Syrian Red Line

Obama said that Assad using gas in Syria would be a red line. Then he muttered that he could not tell which shade of pink it was. However French laboratories  determined and French foreign minister Fabius, an ex-PM, declared officially, that chemical weapons were used in Syria by Assad. Many times. The neurotoxic agent is Sarin.

Time to go to war. War is the force that defines civilization.

Civilization Defended: Ypres

Why to make nerve agent a casus belli? First, chemicals are unfair weapons: one cannot surrender to a gas cloud. Second, militarized chemicals also allow mass killings, cheaply, and readily (in the Nazi extermination camps, most of assassinations happened using deadly gas made by IG Farben, a chemical cartel created by Wall Street in the 1920s).

France hates chemical weapons.

In World War First on 22 April 1915, the German Army released 168 tons of chlorine, north of the Belgian town of Ypres. It formed a gray-green cloud that drifted across a division of French from Martinique and Algeria. Some tried to flee. They got asphyxiated while running. Within ten minutes, more than 5,000 French troops were gazed to death. Yes, in minutes, five thousands dead: analogies with Auschwitz are invited.

Ypres After Fascist Prussian Attack WWI

That massacre left a 7,000 meter gap in the Allied frontline. However, the German infantry, wary of the gas, failed to exploit the breach as much as the criminals who ordered them around wanted them to.

Other Canadian and French troops were rushed in. The Germans reapplied gas. In spite of various counter-measures against the gas, the Canadians suffered 1,800 dead from the chlorine by 24th April.

(Canadians? Were where the “Americans”? They were at peace, and would take another two years to threaten fascist Germany with words: the closest adviser of USA president Wilson had proposed an alliance with Germany in 1914! Thus we can see that World War One happened, in part, because the USA played Germany against France and Britain. Same old, same old…)

The allies called the German usage of gas a war crime. International treaties outlawed the usage of chemicals in shells. The Germans argued disingenuously that the gas had been released from “canisters” not “shells”. Fascists are disingenuous, or they are not.

Because the element of surprise was passed, never again during the war was a gas attack so successful. The Allied Democracies, especially the Brits (up-wind in Flanders!) had to retaliate in kind: only gas could stop  those who used it. All together 100,000 soldiers died from gas, right away, and one million were handicapped for life (most dying in the following years).

France, Britain and Canada screamed loudly that the Prussian General staff was a gang of criminals.

Yet after the war, under pressure from the glandularly deprived, and soon stroke struck USA president Wilson, obvious German war criminals of the First World war, starting with the Kaiser and the four generals and two admirals who had plotted the war, as early as December 1912, were not prosecuted.

That Colonel House, Wilson’s grey eminence, had proposed an American-British-German world domination deal to the Kaiser, on May 1, 1914, obviously inflected American policy thereafter. In particular from 1919, all the way to 1942… don’t be surprised if this sort of history is not taught in pro-plutocratic Harvard.

The non-prosecution of gross war criminality in World War I opened the way to Auschwitz. In the first few weeks of the German invasion, Belgian and French civilians were made hostage to military death threats, and then summarily executed in retaliation (for whatever).

Clearly, the generals who ordered the usage of gas on April 22, 1915, ought to have been judged, condemned and executed. And if there were 500 “Prussian” colonels, and generals to be executed, that should have been done. Their successors would have been in turn, more enthusiastic at executing the Nazis in a timely manner.

Sometimes, civilization is all about executions.

(A dark Obama, his wings laden with smart bombs just passed by… This one has been told to man battlefields exclusively, if he is really as smart as he wants the rabble to believe he is.)

How did the Germans become the greatest, less excusable, mass criminals of the twentieth Century? By not being punished vigorously enough in a timely manner.

BASF chemist Fritz Haber, a Nobel Laureate, had developed the processes used to make ammonia. Haber came up with the idea of using chlorine gas as a weapon. After the war, Haber should have been caged like the wild and dangerous beast he was, and left there to eat dry bread and water for the next thirty years.

That would have emphasized Rabelais’ point, published in 1532 CE, that “Science without conscience is only ruin of the soul.” Instead, some people still harbor respect for Haber, that despicable degenerate, to this day. And please don’t tell me he is honorable because he made ammonia; somebody else would have.

Haber’s violation of international law and common human decency was one of the many moral compromises that foreshadowed greater horrors. As the world war Germany had deliberately started drained manpower from its chemical factories, Bayer Chief Executive Friedrich Carl Duisberg lobbied for a novel solution: importing forced labor from occupied Belgium.

In other words, all what came to be known as “Nazism” was taught to Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels and Goering’s generation by their forefathers. Their unpunished forefathers.

German fascism kept on going, through sheer mental inertia. It gazed more than ten million civilians in WWII.

The Germans, amusingly, were told never to do this again, and signed a very strong treaty about this, never using gas militarily. In 1944-1945, Adolf Hitler’s kingdom of the beasts was perforated by the invading armies of his enemies. Hitler, and the top Nazis knew they were going to die, and that their world of horror was being annihilated. They were total fanatics. Martha Goebbels, wife of ephemeral Reich Chancellor and propaganda chief Goebbels, would poison her six children (although some of her children tried to resist the monstrous author of their days).

Hitler disposed of dozens of thousands tons of stockpiled nerve agent, and the means to deliver them (hypersonic long range rockets and several types of jet bombers). Hitler used his V2 rockets to bomb London and Paris. He could have ordered to gas London and Paris. But Hitler had been gazed in 1918 (by the French). He knew the consequences would have been terrible: Germany would be gazed back, to start with. So the Nazis did not use gas. They did not even consider the usage of gas. On the battlefield.

A moderate mullah, Hassan Rouhani, was just elected president of Iran (on the first turn, by surprise). International sanctions on Iran have been so severe that Iranians chose someone who has always been keen to negotiate with the West (he had been fired from his nuclear negotiator role for being too keen that way).

The best way to encourage people to vote for moderates is by punishing firmly nasty people such as chemical Assad. The systematic use of chemicals cannot be left so unpunished that it keeps on being used. The mood of using gas, expecting to get away with it, could expand, spreading to other countries, in all sorts of ways.

There are of course many other reasons to go to war in Syria, some all the way back to 638 CE, when, after a four year war, characterized by the illness of the emperor, huge tactical blunders, and a lot of luck for the enemy, the Roman empire lost Syria… to fanatics. The best way to fight fanaticism is early on.  

The Western military intervention in Syria will have to support only secular, anti-tyrannical forces. Assad knows this. So he (and co-plotting Iran) released craftily religious fanatics (Al Nusra) to pollute his own opposition and give him a Western palatable excuse to kill it. Another complication is that there is a triangle of hatred, mutual support, and co-dependence between the Muslim Brotherhood (Egypt), the Saudi family (Arabia, oil), and Washington (Wall Street, Dollar, Plutocracy running amok). All these are invested in Syria.

Well, maybe it’s a good occasion to break the cycle. The USA’s oil production is becoming considerable, and the USA is not dependent of the Saudis anymore…

In any case, the usage of Sarin has made the situation clear and transparent. That, by itself, gives enough of a moral reason to go to war in Syria.

Don’t forget that the origin of the concept of morality is sustainability. A world were tyrants use weapons of mass destruction so that their wives can shop till they drop, is not sustainable.

***

Patrice Ayme

Strikes Against Civilization

Dramatis Personae: Obama, Tyranosopher, and assorted characters meet in hell to discuss Obama’s “Signature Strikes”, the bombing by killer robots, of crowds of unknown people, on the chance an enemy would die.

***

 Obama, face contorted by contradictory emotions, affects not to understand the strikes in Boston: “Why did young men who grew up and studied here, as part of our communities and our country, resort to such violence?… We will determine what happened. We will investigate any associations that these terrorists may have had.”

 Tyranosopher: The deepest association is with the breakdown of the spirit of the State of Law. In the West, now, as it happened 2,000 years ago, the spirit of republican law, equality, has broken down. Galla Placidia, made the “association” that counts.

Galla & Socrates: Absolute Power To Law Only

 Galla reigned as a Roman empress, for more than three times as long as you will be president, and in much more trying times. She was acutely aware that the notion of State of Law was the fundamental bedrock of the State, and wrote eloquently about it.

 She explained that it is the Law, not individuals, who should reign. Equal law. Thus the law should apply absolutely, even to the absolute sovereign. The embodiment of the enforcement of this is the International Criminal Court.

 Treat people unequal, they will treat you unequal.

 Brainy Salafist: Obama, you have shown us the way. Killing civilians, you know nothing about, calling assassination of the innocent fighting terrorism. Hiding perfidiously, but ineffectually, behind the CIA to commit acts of wars against Pakistan, as the sedate New York Times’ editorial board pointed out in April 2013. 

 While you, in your unfathomable stupidly, advertized worldwide that you approved every single strike, as if you were anxious to be the first ever Nobel Peace laureate prosecuted for war crimes.

 Obama: I am the leader of the Greatest Nation on Earth, under God. That makes me infallible. Plus we the leaders of the USA have been careful to refuse to recognize the International Criminal Court.

 Brainy Salafist: Thus you, Obama, are just a mafioso leveraging “A Secret Deal on Drones, Sealed in Blood“ (New York Times, April 2013 again). These “Signature Strikes” and “Crowd Killing” your National Security adviser and now CIA head, Brennan, obliquely confirmed their existence in front of the Senate. Many of your associates, Obama’s associates, have confirmed the existence of an association, the Assassination Panel at the White House. So we, the Salafists, imitate you, and kill people we know nothing about. Thanks for teaching us. We call it fighting terrorism too.

 Tyranosopher: Yes, an official assassination panel is something unparalleled in the history of all and any known states. Yet, after the Boston bombing you, Obama, declared that any bombing of civilians was an act of terror. But that’s what your “Signature Strikes” and “Crowd Killing” are all about. 

 Obama: I was shocked  when I became president, and I found out about “Signature Strikes” and “Crowd Killing”. But that’s the only game in town, and I am a team player. It works. We killed thousands of terrorists, using them.

 Tyranosopher: Try to pay attention to your own sick sport semantics. It’s not a game. Killing people does not make you player in a team. You were right to be shocked. Now you are shocking.

 Napoleon, Corsican dictator: “Even in war, moral power is to physical as three parts in one.” “Signature Strikes” bomb the USA’s moral power. The more you use them, the weaker you get. Your “Signature Strikes” are an anti-American strategy.

  Brainy Salafist: Obama you told us terror is the way. We want to be like you when we grow up. We want to do hundreds of “Signature Strikes“, on your territory, as you did, on ours, the House of Peace.

 Tyranosopher: Mr. President, I am afraid Salafists have been associating with the own past behavior of the USA, “Signature Strikes” its latest symbol. This is what a full enquiry would reveal.

