is 111% of GDP, as the IMF says, it’s not 73% as many democrats claim.

USA Debt/GDP Worse Than During WWII

(The green line above depicts what would have happened if Reagan had balanced his budget instead of practicing the Voodoo Economics that debt did not matter.)

If one tried to point to that fact, the 111% debt, the New York Times censorship bureau was long in the habit to find such news unfit to print, and would censor them immediately. They did this to me, dozens of times. I amused myself seeing the liberally correct establishment crack down on this apparently anti-liberal notion. the real extent of the debt. Another trick was to publish unfavorable comments informing me that I “did not know what I was talking about”, and should “do [my] homework“.

The Economist, apparently recognized that there was something good in this conspiracy to underestimate the debt. So it nebulously recognized that the debt was “actually 25%” higher than 73%. That is 100% of GDP.
But, as I said, the total USA debt is above 111% of GDP, and growing by 1% every two months. Not exactly a viable proposition. Those who deny this are, on the face of it, just sycophants of the present economic-financial system. As it is, the USA cannot apply to the European Union, on financial grounds alone. Ironical.

Debt is not computed in the same way in Europe and the USA. First, one has to distinguish “gross” public debt and net public debt. Net public debt subtracts fiscal assets (cash, bonds, shares) owned by the government.

When Europeans talk about the debt their states owe, they talk about the gross debt. That makes a huge difference due to the many assets owned by European states.

The French government could argue French debt is not that bad, because it owns shares in Renault, EADS, etc. The Greek government is busy selling various assets it owns to reduce its debt (countless islands, etc.).

But this is not the mentality ruling the bean counters in the USA. There those who want to under-estimate the debt of the government of the USA, far from being rigorous as the Europeans, go to the opposite extreme. They do NOT take into account the money borrowed FROM Medicare and the Social Security “Trust” Fund. Those who want to underestimate the debt of the USA do not count government bonds owned by the Social Security Fund since it is seen as one arm of government having a claim on another arm of the government.

This sleight of hand reduces the debt/GDP of the USA from 111% down to 73%. In other words, according to this subterfuge, the government general fund does not have to reimburse the five trillion dollars it owes to Medicare and Social Security. Paul Krugman and many at the New York Times and the CBO find this conscientious and liberal.
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LITTLE DEBT, IF WE STEAL SOCIAL SECURITY & MEDICARE:
The debt situation shows that many of the many prominent American liberals are actually not liberal at all. They just play one on TV. Because the most important message they have about the Federal debt of the USA is that, the money owed to Medicare and the Social Security TRUST Fund is actually ZERO.

It’s cool with the New York Times, Krugman and company, if the government stole five trillion dollars to We The People. How conscientious and liberal is that?

But why should we be surprised? Did not the same crowd embrace Obamacare’ public subsidies to private healthcare plutocrats?

Some say that there is no danger. They assume that government bonds will stay as worthy in the future as they are now. Yet this will happen if, and only if the Greater Depression we are in extends indefinitely. If the economy happens to improve significantly, there is no way that the present bonds, with their extremely low returns, would interest investors. So the bonds would lose most of their value.

As the money those bonds used to represent would still be due to Medicare and Social Security, it could either be stolen outright, from The People, or it could be raised from taxing The People once again, for the same thing as they taxed for, before.

Hence ignoring the part of public debt held by the… public, through public institutions is sustainable, if, and only if, the economy keeps on sinking. How progressive.
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TAX FREE RIDERS, TAX CARBON, SPURN UNPRODUCTIVE DEBT, EMBRACE JOBS:
So? Are the loud progressives dominating the media actually regressive? Would that be, by any chance, entangled with their membership in the plutocracy serving oligarchy?

By underestimating the debt problem, the problem of the present economy can keep on being underestimated. A huge deficit can insure that money can keep on been thrown at the People. And that the free riders will keep on riding for free.

Whereas what we The People need, to be fully satisfied, is jobs. Jobs don’t just bring money, but empowerment, pride, satisfy the instinct of utility, mental, and physical activity. A society where People work is fully human, a society where People don’t work, is not.

By realizing how severe the crisis is, jobs can be brought over to bear on the peoblem. Just to make sustainable energies work, millions of jobs have to be created.

Because those jobs would be profitable by definition, they are worth getting indebted for.

Take for example power lines. Power lines are needed because sustainable energy tends to jump around in space and time; lots somewhere sometimes, and then somewhere else, another time. Germany has wind in the north, sun in the south. Washington State has much hydro power in early summer, and not enough power lines to get it out. Much power line work is needed all over.

Windmills work. Especially the latest types, offshore. A problem, though, is that the wind does not blow all the time, or when needed. The same problem affects solar energy. Power lines cannot solve it all. But dams can remedy the rest.

In the case of offshore wind, the solution is obvious: artificial, multibillion dollars islands, to turbine up water in artificial reservoirs, when demand is slack. To build all these islands will surely be a lot of work.

Mandated weatherization of homes and buildings is another obvious target (that is done in some European countries such as France, but not in the USA, where the Obama administration just gave subsidies to weatherize one million homes; a completely different activity, as it redistribute taxpayer money, instead of leveraging private economic activity… without using any taxpayer money).

So here we are: face the debt problem. It’s enormous. Debt ought not to be used for everyday expense, but only for worthy investments, as used to be the case.

And if there is too much debt, the solution is not crushing taxes on salaried people (top tax margin in California is 52%, although the truly hyper rich still pays nought, as they are not salaried…) Nor is the solution savage cuts. Instead the tax system ought to be overhauled: make the richest individuals and corporations pay tax, and make the richest economic activity pay tax too (for example financial transactions ought to pay tax, like all other transactions do; 11 countries of the Eurozone have decided to do so.

Another obvious revenue generator is a worldwide carbon tax. If the USA cooperated with the European Union there, instead of opposing it ridiculously, the tax would become reality so fast it would have a positive economic effect right away. Verily the least carbon burners can do is to pay for the damage they are causing to the biosphere.
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SERVICING CAPITAL IS LESS IMPORTANT THAN SERVICING NATURE:
On the most macroscopic scale, debt services the most wealthy persons, those who have the capital. That’s OK, civilization needs capital. For worthy investments. It’s not OK, when it gets out of control, and debt becomes a way of life.

By insisting that Federal debt of the USA is only 73% of GDP, one lives in denial. One more denial in a web of illusions. Too many illusions governing, and a civilization dissolution guaranteed.

At this point, we can emulate the immense Khmer empire around 1300 CE. We can refuse to change so long, that we cannot change when we are forced to. With one million inhabitants, the capital, Angkor, was perhaps the world’s largest city, larger than China’s Hangzhou. However, the Khmer devastated their ecology, precisely by doing as we do now: using up all the carbon around. That deforestation caused a massive drought, combined with intense floods, and the combination killed the capital of Angkor.

Maybe the Khmer were paralyzed by the debt they were servicing, and, certainly, they were paralyzed by the plutocracy that they were servicing.
What they needed to do was to repair the giant reservoirs they depended upon, that were fillong up by debris from the floods. And stop the deforestation. And they needed to do this in timely manner, when they still had the power. They waited too long, weakened, and were invaded.

The Maya also waited too long in a huge ecological crisis they contributed to, along the same lines. So it was with Sumer: deforestation, drought, salination, biblical (literally!) flood…

Rome went through something similar, long enough to debate the problem. However, the plutocracy barred the way to go further than that.

It’s always the same pattern: not working hard on the ecological problems, when they could still be solved, because one is paralyzed by a self obsessed plutocracy.

Why underestimate the debt difficulties of the USA, while maximizing bad rhetoric about those of Europe? Is there a pro-American cult out there? Not really. It is more a cult of capital, and underestimating the debt one owes to capital is part of it.
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Patrice Ayme
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Note on liabilities: Liabilities are more general than debt. Although this is too arcane to deal with here, QE extends the liabilities of the central banks, and one can view it as augmenting considerably, maybe 50%, German or French debt… But of this no one never talks. For example although USA debt is nearly $17 trillion, all the liabilities of the government of the USA go beyond $62 trillion…

TRUTH & MONSTERS

TRUTH IS AN UNENDING MORAL QUEST, & AGGRESSION IS ITS PROPHET.

Abstract: Humans are truth machines. To know where the monsters are, truth is necessary. Survival means fighting off the monsters, armed with fully deployed truth. Not enough truth, not enough survival. Survival is written with truth.

Hopefully, survival, that is, the right war, never stops. Stop fighting, stop living. There are two types who love no drama. First the weak meekly hiding in the bushes, who do not want to be devoured, and prefer the obscurity of the undergrowth, and slavery, if need be.

Secondly, there is the exact opposite, those who want no drama, because they rule unjustly. They are just predators who can’t snarl,  their mouths full, devouring their prey. In either case, not a pretty picture, and assuredly a defeat of the mind.

One needs drama to reveal the truth. Drama is the engine at the heart of wisdom. Contrarily to what slave religions have imprinted people to believe. Contrarily to the Obama no drama credo of surrendering to the mightiest. Contrarily to all those financial plots where the poor taxpayers rescue their richest oppressors, so that they can be oppressed some more. Indignation is often the wisest course, whether facing Hitler, or his financial and industrial sponsors (or their grand children).

Micro cameras mounted on helmets, as the French have in Afghanistan, will help change distortions of logical and emotional reality all too conductive to wars on behalf of the Dark Side. (French Socialists, should they win the presidential election, will inform their allies in May that they intend to pull the French army out of Afghanistan before the end of 2012.)

It’s a violent universe: after all, death is insured for all. Keeping death at bay, for a while, means that a lot of truth is in charge, and charging. How is violent truth ascertained? Through a ferocious analysis of history. Even in the hardest core physics. To talk about debt, wars, relativity, or CO2 poisoning, without history to brandish, and rinse with an aggressive theory of truth, is to talk about nothing.  

The philosopher Popper is revered by the establishment, precisely because his notion of truth has no teeth, and barks up the wrong tree. Once truth is denied, plutocracy, a pack of self serving, self replicating lies by the class of top exploiters with the lowest values, can prosper.

In truth certainty is the definition of science, and a good way to create certainty is to falsify liars and the idiotic ideas which support them. Plutocracy being the largest source of falsehood there is, both qualitatively, and quantitatively, teaches false Versailles and false WWII, or even false decolonization, and false financial crises, to better keep on going as before, if not even better, all the way down to World War Three.

Watch Obama claiming, when begging for money double faced plutocrats in the Silicon Valley, September 2011, that “[the Europeans] are going through a financial crisis that is scaring the world “. The truth? The USA has re-entered another recession, on its own (not to say the EU is not in recession too).

To stick to facts, Greece has less of a deficit than the USA. American plutocracy inspired dissemblances is what is scaring the world: how deep down the abyss of lies does plutocracy intent to dive, and how much can it stand before imploding us all, Soviet style? Well, be afraid: it will be long, and surprising, all the way down to Pluto.

The devil is in the details, because that is where the lies are, including ultimate ferocity disguised as benevolence. That is why the knights of truth and goodness have to get down there inside, and fight the good fight, against the biggest lies, and the biggest liars who feed from them.

This is not an easy essay to read, the philosophical turbo is on, especially after the attack on Popper, and the subject deserves thousands of pages. But after all, we are in exhilarating times, revolutions breaking all over, plutocracy going insane, CO2 poisoning on a rampage, seas rising, and now Faster Than Light travel, and inconsistent arithmetic (the latest). Philosophy has to embrace it all, and go beyond.

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BE AFRAID OF BEING UNABLE TO ASCERTAIN THE TRUTH:

According to a recent book, when Obama became president he had the right instincts, as far as finance was concerned. As the present author long recommended, Obama wanted some banks to be nationalized in exchange of assistance, and a financial transaction tax to be introduced. But his own cabinet, made of people with a long life at the interface of Washington and Wall Street, treated Obama as an ignorant child, and did not even inform him of the decisions that they, among the most corrupt adults in the world,  had taken stealthily, to completely discard his orders.

In truth, they were the ignorant ones. And dumb too: they had not even seen that the boat on which they scurried all their lives, as well nourished rats, was sinking. The result is a second recession, after no real recovery, which is not surprising, since there has been no plan to engage finance into profitable, energy efficient job creation (as could have happened if, and only if, the biggest, most corrupt banks had been nationalized).

The latest issue of “The Economist”, in its cover story depicting a black hole as it is presumed that it would really appear in space, asserts that:

BE AFRAID

Unless politicians act more boldly, the world economy will keep heading towards a black hole

Oct 1st 2011

Obviously a very large black holes, millions of suns in mass. What are we confronted with?

First of all a failure of cognition. And it is coming from an even deeper failure, the incapacity to know how one gets to establish truth. The pseudo wise salad of smart watchdogs such as Karl Popper has something to do with it, as we will see. Propaganda of the supperrich does not just emanate from them, but also from their obsequious servants, often frantically anxious to please their masters, to get another chocolate medal.

Having erected the incapacity to gather important knowledge as worthy, is why one can see some important elected American officials running for the presidency of the USA, although they sound more ignorant about human evolution than Kanzler Adolf Hitler himself (and they want to impose their ignorance as the only truth worth having).

All over the West democracy has been hypnotized by the superrich anti-tax religion, a willful unravelling of civilization, that very unravelling which brought the end of the Roman republic and state, and its replacement by the Dark Ages, where the power of the superrich became awesome, relatively speaking. About two millennia of plutocracy in various guises, including the feudal order, ensued.