 The notion of military-industrial complex was introduced by Eisenhower, as the greatest danger for the USA. At the height of the Cold War! Now we have something worse, the notion of enemy-industrial complex. It looks as if some in the government of the USA consider that to make sure of having enemies is the best way to have an industry.

 Obama: I did not start the violence in the Middle East.

 Tyranosopher: You sure did not. Arguably, from his own declarations, Muhammad started it, for the present period, in the sense that he revealed to his followers that the Persian-Babylonian-Zoroasthrian and Greco-Roman empires were exhausted, and could collapse if struck vigorously, hence allowing the Arabs to re-instigate the raiding they had been deprived of for more than a millennium.

 Young Salafist: Watch it, Tyranosopher, don’t you insult the Prophet! The Prophet is all I dream about, all the time, wet or not.

 Tyranosopher: You know very well, Young Salafist brimming with uncontrolled hormones, that this is what the fundamental Muslim texts say. Muhammad’s analysis was astute. The Greco-Roman and Persian empires were culprit each in their own way, of the tremendous war they made to each other, and they were on their knees. Muhammad’s hatred of the Jews grew from the Christians’ hatred of the Jews.

 By the way, if I want to insult long dead characters, I have the right to do so, according to my own religion.

 Young Salafist: You don’t have a religion, you believe in nothing, you insult everybody, even your friend Obama.

 Tyranosopher: Quite the opposite, I am helping everybody, by telling the truth. I believe in truth, and I believe in desperately searching for truth. That makes me a follower of the second most fundamental religion of man. And I subscribe to the first one, too, love.

 The truth is that Muhammad came from a prominent family in Mecca, but differently from the rest of them, was an analphabet. Somebody less charitable than me may think that had to do with his tough youth, and attending neurological problems he may have suffered from, PBUH! 

 Young Salafist: Spare me the sarcasm. Peace Be Upon Him, that man I dream about all the time.

 Tyranosopher: Are you gay? I find you rather sad. In any case, Muhammad gave too much of a military mien to Islam. But then, he had to, or Islam would not be on the map. After all, it’s the Roman military dictatorship, that decided to put Christianity, or, more exactly “Orthodox Catholicism”, on the map, and in command. They did so in a disastrous way. Later, the Franks found the right way: use the Church, to impose… progressive secularism.

 Obama: Can you guys come back to the subject at hand? Why such violence? Why couldn’t they all just play basket ball? That’s what I did, look where I am!

 Tyranosopher: Don’t worry the reservoir of potential Salafists inside the USA is a small fraction of that it is in a country such as France. One will hold them back with the idea of the republic, not by taking their rights away, even before judging them.

 You, Obama, could afford to not take your studies seriously. You were the missing link. Your life experience was, from the start, out of the ordinary. You lived in a mansion in Indonesia, with servants’ quarters. You went to the top private school in Hawai’i, Punahou. You also went to Harvard, same as your father, and, because your father had been there (“legacy admission“). Harvard is where the leaders are selected, and the spider web of worldwide leaders is set-up. Most recent USA presidents came from the Ivy League. Aka the Evil League.

 Even the guy who organized Pearl Harbor, the head of the imperial navy, admiral Yamamoto, went to Harvard. Speak of a guy who “studied here”! And let me exceptionally not mention the Nazis.

 It’s not about smarts, but about connections with wealth, as an owner, look at the Bushes, Kennedys, or… as a servant. For compliance, look at Bill Clinton, who did exactly what Goldman-Sachs told him to do, in a Faustian contract. Clinton went to Yale, still Ivy League.

 The contract made him swear. But he did what he was told to do, namely to deregulate finance in a way never seen before in the history of civilization. The total devolution of the public to the private. OK, something like that happened to the republic in Florence, when it turned into “The Prince”, plutocracy, basically a few private banks. (But then notice that Italy fell off civilization for several centuries.) So now here we are, neo-feudalism coalescing.

 Harvard plays into a form of violence. Its connection with various bloody dictators were left unpunished, even unpublished. In economics, many of its professors have published academic papers claiming that transferring more assets to rich people was what the Harvard doctors recommended (allusion to austerity propaganda from famous Harvard professors: Reinhart. Rogoff, Alesina, Ardagna).

 Under the guise of fair, balanced, learned, equal opportunity, extremely stealthy methods of vicious exploitation have been invented. They are different from those denounced in the past, in the period from 1648 (year of parliamentary revolutions in England and Paris, La Fondre) until Proudhon, Marx, etc.

 Obama: Once again Tyranosopher you are drifting through an immense historical landscape that seems to have nothing to do with the Jihadists in our midst.

 Tyranosopher: The most important connections are the ones that have not been made explicit yet, because they are deeper.

 As I was saying, the USA outsmarted the Western European powers, partly deliberately, partly by serendipity, in a sort of selection of the most effective behaviors, however devious. Devious support, by the USA, for the worst of Islam was crucial, in the rise of the present day Jihadism.

 Young Jihadist: See, Obama, you are devious, even though you don’t know about it.

 Tyranosopher: A preferred devious method, has been the traditional one of dividing to conquer. To enact these divisions, support was given to extremely violent enemies of “American” values. Including various fascists, in particular the Soviets, the Nazis, and violently regressive Islamists. Those enemies of the USA turned out to be its best tools. 

 Such fascist embodiments are unsustainable, making them valuable. The mess they create leads to divisions, hence easy pickings. Since 1945, contrarily to the cautious policies of Britain and France, Roosevelt’s USA threw its mighty support to Salafists, starting with the Saudis. (For comparison, the Brits annihilated the fiercest Wahhabist army, not even two decades prior; most of the 9/11 highjackers were Saudis.)

 CIA support was given to Khomeini’s followers, in 1953, and still later to Pakistani Fundamentalists, then to bin Laden (and the SIA), etc.. Thus we see it was more than a plot. It was a plotted strategy, that unfolded over 60 years (the support of Bush II for various Muslim extremists in Iraq was a continuation of that strategy: let the museums and archeological sites be looted, help the fanatics, bury the secularists).

 This strategy is coming to an end for diverse reasons. Terror by drones the way practiced presently by the Obama administration tries to extend it, but it is not sustainable. However, it’s causing, long term, tremendous civilizational damage. The West is losing credibility.

 Obama: “Civilizational damage”? What kind of weird notion is this?

 Tyranosopher: Civilizational standards are not just what make a civilization worth defending. They constitute a fundamental military asset, as Nap said. Civilizational standards are how the Athenians won at Marathon, or Salamis against the immense might of the giant Persian empire. On the verso, uncowed Sparta vanished from history, because its civilization was racist and plutocratic, something that leads to unrecoverable stupidity, among other problems.

 The drone program may have killed only a few thousand people, but the bombing of civilization itself it wrought is unequalled. (Although it may still be reverted at this point, should one be contrite enough about it.)

 Faisal Shahzad, USA citizen of Pakistani origin: “I entered a 2010 guilty plea, to try to set off a car bomb in Times Square, and I justify targeting civilians by telling the judge, ‘When the drones hit, they don’t see children’.

 Obama: I am the leader of the Greatest Nation on Earth, under God. I say this all the time. Pay attention. I am not your average terrorist.

 Tyranosopher: You call the ones you killed, terrorists. Just like in Vietnam. However, the law says that people are innocent, until proven to be terrorists. So you do not respect the most fundamental pre-condition to law, namely that punishment never precedes conviction.

 We know for example that a 16 year old USA born citizen was killed on a beach in a USA drone attack (apparently with a number of other teens), in one of the “Signature Strikes”.  Such an assassination, in the name of civilization, is the signature of a failed civilization. For such a crime, in old republican Rome, you would have been executed the “old fashion way“. (The one Roman president Nero was condemned to by the Senate.)

 Where are the excuses for that, killing boys having fun on a beach? Where is the enquiry? Or do you, Obama, president of the USA, consider, justify and order, killing teens on beaches on the other side of the planet? Explain to me why this is not much worse than the worse pedophilia?

 Obama: As I always say, I am the leader of the Greatest Nation on Earth, under God. I am not a terrorist, by definition, but the very definition of respectability. Fear me.

 Young Salafist: If we killed you, Obama, you, and your followers would not be as respected. However we will not kill you, because you are our best agent. We kill for the Greatest Religion on Earth, in the name of the one and only God. We are not stuck in one nation, our house is the House of the rising Sun, the House Of Peace, the Ummah. My universal God is better than your national god. Watch me and other martyrs die for it.

  Obama: You can’t kill me, I am invincible. Wherever I go, there is an army protecting me. Same for my family. Taxpayers will support me and my family forever, making me forever invincible. As they did with other great USA leaders.

 Tyranosopher: Our Salafist friend here is correct, Greatest Religion beats “Greatest Nation”.  Mr. President, you are too fond of calling the USA “the greatest notion of Earth”. This does not serve the country well. Not at all.

 Obama, laughing: Nation, not notion. Keep your words cogent.

 Tyranosopher: Calling the USA “the greatest nation on Earth” is not just a ridiculous notion. It is also extremely dangerous. There is a plethora of examples in history about the extreme lethality of nationalistic hubris. Athens went down that road to hell.

 Obama: I will remember you for the next drone kill list. See who is lethal.

 Tyranosopher: You feel lethal, as a child, but supreme thoughts kill better. All you are doing, is messing up civilization. Killing crowds, just because some enemies may be there, is the end of any pretense to civilized behavior. Flaunting it, is an attitude that aggravates the practice. 

 The USA is not the first democracy proclaiming, urbi et orbi, that it had a right to kill innocent civilians. It never ended well. it’s a philosophical red line. When a civilization crosses it, it dies. Such a murderous hubris was the proximal cause of Athens’ downfall.

 “Signature strikes” the killing of civilians associated by mere physical proximity, is as low a notion as humanity ever got. You do not even pretend to hate them, or that you want to eat them.

 In the hierarchy of anti-civilizational values, “Signature Strikes” are lower than torture, because torture comes from giving some value to the person one tortures. One values the knowledge that person may have, or one appreciates the pain one inflicts to them, or one values theirmind enough to break it.

 Signature strikes are lower than hate crimes. Signature strikes are lower than even cannibalism. Signature strikes are all about smitting people utterly, as if they were insects.

 Signature strikes makes the president of the USA in a devil Picasso, signing horror with pride of office. It’s beyond terrorism. It enrages people worldwide so much, it does not even bring terror. It only brings horror for the absence of values you embody. It deserves a new name, horrorism. 

 American historian of the racist type: Tyranosopher, I would hate to call you naïve. Yet, face the facts: in WWII, we imprisoned citizens of the USA of second and third generation, if they had some Japanese ancestors. It was brutal. But the reputation of the USA as a brutal power serves the USA well. If, centuries ago, the European colons in North America had not killed nearly all the Natives, the USA would be like Bolivia or Peru. Look even at Mexico: by 1600CE, there were basically only a million natives left. Too many. Now Mexico is like half Indian.

 Tyranosopher: I am not naïve, just the opposite, you are. What worked before, to establish an empire, against naïve Neolithic Natives, can have the exact opposite effect, trying to grab resources from the rest of the world. each “Signature Strike” may kill one hater of the West, and create ten thousands. Better get your anti-missiles working well against Pakistani ICBMs…

 Herodotus, Greek historian: A more general problem is that, by deciding who, among citizens of the USA, would live or die, at your own whim, Obama, you have made yourself, symbollically and practically, into what the Greeks called a tyrannos, a tyrant. As I said of the Athenians under tyranny: …”they let themselves be beaten, since they worked for a master…” To establish new wisdom as Tyranosopher does, one has to be unique. But when a politician reigns as one, that’s a tyrant.

  Obama: Signatures strikes are effective. They show the power of the USA. Not only we can do it physically, but we have the moral strength to do it.

  Tyranosopher: Tyrannies are always short term effective. You do not know what “moral” means. It means: “sustainable”. A traditional war, although with supersonic bombers, drones and smart bombs, as the French republic does in Mali, is indefinitively sustainable, fair and square. But the French fight warriors, on the battlefield. They are not killing crowds of unknown people, not fighting anybody. That earns them respect, even from their enemies.

  Whereas Carthage, long a top civilization, was undone by its immoral morality, killing innocent children. You are making the USA into a modern Carthage.

  Obama: Carthage was defeated by Roman armies, not morals.

  Tyranosopher: Conventional wisdom, the seduction of the superficial, that’s what you want to overcome. Instruct yourself, young man, lest you came to be known as Obabad. The Greeks called barbararians ba-ba, because they thought like children. You add badness to the mix. Obabad.

 The planned annihilation of Carthage in a Third Punic war, was hotly debated in the Roman Senate. Many, including the imperator put in command of the destroying army, were fully aware that Rome was crossing a philosophical red line. That transgression could, and even would, bring Rome’s destruction. This was said explicitly at the time (source: Polybius). The tough-as-diamond Roman imperator cried, as he saw the great metropolis burn under the extermination assault of his crack legions. he knew Rome was sealing her fate.

  Yet, it was foreordained. The fact that Carthage had sacrificed children to the fire made the difference, in the minds of the Roman senators and the military. It was the excuse that allowed to forget the real reason for wanting the annihilation of Carthage.

  You, Obama, sacrifice children to the fire, including the occasional, highly symbolic American child. Killing other people’s children, on the other side of the earth, does not make it any less so.

  Don’t deny.

  If you insist to deny that you are flaunting child killing as a new bedrock for civilization, then make full light about who, among your drone people, decided to kill that 16 year old American born boy, and how. And if it was a honest mistake, so to speak, let’s confront it. Only then can you talk to history with an honest face.

***

Patrice Ayme

Lincoln, CO2, Oblabla, etc.

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

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

No Dark Side, No Humanity. A Paradox.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Obama Unchained?

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

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

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

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

Crushing Infamy Wisdom Makes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

Obama As Lesser Devil

LET’S BE ZEHR KLAR: I DID NOT VOTE ROMNEY.

In 2010, a black lady, an accountant, in a town hall meeting, declared she voted for Obama, but now regretted it, as nothing much had changed. Obama, on automatic, flashed his standard mile wide smile, before realizing, too late, that his beaming attitude was not appropriate to the serious mien of his interlocutor.

Telegenic does not a genius make. Obama’s tenure was abysmal, compared to what should have been. Obama was awed by current of thoughts that were pretty much bipartisan, long established, revering Reagan, plutocracy. The buttler approved of them.

Serious People Fleece Together
Smile & The Sheep Shall Follow

(Un)democratic and (Un)republican controlled congresses both signed on all these policies for years. And therefore the deficit! What did Obama start? Obamacare aka Romneycare?

The auto rescue (good), rescue of the banks (good), just as the sinking of homeowners, rescue of the banksters, Patriot Act, drone strikes on civilians, tax cuts for the rich (all very bad): all started under G. W. Bush.

The question of love is a vast subject. Obama’s sycophants, feigning love, did not help him, nor did they help the polis. I do not see myself as unloving, nor do I see myself as angry. However, I think passion is important to generate creative thinking. Broadcasting abstract creative thinking, when not connected to profit, is intrinsically mass loving, because only to the masses it is addressed, and only love is present as the gift that keeps on giving.

Obama needed a greater aura he could trust to counter-balance the errant oligarchies, but, differently from Pericles, had apparently none. Thus Obama presided over the wreck that fakes intellect.

I met an American in Paris. “My compatriots are such fools,” she grumbled, “they say France is a 2.5 world country. They do not realize everything was invented here, even most of the laser.” Me: “You mean Alfred Kastler discovered Optical Pumping at the same Normale Superieure lab where, 50 years later, Haroche discovered how to see light with atoms, earning him the 2012 Physics Nobel Prize?” “Yes, that’s what I mean. without optical pumping, there would be no laser.” Me:”But Kastler got a Nobel prize all to himself.” The American PhD in Paris:“Yes, well, occasionally those infeodated Swedes in Stockholm have to recognize the truth.” 

Me: “Is not the French social system too expensive?” Connie shrugged:“Well, France buys nearly all its energy outside. The oil from the Middle East, the gas from Russia. Even the uranium comes from Africa. The rare earths are bought all over the planet, France has nearly none. The USA is fortunate owning such a rich continent that it could out-Saudi Arabia, Saudi Arabia itself, as the right wingers have been arguing.

Plus the French president told, at the Elysee palace on Monday, the CEO of Google that Google had an outstanding tax bill of more than a billion euros. Americans have to understand they cannot go around the planet like vultures around the savannah, picking the bones of their victims clean.”

So much with the big argument that Obama is a dangerous socialist who wants to turn the USA into France. The USA uses lasers all over because Alfred Kastler in Paris found how to make optical pumping. Americans may have invented mother and apple pie, but even the laser they use on Mars is made in France (by the French defense giant Thales).

Haroche succeeded to see light with atoms, a proposition so insane that no firm would ever support it (be it only because it’s not ready for showtime in the economy). Several Physics Nobel Prizes at the University of Colorado, Boulder, for  the good and simple reason it’s associated with NCAR (National Center Atmospheric Research) where Federal funding for farfetched ideas is steady (the Connie above worked at NCAR on sun physics).

CERN, Kastler and Haroche were not financed by private plutocratic friendly universities, but by state institutions. I know lots of Nobels are attributed to American universities, in a feat of lucrative self glorification. But the judgment of history is clear: the deepest basic research tends to be state funded (something Obama somewhat violated because he got confused between medicine men trying to make a buck (Solyandra, Musk, A123, Fisker, etc.) and fundamental science… and thinking.)

Another, and very important, example are the giant governmental budgets for archeology in France. They allow us to know the ways and means of the past, hence ourselves, today (in turn they entice the rest of the planet to research archeology too).

What of the reproach Obama is a socialist? Misspelling: he is rather a socialite, the best friends banksters could have had. If Romney had been president, giving, as Obama, $8,000 billion to the banksters so they could pursue more of the same conspiracies, the democrats would have been in the streets, and Romney would have had to arrest banksters. But, with the Obama put, banksters were protected.

All economies are socialist, and they have been in the last five millennia since the West’s representative democracy exist (I’m thinking of Sumer). More or less. Why did the Papuans not develop civilization, whereas the West did? Because the West was full of socialism, whereas the Papuans concentrated on human meat recipes, however delicious, not enough a socialistic end. [See note Egypt versus cannibalism.]

What to do with the elections in the USA? I already voted, and it was NOT for Romney. The big argument in favor of Obama is that he represents the devil we know.

The Obama we have now makes us believe that he is less in love with banks and Wall Street. That is partly corroborated by Wall Street, which was the main contributor to Obama’s campaign in 2008. Apparently Wall Street is now heavily supporting Romney.

In most states, there are other candidates than Obama and Romney, such as Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate. The establishment, to celebrate her candidacy, arrested her several times in the last few weeks.

Evil is the label attached to the mental system that allows to override love, the human mental default state. Due to changing martial, social and environmental circumstances, all we need is NOT love always. Sometimes, evil deed is all you need, nothing else will do.

Obama could say:”I told you so! Did I not read this all over your sites? Practice evil, do what’s necessary. I love it.”

Well, no, Barry-Barack, your problem, precisely, is that you mostly did easy war, with CIA robots in Eurasian mountains, or in a senseless Afghan built-up. You, Obama, as president, did not do the hard war against mad, terrorist finance. Instead, when the banksters were on their knees, you practiced bankster worship, as your cultish association with carnivorous Wolf (UBS) and daemon Dimon (JP Morgan) amply demonstrated. And when you finally reluctantly paid lip service against mad finance, hiding behind, of all things, the financial criminal Buffet, who you personally adulate, mad finance dropped you like the sloppy butler you revealed yourself to be.

Michelle Obama:”I am confused. Patrice, are you in?” Me:”Ask not, Michelle, whether we are in or out, but whether your mind is plugged in, or not.”

***

People such as me are advocates of civilization, that is, the state that makes it possible. The state of the state is both problem, and solution. Nothing else compares.

When Obama set-up his lamentably small stimulus, he forgot, or did not know, rule number one: if it is not big enough, it may well have no effect. Rule number two is that one should have an effect that can be used as a symbol.

Say as the Hoover dam. As I asked:”Tell me Mr. big time socialist (as alleged by republicans) president, where is your Hoover dam? Obama should have concentrated on making one (North East corridor) or two (California) High Speed train line(s) work. Another symbol would have been to equip the financial damnation capital, New York City, with sea gates. Even London, another financial pirates’ den, has sea gates. And London is not threatened by hurricanes.

New York was lucky this time: it did not take a direct hit from a force five hurricane, with sustained 300 km/h winds and a fifty foot storm surge rushing in at 20 km/h. But it is sure to happen, in the fullness of time, considering the CO2 built-up. So Obabla could talk about this, and not just look smart, but be smart. Of these sort of intelligent forward thinking does the survival of civilization depend. Big time government thinking. Not just hanging around the small bore sharks in Silicon Valley, who confuse technology they did not invent with civilization they cannot stand.

Obama did not do anything much when he became president, because he was a house divided between what he knew he had to say, and his self interest, his “navigation”. Romney would certainly not fall in that hypnotic self glorification. Romney would do a lot, change everything in a few weeks. Thus, he may make a much better president. Or then Paul Ryan, his ideological VP candidate could be unleashed, and full regression yowards the jungle applied. We don’t know. 

Some have called my acerbic sounding critique of Obama “nihilistic”, and have even compared me to PM Chamberlain (supposedly too nice with Hitler, as I am supposedly to Romney). Three points about that:

1) I am not nihilistic. Quite the opposite. Obama has a high nihilistic index relative to me.