The Presiding Judge of the superior Court of San Francisco County said that her court nearly “fell off a cliff” before an emergency loan, and that she expects most of the counties in California to fall off that cliff in the coming months, anyway. All of this because Californians want to pay basically no gas tax.

The Presiding Judge, Katherine Feinstein, is the daughter of Dianne, California’s senior senator, a major support of Obama, so one cannot say that she is not politically connected. Civil adjudication could stop altogether, as it already has on one judicial circuit in Georgia. That, says Judge Feinstein, would bring about the “unravelling of society”.

The People of the “California Republic” do not realize that their rejection of fiscal austerity is condemning their society to feudalism now. Why? Because they are completely imprinted by the ideology of the superrich. They may vaguely feel that this is not right, but, just like president Obama, their own thought system is not sturdy enough to be certain about what to do.

This failure of correct certainty extends all over the West. Only the plutocrats, and their bankers, in control of Main Stream media propaganda, are certain of what needs to be done, for themselves, so that they can keep on flying in private jets from Bali to Gstaad.

A guy called Apotheker headed Hewlet Packard for 11 months. Differently from the publicity seeking commercial outfit known as Apple, HP does real research in real applied physics. It’s also a software giant, and the world’s number one computer maker. And based in the Silicon Valley, where it helped, through leases, to make Stanford University wealthy. Apotheker decided to make HP exit its profitable computer business, after starving it from research funds, creating an uproar, and the board threw him out (rightly so!). Terminating HP computers would have led to a desertion of the extremely profitable HP copier business. To keep him happy, Apotheker was given 23 million dollars.

This is what plutocracy means: a few worthless individuals, paid immense fortunes for doing everything wrong. Are they paid that much because they know where the bodies are buried? Or by exploiting CEO class solidarity? Or both?  

***

DYING FOR PLUTOCRACY IN WWI, WWII, AND, SOON, WWIII?

Hitler was a monster. So were Himmler, Goebbels, Goering, Keitel, SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, and their millions of helpers… Obviously too many millions of monsters for them to be spontaneously generated, so they actually were programmed by a monstrous ideology. The real monster was the ideology Nietzsche had already excoriated, plus added addled ingredients such as Keynes, Henry Ford, and their devotees! That monstrous ideology was dramatically confronted, on September 1, 1939, when France and Britain served Nazi Germany with an ultimatum.

Why would it be philosophical to avoid drama? The age of no drama Obama has demonstrated, if need be, that all reforms are dramatically unmade by putting one’s supporters to sleep with soothing words while conceding the fanatical opposition whatever it wants. No drama Obama has showed us that a never ending blah blah is best to hide the fact one is walking backwards in the other direction. Appeasement of monstrosity only does the monsters good.

Latest cases of this stealth American refusal of any dramatic evolution for good: Washington’s protests against the incoming European carbon tax on aircraft pollution, and the European proposed worldwide Financial Transaction Tax (which Sarkozy is pushing as head of the G20; the UK already has one, the “Stamp Tax“).

Fighting pollution and financial piracy is fine speech as far as the Obama administration is concerned, as long as it requires no effort from those who sponsor it.

In the end, drama is often no choice. At some point, drama is forced by inertia.

The dramatic, plutocratically driven imbalances of the present world economy, mean only two outcomes: revolution, or war. That civilization will quietly degenerate for six centuries, as it did in imperial Rome, is highly unlikely: Rome had no peers. Instead what we have now is a multi body problem. Variants of the European system have been adopted worldwide. In a sense, the world is just like Europe was before 1914, and, considering what happened in Europe in 1853, 1858, 1866, 1870-71, and 1914, we know what it means.

In a dramatic week at the end of July 1914, the socialists in Germany and France saw that German plutocrats had decided upon war as the best way to preserve their endangered status (an explicit plot that a document found in a German attic would confirm, 60 years later). The Franco-German socialists wished to block the incoming war with a general, common strike. However the French socialist leader, Jean Jaures, a top philosopher, was assassinated, and war hysteria took command.

To avoid the most dramatic dramas, timely drama in the pursuit of truth is the way.

The next major drama which unfolded originated in the lies of the economist Keynes and his Anglo-Saxon accomplices about the real dangers of the nature of the French imposed truce of 1919.

Keynes claimed that only on-going hegemony by German plutocrats and their friends would preserve the economy (of the people he cared about; as he was a British speculator, unsurprisingly he was all about fellow Anglo-Saxon plutocrats; Britain would follow Keynes’ line until 1938, and the USA never stopped).

France instead set the peoples of Eastern Europe free from German plutocratic subjugation. The Americans disingenuously have claimed ever since, that France caused Nazism, a theme that the Nazis were all to happy to adopt with a vengeance. The Nazis had to avenge themselves when it dawned on their idiotic selves, starting with their “Guide”, on September 3, 1939, that the Anglo-Saxons plutocrats and their German colleagues had played them. When Adolf the Guide found he had been teleguided, in other words, teleprompted, he was most enraged. But it was too late. Franco-Britannia had declared war. The holocaust had started. Within a few weeks, hundreds of thousands would be dead, and American plutocracy, at its most lethal and stealthy, would feed the war on the fascist side, enabling it to last six years, when it could have been over in months.

Real history is complicated in its details, revealing in its simplicity.

The spirit of plutocracy has been flying from victory to victory, for a full century, as far as American plutocracy and its friends are concerned. Or make that more than two centuries? WWI was turned into the great success of WWII, and then decolonization into a further success, the reverse plutocratic colonization known as “globalization“.

Even the succession of financial crises that plutocracy caused in the last few decades was turned to advantage as the American plutocracy and its friends (from Thatcher to Sarkozy) imposed to the naïve people the further punishment of giving their torturers the banksters ever more money and power.

The exact scheme which plutocracy developed with Nazism is now tried with China: plutocracy is sending enormous resources to the “People Republic of China“, both weakening the dangerously socializing historical base of plutocracy, while increasing its profits tremendously.

The resulting imbalances are unsustainable, as jobs disappear in the West.

Plutocracy would win if and only if it can steer civilization to total war, and its associated fascism, as it did in the Roman republic around 150 BCE. This time it may not work though: not only are some philosophers, such as yours truly, aware of what is going on, but the Chinese and Indian civilizations were not born yesterday. Verily, it’s American plutocracy which was born yesterday. It is now confronting, all over Eurasia, six thousand years of cultural experience, from the “scary” Europeans (dixit Obama) to the impenetrable Chinese (busy launching their own space station, while the USA is reduced to beg the Russians to give them access to space).

Plutocracy has grown with debt, as wealth is created by private banks, through debt. Don’t expect Paul Krugman to explain you this: he is not keen to lose influence and access. I am not even blaming him. I am not even blaming Obama, just what he has been told to regurgitate. OK, let’s plunge in a little piece of that jungle facts, growing all over the place, have been making.

***

CASES STUDIES OF DEBT RUNNING AMOK: TEMPLARS, FRENCH REVOLUTION, WEIMAR, 1944…

We hear a lot of absurdities about debt, from both extremes. It would help to know some history. Debt is a very good thing to engage in, for irresistible investments which will improve the efficiency of the economy. And debt is often a necessary thing, when really necessary military spending is concerned, as the Italian republics of the Middle Ages demonstrated. However, for a government’s current account, debt should be banned. A historical  perspective helps to reveal the truth about debt, namely the serious evils it can entail.

In 1306 CE, Philippe Le Bel solved the problem of the French national debt, spectacularly: he destroyed the superrich Order of the Templar Monks the state owed much to, seized its assets, and sent its chiefs to hold congress from the center of roaring fires (Friday 13, 1307). The Templars were a militarized plutocracy extending all across the Frankish empire, from England, all the way to the “Levant”, Palestine. They did not pay taxes, pretty much like today’s world plutocracy.

OK, smarty pants will object that the king of France himself was at the head of a plutocracy. Sure. However long traditions, including the rules of Salic and Roman law, plus being at the head of an enormous state comprising church, university, police, judiciary and army, made the plutocracy the king was leading, a much more civilized and democratic force than the conspiratorial, secretive undemocratic Templars.

Philippe IV’s two closest associates were not nobles, but particularly gifted lawyers who had made particularly good studies, and had a republican conception of the state. Philippe, with his more or less vassal, the English king, he had just made war to (creating…debt to the Templars), decided to tax the entire Christian church (something the contemporary Greek republic still has to do). The pope opposed tax justice strongly, which was a mistake. Mr. Pope had forgotten who had put him where he was, and how he was, namely the Carolingian empire.

But Philippe IV had not forgotten his Frankish predecessors’ attitude, seven, six, and five centuries before. The French state, all the way back to Consul Clovis, had always viewed the Church as a tool serving an underlying republican equalitarian secularism. Charles the Hammer had even nationalized the Church, as a warm up before repulsing those peculiar Christians they called the Saracens.

So the church got taxed by France and England. (Later the church cheated again, and England and France, Henry VIII and the French republic, had to correct, all that free riding tax cheating, again.)

A contemporary quandary related to this: why should not the Greek church get taxed too? Is not Greece getting dozens of billions from the French taxpayers? Why is the French secularist republic supporting the Greek Orthodox Church? Was not that all over after the Franks conquered the Byzantine empire and its capital, Constantinople in 1204? During the French revolution, priests had to take an oath to the republic, and now rent (for free) their religious edifices from the French republic. Why is Greek superstition paid for by 16 other secular states?

In an afterthought, Philippe served the arrogant Pope in Rome, with a warrant for his arrest, the equivalent of today’s Interpol red notice (the French king being “emperor in his kingdom”, and the Papal state being a gift from Charles the Great ). The Pope died while in the tender care of French special forces. After that Popes were required to serve in Avignon, not Rome.

In 1789, the debt of the kingdom of France reached 80% of GDP (about what it is now). This came from the fact that the plutocrats, namely the nobles and the church, did not pay (enough) taxes. I guess the same causes have the same effects.

Aware of this looming disaster, the king Louis XVI, fresh from his success in creating the American republic, by sending a massive land and sea force to help the American rebels, his government had enticed, decided to modify the tax system. The king wanted to make the superrich pay, but, in the sort of hesitancy Obama loves to exhibit, he danced around reform for several years, even naming serious revolutionary economists as (to the equivalent of)Prime Minister (some teachers of Adam Smith). But, Obama like, Louis played shrinking violet when confronted to serious plutocratic opposition.

Finally, a bit like Obama named a “super commission” to do his job, Louis XVI convoked the “General Estates” to decide what should be done. The “General Estates” were a sort of giant national assembly of representatives of whoever mattered in the realm. They had not been convoked for 250 years.

The situation escaped Louis XVI’s control when the General Estates decided to transform itself in Constitutional Assembly, and rushed to come up with a constitution as if it were in a race with the USA to come up with a new political system.

The USA was in the process of writing its own constitution. To understand this fully, one has to know that kings of the Franks were elected, and the myth that so it was, persisted for centuries. One has also to know that Great Britain, the fruit of various wars, coups and revolutions, did not have a Constitution (nor does Israel). Constitutions had been written for Sparta and Athens, way back. But Rome, even republican Rome did without a constitution, a habit that it not only died from, but also passed to the Franks.

In any case, Louis XVI, after playing around with debt (he kept secret books to pay for the American independence war), found himself losing his head in a revolution.

After 1919, Germany, having destroyed vast swathes of France and Belgium, a lot of it deliberate vandalism (from the burning of the immense Middle Ages libraries full of irreplaceable books, to the dynamiting and flooding of French coal mines) was condemned to pay reparations (as Prussia had exacted from France in 1871). The German Second Reich (aka “Weimar republic”) was unwilling to pay this debt, and decided to engage in hyper inflation instead (France had paid the reparations unjustly exacted by Bismarck in 4 years in the 1870s).

In 1944, French national debt, laden by five years of total war, was 290% of GDP. France would mostly grew out of it, helped by significant inflation and planned reconstruction. Within 12 months, a devastated Germany would be partly denazified, occupied and go hungry, for years. And the third main piece of the old Imperium Francorum, England, was saddled with enormous debts to its generous American ally, and devastation of its own.

Afterwards the Europeans enjoyed the American Century, now just decried, in French, by the irate president of the European Commission, as a “paternalism“, to be crushed by “European pride“. The experienced German finance minister, another conservative, depicted the three trillion dollars American style TARP the Americans want the European to implement a “stupid idea“. Obama was reduced to professorially intone  a rewriting of history.

The truth is that, as the Europeans clinch their jaws and embrace austerity, they remember centuries of history, and more. Imperial shortcuts and financial craziness, not to say indebtedness, brought disasters, and that’s the truth.

Germany, and France too, did very well with austerity, in the last few decades, and that is also the truth, thank you. All of Europe has very high energy taxes, and even some have taxes on wealth. Britain high income bracket is taxed at 50%. The French just introduced a tax on the most polluting factories. The European carbon tax on airlines, incoming January 1, 2012, drives the Washington republic bananas (oops, sorry about the implied pleonasm; how to drive a banana banana?).

***

IF YOU GO TO WAR, FIRST VISIT THE HOUSE OF TRUTH:

The Libyan war was necessary for the European Imperium to engage in. Gaddafi had caused too much human rights violations, all too close. Too bad that vassal Merkel squeaked from the sidelines, after betraying Paris and London at the UN, a behavior that Berlin should remember has no future, except for a very bad past.