2) Chamberlain was not the worst PM of the 1930s, far from it. He was from the other side of the pro-Nazi divide (after the UK got rid of those who were too clearly pro-Nazi in 1936). In his argument with Chruschill about the Air Force, Chamberlain was right about developping the new planes versus mass producing the old ones, as Churchill wanted. Simply, at Munich in 1938, the UK was strictly unable to go to war… having no Air Force, and no Army, among other problems. Churchill was rather pro-Nazi in the 1920s, BTW….

3) What is needed in USA politics is normal people getting in it, not through elections (that’s close to hopeless, see prop 37 in California), but through everyday awareness and protest. As long as USA politics is the exclusive province of a few thousands professionals instead of 200 million citizens, the march towards plutocracy will proceed…

With Obama in power, one may always dream that the left would finally wake up, and help him with a spine. Probably we would just get Romney light. That’s more survivable than Ryan strong. Outside of swing states, I would recommend the Green Party. Greens, worldwide, have often had a positive influence when they start to look threatening to the established order.

There is also a more general problem in the Obama versus Romney choice. Let’s rise above the individuals involved. ever since Reagan, the motto has been that:”The government is not the solution, the government is the problem.” This is a very erroneous notion. So bad, that Reagan himself did not believe in it.

However, the slogan was removed from its context, namely the caveat that Reagan did not exclusively believe in it, and the slogan took a life of its own. A new generation was brought up, and learned to believe in that slogan as if it were the gospel (Obama, and certainly Ryan belong to that naive crowd).

The truth is pretty much the opposite.

To many deep problems in society, only the government can bring a solution. Civilization cannot exist without government.

An article in Slate argues the obvious: socialist Europe is better for families than plutocratic USA.

This, let it be said in passing, has been my argument, since ever, against Price Purchase Parity: PPP takes the price of hamburgers into account, as if child care did not matter. (Or does the heartlessness of the conventional PPP mean that children should be turned into hamburgers, or are not any better than hamburgers, or are best represented as hamburgers?)

Some could say:”Government should not do child care.” Answer:”The government always did child care.” Indeed, in prehistoric groups, there was child care. Even wild dogs packs have child care. A fortiori humans. So the healthy adult parents forage, and the rest of prehistoric society took care of the children. Civilization had to reproduce that prehistoric set-up, because that is who we are, as we evolved under these circumstances, those of child care.

It’s not just child care. Running through the Lyon train station in Paris, my sick American spouse who had flown the preceding day from California was given antibiotics by the pharmacist. (OK, not given: a ten day course cost nine dollars.) The antibiotics did wonders. The same scene is unimaginable in the USA (one would have had to make an appointment with a doctor first, and the doctor would have been indoctrinated with the notion that only fowl, sheep, cattle and pigs should get antibiotics) .

I argued above that a more socialist system does wonder for deeper thinking, even in, say, physics.

Let alone mathematics, philosophy, sociology.

Hence by supporting Obama one supports the idea of the state that has been vehemently criticized by plutocrats and their obsequious servants, and attributed, by them, to him.

Romney is not a bad person, and could have been a much better president than many of the recent ones (including the dissembling Clinton). However, the election has also turned into an implicit referendum on ideas of the Tea Party, and some of those ideas are very bad.

The truth is often quite the opposite of what the partiers having tea hold. Namely, in truth:

No government, no civilization. No socialism, no civilization. It is not the state that is a problem, but the state of the state. And to the gravest problems, only the state can bring a solution.

Ironically, Obama, who did so little progressive, when he did not apply full reverse, with the extravagant powers conferred to him by an obsolete constitution, has been transformed into the vainglorious knight symbolizing civilization.

***

Patrice Ayme

“Obama” Lost Already?

GIVING CHANGE WITH NO CHANGE GOES ONLY THAT FAR?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Financials Make 40% Of Corporate Profits

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is Obama a double agent?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

We are in the worst crisis, ever.

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dream and hope never dies…

***

Patrice Ayme

Ideas For Democrats

So here we are. Romney has a plan, in five points. Obama says Romney’s plan is just one point: the rich should play with different rules. But what’s Obama’s plan? What is Obama’s point? Nothing. Except more of the same. And the same does not work.

The democrats have zero new ideas. After he was elected president, Obama spent two years on his knees, begging republicans to change tone. Apparently he was elected president to beg for love: Obama did not need republicans, in the first few months, as he enjoyed a supermajority. [See note.] Did he want to do nothing more than Bush, in the hope he would be rewarded, like Clinton (or Major, or Blair, or Sarkozy)? Giving six figure speeches to the powers that be.

I long pointed out that the economy is worse than in the 1930s, in some dimensions. Not too many celebrities point that out on the left: their power & wealth depend upon the present corrupt intellectual scheme.  I want to meditate this graph:

French & German Private Companies Research & Development.

A consequence is this graph:

German Industrial Production Is Higher Than Ever. Because Research and Development in German private companies is higher than ever.

Why to brandish France and Germany in the context of the election in the USA? The European Union is an excellent place to test policies. What we see above is that Germany did something right, and France the exact same thing, wrong. With dramatic consequences (jobs are disappearing by the thousands in France every day it seems). Something resembling what’s done in Germany is basically the only solution for the West. And that’s real progressivism.

Germany is doing great economically. Germany has an unemployment rate of 5.5% although she accepted no less than one million new Eurozone residents, who came to work, in the last year alone. A spectacular way to solve the… German problem… Now something more about a dying birthrate.

Many leaders, political, academic or intellectual, on the left are more corrupt than on the right, because their minds are twisted. They are not what they seem. They are the opposite of what they claim. Those pseudo leftists are plutocrats, or next to plutocrats, or serving plutocrats… while claiming to serve the People. At least the Koch brothers, when they do their machinations, are really trying to influence public opinion the way one expects them to.

Whereas plutocrats such as (chief of the democrats in Congress) Nancy Pelosi (personal worth perhaps as great as Romney, about 200 million dollars), or (Senior Senator) Dianne Feinstein (personal worth up to twice Romney) claim to care about the plebs… Which is fine. However their historical record is that they did nothing when they controlled Congress, except for extending Bush’s tax cuts, Bush’s wars, and an ObamaCare who looks (to me) more like BuffetCare than anything else (Buffet is a notorious investor in HMOs and the like). So they are not what they seem.

Many of the critiques Romney has been making, I have been making over the years, to wit:

1) the lowering of the median family income by more than $4,300 (roughly 10%, in constant dollars). This is actually (one of) the main argument I historically made to qualify the present slump as the “Greater Depression”. (There are other arguments, now reinforcing, such as the decrease of life expectancy.) 

2) that health care costs are out of control. Romney said they increased by more than $2,000 under Obama, and independent evaluators have forecast a proximal augmentation of the average family health insurance bill by as much as ObamaCare kicks in fully by 2014.

To put health care under control the only way is to make the basic plan public (as this takes the profit motive out of the cost of rendering care to the otherwise moribund). OK, Obama could push for that later.

3) the lack of jobs. Romney say he will get tougher with China, for currency manipulation (Obama already did this quite a bit), and Intellectual Property theft. IP theft is the big one. The West has been like a baby while the Chinese Communist Party and its plutocratic agents have been stealing IP right and left to the West.

The democrats have no plan, but Romney came up with one: take out all the deductions, beyond $25,000 total, do not tax capital gains below $200,000. And of course, reduce taxes all across the board, except, overall, for the top 5%.

How come the democrats do not have a plan? OK, tax the rich mandatorily 30%. That’s their would be plan. Good luck forcing Pelosi and Feinstein to pay 30% tax. The average Congress person and senator is a high multimilionaire, I do not see them taxing themselves. Moreover, taxes do not mean jobs, as Constantinople demonstrated for a millennium.

The same critique can be made to, say, the French Socialists. There the proposed tax is 75%. But entrepreneurs in France revolted, and used exactly the same argument as Romney: small companies create jobs, a lot of the pseudo millionaires actually re-invest massively in their companies, creating employment. A really progressive agenda has to take this into account. Bitten by critique that way, the French Socialists accepted that Romney/Silicon Valley argument, and operated a strategic retreat. And now they are sitting on their haunches, thinking harder and deeper… (Notice that the Socialists are in total control of France: Presidency, Senate, Parliament, most large cities and regions; what they have is an intellectual, not political problem.)

This argument, that multi-millionaire entrepreneurs create jobs, is correct, and close to the heart of Germany’s economic success. I would argue that small entrepreneurs should be taxed ZERO on the portion of the money they make that they reinvest in R&D.

German entrepreneur-owners in the Mittlestand (Middle Stand) re-invest massively in their companies. OK, they are tough with their employees, but is it better to have a sadistic boss rather than having no income whatsoever? OK, it depends how sadistic, it’s all about 50 Shades Of Grey (Feldgrau in this case…).

Thus it would be good for USA democrats and French Socialists to have a system similar to that Angela Merkel presides over. The Mittelstand invests massively in research and development.

In 2011, Germany obtained three times more patents than France (which has 83% of the population of Germany). Here are the numbers from 2008:

Rank	Country	No. of Patents Granted
1	Japan	239,338
2	United States	146,871
3	South Korea	79,652
4	Germany	53,752
5	China	48,814
6	France	25,535
7	Russia	22,870
8	Italy	12,789
9	United Kingdom	12,162
10	Switzerland	11,291
11	Netherlands	11,103
12	Canada	8,188
13	Sweden	7,453
14	Finland	4,675
15	Australia	4,386
16	Spain	3,636
17	Belgium	2,948
18	Israel	2,665
19	Denmark	2,347
20	Austria	2,306

The classification is very different for patents in force, and for applications. Comparing all, it seems some countries, presently in economic difficulty are seeing their patent position decay quickly. Digging a bit deeper, one can see that research and development led by private companies has exploded in Germany, while it has decayed in France.

The bottom line is this: people in the developing world earn at most 5% of what they would earn, with the same job, in the developed countries. Reciprocally this means that most employees, in developed countries, are paid twenty, and often thirty times too much, or at least would be if the communications were free.

The way out is for developed countries to develop jobs that cannot be replaced at a distance. Except for low lives’ jobs, such as pushing carts around and shining shoes in airport, this means jobs depending upon knowledge most countries cannot endow their citizens with. Firms with a persistent R&D strategy outperform those with an irregular or no R&D investment.

European Countries With Higher R&D Do Much Better

So, to provide with employment, developed societies should be oriented towards research, to develop further. The target should not be 3%, but 10% of GDP. A good way to do this would be to make all research and development go tax free. $6.6 billion of research tax credit has been claimed recently in the USA, a very small fraction of the total R&D, so there is a lot of room to spur research using taxation!

It goes without saying that forcing the banks away from derivatives, and back into the real economy would help. One can easily argue that three quarter of world finance is actually a criminal organization. How? Simple: the world used to work with 8% of corporate profits in finance. Now it’s 40%. Those 32%, one third of world profits, can only be explained as parasitism of some sort.