Afghanistan is the opposite story. In this case, the Europeans, naively, have flown to the rescue of the trouble maker. It’s the USA which has officially caused trouble in Afghanistan since July 3, 1979. To help the trouble maker is no way out of trouble. And, by the way, Pakistan, as it is, is also the USA’s baby.

French soldiers in Afghanistan mount micro video cameras on their helmets, and film combat. Two came back to France, and found that nobody was interested by that lamentable war. So they left the army, left France, for good measure, and published their internet generation movie making on the web.

It is very interesting: war as videogame. Huge explosions, rockets, unending strands of bullets, all armored monsters running around with giant weapons. The humor is extraordinary, fully appropriate, and highly disturbing. The soldiers laugh, even when shaken by explosions inside a tank.

Deadly combat is best for gallows humor: “Wow! We are surrounded on all sides, we are going to die here!” [Genuine amusement, laughter!] “Shut up, I don’t want to die here!” [More laughter! One of the funniest thing ever heard, the way the laughter sounds! If even their imminent death is a cause of genuine hilarity, how do you get to soldiers like that?]” “OK, guys, shoot on anything which move, except children, I am calling the planes!” [Bombardments, napalm] “Wow! That’s hot!” [Watching napalm: laughter!] “There were children there! We are such bastards!” [Laughter, a bit more nervous, with a sense of wonder at being such bastards… Like they did not know they had that in them.]

People do some things because they believe some related things are true. Man is a theoretical animal, going from theory to theory, like a gibbon goes from branch to branch. If one of these theories proves false, man crashes. So it is, when a gibbon grabs a rotten branch.

In Afghanistan, the gibbons in chief have miscomputed: many, all too many,  of their theories are rotten branches of empty rhetoric, as wrong as wrong can be. They empowered fanatical war-like Islam in Afghanistan, and set-up an Islamist corrupt “republic” there, and now fight bad Islamists in the name of good Islam, or so they say (but their lies fool no one there).

Those gibbons in chief just owe an ever increasing debt to society for the pain and suffering they cause, for no good reason whatsoever, but the inertia of empire.

***

TO FIND TRUTH, START WITH SCIENCE, BUT AVOID POP POPPERIZATION:

The philosopher Karl Popper defended the notion of falsification to distinguish between what was science, from what was not science. At some point, Popper even said that a theory is scientific, if and only if it is falsifiable, which is obviously silly (that would make the theory that Tuesday is on Wednesday since it is falsifiable…)

Einstein’s Special Relativity could not be falsified, or proven wrong. According to Popper does that mean that it was not science? And now that it may have been proven wrong, is it therefore, in retrospect, science?

Is science science, as soon as it is not science anymore? Is that what Popper is saying?

Some will say that I am confusing “falsifiable” and “falsified“. Well so? Popper makes me both irritable and irritated. Is not that a distinction without much of a difference? If Popper were asked to define “peace”, it seems he would do what he did for science, go to its natural opposite: he would say that a peace can be distinguished from a conflict, if is irritable… which irritates me, for sure. 

Popper was aware of some of the problems with his definition of science, so he apparently switched to “criticizability“. Later Popper discovered the logician Tarski, a deeper thinker, proponent of unadorned truth, and regretted to not have heard of him before… Thus Popper’s statements are all over the map.

All this philosophical self contradictory meandering meant to be clever, had a disastrous effect on teaching in the USA, as U.S. law says that only real “science” can be taught in the school of the USA, under that name. If science cannot be defined, it cannot be taught. Thus the obscure reign of Popper’s naïve considerations became the reign of obscurantism, and now many republican candidates to the presidency seem to have grown up with the dinosaurs.

But of course, disastrous teaching of reason has been excellent for plutocracy; as intelligence, knowledge and common sense sank, plutocracy soared. More and more insane laws were passed, such as anti tax laws in periods of rising deficits, and calling that “stimulating”. Verily, idiots are stimulated by the triumph of stupidity.

***

PROPERLY DEFINING SCIENCE:

So let’s reject  Popper’s pauperization of the mind. One should call science what is known with certainty.

That means science is what we can predict what will happen, meaning that it works with better than 50% probability. Yes, that means that making fire with stones was, and is, a science, one of the oldest.

In some cases the probability that it will happen is infinitesimally close to 100%. Otherwise only the suicidal would travel by car, train, or air. Even the most superstitious, nowadays, use science all day long. So, when they deny science and the faith they have in it, it they are hypocrites at best, and completely delusional, otherwise.

Part of a scientific theory can be more or less scientific. Einstein’s critique of his own “general” theory gave me the idea, if nothing else would. Einstein thought that the right hand side of his own Einstein gravitational field equation, that right hand side being the mass-energy tensor, was suspect, and it sure is! (Be it only because it depends upon the left hand side, I would say: curvature of spacetime has energy!)

Most of what is called Einstein’s theory of Special Relativity (ESR) is science because it has been demonstrated experimentally thoroughly, and its logic is simple.

However, some parts of Einstein’s theory are more dubious. It seems to me that Einstein, carried away by a craving for over simplification, not to say divination, got philosophically confused between different notions which he should have kept distinct and separate (such as local time and global light). It is as if he wanted to produce a theory which begged for falsification.

(OK, Einstein had a more subtle reason: his will to oversimplify physics, and do it all with just one interaction, electro-magnetism, as gravitation was geometrized out; modern high energy physics has thrown that out of the window, as many interactions were revealed, starting with the weak force… that of neutrino.)

So part of Relativity is certainly true, and some part unproven poetry (flights of fancy within Einstein’s work are well known, among specialists, for example in his theory of E= mcc, where he thought he could prove more than he could chew).

A more concrete example of science being hard here, soft there: the theory of plate tectonic.  It is certain that there are plates, and they move, and how they have moved. That part of the theory is hard core science, because it is certain. However, why the plates move is much less certain, and even volcanism inside the plates (say volcanoes in Arizona), or the exact nature of the Tibetan Plateau (is it lifted or compressed? Or both?), are very hypothetical.

Just as certainty vary, science varies. After careful observations, Pumas, aka Mountain Lions, aka Cougars, a species with 40 names in English, and many more in Spanish, were classified as Felis Concolor, and viewed as the largest member of the 100 species one could call “cats” (Felis), in a distinction from Pantherinae (lions, jaguars, etc.)

However, it is thought, since 1993, that the ferocious creature should be known as Puma Concolor: it’s not a felis after all, as it seems closer to cheetahs (which should have been obvious to start with, considering that they look very similar).

***

FALSIFY LIARS, CERTIFY SCIENCE:

So OK, science is what has proven, and it is more or less scientific according to how more or less certain it is. Simple, back to basics. Having neutrinos going faster than light would not falsify all of Special Relativity, just some imbalanced ideas Einstein pushed, by trying to tell us what his god had decided in all the details, and which Special Relativity can do without, contrarily to what he pretended.

Is nothing to be saved from Popper’s obsession with falsification? Yes, much. The best way to establish certainty is by repeated experiments, until faith is established. But there is another way, which I pretty much (re)discovered by studying top mathematicians. It was a way well known to the ancients. it is implicitly all over science and mathematics: is true what reputable sources believe.

Indeed what of pure math, unconnected from any experience which could indirectly check it? How is certainty established there? Well, most mathematics, operationally, is established by repeated conventions among respectable (wo)men. This is the paradox of mathematics: although most logical, it’s mostly about duplicating authority, in the hope authority is correct.

Some will scream. How can I dare say this? Mathematics as part convention? I have had Fields Medals (a top medal mathematicians of influence give to their pupils), who were friends, turn savagely against me, as I uttered that truth. And they became enemies in seconds.

So no wonder that there has been a lot of screaming, shortly after the neutrinos beat up light, 16,000 times, when a top senior, famous mathematician, Edward Nelson, from Princeton, came up with a purported proof that basic arithmetic is “inconsistent“.  Yes, the most basic arithmetic would make no sense.

I don’t know if that proof is correct or not, but I have a meta argument for inconsistency, coming from my neurological interpretation of mathematics.

From experiment to convention there is the plenitude of the truth of (wo)man. Truth, I believe, is essentially neurological, when not experimental. Another type of experience, sure: the inner, ultimate experience.

Thus truth depends upon a faithful representation of both outside and inner experience.

This is why and where the obsession with falsification comes in handy. To find out where the liars are and the lying lies that lay about. That is why top research mathematicians, or scientists in general, are obsessed by the reputation of people, as it conveys the truth of authority. (And the importance of medals and prizes.)

***

TRUTH IS MORAL:

Thus the theory of truth passes by the moral discovery that many human beings are up to no good, and who, among them bear the darkness of deception.

Saint Augustine had claimed that most humans were up to no good, in the old Roman tradition, and thus inflected the pessimistic and torturous attitude of the Christian church ever since. More cogently, Sade observed that deception and the rest of the Dark Side was all too natural (a point reiterated by Nietzsche, in a more Hinduist, classical mathematical way, as the return of the same). To make matters worse, I pointed out the reason why nature is so cruel: as an organizing principle, stimulating the speed of life. It’s all too ecological.

One can proceed towards truth by cutting off what is deception, and what is false.

And an aid in doing that is to find out individuals who are deliberately deceiving (most of them, according to saint Augustine). Thus an approach to truth: expose those who deliberately lie, and the lying subjects they promote.

OK, both methods are aggressive. But aggression is not antagonistic to truth. Quite the opposite. Verily, success is often the ultimate proof. The proof of the truth is in the eating. As wolves will certify, best nourishment is to be had from the marrow of the erroneous. The proof is not just in the pudding, it’s in the kill.

Wolves know that, individually, a puma can kill them. But they also know that, as a pack, they can steal kills from a puma, and even kill the cat. That’s basic wolf science, in the Americas. Wolf science? Why not? Animal knowledge is born from experience, but mostly, from culture (as the insertion in the wild of human raised wildlife has amply demonstrated).

Let’s give an example of the hard pursuit of truth.

***

HOT TRUTH: 450.

In the USA, the world’s most wasteful country, global warming is not hot. The plutocrats are cool to the notion. That global warming is actually cool, admitting it happens at all,  is promoted by fossil fuel loving living fossils of the plutocratic type, who pay, in diverse fashions, many outlays to tell lies about the situation, and the responsibilities which are involved.

The question is: how do we destroy the respectability of those who believe that there is no problem with poisoning seas and air with CO2 equivalent gases? What is the argument they cannot counter, which will make their criminality blatant?

In climate science, the number “450″ cannot be contested. It’s raw data (as “390″ cannot be contested for CO2).

The most important categorization of knowledge comes from the importance one endows to the notions one considers, within the theory one addresses.

For example many modern academic philosophers consider “hermeneutics”, the theory of interpreting gossip, as the most valuable, making them worse than useless. As they corrupt the youth away from the critique of real power.

In turn, the value, or rather the lack thereof, of the notions deceivers put forward, allows to expose those one may suspect of deceiving. Deceivers will typically focus on secondary details, and forget the big pictures.

For the CO2 equivalent gas poisoning, just one notion is enough: 450 ppm. Contesting that number is impossible, it is a fact. Denying its importance, lie or deception. When confronted to a climate denier, just ask her/him what part of “450″ s/he does not understand. And why.

If they say: “450? What are you talking about?” They are just either so dumb that they are like people who would pretend to read, but don’t know how to read a single letter, or they are deliberately lying. In both cases, they are fanatics. Namely they come out of the fanum, the temple.

***

Conclusion: Ideas, situations, feelings, methods, entire cultures and superstitions can turn out to be propitious to evil. They are the ones which are, truly, evil. This is admitted by modern law, which recognizes that “fighting words“, and “hate speech” are crimes.

We need to extent the notion that it is with some configurations of the human mind, or even of cognition, or moral attitude, that the crimes truly originate, they are the true culprits.

In other words, Hitler, far from being pathological, was the all too healthy product of a sick and demented culture. He could have been replaced by many a similarly programmed person (and there were plenty, as Nietzsche shrieked, 50 years earlier, well before Hitler’s birth). This is important: a lot of German hermeneutics, so admired to his day, by preventing thinking, was just to Nazism what a smokescreen used to be to a battleship. It’s playing that exact same role to this day, this time protecting Nazism’s sponsor, plutocracy itself. Thus many philosophical departments are neutralized by the study of gossip made into the only science worth studying.

It goes without saying that however flawed Stalin was (he got started by bringing money to the Party, by stealing banks; one the robberies brought millions and perhaps 40 dead), the real monster was Marxism-Leninism, a hateful ideology no doubt partly prompted by Lenin’s brother’s execution, and similar violence from the Tsarist state.

In today’s USA, those who sincerely believe that their ancestors were running around with dinosaurs in the garden of Eden have deep flaws either in their character, or in the way they establish truth, or in what the raw data they learned at school. Flaws so deep that they are similar to those Hitler had. And the same for all those, who, like Hitler believed they were god, or in the inner circle of god. The edict of Philippe IV Le Bel against the lenders to the French state started with:”Dieu n’est pas content…”. God was not content, no doubt…

***

INCREASINGLY, GUILTY MINDS ARE BAD ENOUGH:

When robots act, one cannot claim that the minds who programmed them, rest. To be culprit, in Roman Law one needed to have a culprit mind (“mens rea”). Actus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea: “the act does not make a person guilty unless the mind is also guilty“. Nowadays, having so much physical power at our disposal, we need to have more perfect minds, that is, the thought itself can be a guilty act. This is especially true for the leadership, and not just political leadership.

Economists who thought that some banks are too big to fail and should be given as much public money as their managements and shareholders ask, are, arguably more culprit than the elected representatives that they advised.