So let the left talk about these things. That would be more constructive than the specious arguments Obama used in the debate to mark points with the silly ones [See note]. If Obama is elected without an effective plan, the situation is pretty sure to disintegrate further, and when things get too desperate, the fascist instinct always gets in gear.

***

Patrice Ayme

***

Note on Obama’s specious arguments: the 47%. And the Benghazi fiasco. Obama said he used the word “terror” the next day. But I thoroughly documented that the White House administration prepared declarations at the time accused those who “denigrated Islam”, not a deliberate Salafist attack by a commando (which is what really happened). Instead a video describing the Qur’an according to itself (!), and a French magazine with two silly drawings (one representing a Jew and a Muslim, and the other that I reproduced). I would actually suggest that Clinton sacrifice herself, and resign. Time to man up. After all, there was a massive Salafist base next door (since then destroyed by inhabitants of Benghazi in retaliation for the attack on the Consulate of the USA).

***

Note on supermajority: I sent a comment on the Krugman New York Times editorial (another freaky attack accusing Romney to have lied about what he did in next year). I pointed out Obama did nothing when he could have done everything. exceptionally, the NYT published it, jointly with a reply that I was deluded because Obama had a super majority of 60 in the Senate for only 14 weeks (as the rest of the time, the reply argued, poor Ted Kennedy was idiotically “housebound“, meaning Teddy, a specialist of swimming against the current, preferred to help the republicans by eating pancakes at home, rather than facing his destiny, and resigning).

That was doubly idiotic: first of all, the democrats controlled Congress for four years, during which, they did preciously nothing. Secondly, even if it’s all the fault of poor rich Teddy boy eating pancakes at home, 14 weeks is a long time. In less than 14 weeks, the French Socialist government has passed an enormous amount of legislation, including a European financial rescue mechanism, an FDIC for Europe (that required sorting things out with 26 other Congresses!), a 75% tax on income, a financial transaction tax, and the French Socialists passed countless other laws.

Face it guys: Obama hid behind Oblahblah, also known as George W. Bush III… And plutocrat Pelosi, his prophet.

So the New York Times published my comment which mentioned just in passing “supermajority”, joined with a reply already “approved” by 108 people (!) In other words, a lot of money is deployed to cheaply twist reality. How could have these people read by stuff, reply to it, and have 108 people read the reply, and approve it? All in one nanosecond?

USA & France Do NOT Respect Religion

UNHOLY ALLIANCE OF ISLAMISM WITH DARK HOUSE CLUELESS ON FREEDOM, The Essence Of The West:

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney reading a prepared statement: “We are aware that a French magazine published cartoons featuring a figure resembling the prophet Muhammad, and obviously we have questions about the judgment of publishing something like this… We know these images will be deeply offensive to many and have the potential to be inflammatory.”

Muha Bad, or Muha Mad? Neither! White House suggests ‘figure resembles prophet Muhammad’!

This is the cartoon that the (fanatically Islamist?) White House views as “deeply offensive“. What about deeply offending the USA Constitution and the Founding Fathers? [Caption translates as: The movie that inflames the Muslim World; then the "figure resembling the Prophet Muhammad" according to the White House, says: "And my buns, do you like my buns?".] 

“Deeply offensive to many“? Many what? Grand inquisitors? Salafists? Did the White House see the picture of the burned ambassador, not quite completely dead? They have been shown in France. Atrocious pictures. That’s what “deeply offensive” means, burning alive innocent people, good people.

***

“We are aware… we know… obviously…questions… judgment…figure resembling the prophet Muhammad…deeply offensive”. In any discourse, one can gather a lot by the context the key words describe. (Those knowing combinatorial topology will recognize keys words describe a simplicial complex the faces of which define higher concepts…)

The USA administration’s  hostility to the famous French magazine Charlie Hebdo follows the administration’s September 14 effort to persuade Google to take down a short, cheap satirical video on YouTube that also angered a few fanatical Islamists. Thank god, for once Google lived up to its slogan:”Don’t be evil!“

What basically the administration is doing is the following. Some Christian fundamentalists have killed doctors, because,  they said, they were offended by abortion. Suppose a cartoon came out, suggesting that the assassins are narcistic, and obsessed by whether they looked good. Would the White House have declared that such a cartoon was “deeply offensive to many and have the potential to be inflammatory“? So why the pandering to fanatic criminals? A few days after an American ambassador and three other employees of the State Department got assassinated?

The State Department has been incredibly incompetent: incapable of defending a “mission” against 70 guys armed with diesel fuel. The USA ambassador and another US citizen died in the fire. The attack was on 9/11. In a second attack, a bit later, some of the attackers were carrying weapons bigger than Obama himself. Two ex Navy seals got killed.

The video describing the major contents of the Qur’an, made by an Egyptian, had been out for 6 months. Accusing it was untenable. Still, that is what the White House did, following the discourse of Islamist fanatics. Who is better at determining what insults Islam than Islamist fanatics? Nobody in the world, proposes the White House! No doubt the majority of Muslims, who are deeply hostile to Islamist fanatics, will thus find a new reason to dislike the White House, and to suspect that it’s there mostly to add fuel (diesel or not) to the fire.

Did the administration read the Qur’an? What’s in that video that is not in the Qur’an? I read one and watched the other, and I fail to see in which sense the video is not deeply respctful of the Innocence of Muslims, as revealed by scripture.

By insisting that the attack was caused by “Innocence of Muslims“, the administration made a joint statement with Al Qaeda: trailer kills ambassador. Same thing about condemning Muhammad’s sketches; so doing, the White House is insisting that the Wahhabist interpretation of Islam is the correct one.

Finally the administration recognized the obvious. Yes, it was a terrorist attack. After all. Al Qaeda.

***

USA DOES NOT RESPECT RELIGION, SAY CONSTITUTION, FOUNDING FATHERS:  

Does the administration know the Constitution? Apparently not. The First Amendment to the United States Constitution starts with: “Congress shall make no law RESPECTING an establishment of religion…

In an astounding contrast, the White House orders us to respect sketches of naked guys worrying about whether their buns look good, because, well, some crazed fanatics, somewhere, have it that’s against their superstition. Not just against their superstion, but their heavens high indignation gives them the right to kill whoever has displeased them. And the present White House approves? Why should we abhor sketches of naked guys? Why should we obsess about naked guys?

Jefferson, Third President of the USA, wrote, “I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law RESPECTING an establishment of religion…thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.”

Calling the clowns in the white House “apes” (as the Qur’an does, speaking of Jews and Christians) would be too mild, because apes ape, and the White House boys can’t even do this.

In the Treaty Of Tripoli, worked on by all the Founding Fathers, and signed on by the first two presidents of the USA, George Washington, and John Adams we find this:

 As the Government of the United States of America is not, IN ANY SENSE, founded on the Christian religion,—as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of Mussulmen [Muslims],—and as the said States never entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mahometan [Muslim] nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from RELIGIOUS OPINIONS shall EVER produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.

“Not in any sense, no pretext ever from religious opinion“: get it, Obama? Learn. A corollary, obviously, is that the USA is not, in any sense, founded on the MUSLIM religion. So Muhammad’s buns, if any, are none of the USA’s official business.

Another corollary is that all the god stuff brandished since 1954 CE in the USA about Allah is unconstitutional. The present period will be viewed in history as the times when the presidents of the USA thought they were Caliphs!

On the whole planet, the total number of demonstrators against “Innocence of Muslims” and the French caricatures, so far, including government organized demonstrations in Sudan and Iran, is 150,000… out of 1.5 billion Muslims, that’s .1%. A tenth of one percent. Yet, when the White House, in the name of the American People, denounces free speech, as Carney did, that’s 310 million speaking, and a major democracy falling for the Dark Side of god.

The Administration insisted, initially that the lethal attack against the USA ambassador and other government officials, had everything to do with “Innocence of Muslims“. In other words, people  supposedly “denigrating” Islam caused the attack.

The White House and others kept on describing the trailer as “denigrating“, but they forgot to tell us why, and how, exactly. Wild accusations without explicit foundation are just devolutions of reason.

Here, watch me go explicit. The trailer was accused to represent Muhammad as a pedophile polygamist who got involved in combat with a bloody sword, and whose ideas came from a Christian monk, cousin to his wife. The trailer mostly follows impeccably the Qur’an and Hadith, as I explained in “Progress kills Killer Religions“.

Yes, Muhammad married a 6 year old girl. Yes he had many “wives” some from the battlefield, some Jewish, some from a irate subordinate. Yes, Muhammad was a raider of caravans, and led battles personally, resulting in the death of thousands. Including an entire Jewish tribe, annihilated. This is all in the sacred texts of Islam.

***

FRANCE’S UNCOMPROMISING STANCE ON ISLAM:

In 721 CE, the greatest army Islam ever had, invaded “Francia”. The Franks of the Dux of Aquitania retreated, setting a trap for the charging Islamist horde, which was annihilated. Two further invasions followed, with the same result, bold Muslim penetrations, followed by encirclement, entrapment and annihilation, hammered by Charles Martel, a Carolingian, grandfather of Charlemagne. Militarily decapitated, the Arab caliphate fell by 750 CE, and was never seen again (other Islamized nations became dominant, such as Iranian, Mongols and Turks)  

The White house kept on debasing itself. A somewhat haggard Clinton read a statement on Friday claiming the USA had nothing to do with the “Innocence of Muslims”. Meanwhile, in the center of civilization, Charlie Hebdo made another massive printing of its Muhammad cartoons. Disingenuously, USA media claimed the French government had condemned the cartoons “swiftly”. It was not ‘swift”, and it did not happen.(The New York Times just misrepresented what French foreign minister Fabius (a “Jew”) had said.)

Quite the opposite. Several days before Charlie Hebdo went on the attack, the French president, Hollande, inaugurating the magnificent museum of Islamic Arts in the Louvres, Paris, condemned religious fanaticism: “Les meilleures armes pour lutter contre le fanatisme qui se reclame de l’Islam se trouve dans l’Islam lui meme. Quand le patrimoine est saccage’, ceux sont toutes les civilisations qui sont attaquees…[ce qu'il faut condamner c'est] L’insondable betise qui rend chaque civilisation vulnerable. “

(Best weapons against the Islamist fanaticism are found in Islam itself. When patrimony is devastated, it’s all of civilization which is attacked… What one needs to condemn is the unfathomable stupidity that makes each civilization vulnerable )

The issue of Charlie Hebdo condemned by the White House had only 2 or 3 cartoons that could be religiously interpreted out of 30 or so in the issue. The weekly comments on the events of the week, it comes out on Wednesday. However, it proved so successful that it quickly ran out, and it was reprinted exceptionally for Friday, the day of the great prayer. So much for the French being terrorized by Muhammad’s buns.

The director of publishing at Charlie Hebdo pointed out that the great religions live out of the fear they inspire. Instead, most people publishing Charlie Hebdo  don’t want to live in fear, they want to live in fun and good humor, lightly. 

One thing the White House should pay more attention to is that to live lightly has to do with light and the enlightenment. Why should those who want to live in the light, by the light, and lightly, care about what master terrorists expert in the mania of crowds claim to worry idiotically about?

***

Patrice Ayme

“Greatest Nation On Earth”? Really?

YES WE CAN, MURDER WHOEVER WE WANT:

What Else? Not Much. 

The Higher The Assassin Climbs, The More It Shows Its Bottom.

***

[Those who spurn critical thinking can take the blue pill offered by Krugman, trying desperately to mumble vaguely positive about who history may abstract as the assassin in chief! Uncritical thinking: what mussels do.]

***

“We work harder and smarter than anyone else.” 

Thus boasted Obama at the democratic convention. If a politician in France proffered such a lie, voters would think he was not just deranged, but nationalistically crazed. What’s true instead? We are much less employed:

Employment Ratio Prime Age Population

If one had an ethical graph, it would crash through the floor. Obama stood on its head 25 centuries of Ius Belli (see below). Assassination without due process is the only category where Obama unquestionably surpassed G. W. Bush (Bush had implemented free drugs for seniors, effective immediately, so, in a sense, Bush beat up Obama at the health care game: Bush really did something major, and positive, while president).

The naive may object that the collapse of employment was not Obama’s making. But the opposite is pretty much true. Obama approved, with the republican presidential candidate, John McCain, in a showy way, the decisions of the Bush administration. Obama even left the main engineer in charge, tax avoiding New York Fed chief Tim Geithner. Geithner is still in place, having presided over a collapse of employment.

Plutocrats, starting in ancient Rome, have always loved unemployment, because it transforms the People into hungry pigeons who eat in their hands, humbly. Nothing makes Pluto happier that this daily humiliation.

Moreover Obama resurrected Larry Summers, and took him as economic guru, starting in August 2008. This is exactly when unemployment rolled over, big time. The obvious causal relationship is that, at the time Summers gave a presentation to Obama about the importance to save the criminals, the banksters, and re-establish their wealth. that, in turn, gave the Bush administration a green light to do just that. So, instead of playing FDR, that means, stimulator to the economy, Obama played stimulator to banks.

A the time Bush was lost, his dreams smouldering, and checked out (and not just out of Iraq). Geithner, Summers, and the Mc Cain advisers were all in agreement to save the banksters, and damn the real economy. So here we are. Worldwide.  

Instead what had to be done, ALL OVER, was what was done to save the car industry. Obama did it, but just for the car industry (I gave explicit recommendations on how to do it in other industries, so it was possible to do so, obviously… Trillions were spent on the banks, for the banks, by the taxpayers, order of Obabush.)

Mr. Summers was the architect of the sustainable crushing of the economy by an unregulated bubble of financial derivatives and activities, under money hungry resident Clinton. It made the economy red hot under Clinton, and after that, it imploded. For this, people are much grateful to Clinton.

People are mesmerized by Clinton, like birds by a mamba. Something about bird brains, that even mambas understand.

Verily, the much despised Greeks work 2,100 hours a year (that’s because Greece is the country with the most family owned businesses). Koreans work 2,200 hours, and USA citizens work “only” 1778 hours. At least 15 nations work more per hour than the USA… In the OECD alone.

These numbers are known by all serious people. So why is Obama seriously lying to the thunderously applauding multitude? Why is the pseudo left multitude applauding those serious lies? So that they can better forget that their great leader is busy reverting 25 centuries of civilization, replacing justice by assassinations, in the best tyrant style?

It is revealing to compare the French and USA presidential elections. Raw nationalism is very strong, all too strong, in the USA. Nationalism is even viewed as a moral duty, in the USA. In France, among other European countries, nationalism is viewed with intense suspicion, so one does NOT go shrill that way, there. In France, nationalism reeks of insufferable bad manners (except in the despised National Front, despised precisely because of its nationalist rhetoric). 

After all, when the Nazi tanks rolled in, the most important mental force in plain view was nationalism. Nationalism is the “Na” in Nazism.

So no wonder nationalism is not hot in Germany anymore, either. And that’s very gut.

Civilization is not made just of things one does, but also of things one does not do anymore. Lying about other countries is a very bad habit to have. Just as it is a rather bad habit not to reveal that the USA attacked the Republic of Afghanistan, with the help of its henchmen in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, more than 35 years ago. Attacking people, killing millions, for no good reasons, has consequences. In the fullness of time.

True, Rome killed and enslaved millions in Gaul; but there were good reasons, said Caesar, although the Senate stridently disagreed. The judgement of history, and of most of the Celts themselves, at the time, and even more afterwards, was that Caesar was right. So killing millions is not necessarily bad. (Anyway, conflicts cascaded in Celto-Germania, and Caesar did not start the war, the Helvetes did.)

Killing more than ten million Germans was the price to get rid of Nazism; there was an excellent reason. In Afghanistan, all the reasons of the USA, to sow religious war there in the 1970s, were terrible, anti-civilizational, and part of the price is the unravelling of the constitution of the American Anglo Republic into an unprincipled Principate.

The official story about how 9/11 came about, is an enormous lie. In truth, the USA attacked civilians on the other side of the Earth, and that was followed by a counter-attack, more than a quarter of a century later, after the primeval action of the USA led to the death of several millions in Afghanistan.

The truth is mean, but it is the truth. And even so called “god” cannot do anything about it.

“We are endowed by our creator… we are the greatest engine of growth and prosperity that the world has ever known…” We we we we… Is that a mutation of the self satisfied he he  he he of G. W. Bush?

We, we, we, we have a president who is personally acquainted with his “creator“. Was that creator UBS, or Wall Street? Those were the only creators in plain sight, for the objective observers (except for the millions of suckers like me, all the little tini tiny creators who helped decisively Obama come to power, last time, of course. But then he forgot us all, because we were not banksters!).

Speaking of that great other USA president, G. W. Bush, his CIA tortured those it captured for Qaddafi first. Hey, what are friends for? “We work harder and smarter than anyone else.” Indeed, some world records may have been shattered. Torture records and cover-ups records are piling up. For the whole world to contemplate.

Some victims were left dangling from manacles around their wrists and feet for four months straight (interview on French TV from a famous survivor captured in Asia by the CIA). This assuredly demonstrates that USA torturers can get lazy: leaving a guy to hang around for four months does not smack of hard work. Besides those CIA goons are not that smart, because they forgot to kill all those they tortured, so now they speak (at least to non USA media).

People will say: “Oh, that was Bush, that was before”. Right. Things have become much worse, as a policy of systematic assassination by robots is being conducted worldwide, even on USA citizens, even on some of those who are still children. People should meditate this carefully: do they want a world where a so called “commander in chief” selected by some tribe with 4% of mankind go around the world, assassinating people without judicial process?

The Roman Republic leaders, 25 centuries ago, found such a notion atrocious, repulsive, uncivilized. Some of Rome worse terrorist adversaries received a sort of legal process (for example, Jugurtha, Vercingetorix, Simon bar Giora and John of Giscala; the former three were judged and executed, the latter, condemned to life imprisonment). These events were, in order of people killed, relative to the population then, and the danger they represented to Rome, greater, by orders of magnitude, to relatively puny 9/11. Still the Romans kept their constitutional cool, they applied due process to the criminals.

Formidable adversaries such as Josephus, the top Jewish general in the (treacherous Judea war) in the end was adopted by emperor Vespasian, and inherited his mansion, in Rome.

And the Romans kept their constitution intact, whereas Obama considers he has right of life and death on anybody, worldwide, without a semblance of due process. Definitively a violation of Ius Belli and international law. Say the millennia.

The Romans knew that “Ius Belli“, the Law of War, killing the adversary philosophically, was more important than killing the adversary physically. Obama confuses looking cool as a chap, and cold blooded assassination. Worse: goose stepping behind, cheering and applauding Obama’s exhibitionist love for his family, a circus for little children, USA citizens are carefully arranging their forgetfullness about what the Romans knew, 25 centuries ago. Namely that it matters when one goes and kill people, that everybody understand why, and that the cause be just.

The main axis of France’s foreign policy, since May 8, 1945, has been to re-educate the Germans in the way of peace and love. Franco-German reconciliation has been number one top priority. This was not compatible with nationalism, and that is why France did not seize one square kilometer of German territory after the Nazi defeat.

I turned the TV on, to watch the democratic convention, and here were sexy girls speaking like they knew it all, telling the USA what to think. They were movie actresses, and the crowd just loved them. With a teleprompter, any mental retard who knows how to read can work harder and smarter than anyone else.

Talking about plastic surgery, here was Vice President Jo Biden. All excited, and delivering a pretty good speech. He celebrated, (for want of a better word),  the death of more than 6,000 soldiers, and 50,000 wounded some so very severely, he marvelled with exorbited eyes. The RESOURCE WAR, aka “war against terrorism“, brought a tear eyed evocation. Biden finished on :”God bless you, God bless you!“

God bless you for what? Destroying Afghanistan since 1978, just because “yes, we can“

What struck me, beyond Joe’s predictable rhetoric, was how Biden had suffered from plastic surgery. His eyebrows were angling up, then came down hard on the side. His eyelids were wide open, as if he had been immensely struck by the incongruity of it all, after been hit on the head. What did that creature remind me of? It felt familiar. Yes. Those Batman movies, with the Joker. OK, I am not a specialist of Batman, and I have not really seen the movie, just extracts, so I cannot explore further what Biden has been trying to say by being a real life imitation of the joker incarnated by Jack Nicholson. Is it all a joke? Is that what he wants to say?

Another contrast with France was the so called “First Lady” that introduced “the love of my life“. Nobody of importance in the USA is aware that the “First Man” semantics was invented by Augustus, Rome’s first life long tyrant. But, even Augustus, did not introduce the ridiculous notion of “First Lady“. Who are the Last Ladies?

And why is the First Lady’s sex life so important? Sorry, I meant romantic. Hey, go easy on the steroids, by the way, those shoulders… And why does the resident instrumentalize his daughters? “Malia, Sasha, we are so proud of you… and tomorrow you have to go to school.” Why is that national news? Why does the president’s official business includes telling his daughters he is proud of them? It’s not obvious? He did not think of it before? He needs a teleprompter to communicate with his family? 

And why are taxpayers paying 100 million dollars for this pathetic, clownish circus?

Are USA citizens so deprived of these things they need to see them on TV? I was amused when Michelle made a huge smile off sync while telling the story of someone who could not afford health care. It was meant to express compassion, but the timing and intensity were off. With these little things sincerity, or lack thereof, shines through. Can one work the appearance of a heart harder and smarter than anyone else? A question much of the world has for the USA.