All what many a mental attitude or tradition deserves, is extermination. No use tolerating the systems of thought promoting human sacrifice (so it was good to get rid of that part of Aztec, Maya, Inca, Celtic and Punic civilizations).

***

All too many times, the monster is not as much the already monstrous person, as the situation their ilk arise from, and further foster. One should avoid a confusion between individuals and the cultural situations they arise from. It seems that, in his quasi pathological coolness, Obama may have been carried away into connivance, by calling plutocrats such as Mr. Jamie Dimon, head of the giant JP Morgan Chase, or Buffet, his “friends“, all too much.

Mr. Dimon and Mr. Buffet, and their fellow plutocrats are no doubt nice, but that does not mean that so are their ideas, and various dissemblances they hide behind.

I know Buffet has decried the fact he was taxed at a much lower rate than his secretary or receptionist. But that was denounced, for many years by this author, and Buffet, all the while, was careful not to notice the outrage. Now that everybody has noticed, Obama, in a Freudian slip, celebrates the “Buffet rule”. Thus the chameleon changes colors to better catch flies and escape predators. Condemning the tax brackets Obama put in place when he controlled everything, now that everybody has noticed, can be used as a smokescreen. Indeed, Obama and Buffet keep on viewing carbon taxes and transaction taxes as devils view holy water.

Dimon recently revealed his true colors by attacking new world wide banking regulations”cockamamie nonsense…anti-American…anti-European“. Dimon is one of the big guys of central bank of the USA, another monstrosity, as this device, the Fed, far from being independent, is an emanation of the private banks.

***

Conclusion: THE ECOLOGY OF TRUTH NEEDS THE DARK SIDE, JUST NOT TOO MUCH:

Many paths lead to truth. They entangle into theories. Erroneous strands and stands can be deconstructed without the theories really collapsing: that would be true for Relativity or Arithmetic. Believing that secularism ought to be the master religion does not mean that superstition ought to be outlawed (that would be a bad omen).

An approach to truth is to seriate problems, and logical components to solving them, according to their logical probability, certainty, value, or importance.

The 450 ppm level in CO2 equivalent gas poisoning has extreme importance, because it is an overwhelmingly monstrous evidence, a carrier of unmitigated doom: this is the highest percentage of greenhouse gases in dozens of millions of years. Only enormous science will get us out of that hole (half of the added CO2 is in the acidifying oceans).

Would there be as many truths, if there were much fewer monsters? Of course not. The logic of the house of truth needs monsters, just as biological ecology needs carnivorous monsters who are indispensable to prevent a self destroying ecology. Just to create the dram which gets our neurons going. Whether we like it or not, we wake up best when we flee, or fight. That is why Einstein made exaggerated, unbalanced claims. A safer way to higher thinking than the tobacco which killed him.

Monsters and truths dancing: it is all a matter of balance, as it is a matter of balance, to keep a plane aloft.

However, right now we have an imbalance of truth, and not just in Syria. We are going down into the black hole of the Dark Side, plutocracy imploding, as happened with the Roman empire. Or the Mayan civilization, whose plutocracy called onto suicidal war, instead of the ecological measures necessary to answer a drought. Or pharaonic Egypt immediately after its Ramses peak, financially imploding, reduced to steal its own treasures to balance the budget, before being taken over by Libyans, and soon, the Assyrians.

Even the Mongols, austere and ferocious, having taken over China as the Yuan, degenerated soon down the plutocratic hole. When a succession of ecological disasters reminiscent of those incoming today, struck, the government’s response was ineffective, and then military. So the Yuan were thrown out by the Red Turban and Ming rebellion.

But maybe the Easter Island civilization is a more appropriate analogy. The late Easter Island civilization, only building giant statues, as if calling for help across the empty sea.  Ultimately “help” came from across the sea, too late, and too genocidal.

Our empty statues we keep on vainly carving with all our resources, are the banks too big to flay. But they should be flayed, and left to rot. The present way in which money is created through leveraged debt, by secretive, unelected, insanely self interested individuals, the conniving bankers, just does not correspond to the highly open, highly democratic, highly scientific society we need, just to survive.

At this point, we are all turning into Easter Islanders. But our sea is even emptier, it is space itself, and we can only hope that no help is coming across that final frontier.

***

Patrice Ayme

Love Can Be An Authority

Abstract: The clown in chief gets all the tricolor flags out, parades in front of them celebrating himself, his blackness, while his debt reaches heavens. He just forgot to pay for it. He insists that “the USA is a AAA country, we all know this, make no mistake“. Meanwhile one of Obama’s killer toys causes sorrow, while strafing the natives on the other side of the planet, just because. All those events are causally related by the logic of the deliberately stupid.

The epic failure is global: even American left wing economist have bought the sycophantic line. The USA prefers oil & gas to… water itself, a choice which may leave the USA low and dry. Many American economists believe more of the same is the essence of the future, and they are wrong.

Well, there is no essence, but the Quantum, and it jumps around in unexpected way. Expect the unexpectable… But suspectable. With the Quantum, properly understood, the philosophy of suspicion has fused with the physics of probabilities.

***

***

 Great Triumph Of The Great Leader; He Made It To 50!

The leader celebrated his birthday in public, thousands in attendance, close to tears, there was singing. The great leader passed, discreetly waving, moved by the collective fervor, dozens of giant tricolor flags behind him, red, white… Adolf Hitler, of course.

And Barack Obama, de facto, August 4, 2011, apparently celebrating the passing of 100% GDP debt, and his abdication. Indeed the president had just renounced the pesky pretense of being master of his destiny, or leader of the USA. From now on, he would just watch, officially as a dozen Congress people would decide or apply automatic cuts, balanced between Medicare and whatever. When the “You guys” guy has run out of clichés, he is naked, and that’s what happens.

The two most important words in politics are: de facto. Out (of) fact. De facto, Obama is Tea Party. That he screams otherwise, despite the colossal evidence to the contrary, makes it even more so. De facto, Nixon was an extreme left winger, relatively speaking, by today’s lamentable standards.

***

Mr. Obama, Where Is Your Hoover Dam?

The worth of the debt of the USA has been the object of collective hallucination on the part of worldwide investors and the American public and government. American debt is worth very little. Why? Because the USA WILL DEFAULT. It’s only a matter of time. A lot of time, but a foreseeable time.

The U. S. Federal debt, and U.S. consumer debt was used for … consumption. Still is. Consumption consumes, by definition. As Christ said on his cross:”All is consumed“. Meaning he was finished. If Christ was American, he would have paid for his cross with crushing debt.

70% of the U.S. economy is consumption. One guesses that, just to have sustainability, one ought to balance consumption, that is, destruction, and construction. But it is not so. Obama could not build a bridge, let alone the equivalent of one of the many giant dams which republican president Hoover saw built during his tenure. (For example Obama could have built a High Speed Rail line… But he did not. Although the Eastern corridor was ripe for an upgrade.)

***

Hoover Did Public Works, FDR Made Even More, And Cleaned The Stables, BHO Did Nought:

The conflict between Hoover, an engineer by formation, and F.D. Roosevelt was extreme. FDR was a lawyer who had very high government responsibilities, such as Assistant Sec. of The Navy for seven years (but he was truly the man behind the Navy built-up, and especially the submarine force), and it was during World War One, when the German submarine force was terribly successful, for all too long, threatening to isolate Britain, and cut-off the USA from France. Then FDR was governor of New York state, and re-elected. A person of immense experience. His cousin Teddy, also another revolutionary U.S. president for this privileged family, stood-in as his father in law during his wedding (thus FDR was much closer to Teddy than is generally assumed, and was no doubt encouraged by his dashing mien).

Perfidiously, FDR ran against Hoover’s deficits. FDR wanted “immediate and drastic reductions of all public expenditures… abolishing useless commissions and offices, consolidating departments and bureaus, and eliminating extravagances”.

But FDR changed his tune, once elected: “I pledge you, I pledge myself to a New Deal for the American people… This is more than a political campaign. It is a call to arms.”

In a way FDR was the anti-Obama: he campaigned conservatively (except for the repeal of prohibition, which he called for), but reigned revolutionarily.

FDR realized an enormous government intervention in the economy, and the cleanup of the banking system. Hoover thought enough enormous state sponsored works were in the pipeline. As events showed, FDR was right, and Hoover was wrong. Obama would have accused Hoover to be a far left wing liberal, and he would have found no words harsh enough for FDR. 

FDR shut down the banking system on day one of his presidency. What did Obama do that day? He celebrated himself. On day one, Obama celebrated Benito Mussolini style, chin sky high in front of the multitude, as if visited by Zeus himself. It’s funny, this chin thing the great leaders have. The elevated chin detracts from the rest.

***

FDR As Anti-Plutocrat:

The world has sunk in depression. Says FDR: “Primarily this is because rulers of the exchange of mankind’s goods have failed through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and have abdicated. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men. True they have tried, but their efforts have been cast in the pattern of an outworn tradition. Faced by failure of credit they have proposed only the lending of more money. Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence….The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.“

Who speaks this way nowadays, among the dwarves who are supposed to lead? (OK, they only lead with more fund raising from their plutocratic owners.) This present situation is in part explained by the vast de-politization, decerebration of much of the populations of the leading Western countries (especially in the USA: FDR got support from a vast tradition of recrimination, protests and large unions, both of which have pretty much disappeared from decades of propaganda to make most people stupid enough to be led by the nose by the masters).

One may notice that “Faced by failure of credit they have proposed only the lending of more money”, is the main line of the USA and the EU. Greece was lent hundreds of billions… to pay the interest on her debt to private banks. But of course the banks, or more exactly the managements of these banks are co-responsible, and should take a cut. And if they need too much help from the People, the People should take possession of them (= nationalization). Instead of giving the crooked bankers money for nothing, so they can keep on with their “false leadership“, as FDR put it.

However, debt is complicated; interest payment of the U.S. debt was 451 billion in 2008. It is projected to be only 411 billion in 2011. Yes, the debt augmented considerably, but the payments went down. Because, as the economy tanked, interest rates went down.

As I have long argued, now is the time to borrow maximally to create jobs. The failed banks which should have been nationalized should now spearhead this effort.

In: http//krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/06/the-arithmetic-of-near-term-deficits-and-debt/, Krugman points out that borrowing trillions would cost nought. Now.

But of course it ought to be to create intelligent jobs, highest value jobs. In other words, create jobs for those who will rebel, adopt FDR’s ideas, and throw down the plutocrats. So the plutocrats are not keen: they say no to the infrastructure bank.

The unemployment is a political choice, not an accident. A choice of Obama and his sponsors. Obama has chosen his class. It’s the class of Bush, the class which views most people as crumbs. Anything else is a big lie.

***

Quoting The Devil Approvingly:

Xinhua, the official newswire agency, wrote an editorial:  “The days when the debt-ridden Uncle Sam could leisurely squander unlimited overseas borrowing appeared to be numbered… mounting debts and ridiculous political wrestling in Washington have damaged America’s image abroad…. All Americans, both beltway politicians and those on Main Street, have to do some serious soul-searching to bring their country back from a potential financial abyss.”

The editorial recommended “substantial cuts” to “bloated social welfare costs” and a “gigantic military expenditure.” This echoed China’s top general, Chen Bingde, who told a press conference last month that as America deals with “difficulties in its economy … it would be a better thing if the United States did not spend so much money on the military.” He said so while standing next to Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Earlier in the week the Beijing-based Dagong Global Credit Rating Co. dropped its rating of the United States from A+ to A with a negative outlook: “the defects in the (U.S.) political structure exposed in the bipartisan struggle indicate that the U.S. government has difficulty in ultimately resolving the sovereign debt crisis.“

Friday Standard & Poor followed Dagong, with the same terms. Xinhua noted approvingly that this “proved what its Chinese counterpart has done is nothing but telling the global investors the ugly truth.“

Well all this boils down to child in chief Obama having not faced reality: he had total control, and, while the deficit exploded, he did nothing. No new taxes, for Obama, and knocking off many pre-existing taxes. Moreover, Obama invested in nothing. Oops, I forgot that big investment, the biggest of them all, Afghanistan.

Nowadays, investing a trillion into the real economy would cost nothing in GDP (because interests have collapsed, as Krugman explains).

One has to understand that, without investments, debt becomes unserviceable. One GROWS out of debt. The Russian debt to France was paid back, only because Russia grew out of it, 90 years later. Yes, 90. The American Federal debt of WWII was never paid back, really, but grown out of.

Debt and investment are separated by fools only.

Since Obama gets orders from banks, he cannot order them to invest in the real economy, that would contravene his orders. So he wants to create an infrastructure bank, a way to compromise, so he hopes audaciously. But Geithner, the creature of Wall Street, does not want to do so. Indeed, an infrastructure bank would make Wall Street lose its tight grip on the U.S. economy…. And thus on U.S. society (thus exposing Wall Street plotters and thieves to prosecution).

Indeed, Wall Street controls his boy Geithner; with them, the world is his oyster. And so on. Around it goes. A few dogs chasing money around in the wind, their mission in life. Applying social values more noble than mere monetary profit to themselves totally escapes this crowd of plotters.

***

The Violent Truth; A Drunk Is Under The Bridge:

The USA has not been taking care of itself. It’s like the old, sick, depressed, confused, overweight smelly drunk lying in urine for too long below a bridge. Nobody took care of the bridge, either, and now that work of art is falling apart, threatening to crush the drunkard. Who will dare to do something? Why should that scene be worth anything? That is the scene of American debt.