“Michelle…I love you so much” Thus Obama does not just love to coolly assassinate citizens, worldwide. His love is all encompassing. And the other clown who smiles, immensely touched by this apparent revelation, just made to her, watched by hundreds of millions. And they embrace, and embrace… Why don’t they go all the way? Would not that augment the audience? Worldwide exhibitionism. What happens when it turns out that the president was sleeping around with the hordes, as happened so many times in the past, with many other presidents? Maybe all these drugs they are given to perform 24/7, like circus animals who would never, ever, rest in a cage.

For that matter, how come ex-resident Clinton, now filthy rich, is immensely popular while everybody should know, by now, that he planted, with his gardener, Larry Summers, the seeds of the financial disaster? Namely plutocratically engineered derivatives to the horizon, devouring the world economy? Is WE THE PEOPLE dominated by masochism?

So why the exhibitionism? Because when there is enough style, it can displace substance. And when the substance is banksterism as far as the eye can see, it’s best hidden in plain sight.

The best joke was Obama’s content empty discourse. He even forgot to mention “Obamacare” also known as the “Affordable Care Act”. His sycophants used to call that monstrosity his “signature achievement“. And here he was, refusing to sign his achievement again! Tell us it’s not true, Barry-Barack, tell us that you do not just say what the polls tell you to say.

Health care is much improved, just wait for the bill. Apparently Obamacare has become better not talked about. (True the ACA is supposed to increase how much most people are supposed to spend in health care: the act may be affordable, but is it care? The Republicans have noticed that Obama proposed to reduce the funding of Medicare by $750 billion… So naturally they pounced on that, while proposing to transform Medicare into Vouchercare. Democrats are screaming it ain’t fair, as if that were not predictable. Either they are lying, or they really have puny brains)

In truth, Obama and his Pelosi plutocrat carefully wasted time when they had total control with a health care plan that will not work (because it does not have a sustainable mechanism for cost control). They agitated the ACA as the red flag it was, thus distracting the attention of the People away from the banksters (neither jailed nor even prosecuted), and from Quantitative Easing (print money for the banks that caused the crisis), and from allowing banks to use loans as rents for over-valued properties (over-valued by the banks themselves), while they, those Pelosi plutocrats, were keeping the taxes on the hyper rich at rock bottom, more than ever, and closing their eyes on giant loopholes in taxation (such as billionaires borrowing instead of spending).

Did I mention the tripling of troops in Afghanistan? (The Iraq withdrawal was pre-set by Bush the torturer, but that did not prevent Obarack to claim success for it, whereas, in truth, he was kicked out by the Iraqis, after trying to stay.)

The Pelosi plutocrat has long posed as a leftist, while owning Sugar Bowl, among other things. Never mind that Sugar Bowl had plotted with Royal Gorge LLC to destroy a huge amount of wilderness to extent both resorts (now an ad hoc conservation group has saved the wilderness from the claws of Pelosi plutocrat and her kind).

“Hope has been tested“. Obama has switched from being the candidate of hope to the candidate of “hopeful“. So cars will go twice further “in the middle of next decade” (news: they already do, in Europe, and they will anyway, even in the USA, when oil hits $200 a barrel). OK, could have been worse: Obama could have passed a law to improve cars in the middle of next century, and improve health care by selling body parts. Small favors are better than no favors. Four more years of empty promises, and love of my life celebrations. In the Roman Republic the two Consuls were elected for a year, and rotated supreme authority every month. OK, Romans did not have plastic surgery honey babies to tell them what to think.

Obama finally left the stage, after bellowing about the “greatest nation on earth“. A god nut, Timothy Cardinal Dolan, archbishop of New York, took the stage to deliver a general blessing. May this land of the free never lack those willing to grab guns, and kill others, said the holly man in substance, as he circled several times around the notions pertaining to “men in uniform“.

‘One nation under god, so dear god, bless the USA.’

The old fat man of god was a nice contrast with the young sexy actresses who had warmed up the scene before. Sex and the City of God. Even more weird was the gun fanatic who got shot in the head (with many others) and came to be rolled out as a great hero, whereas all she proves is that, even before being pierced by a bullet, she did not think right.

But 73% of USA citizens attach the greatest importance to shooting other USA citizens. A problem when crazies get crazier: craziness is viewed as heroism (for further reference, see our historical guinea pigs, the Nazis: the deeper they got in their madness, the madder they got).

So what is Obama proposing to do, by the way? Change you can’t believe in! Obama is mostly proposing to do what he did not do when he was in total control, namely rising taxes on the rich, and imposing a minimum tax of 30% on the hyper rich. It’s safe to propose it now, his masters have determined: he is not in control anymore (the Republicans are). So his masters told him: OK, go ahead, tell them what they want to hear, the Dream, the American Dream.

We work harder and smarter than anyone else. Who is that “we” who haunts us? The plutocrats?

Raising taxes on the rich is also insufficient, in any case: it won’t solve the deficit, right now augmenting at one trillion a year, for a grand total of 16 trillion dollars, nearly as much as the 17,6 trillion GDP of the European Union.. . And certainly higher than the 15 trillion dollars USA GDP. (European countries have an Added Value Tax of at least 15%, by law, 17.5% in France and Germany, up to 20% in Great Britain, 23% in Greece. That reduces deficits, but Obama does not know what it is, although I wrote extensively about it, and offered him a book, where it is, black on white.)

Partisans such as Krugman speak only of a USA deficit of around 10 trillion dollars, allowing the USA to look slightly better than France or Germany. How do they do it? How do they cheat? Partisans of USA greatness omit what the USA government borrowed from USA government funds whose spending in the future is mandated by law.

By the way, recent graphs show the USA GDP going up by leaps and bounds, whereas the EU’s stagnates (with Germany not enough to compensate Britain rolling over, lower, while Italy and Spain sink, and France is going nowhere). This looks good, for the USA, but it means nothing. Inefficiencies, waste, jams, and the intrusion of pay services in what ought to be free (like school and care) augment GDP artificially, or, let’s say in ways that cannot be compared!

Obama crowed that he had signed free trade agreements that allowed to sell lots of products stamped “Made in America”. Never mind that “America” is not an official country.

Never mind that the free trade agreements with Panama, Columbia, South Korea, were long stalled, because of the fear for USA jobs, and passed… by the Republican Congress in October 2011. The democratic crowd roared its approval, of the great Obama victory, grabbing his pen to sign on Republican policy, I guess. I am also for free trade… But only if and when everything else been equal. Actually the USA administration (and also Europe) are claiming that China dumps solar panels. Among other things.

Obama forgot to put a carbon tax, so his ‘5 millions‘ renewable energy jobs did not materialize. (By comparison Sweden passed a carbon tax in 1990, to great success for employment and CO2, let alone energy independence.)

Nationalist frenzy, and plutocratization, are hard to reverse. Citizens of the USA view as a self evident truth that they got attacked on 9/11 by a country they had nothing to do with, as they were careful, and still are careful, to NOT learn what really happen. Namely they do not want to read that the USA was engaged in a war of aggression in Afghanistan as early as 1978. (Shortly after three government sponsored Franco-Afghan geological missions under Dr. Laparent, found great mineral wealth. Is the Afghan war just a Franco-american conflict?)     

Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s National Security Adviser, stated in 1998, to the French “According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujaheddin began… after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan… But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise:

Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.… We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.” [Le Nouvel Observateur (Paris), 1/15/1998] After Brzezinski’s confession, other US officials who denied US involvement prior to the Soviet invasion, also changed their story. (For instance, Charles Cogan, head of the CIA covert aid program to Afghanistan at this time.)

For a fuller quote and a more comprehensive story see: http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2010/09/17/obama-commemorates-911-his-way/

By the way, it’s really hard to search the web, in the USA, only in the USA, about the Pelosi plutocrat‘s plutocracy, or Carter’s henchmen terrorizing Afghanistan. It’s not just the People Republic of China which manipulates the search engines.

But it works: the professional killer who was leader of the section who killed Bin Laden, although increasingly cynical in all sorts of ways, really believed that the USA was treacherously attacked on 9/11. Attacked, sure. Treacherous? Not so fast. That soldier had no idea that USA henchmen instructed the Islamist Fundamentalists to attack civilian objectives in Afghanistan, and, preferably school for little girls, a full generation earlier. (No, I will not bother to make a search for this from the USA; I would come empty. But, overseas, the documentation is plentiful.) 

Obama also strokes the dream of the unprovoked 9/11 attack.

Whatever happens, plutocracy will soon elect its next USA president. It would be funnier, if it were Biden. With his distorted face, he looks the part. Joker.

Obama has accomplished his role, that of a vaccine against change. You can read through his face his great interrogation: are they, my rich friends, replacing me with one that they would like more? So he mouthed the change-y thing unconvincingly. He took the left for granted, giving it only pittance. All the horrors inaugurated by G W Bush were left in place, more, even more terrible, were added. Worst: the left took Obama for granted Brown skin, lofty rhetoric, what could go wrong?

Fact is, although the assassination program and its death panel is going strong, the economy is going, at best, nowhere (in France, EU, or the USA) once population change is factored out. See the fawning Krugman, September 7, admitting in a burp of honesty, speaking of employment:“A plunge and a stabilization at a depressed level, which has now gone on for almost three years. Everything else is just noise.” (By the way, Krugman is now looking at the employment ratio, which I long advocated as more pertinent than the U numbers.)

Systems of minds are dynamic. As they go on, they become their own initial conditions. Plutocratization is hard to stop. In Rome it got unfettered after Hannibal’s forever wandering cataclysm. The situation got ever worse. 160 years later, the Republic had fallen. Augustus, of course re-established the Republic, formally speaking, so he claimed. With a caveat: he was to be known as the “First Man In Rome.” Princeps. Or as the French, always inclined to abstraction, put it: prince.

Whatever that was, whatever that is, it’s not democracy. Certainly not democracy as the Greeks understood it, and not even democracy as the Romans understood it. An abomination looking for a catastrophe is more like it. In the fullness of time, sometimes the present itself turns into a golden legend, as the floor disappears below a civilization.

Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Chanted Obama and his helpers four years ago (me among them). Yes, he could. Asssasinate whoever the death panel Obama instituted at the White House wants. This has been Obama’s presidency greatest breakthrough, its true signature achievement. Not fighting climate change. Not bringing jobs. Not rolling back metastatic kleptocratic finance. No. It’s all the way back to the jungle. Yes We Can! Assassinate. Whoever we want. For whatever they do.

And yet ethics was invented for economics, not just survival. When the god fearing Carter sent his assassins to Afghanistan, he set the groundwork for 9/11… And probably much worse to come (the USA has helped Pakistan’s Islamist regime make thermonuclear weapons, thus enabling a potential thermonuclear 9/11).

Nastiness does not just propagates, it feeds on itself. Not that the plutocrats mind. In hell, all fired up, ready to go, their lord dwell. When plutocracy turns into an avalanche, civilization is swept away.

***

Patrice Ayme

Happy Banking Barack!

I MEAN BIRTHDAY, WHATEVER.