The president just showed he was a child who abdicated all responsibility, abdicating, as he did, in favor of Congress, where “supercommittees” are going to be created to decide of all what’s important. Including, supposedly, defense. By the way both the French and British parliaments approved the Libyan war. At least the semblance of representative democracy are been kept. There. In the USA, Congress did not vote on Libya.

What’s next? A super dictatorship? A bipartisan dictatorship? President plays golf, looking real cool, the child cannot do his job, so supercommittees of the bipartisan party rule?

Anybody travelling the USA can observe that the country is decrepit, and increasingly so. Out there in the boondocks, much of what people live in was built at the earliest, 50 years ago. But it was not built with good timber, as in the Middle Ages, or good stone, as in Renaissance Europe. Instead much was built in plywood, a mix of wood pulp and glue. It is now falling apart, and mold pervades it. Let alone the fire hazard.

Obama called a “stimulus” to rush money so that fire departments would not be closed, all over the USA. But even in Silicon Valley, the richest part, at least one police department closed, and a fire department of a major city of the valley of silicon soon will.

Meanwhile Afghans object to the invasion force in their midst. They are arming themselves. 38 imperial troopers went down when their chopper was shot down on takeoff. A few hours later, two French legionaires got killed, and five wounded, in a good old fashion assault against Taliban fortifications. A colonial war, without the colonization. Brute force, for nothing, just the heck of it.

Concludes the valorous soldiers war chief child Obama: “Their death is a reminder of the extraordinary sacrifice made by the men and women of our military and their families. We will draw inspiration from their lives, and continue the work of securing our country and standing up for the values that they embodied ”

Which kind of lives are those? Going to the other side of the earth, fighting to death, for the Islamist drug lords in Kabul?

Standing up for which values? Fighting for the Islamist Constitution of Afghanistan? And how does spending a trillion dollar a year on “defense” (in the Hindu Kusch, killing the natives) will help defend the USA? Bin laden was recruited and trained by the CIA (and its Saudi subsidiary).  So if one wants to go bomb and kill the origins of bin Laden, no needs not to go all the way to the other side of the Earth. The 9/11 commandos were trained in Germany and the USA, so why not to go attack that instead?

Standing up for which values? Everything indicates that the topmost values of the leaders of the USA are corruption, collusion,  connivance and confusion, in this order.

***

Debt For Nothing (Continuing):

One thing is clear: the USA ought to change from a fiscal and judicial context favorable to consumption, to one favorable to investment. Getting in debt for consumption is very different from getting in debt for investment. That is why I am bullish on Europe. And those who are bearish on Europe are wrong: The euro is just a bait. Sure it was good to eat, it was meant to be. There is a hook inside that delicious euro, a federal hook, and it’s starting to hurt. Pain does not prove that there will be no gain.

Even Greece has some recent infrastructure to show you (subway!) than the USA, and more of it. The only serious bridge (re)built in the USA right now the Oakland-San Francisco bay bridge. It has been made in China, for more than 20 years, an humiliation.

By comparison, a French private company built the world tallest bridge, the 3.5 mile long Viaduct de Millaut, in just three years. French, not Chinese engineering, employing French, not Chinese engineers! Economics without industry is only ruin of society.

***

The Empty Suit Is A Right Wing Cataclysm:

Under Obama the total federal deficit exploded. Under his watch, the Federal deficit went completely out of control.

It is a subtle thing, because much is hidden. Looked at it one way, the debt augmented 45% under Obama, in absolute value, from 10 trillion to 14.5 trillion (August 2011). The face value, official debt went from 80% of GDP (end of Bush II) to more than 100% of GDP. Soon we will be above 120% of GDP, the maximum, ever attained by the USA, during World War Two.

Of course, World War Two was a giant investment: the USA ended up owning the world, except China, the USSR (and Eastern Europe that Uncle Sam offered to Uncle Joe, with negotiating skills reminiscent of Obama).

However, many items are not counted in the 14.5 trillion. Some items pertaining to TARP (giving or lending money to the bankers who ruined the country; when it’s a gift, it’s counted in the deficit, when it’s lent, it’s not). Some pertaining to whatever. The total potential debt of the USA is more than 70 trillion dollars. And increasing fast.

Contrarily to what is said by the plutocratically sponsored politicians, debt is increasing fast, not because there were not enough cuts, but because there were too many cuts. What counts is not the value of debt, but the debt-valuable investment ratio. So I say.

Because the USA confuses economic activity with consuming consumption, that ratio stays bad, and the recent decisions, the recent abdication of Obama, guarantee that it will get way worse.

As the rating agency S & P pointed out, the politic positioning of the ill named “Republicans” makes it unlikely that taxes will be raised. Obama made the so called republicans’ beds, as he did nothing, when he could, and should have.

Differently from Italy, where the Italian government owes its debt to the Italian People, the USA owes its debt to foreigners, as Xinhua pointed out. Foreigners own approximately 50% of all the federal U.S. debt held by the public.

This means that, if foreigners feel that the USA cannot be trusted anymore, as a place of investment, the Federal government will suddenly be 20% short in the budget it has at its disposal. It could only compensate for that by making foreigners offers they cannot refuse. meaning very high interest rates (as happened with Greece).

***

The Empty Suit: Right Of The Tea Party?

That is the only question which is amusing enough. An article in the New York Times, “The Madman Theory“, points out that, Nixon was a “de facto liberal”. Although, at the times, he was evil personified as far as half of the USA was concerned, and most of the planet. Obama, in comparison, is, de facto, the most right wing president, ever. His mouth may be on the left, but his hands are on the extreme right.

We have known for a long time that Obama is way to the right of Nixon. I knew this on the day after his election as president: he went to work at a hedge fund in Chicago. That he does want to admit what it means makes it even more so. He is a bad negotiator, intentionally, beyond grotesque: he bears witness against himself.

Now Obama wants to make a billion, that’s Obama’s declared aim in life. Chin up! Higher! Mussolini is jealous! Further! The audacity of dope.

***

Anders Brievik’s Massacre In Norway:

I am for immigration. In a sense, I have been emigrating my entire life, I know how it feels when one does not belong. Sometimes it’s OK not to belong, and it helps the country one does not belong to spiritually, by opening to it new knowledge, enriching wisdom.

However, there is integration and integration, and integration ought not to be confused with disintegration. Examples abound, in history, where a civilization collapsed under a migratory flux. Immigration without integration at all is only disintegration of civilization, let alone explosion of edification.

Meaning? Norway brought 550,000 nationalized (OK, “naturalized”) immigrants in 15 years (that is more than 11% of the population). Out of that, officially, about half were extra-European Muslim (thus harder to integrate). That is way too much, way too fast. Dubai would not have naturalized one of them (OK, Dubai is racist, but also, prudent).

This crazed immigration does not explain the insane maniac’s convoluted thinking process. It just made it unavoidable. I was myself bombed by an extreme right wing French commando of Breivik like characters, long ago.

That is actually ironical: Breivik had serious deficiencies in his fascist, racist culture: there is an old, fascist, not to say racist current in France, which helped inspire even Hitler. Breivik wanted to change the “multiculturalist” regime in France (Sarko, multicultural, really?)

Breivik wanted to set up a nuclear device on the Eiffel Tower. It was completely silly, as the overall principle of France is integration, not multiculturalism. (The French principle of integration was weakened in the last few decades under withering criticism by the Americano-Northern European cultural multiculturalist opportunism, but that critique is now in full disarray, and retreat, so one suspects that French integrationism is going to return with a vengeance, as the Qaddafi clan can testify.)

Much of French ancestry can be traced to North Africa and the Middle East (Arab, Berbers, Jews), genetic tests show. (OK, and Italians descend from Iraqi agricultural immigrants, 7,000 years ago!)

Overall, a peculiar culture, now identified with the United Nations and Human Rights, a culture which one should call Paleolithic, triumphed. A paleolithic moral diet.

At least it triumphed ever since slavery was outlawed in 660 CE (forgetting about lamentable episodes such as most Crusades, “Saint” Louis the Cruel Butcher, the insane Religious wars, and the confused immoral Louis XIV). So, if Breivik was talking about culture, against and swallowing hard core Islam, France is where the successful imperialism is. The French like culture is triumphing worldwide, much more than any other cultural current, at this very moment, as the head of the UN go teach the Syrian dictator human rights.

***

Frack Me Up!

European bashing is a strange thing. American economists, even “left” wing economists (Krugman, Stiglitz, Johnson) do it a lot. It seems to me that the Europeans are trying harder than the Americans to get their house in better order. The USA was economically fortunate to have plenty of energy, for 150 years, at least. In places, as it still does in some parts of Iraq today, crude oil was gathering in lakes at the surface. Starting in Pennsylvania, the gods made the USA the world’s first producer of oil, for most of the age of oil. That was extended, after 1945, by a pact with Middle East feudal devils.

Now all American hopes are in fracking. Fracking consists in injecting one truck of pure acid underground, mixed with ten trucks of water, adding many agents meant to kill all life (in case it survived the acid!)

But how well will fracking work? In truth, nobody knows. But the entire USA has bet that it will work, that cheap energy will keep on coming. Top economists take this for granted. If it does not, the economical disaster will be enormous, because the USA expects to keep on going with an energetically inefficient economy. If fracking backfires (literally) the USA will roast.

How could fracking backfire? Well, the process of creating fractures underground is renewed many times in the same well. The deadly acidic mix is pushed down, then regurgitated, brought back up to the surface, and gas is extracted, until pressure drops, and a new deadly acidic mix is prepared, pushed down again.

As this cycle is repeated, fractures keep on propagating. Most of the well is horizontal (the drilling bit can be steered). A drawing shows that, after a while, fractures should reach up, and contaminate the water table. And that is where the economics fail, because water is much more precious than oil, or gas. One cannot drink oil, and one cannot breathe gas.

***

Desalination Requires Energy:

Desalination plants can bring water in: Barcelona built a massive plant quickly to lessen its imports of water from the French Hautes Alpes, 700 kilometers away. But Barcelona is on the sea. Huge European companies are selling desalination plants all around the world, and no doubt some progress will be done using renewable energy, such as solar, more than now.

However, desalination plants need clean sea water, and a lot of energy. Therein a vicious circle: if your energy destroys your water, you lose both water, and energy.

The main fact of economics: it’s all about energy management.

***

What Is The Essence Of Quantum Physics?

Quantum (De Broglie) hypothesis: Any natural phenomenon evolves according to a wave associated to it, which determines its existence. Its wavelength is inversely proportional to its momentum, and proportional to Planck constant.

The Quantum (De Broglie) hypothesis has various spectacular consequences, such as the penetration of forbidden regions, as waves do not stop on a dime (this is the tunnel effect).

The point is that the Quantum is all about waves, existence waves, no less. And those waves are globally determined by the geometry that can be reached (in the wavy sense of reaching, which entails penetration, as I just said, a phenomenon already known in classical electromagnetism).

When one starts to think in a Quantum way, a lot of the real world is illuminated anew.

***

Existence Is Quantum, Or Is Not:

So what to think of philosophers who talk about existence, time, nothingness, and know no Quantum Physics? Well, they have an excuse, if they were contemporaries of the birth of the Quantum. But their philosophies do not have that excuse, nowadays.

Now, if we want to think about the world, truly, we have to follow, and respect, the Quantum paradigm.

***

Does Authority Rest On Guns, Ultimately, Always?

To a great extent. However, there is something as proximal reason. The Nazis did not have as much guns as the German army. They resolved that by seducing the army. Actually, the Nazis were nearly all about seduction. OK, they killed 10,000 opponents in 1932. However, they told voters that they represented a new order, a new hope, and they were audacious, that was guaranteed. If Germans voters had known what the Nazis were really in the bed of the plutocracy (they claimed the opposite, the Nazis claimed they would submit the filthy rich), and that the Nazis truly planned another world war, German voters would not have voted for them in national and regional elections, and referendums.

Meanwhile the Nazis, and, in particular, Hitler, seduced the army chiefs. With the army wrapped around their little finger, they had big guns, indeed. But they got them through love.

The Germans were seduced with very big lies, quite a bit as Obama seduced those who wanted change in the USA, and all he did was more of the same, more plutocracy, more military-industrial complex, more debt for nothing, more loopholes for the hyper rich, and his hedge fund friends. Alright Obama talks against his billionaires and his hedge fund sponsors. So did Hitler, on an astronomical scale, and, truly, he did the opposite.

The louder Hitler was, the more suspicious one should have been. Hitler used to holler about his desire to protect peace and minorities. Such were his great themes. This has been forgotten now, so Hitler’s seduction of the masses is now mysterious.

All what was in the way of peace and minorities, Hitler screamed, was the Versailles Treaty (a colossal lie, generally repeated ad nauseam by pseudo intellectuals, to this day).

Lies, spring, eternal. The leopard does not have dots because they are pretty, but because they are confusing, and masks the true shape of the flesh eating monster. Voracity comes with camouflage.

One does not have to chose between love and guns. Love can bring control of the guns. Love can commandeer guns. Love too, is authority.

But authority without truth is, ultimately, only the ruin of power.

***

Patrice Ayme

Borrowing For Nothing. Twice.

PLUTOCRATS LOVE UNEMPLOYMENT.

Abstract: The government of the USA has borrowed enormously, when it was expensive to do so, to enslave its population, instead of raising taxes on the hyper rich, and tax corporations (many of the largest, instead, get more money from the government than they pay in taxes).

Obama was full leader of this apparent madness: as he was in total control of the USA, he spent his time pleading with the republicans that he was the adult in the room, and there was enough blame to go around, so he won’t play that blame game. Such circuitous logic in outer space, very cool, allowed him to do nothing, but ingratiating himself with the plutocracy, personally, while the pundits could claim it was all beyond them.  That apparent madness does make sense, underground.

Now, however, that the government of the USA can borrow for nothing, to create jobs, it refuses to do so. Both maddening ways of mishandling debt are fruits of the same logic, I claim, and it is all entirely natural, considering who truly lead the USA. Expanding massively on Krugman’s pondering, we explore that apparent contradiction psychoanalytically, and find how to make sense of it all.

***

***

When the government of the USA spends one dollar, it borrows 40 cents. We are going to think about what this means.

Professor Samuel Bowles of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico argued in July 2010 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that farming made no sense when it arose. Or, more precisely, makes no sense within the conventional “Better Mousetrap Theory“. That says that new technologies evolve, which are more efficient, and thus they are adopted for narrow, purely economic reasons. And that adoption modifies society in turn.

Instead, Bowles found that a much bigger picture is needed. I have advocated such a bigger picture for a very long time. Most drastically, purely philosophical changes can have direct predatory effects. This is found in several guises, in the rest of this essay. why to insist on predation? Well, predation primes evolution, as the one who has been eaten cannot evolve as a free agent anymore. Plutocracy often devours the very society, country, even the civilization, which has given birth to it. Rome and the Mayas are examples.

Textbooks tell us cultivation and herding came about because they allowed humans access to more abundant food. But an analysis from Bowles shows that they were much less efficient than the hunter-gatherer lifestyle they replaced in terms of producing food. I believe that Bowles may overstate his case a bit. However, early farmers ate less well, and there were more of them, and both of these are known facts, from direct archeological evidence (see Bowles’ abstract reproduced in the note below.)

Why then did humans make the switch to agriculture? More children and more war capability is the answer arrived at by Bowles. This supports one of the great philosophical themes of this blog. Namely there is more to economy, and to civilization, than what activates conventional economists.

In particular, the switch from the Greco-Romans to the Franks was, first a philosophical switch, from the enslaving, sexist, superstitious, obscurantist to less sexist, secular, free, in other words, frank, system. It also boosted military performance, just like the switch to agriculture. As the USA deviates from the philosophical principles of the Franks, it deviates back into obscurantism and plutocracy.

When the government of the USA spends one dollar, it borrows 40 cents.

Borrow 40 cents to do what? To be the imperial power of the world, the super power, with a total military plus “black operations” budget close to a trillion dollars, bases all around the world, and countless useless military programs (new aircraft carriers, F35, all known not to work before they even sail or fly, etc.) Plus several totally useless, counterproductive wars (and I am counting Libya as a useful war, and it’s mostly fought by France, seconded by Britain, anyway).

Useless wars? The wars are against, or between variants of Islam. So they are, in first order, theological debates. The only correct position for western democracies, looking in, is secularism. Instead, Obama has posed a mullah in chief, telling us some variants of Islam were not really Islam, and that is why he fights them, etc. Ridiculous.  

One true reason for the wars has been the support, by the West, to get oil, of feudal regimes resting on obsolete, fanatical Islam. When Obama says there is nothing wrong about (THAT) Islam, he feeds the pump. And the animosity. Nothing wrong with Wahhabism? Says the legitimately furious: “Let me show you!”

Counterproductive wars? By striking unlawfully populations by missiles fired from robots often operated by non military personnel, without a UN authorization, Obama has put the USA out of the law in several ways. That Bush started it is no excuse. Bush knew it was wrong, for the reasons I cited, so did not do it much. Now, of course, idiots have said it was highly productive. The same idiots, or the same sort of idiots used to say that the relationship with Bin Laden was highly productive. Then there was 9/11, and they forgot all the idiocies they had said before, and Obama told us the USA did not start it. Start what? The relationship with bin Laden? If Obama makes war in Yemen, said war should be made legally, officially.

Western democracies are not, or were not, and are not supposed to be, piratical regimes operating in the dark on a massive scale. If we have grudges, they should be legitimate, so they should stand in the light, for all to see, and our cause ought to be just, for all to see, and that is why and how we stand in the light… We cannot do this, because our cause is not just. Obama loves to do everything in the dark, not to say the black (since he prefers red), and that is fundamentally antidemocratic, as his campaign argued, following closely my various sites.

So this is what Obama and its USA do with its trillion dollars on war, spent annually: make enemies who have been treated really badly, and then lose wars. Indeed the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are total losses. All what comes out of it, is thousands of enraged, fanatical, aggrieved warriors, ready to visit many 9/11s on the West.  At first sight, it makes no sense. But that is because one is looking above the ground. Underground, where Pluto dwells, it makes sense. Therein another true reason for the military madness.

One can compare with France, which was able to fight and win an Ivory Coast war, after obtaining a UN mandate. (Well, in truth, France attacked first, and, because the cause was just, got the UN in, later; the USA cannot go to the UN about Yemen, because the USA’s cause in Yemen is not just!)

France operates on a military budget which is incredibly lean relative to that of the USA. However France engaged as leading actor in the two wars of 2011, in Ivory Coast, and Libya. France had been the leading actor in the war against Serbia in the 1990s (no, it was not Clinton! France was followed by Britain, under a UN mandate, and the USA intervened decisively, but years later). And was the only actor to finish the civil war in Rwanda (the USA just gave a logistical support to France). Of course France was the leading, sacrificial, actor against Hitler, and that is no coincidence. All these wars were, ultimately, big wins, and they helped France, as a nation. Not just her military-industrial complex. It extirpated fascism incompatible with French democracy. And that is why Britain often follows. It does not have to do with materialism obsessed imperialism, but  with the imperialism democracy needs to survive (examplified by the wars the Roman republic led in its heydays).

The difference between the French and American war spending right now, is that the French military is supposed to win wars, at this point, not just being a big pork barrel (France has been there, and done that, way back in the 1930s, leading to the astounding defeat of May 1940).

The American war in Afghanistan was never fought to be won, as letting bin Laden escape at Tora Bora proved. It was just fought to justify the American military expenses. The same holds for the ambivalent conspiracies subterraneously manipulated by American services in Pakistan. One cannot escape the conclusion that, when the USA paid for Pakistani nukes, under G. W. Bush, the aim was just to create a potential justification for more military spending by the USA.

When the government of the USA spends one dollar, it borrows 40 cents.

Borrow 40 cents from whom? Most of them, from the Chinese dictatorship. Those who don’t know history, nor economics, nor common sense, argue perpetually that this is an insurance policy, as China will never attack who it is owed money by. Right. 1 + 1 = 0. Too! This is literally right, in base two (not in the conventional numbering system, which is in base ten). Nearly all statements can be viewed as right, if one tweaks their context enough.

Right, just as China will never destroy American aircraft carriers, although, in its naivety, the Chinese army believes it can do so, with new special ballistic missiles. Who is naïve there? the Chinese military, or American pundits and lobbyists? With the future F35 defending American carriers, with its puny range, half of that of the existing French Rafale, and its minuscule payload (whereas the Rafale can take off with nearly three times its empty weight!), we can be sure that the Chinese do not feel too scared.

When the government of the USA spends one dollar, it borrows 40 cents.

Why? Because it makes the American population into serfs. As simple as that. This is exactly how serfdom arose. From debt. And this is the effect that the American oligarchy is looking for. Because it is inferior, and tries to prove to itself that it is not so, by piling up material goods, with bigger planes, bigger mansions, more islands and beaches, privately owned, more servants… And by piling up power and influence, like Murderoch, to forget the ugly hearts and feeble minds they are affected with.

In the Eight Century, the empire of the Franks, the Imperium Francorum, was the richest, but less defended, part of the world. So it was invaded, from the North (Vikings), from the East (Avars, a sort of Huns or Mongols), and from the South (Arab and Berber Islamist armies, foaming at the mouth, which had created, undefeated, the world’s largest empire, by the sword, in less than a generation, extending from India and China to the Atlantic).

The Franks not only resisted, but counterpunched. They freed Northern Spain from the Islamists, conquered Hungary, pushed civilization east of Berlin, rolled back the Muslim out of Rome and Italy, “Christianized” the heathens up north, etc.

So the Franks had huge military spending. They did not borrow from China, or other hostiles, to pay for it. Instead they nationalized hyper wealth, namely, their piggy bank, the Christian Church.

Then the Frankish military borrowed heavily from the peasants, and made them pay, in turn, for their services. A weird communist organization with lords on top came out of it all: the feudal system. It was highly effective to create military supremacy, as the Franks not only conquered England, Sicily, Cyprus, and crusading armies not only fought and conquered the Balts or reconquered Jerusalem, but the Spanish crusader army, which was supposed to finish Islam in North Africa and the Middle East, for good, got diverted, to the just discovered Americas, and conquered that. (The conquest of North America was stopped by emperor Charles V, on the ground that a holocaust had been committed.)

When the government of the USA spends one dollar, it borrows 40 cents.

Why can’t the government of the USA find the money elsewhere than China? Because American plutocracy, basically, wants to turn average Americans into serfs. That may sound counterintuitive. But it is not. (Moreover, it has a little plot plus conspiracy going with the Chinese dictators, although Immel, head of GE, right arm of his little boy Obama, has screamed stridently recently that it was not so: the louder they scream, the more obnoxious they are.)

The Very Serious People leading the USA are plutocrats and their obsequious servants (contemplate Geithner for obsequiousness). The plutocrats want to keep on flying private jets, live in mansions, etc. They want hordes of servants, and domestics. They want the ear, not to say the beck and call, of the White House.

Krugman attracts the attention (July 31, 2011) upon the fact that borrowing now comes for free, so, presumably, one could borrow massively, not to fund useless pursuits, such as the military-industrial complex all around the planet, but to give people jobs.

However the plutocratic party has insisted to cut spending, just when it should be maximized to put people to work. The true employment rate of the working age population in the USA is now less than what it is in France, the archetype welfare state vilified by Murderochs and other plutocrats. And this is a general effect relative to Europe, see the graph in Krugman’s “The End Of Eurosclerosis“. The USA looks better in employment, only when one puts the elderly and children to work in the statistics (putting children to work is against UN law, and only Iran, North Korea, and the USA think it’s a great idea).

Americans are heavily in debt: when the Greater Depression started, thehousehold debt was 100% of GDP. Now, in 2011, it’s 90%. In 1982, at the depth of the recession then, household debt was only 45%. So people need jobs to get out of this hold, and this hole. The goverment can force private industry, which sits on 2 trillion dollars of cash, to spend it, by ooffering jobs.

Example of legislation enforced economic activity: not just refurbishing schools, bridges, but, say, burying utilities by law, which would be quite useful in areas of the USA threatened by fires, quakes, tornadoes, storms and hurricanes… which is most of the USA. Let alone making housing efficient. The European Union has such laws, and they will make the Union ever richer.

So why don’t the plutocrats want Americans to work? What plutocrats don’t want is to share equally. That would defeat what they are all about, which is their personal splendor, made more prominent by comparing itself to misery. Putting everybody to work would spoil the fun, they want an unequal society. So they do what enhances their glory to themselves: deciding the fate of the world, their way. By doing their biding, Obama hopes to keep on being their aspiring boy, and share their fun, one of the dreams from his father, invited to their houses, eating their dinners, sleeping in their sheets (all of this against old Roman republican law).

Now that all the plutocrats have lined up in Washington in the last few days, reminding their domestic politicos who was the boss, no doubt things will advance their way some more.

What should American progressives do? Or, let’s say, what should those who don’t want to regress do?

Well first get rid of their Trojan Horse, and its black operators. The dark horse speaks one way, and acts the other. He bemoans the tax cuts, but he set them up. One cannot fight war in the front, when one is stabbed, in the back. Better to lose an election, and regroup. The best wars can start with the best defeats, as nothing can increase the motivation better.

So throw out Obama and his plutocratic groveling, to start afresh, with a better idea about what the correct attitude is. don’t worry, he will be alright: the masters know how to reward their operators, “pour encourager les autres“.

The correct attitude is not to grovel to the masters. The masters have proven that they were full of it, in 2008, for all to see, after a decade of decreasing real family median income (a point I have made, long ago, now captured in turn, by Krugman; I used that point to argue that we are in a GREATER DEPRESSION, and the plutocracy has caused it, with its increasing feudal, colonial regime, served by its little boy-servants).

Offering, as Obama did, apparently, to take the first bite out of Medicare and other social programs, vastly inferior, as they are, to what is found in the European Union, just so that the plutocrats can keep on flying in private jets, is within the realm of clear betrayal. How many stabs in the back do we need?

Obama and his predecessor and apparent mentor, G. W. Bush, borrowed for nothing. OK, I am unfair to Bush: he borrowed for covering drugs to seniors. It is Obama who has really nothing to show for it. Even Hoover started a whole bunch of massive employment projects, including several huge dams which have paid handsomely since. Obama, in a much graver economic situation than the Great Depression, has understood nothing. Why? Maybe he is too stupid and full of himself. But he also has no interest to understand anything deep, as it would compromise his literal sleeping with the hyper rich in the Silicon Valley for example (I was there, I saw it). To argue that Obama had a recession, so he could not put people to work is dysfunctionally stupid: so did Hoover, and Franklin Roosevelt. Those tow disagreed on the extent of public spending. Obama and his Tea Party believes cuts is what is needed. It is not because Obama claims that he is not in the Tea party that he is not it’s, de facto, leader. He is. Don’t read his lips, read his record.

Then what? Differently from Rome, which stood alone, the USA has plenty of competition. So some shrinkage of this whole circus is in the offing (not all nations have been captured by plutocracy, gagged and bound, hand and foot).

As agriculture and herding rose, another activity did, too: civilization, the art of living in cities (the first cities, found in present day Turkey, depended partly upon foraging). So did the plutocratic effect, because capital renders it possible (roll over, Marx, and don’t bother me).

I have argued that the plutocratic effect is a great danger to civilization. Nevertheless, it is not all that simple: indeed war societies do best when led by a well fed warrior class (well fed means taller, bigger, fiercer, better neurology). In other words, a plutocracy.

Highly successful long lived societies in Europe, India, Japan were led by ferocious plutocracies which towered, tall and fair, above the dark, small peasants, while protecting them, as shepherds protect the sheep they eat and fleece. The implicit argument the reigning American extreme right is making is, implicitly, that one. But it is wrong, in the present circumstances.

It is not just that more intelligent societies will, probably, predate on the more stupid ones. And that too much plutocracy promotes and is only compatible with the stupidity of the masses. It is also that the world environment is collapsing, and that making the American population more stupid, a crucial ingredient in the rise of the plutocracy, has contributed considerably to this collapse.

Many governments around the world are increasing spending on real investments, or have created conditions for such by private industry (a consortium of French private companies and banks announced July 30 the construction of a very high speed, 250 mph, train line towards Brittany, to cost 5 billion dollars). The American government is nearly the only one to act against the most basic logic, and to confuse the cancerous growth of Wall Street and its banks with something good. Hopefully, those dangerous delusions will be restrained to its little courtyard, looking forward.

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Patrice Ayme

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Note 1: The picture of being “stabbed in the back”, was suggested ironically by a British general to general Ludendorff, effective commander of the Prussian army in 1918. Ludendorff, a Nazi before Hitler himself, found that name, jumped on the concept, and the Nazis ran away with it, claiming  that the Versailles Treaty (not signed when the Brit made fun of Ludendorff) had stabbed them in the back.  This being said, as the tale of the Trojan Horse has it, it is entirely possible for a nation to be stabbed in the back. This is what Napoleon did to France, as he turned from defender to exploiter. Actually the declaration of war of a few Prussian generals, to the world, in 1914, stabbed Germany in the back (as it was highly unlikely that Germany could defeat France, Britain, and Russia).

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Note 2: Bowles speaking, 2010: Did foragers become farmers because cultivation of crops was simply a better way to make a living? If so, what is arguably the greatest ever revolution in human livelihoods is readily explained. To answer the question, I estimate the caloric returns per hour of labor devoted to foraging wild species and cultivating the cereals exploited by the first farmers, using data on foragers and land-abundant hand-tool farmers in the ethnographic and historical record, as well as archaeological evidence. A convincing answer must account not only for the work of foraging and cultivation but also for storage, processing, and other indirect labor, and for the costs associated with the delayed nature of agricultural production and the greater exposure to risk of those whose livelihoods depended on a few cultivars rather than a larger number of wild species. Notwithstanding the considerable uncertainty to which these estimates inevitably are subject, the evidence is inconsistent with the hypothesis that the productivity of the first farmers exceeded that of early Holocene foragers. Social and demographic aspects of farming, rather than its productivity, may have been essential to its emergence and spread. Prominent among these aspects may have been the contribution of farming to population growth and to military prowess, both promoting the spread of farming as a livelihood.

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.

***

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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).

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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…) 
***

Simulating Stimulus, Undervaluing Values

SIMULATING STIMULUS, SAVING SERFDOM, UNDERVALUING SKILLS.

***

OBAMA KEPT THE SERFS IN SERVITUDE:

How did the financial crisis start? By Americans having to pay more than ten trillion of mortgage debt. That was simply too much. Don’t forget that if you owe a million (say) to a bank with a 30 year mortgage, you end up paying about 3 times that.

So now we are 5 years after the crisis started. The Bush-Obama administration threw 3,700 billion dollars at the banks to save them from the crisis (said the TARP inspector, an independent government official, July 2010). The Obama administration in particular tried to preserve the value of the homes (as Obama says at every occasion).

Obama is a funny guy, very cool, that his job. The great terror of the banks was that all mortgage holders would default, and buy the house to the left. Say the house to the left was worth 30% of what it was worth before. The total sum of all mortgages in the USA would have been divided by 3. Big banks, instead of getting 600 billions annually, would get only 200 billions.

But Obama saved the value of the homes, that is the value of the mortgages, that is, the extent of the servitude to banks. 5 years after the crisis started, indeed, the total value of all home mortgages is still above ten trillion dollars. In other words, Obama did nothing, strictly nothing, to solve the housing crisis. It’s still here, just as big as it was before. But Obama kept the serfs in place, paying the same as they did before. His lenifying discourses have mesmerized Americans. Very cool, indeed.

***

SIMULATING STIMULUS WITH GAB:

As I have said many times in the past, as soon as February 2009, there was no Obama stimulus. Obama goes around saying just this, without understanding what he says: ‘I saved the states’. Saving is not stimulating.

I did the arithmetic, long ago. But then, I am not a lawyer (like Obama), or a failed journalist (like Axelrod), or a super, overnight multimillionaire banker (like Rahm Emanuel). I can add. Now finally Krugman did a graph (he has plenty of slave students to make them). Here it is:

BEA, CBO

As Krugman says in "Hey, Small Spender!": "Feel the surge!". The far right microscopic tilt up is Obama’s stimulus. And it is entirely due to spending on unemployment benefits and the like. It goes without saying that, if you removed the military spending (which has augmented enormously under the bipartisan president), you would get a sharp hook, DOWN.

***

NO ENGINEERING, BUT TALKING UP A STORM:

Obama is a lawyer who is viewed as black. So he showed up at Harvard, was bipartisan with the conservative Law Review, and was elected president of it, just as Ulysses elected to make the gift of a horse for Troy. I wonder if it was a black horse. Anyway, in three years, Obama was done. Three years is enough to sharpen the tongue in the skill of false beliefs giving hope to the naïve, unwary and good natured.

But, whereas it is easy to form a specialist of gab, it takes more than a decade to form an engineer, or some technology specialists. Therein the pitfall of the Wall Street directed economics: as engineers get yanked about, and finance replaces thinking, engineering skills get lost. They are hard to replace.

Some will say: so what? But GM (cost 60 billion dollars to taxpayers) will fail, because it needs as good automotive technology as there is anywhere, just to survive (in spite of American nationalism, I do not see too many Americans spending giant money on the unworkable Volt car). This is caused, in part, by world overproduction of cars, and a pretty open market… in combination with an attenuation, in the USA, or, at least upper management in the USA, of thinking excellence.

***

SUPER KILLER ROBOTS STIMULATE THE ENEMY:

Now, make no mistake, the USA is still a technological leader. thanks to a government program known as the military-industrial complex. American killer robots are by far the best in the world, thanks to the war in the Middle East.

So the war in the Middle East is Obama’s true and only stimulus. It is also the USA’s high tech and engineering insurance program. However, in the meantime, the school and university systems are giving signs of stress, and they underlay engineering supremacy. Why? Money is disappearing, as it is all sucked up by the military-pharmaceutical-financial-congressional complex, leaving crumbs for the crucial parts.

***

TOO MUCH IMBALANCE, NOT ENOUGH INTELLIGENCE:

Advanced skills can be lost. Henrich has it that not enough numbers will do it, and thus he explains the Tasmanian effect (science fiction writers and Krugman have jumped on this, concluding that millions of people are needed to colonize … Mars). I have an essay on this coming. My explanation is completely different, and argues that ideas are more important than numbers: many are the ants, few are the philosophers.

In recent decades, tendentious commentators, sociologists, ethnologists, and philosophers (many of the original ones being famous French philosophers) have painted European civilization under an erroneous light, describing it first as a place of imperialism, sucking the innocent world dry. In this those advocates of "multiculturalism" strangely followed the line invented by Herder and Rousseau. That line of thought which produced Hitler.

I am extremely multicultural myself, so multicultural that I need a valuation system to order all my multicultural ideas. This is what happens when Murid, Greek, European, American, mathematical, historical, scientific and countless other value system have to cohabit together in the same brain. Multiculturalism without multivaluationism is a chicken with a thousand heads.

By overdeveloping its military skills, the USA is dangerously losing more important skills. And thinking, foremost. Not to see, not to feel that plutocracy and democracy are incompatible is exhibit number one.

***

TOO MUCH MILITARY, NOT ENOUGH INTELLIGENCE:

Pushing technology as military technology is not necessarily best for society. This is probably a difference between Britain and France during the last 600 years. As a continental land power, France had to maintain a vast, expensive, high tech army. Britain could do most of the time with little, or no army.

So, for example, the ramshackle fleet of Elizabeth I, with a handful of expert navigators (Drake, etc.), using brazen, desperate methods, and a lot of luck, were able to stop the Grand Armada. But, if the irresistible Spanish army had crossed over, it would have quickly ended in Edinburgh. Spending little on army and fleet, relative to France, Britain was able to develop a less militarized society.

Meanwhile, each time the Spanish army was entering the Netherlands to submit the recalcitrant Dutch, there would be war with France. It’s really the French army which, after 70 years or so, finished that imperialistic fascism Philip II had started. Fine, but this establishment in perpetuity of the Dutch republic cost a lot.

Later, it was more of the same, in reverse; the heirless Spanish king offered his throne to the Bourbon, uniting in some sense France and Spain. This started the War Of The Spanish Succession, where all of Europe united against France and Spain. There, again, Britain, just as in the Middle Ages, per its position as an island, was able to bring in cheaply a lot of expensive troubles to France.

It sounds all very picturesque, but these wars created enormous destructions, deaths, and lasting impoverishments on French territory.

All of plutocratic Europe would unite again against France in 1792, to try to destroy the ("French") Human Rights Revolution. The invention of new explosives for the battle of Valmy allowed the French rabble to stop the Prussian army.

Meanwhile the "nation of shopkeepers" that the dictator Napoleon underestimated, was developing its civilian industrial economy frantically, leaving France in the dust. It is not that the French were backward relative to the Brit. To a great extent, it was the other way around. The breakthrough on steam power was made by a Frenchman working in England.

A century later, in 1769, a French military program tried to develop tanks (under the good king Louis XV!). They worked, but the military lost interest. In the following century another French military program financed the first planes (built by Ader, who also invented the word "avion", "aviation", etc.).

In WWI and WWII, Great Britain declared war immediately, but, having basically no army, France was left to fight alone fascist Germany twice her size, for all too long (hence the defeat of 1940).

It’s not that Britain was nasty and treacherous. It’s simply that the British empire was run with a big Navy (a necessary condition) and a shoestring budget. That cheapness allowed British industry to dominate. As the French were busy with giant military spending, the chemistry of dies was developing in England, soon stolen by the Germans, founding the powerful German chemical industry.

Military technology programs do not improve the efficiency of the overall economy. This is a major problem, at least for the USA as old energy systems are quickly becoming too expensive on the face of it, in indirect costs and pollution costs. Although there is no doubt that plenty of robotic technology will come out of the war effort, it is probable that other countries developing robots directly for the civilian sector will come ahead. A famous example is that a Frenchman, Bear de Rochas, developed the first gasoline internal combustion engine, but forgot to patent it (1862). Daimler and Benz became what they did, by using that loophole.

***

SERIOUS STIMULUS: SUPER FAST ATOMIC TRAINS:

I have argued that the USA ought to develop advanced nuclear technology. It can be made safe, very efficient, and such that proliferation problems would be resolved. But for all this to happen, American nuclear tech has to be at the forefront, which it is not right now. It even uses a primitive, and extremely wasteful, dangerous and polluting open cycle, the same as in the 1940s. France’s atomic energy runs completely on a closed cycle, generating much smaller waste (which could be burned in more advanced reactors).

Developing and leading in nuclear arts also a moral necessity, because efforts to prevent the rise of nuclear tech in other countries is bound to fail. All what the leading countries of the West can do (including Japan) is lead the process to a safe and effective nuclear world.

Fast forward now to electric trains.

The USA, alone in the world among the most developed, significant countries with high density population corridors, which is not developing high speed rail. China, by contrast, is developing it at break neck speed (it is alleged that China uses more or less stolen German tech, but the same can be said perhaps for Bombardier and Alstom).

First of all the fastest trains are really fast. The world record has been held by French electric trains since 1954 (except for a few months in 1988 when German trains became insolent). The speed record is now 574.9 km/h. This was obtained by a TGV with AGV motorization, on the TGV Est line, which is designed and homologated for 250 miles per hour.

Most of French electricity is nuclear, and most of the rest of renewable origin. Thus the French trains are actually nuclear trains. They create not even 3% of the CO2 other transport modes create.

The magnetic levitation (maglev) record, obtained only for a second or two on a short experimental track, is only 6 kilometers per hour higher. Maglevs are not suitable, because they cannot run on conventional tracks, their magnetic fields are dangerous, and their hyper light construction makes them extremely flammable and fragile (more than 2 dozen people got killed on an experimental German maglev). Moreover, they are much more costly to operate (due in part to their unforgiving concrete tracks; fast Franco-German trains use ballast, which is elastic). And they have no advantage whatsoever.

Air is very dense close to the ground, that is why planes fly high. At sea level, maximum speed by military jets is much less than the cruise speed of Concorde (the SR71 was also flying very high).

The factor limiting the French train record speed was aerodynamics. The Alstom engineers were surprised by this. Resonances and vibrations in rail and piloted pantograph can be mastered up to 660 km/h with present technology. The AGV has better aerodynamics, but has not been tested at maximum speed yet.

Many routes in the USA are French scale. Chicago-New York and Boston-Washington, or San Francisco-LA are similar to Paris-Marseilles. London-Marseilles will beat the plane once a more direct High Speed Line is built through Picardie. At 252 miles per hour, it takes only 10 hours to go from Los Angeles to New York, arguably faster and more convenient than taking the plane. Siemens’ Velaro has reached such speeds on the Madrid-Barcelona Very High Speed line in conventional operations with a conventional train. So none of this is science-fiction. And better French and German high speed train sets are coming.

Russia, the world’s largest country, has a vast program of equipment and technology transfers from Alstom (pendular trains) and Siemens (Velaro), for the next 20 years. Pendular trains can reached very high speeds (up to 200 mph) on conventional lines. They lean in turns.

Trains can be made very safe. TGVs will stop if they are ahead, or ignore signals. It’s a system similar to the metro, with no current between the train sets. Al Qaeda bombed a TGV, with lots of explosives, destroying a cab, but the rest of the train survived untouched. TGVs are made to stay upright, even if they leave the tracks (which has happened after some collisions with trucks). The energy is absorbed by the zigzags of the train out of tracks.

***

NO VISION, NO MEMORY, NO NOTHING:

The secretary of transportation said that Obama has a "vision" of high speed rail, and some lines at 110 mph are being financed (in Europe high speed is higher than that, and VHS is double that). And then there is the idea of putting high speed on slow freight lines, which is impossible (even 100mph lines .would cost a lot of money if built for freight).

Instead Obama should have spent lots of money on one true Very High Speed line, to demonstrate to all Americans how superior High Speed Train was. That is what Russia did on the Moscow-Saint Petersburg line, which is equipped with Velaro trains running at 155 mph (250kmh), covering the 400 miles in 3 hours.

Hoover had the Hoover dam (and many other large construction projects). What will the Obama administration be remembered for? For its health plan, to come on line in 2014, after the republicans have completely gutted it of any relevant meaning? For saving GM which will fail within 2 or 3 years? For the financial cover-up over the inability to put back in place the Banking Act of Roosevelt of 1933? For putting back in power the same exact people who destroyed the banking act, ten years ago? Will the Obama administration be remembered for having delayed the collapse of the insufferable enormity of the ensemble of all mortgages due? Will the Obama administration be remembered for its lack of reading on Afghanistan before deciding to move mountains there? Or for viewing Afghanistan as a proper stimulus for the USA? Will the Obama administration be remembered for having augmented enormously the already unsustainable military spending? Is this lack of anything positive to be remembered by related to the fact that only 42% of Americans think Obama is American born (August 2010)?

In any case, the Obama administration will not be remembered for having put the USA back on the rails.

Patrice Ayme

WHERE ANTI AMERICANISM COMES FROM?

 

DEBT TO THE LORD DOES NOT MAKE SERFS GRACIOUS. ESPECIALLY IF THE LORD SET THE FIRE.

Paul Krugman noticed that World War Two "left America with a big debt — bigger, relative to our resources, than we’re likely to face when the economic rescue is over. We dealt with it."

Why? Krugman does not say. He is simply happy to assert that "big defense spending during the war didn’t somehow make it easier to pay down debt after the war was over."

***

Krugman’s inner certainty made it somehow easier for me to show that, au contraire, defense spending during the war allowed the USA to purchase the world while it was on sale. No wonder the investment or, in other words, the debt of World War Two, was worth it.

The devil is in what was the debt for, and who it was supposed to be paid back to. That the US government paid US defense contractors with borrowed money it got from US taxpayers was a sort of symbolic calculus during WWII. Relative to these internal intricacies, the result of WWII, that the USA came into political and economic and financial possession of the entire planet, is such an enormous fact that everything else pales in insignificance.

The intricacies of the accounting of who should get most of the pie inside the USA is irrelevant. There was enough pie to give all American indigestion.

Whereas, when Britain had to borrow to the USA to buy US warships (one hundred destroyers early in the war, for example), and other military supplies and services, it was a transfer of sovereignty; the USA took control of part of the economic destiny of Britain. That later sort of debt, from one country to another, can be ruinous, and not just economically.

For example, what brought Argentina down during the twentieth century was not so much debt itself as the fact that it was owed to foreigners. When the foreigners got cold feet the peso collapsed, boosting interest rates even higher. To some extend this is happening to the USA now, because a lot of US debt is owed to foreigners, although this is still mitigated because the US dollar is still the world’s reserve currency ( but a wasting asset, to use military semantics).

Right now the USA is still hell bent on a policy of using much force to get energy from the Middle East, rather than using much more effort to modify its energy needs.

This policy creates another form of dependency on foreign powers, which is just as dangerous as debt owed to foreigners. The habit of gambling twice more to compensate for failed policies (for example invading Iraq, an ally, because one lost Iran, an ex-ally) makes this policy increasingly onerous and unstable.

Now Iraq’s Shiite, an independent part of Iran, come to think of it historically speaking, is ready to cut a deal with Iran, as soon as there will be fewer US troops around, so how much more the USA will have to get in debt for to try to prevent this ineluctable evolution?

Good debt and good taxes would mean, now, to set the country on a path to solve the energy crisis. The later the USA commits to this, the greater the pain. And this pain will probably not be restricted to the USA.

One can compare the contemporary Louis XV style approach of the USA (”Apres moi le deluge” -After me the flood) to the contemporary French approach, which is exactly the opposite: gasoline is three times more expensive in France, and France will be introducing a carbon tax in 2010. This heavy taxation makes the French economy more efficient, hence it got out of recession faster.

France has learned the history taught by an arrogant fool such as Louis XV, and has decided to do exactly what that idiotic monarch decided not to do: have foresight, and act on it.

French students are forced to study history at school for ten years: history is not an elective, and it is rammed into the minds of children as soon as they can read, and again, and again, as they become more intelligent. Thus, the approach to policy of Louis XV is well known to French students. Since this time a literal flood is coming, it’s even easier.

While Voltaire advised Louis XV not to die for a few acres of snow in Canada, Colonel Washington speculated for real estate in the Ohio valley, gun in hand, determined to extend his dominion. Since then Washington, the city, has been best at wasting the opposition and extending dominion. But it was against weak opposition, and with tremendously strong allies.

German forces late in 1918 were not what they were in August 1914, they were beaten. In 1944-45, the maximum of 64 American divisions engaged in Europe constituted a minority, even on the Western front. In the East, Stalin had 600 divisions (and 26.6 million dead). The French army was one million. When attacked by elite Nazi forces during the Battle of the Bulge, it was ordered to evacuate Alsace by Eisenhower. But the French army refused tor surrender one inch of ground . A frustrated Ike later cut off fuel and ammo to the French. Still, they got to Austria first. The British army was nearly three million.

The study of history shows that nothing replaces the correct policy, early on.

The tragedy of the USA is that its successful history is that of expansion and using force onto others, unabashedly, to maximize profit. This sounds arcane, but transpose this wisdom to the health care battle, and you have got Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel.

And the worst is that wisdom of profit violence worked, and could not have failed to work. Considering the initial conditions of the USA.

Now, all great empires were built by force, right. But, in the case of the USA, a single method to solve all problems was thus established, during the last four centuries, and it has become most of the history most Americans will ever know. Hubris became how the West was won. It worked. But now it’s failing, and most Americans do not have the eyes in their heads to see it is.

Europeans have learned though, that to draw such a lesson from history, that hubris is your friend, is a mistake, and a most common one. More humility, prudence, knowledge, appreciation and more foresight are to be preferred.

Not all taxes, and not all debt are bad. More crucial is what the taxes and investments are for. If they are for progress, they are good. If they are for bankers’ bonuses, they are bad.

***

Krugman, although going in a well deserved vacation, came back to the charge: he said that commenters objected that "didn’t the fact that the rest of the world was in ruins help?

Krugman does not think so; “Let me explain why [the] objection [is] off point… the war left our competitors in ruins? Well, yes it did — but it also left our markets in ruins. This goes back to stuff I wrote way back, about the fallacy of thinking about a country as if it were a company; basically, there’s no reason to believe that economic growth in the rest of the world necessarily makes us poorer."

Nor, would I perfidiously add, is there any reason to believe that economic growth in the rest of the world necessarily makes us richer.

***

Let me make an African observation: when the lion is weak, even dogs can eat it. The weakening, and then destruction of the lion is profitable, although it goes to the dogs.

Before going back to some carpet bombing of mine with facts of WWII, let me make a very refined observation that is little known and that any serious economic theory will have to take into account.

The Fourteenth century saw several (related) calamities in a few years, including famines, ecological collapse, severe climate cooling, the start of the 478 years "100 years" civil war between Paris and London, Normandy and Anjou, plus the "plague". Whatever the "plague" really was, it killed about half of Europe. People were left twice richer. Hence an economic boom. So much for the more, the merrier.

***

Contrarily to what Krugman implies, the ruinous aspects of the competitors’ markets was an enormous advantage for the USA, after WWII. European lions laid in ruins, while American dogs had full stomachs. No explanation really necessary.

The USA was left with huge profits, in part just as Goldman Sachs, having reduced its competition, thanks to the US government, is making larger profits than ever. Let me go into World War Two specifics.

Did the US markets disappear at the end of WWII? No. Just the opposite. One has to distinguish having a destitute patron, and having no patron. Actually, yesterday’s lord, if destitute, can be made into a dependent. WWII expanded US market enormously. Let me explain.

For example, when the French decided to build a nuclear power industry, they bought the technology from Westinghouse, a US company. Since they built many nuclear plants, it was a major deal, which transferred back a lot of wealth to the USA.

Let’s dig a bit deeper in that example. The French physicist (and Nobel prize winner) Irene Curie discovered the principle of the nuclear chain reaction (generally misattributed in "Germanic" countries to other people who contributed later). Patents on nuclear energy were deposited as early as 1937. When the Curies alerted the War Minister to the military application, making bombs, the patents were withdrawn, and a military program started. After adventures that put James Bond to shame, the program went on as the Manhattan project.

The economic point is this: the French were way ahead in nuclear energy. Still because of WWII, they were forced to buy massively US technology 30 years later. The same holds for jets. The first jets were Europeans, just as the first helicopters were French (so was the first plane).

The Germans were way ahead with jet aircraft: the swept wing Me 262 was 5 years ahead of US technology (even though the Americans could study captured Me 262s). Still, Germany became dependent upon American jets, for decades. It is only now that, thanks to EADS (including Airbus) and Arianespace that Germany has become independent again in aerospace. EADS is now the world’s largest aerospace-defense company (in sales).

Sweet for the first country to sink a battleship using a cruise missile, or to use rocket interceptors (Heinkel 163). By the way the fancy electronic in that drone which sank that big ship came as no surprise; (basically) German scientists invented the first transistors, as early as 1925 (the American "discovery" of the transistors was more than 20 years later and was proven, scholarly, and judicially, to be a copy of the German germanium transistors and their patents). Another German sweet vengeance was that 100 Nazi rocket engineers were working on Von Braun’s Apollo moon landings.

And so on. None of the huge transfers of American goods and technology would have happened, in the aftermath of WWII, but for WWII.

BTW, the captive markets that were the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, French and British empires, plus the Commonwealth, French Algeria, and enormous Franco-British protectorates over the entire Middle East, could basically leave the USA without markets. Pakistan would not have become a Muslim fundamentalist American puppet/client, if not for the collapse of the Raj. Actually, there would have been no Pakistan. A mighty Great Britain would have kept Gandhi’s Hindu nationalism under control, and thus the Muslim reaction.

After WWII, the USA acquired the entire planet as a market, except for the USSR. The patrons were desperately poor, but they were extended credit by Uncle Sam. Then they became dependent upon Uncle Sam, exactly, and in all ways, as serfs became dependent upon their Lord in the Middle Ages. This is where the "Anti-Americanism" Obama does not understand at all, comes from, deep down.

All of this was made possible by the crafty refusal of the Roosevelt administration to help the French republic as she set herself the mission of destroying Hitler.

Instead countless US plutocrats transferred technology and directly invested in Hitler’s Reich. in 1939, France found herself at war formally with Hitler and Stalin, both helped, managed and financed by many of Uncle Sam’s plutocrats. Often when I write this, the next thing which happens is that I get banned from"left" websites, who seem to all too often be all too friendly to plutocrats. Although the history I mention is all easy to prove (however, I know of no book putting it all together).

But, of course, many Internet commenters, in the USA, find culturally refined to object to “conspiracy theories”. Little do they know that most of history’s tragedies were the result of conspiracies.

On my sites, I studied in depth if that crime was committed with foresight or not, and its extent. Nuremberg established that some of the Nazis had conspired to make a war of aggression. They were hanged. My question is whether the conspiracy was much greater. And the answer is yes.

In any case, the "American Century" was made possible by WWII. The effect was to make the world the captive market of the USA, fed by US credit. As WWII fades away, so does the "American Century". Resistance is futile.

Patrice Ayme.