***

Abstract: Obama’s birthday today. What a precocious child, from nothing to president. OK, Senator a few years. “Senator”: the word is from “senior”. The Roman Senate was made of seniors, advising.

Obama: so young, inexperienced, and yet father of the nation, with his young fellow multimillionaires friends from Chicago to talk to! Jamie Dimon, a young plutocrat, third generation, lived there in a 17 rooms mansion. Is not the world wonderful? Obama: even Nobel before noble! What magic! President of the mightiest nation without genuinely friendly family elders for common sense advice?

At least Vladimir Putin got the elders at the KGB for advice, who he knew and trusted since he was a student! With Obama, the elders were there for advice, sure: they were the very greedy plutocrats who caused the crisis.

What did Obama accomplish? Why so admiring of banks and financiers? Is it why he did so little in reforming finance? Because it was the greatest heist that ever was, and is still on-going, in full view, and still nobody sees it? The emperor has no clothes, but dances the twist? Truly a wonder! Fooling all the people, all of the time?

In Great Britain even the right wing conservative government of David Cameron has had enough with the banks. The Tory-Liberal government and The Economist are now saying about banks what I have long repeated. The bank outrage is central to the crisis not just in Great Britain and the USA, but in the entire West.

Just two days ago a crazed financial program went on line and caused at least half a billion dollar loss to its firm, while battering the credibility of the USA’s financial markets. Operators could not even stop it for half an hour. That sort of scandal could easily be avoided with a Financial Transaction Tax. A Financial transaction Tax would automatically impose a speed limit on financial trading to re-establish causality, as I have long advocated. (Also it’s only justice; all other transactions are subject to taxation!)

Why did only France pass a Financial Transaction Tax?

***

GETTING ADVICE FROM CROOKS: DREAMS OF ONE’S FATHER FOR THE CLUELESS:

This is Barack Obama’s birthday. For those outside of the USA, it is hard to fathom the cult the Obama campaign is trying to build around it. Truly pathetic. Those guys are desperate, begging for money. And people ask: what did you give us for our money, Barack? Odes to banks and the world’s richest men? The citizens of the USA are treated as if they were three years old.

As I am slightly more mature than that, I decided to go to the bottom of that childish behavior. I met recently with people who knew Obama pretty well when he was a child, when they, themselves, were already responsible adults with children of their own. I asked them whether they found normal that the kid they knew and befriended is not only now president, but never bothered to ask for their parental advice. It’s not like Obama had living parents. He has not been so endowed, for years.

Those elders thought it had been a mistake for Obama never to talk with them. They were actually shocked by it. Who else could Obama have turned to for friendly trust, guidance and experience?

People such as the plutocrat Eskrine Bowles, advised (or ordered?) Obama to “leave your friends behind, they only cause problems“? Welcome to plutocracy, Obambi!

We, the elders and me, concluded that the inappropriate public dreaming of Obama for figures such as Warren Buffet was an ersatz search for fatherly advice. Instead of finding the latter, with those he could trust, since childhood, Obama went to search for advice in all the wrong places. It will, no doubt turn out well for him financially. If you obey Morgan Stanley as USA president, Morgan Stanley should not forget you, as USA citizen. But the question remains: is that all the wisdom the world can pretend to?

***

WHAT HAVE YOU DONE BESIDES SINGING THE PRAISES OF FINANCIERS?

Tyranosopher: So this is your birthday, Mr. President, and what have you done? [Words on the song of John Lennon, So This Is Christmas]. Answer: When I could, not much. When I could not, well, I begged for much money, for me, The One. Although I did support the war of France against Qaddafi, like you guys wanted.

Tyranosopher: This you did, and that was good. And you also saved the auto industry, and that was excellent. But you saved the auto industry, because it begged for mercy, first, and when only public money could provide it. The banks have not begged for mercy. Ever. Quite the opposite, they, and their agents (Honorable Krugman among them), have been dictating the agenda, up to, and since, 2008. The banks were not allowed to fail, first. So they could not be nationalize for nothing.

The only bank that was not helped, Lehman Brothers, was not helped because the secretary of the treasury, Paulson, ex-football player, not really an intellectual, ex-head of Goldman Sachs, and owner of a large island, hated it with a passion.

Obama: I accomplished my signature achievement, ACA, the Affordable Care Act.

Tyranosopher: You could have expanded Medicare in one minute, and get Congress to pass the whole thing the next day, when you had a super majority in the Senate (60 votes, as Ted Kennedy was still well enough to vote, then). It would have long been effective. That’s change. Change that may happen someday, if you are still around on top, that’s not change.

Instead you bent over backwards to please the plutocrats, so it is taking years to produce that silly, hyper complicated thing, and we ended down in the muck with an ACA, aka Obamacare, aka Romneycare, which pleases nobody. If you lose the election, we can only admire how hard you worked for it. Or how hubristic you were to think you could fool everybody, and get away with it.

Obama: “What’s done is done. We gave a serious thought at what you call Medicare For All, too late. Now ACA is the law.”

Tyranosopher: ACA is the law, as long as you are not beaten in three months. And that hinges on enough of an economic recovery, which is hobbled by the financial plutocracy, which believes it owns all the money in the world, and ought to keep it to itself.

That economic non-disintegration, in turn, depends a lot upon Europe not collapsing in another bout of deep recession in its on-going Greater Depression. Please don’t forget that the present head of the European Central banks was a partner at Goldman Sachs for six years, and even a vice-chairman there. Why would he want to help you? When he can help the real thing, Romney?

*** 

MIGHT IS RIGHT, SO MONEY IS RIGHT:

Ever since the 2008 banking Crisis, the Anglo-Saxon governments, the U.S. Federal Reserve, and their obsequious followers (the ECB Draghi) have known mostly one policy: throwing money, ever more money, at the banks (It’s called under various names, to confuse the herd of bleating sheep).

The self celebrating conscientious liberal Paul Krugman would put it, trying to hide his apparent plutophilia behind semantics, throwing ever more, “monetary base” at the banks.

Obama of course, has been a central part of this celebration of the banks. Obama does even more: he celebrates hyper rich financiers and over-crooks, and sing their praises all over the main stream media. He wrote an ode in Newsweek to the famous Warren Buffet, a rare plutocrat owning the main rating agencies, Goldman Sachs, and going long or short, accordingly, when he is not plotting with the Chinese the demise of Western work, industry, and the global atmosphere.

Indeed China, were Buffet invests so much, is “severely under-reporting its carbon emissions“…“China may be under-reporting its annual carbon emissions by as much as 1.4 billion tonnes a year—roughly the amount that Japan, the world’s fourth-largest emitter of carbon dioxide (CO2), pumps out each year” (The Economist quoting Nature Climate Change.)

Obama went on TV to sing the praises of Jamie Dimon. Hey, suppose Obama has no job next year, would not it be nice to be invited at Citigroup, or Goldman Sachs, and be n $200,000 for a few minutes’ speech as Larry Summers had been? A man needs to feed his fancy, and cannot live normal, after living so big, that would be cruel and unusual punishment…

OK, back to the banks. I will quote extensively from the most current issue of The Economist (I am a subscriber), and if the Economist disagrees, it can always have its directors in Luxembourg, behind that cheap door, explain to me that I cheated taxpayers. I will address their grievance.

The reason for quoting extensively from The Economist is that this way I cannot be accused to be far out to the left of Marx, all alone. I have company among the fact based community.

***

AS LONG AS BANKS HAVE MONEY, THEY DON’T NEED AN ECONOMY:

The Economist says, in “Money For Nothing“,  that: “Although it should still, in theory, be profitable for banks to lend to small and medium-sized companies, they seem unwilling to do so. The latest figures from the European Central Bank show that bank loans to the private sector were down… Nor is it economic, given the issuing costs, for small companies to borrow money in the bond market.”

So why don’t the democratic governments create PUBLIC banks to finance small and medium companies? (The French Socialist government has said it would create such a bank, but it has been busy changing the fiscal system, with the Financial Transaction Tax, effective since august 1, 2012. Now, of course it went to the sacred August vacation, last savagely interrupted in August, 1914!)

Amusingly, some in the right wing British government are starting to feel so inclined…

***

BRITAIN IS IN A GREATER DEPRESSION, BUT NOT ITS BANKSTERS:

The Financial Times, on August 2nd 2012, announced that “cabinet ministers” have been discussing the nationalization of the Royal Bank of Scotland (The British People already owns 82% of the Royal Bank of Scotland after bailing it out in 2008!) OK, the Financial Times has also its directors behind that same door in Luxembourg: the theme today is collaboration with the enemy, to fight greater evil.

As The Economist put it (before  removing the post later!):

“Fed up with the lack of lending, “senior government figures” are discussing whether to spend £5 billion buying up the 18% of RBS the state doesn’t own.

… the long-toothed Liberal business secretary Vince Cable… is looking for a more radical solution. In a leaked letter to the Prime Minister David Cameron in March, Mr Cable suggests breaking up RBS to create a “British Business Bank with a clean balance sheet and a mandate to expand lending rapidly to sound business“.

The rationale behind it is to lend to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Current government policy on this lies in tatters. In February 2011, those at the top came up with a whizzy idea called Project Merlin. The idea was that British banks would sign a contract agreeing to lend more to businesses and—like magic—there would be growth. The Excalibur of bonus cuts was hinted at.

This didn’t work. Growth flatlined. Lending dried up. Excalibur stayed in its stone…

To Mr Cable, “the banking crisis casts a long shadow”. Some economists place Britain’s flagging productivity and lost output down to the seizing up of credit. To desperate ministers who think the market has failed, letting the state step in seems increasingly a good idea.

…the coalition’s current plan—is to nurse RBS back to health and sell it off for a profit. But the bank is expected to announce losses of about £1.5 billion for the first half of the year…. This gives ministers a political reason to nationalise it.

There would also be trouble from the EU. Letting the state direct credit for a bank with a £1 trillion balance sheet might breach EU state-aid rules. This is not to mention the political difficulty of spending £5 billion (where will the money come from?) on something less likely to make a profit. But in an economy now smaller than when the coalition came into power, these things seem to matter less and less.”

To prevent all this economy stalling circus, money losing bank corporations should have been allowed to fail, until they were bought back (by the government, if nobody else, like a crazed sheik, moved in first), for cents on the euro, pence on the pound, pennies on the dollar.

The correct course would be for the British government to coolly announce that they would stop helping banks such as RBS, and threaten to take away their banking license. After such a menace, loud and clear, the stock prices of the banking corporations would collapse, and the banks could be nationalized cheaply. Meanwhile a PUBLIC bank to lend to SMEs ought to be created (say with the 80 billion pounds brandished to help existing banks).

The same applies everywhere.

Of course, in the USA, the lovers of financiers come around, and like Obama, proclaimed that the USA put its banking house in order, while Europe did not. But Europe did lent trillions, at zero interest (basically) to banks. And what did the banks do? Keep the money to themselves, not recycle it in the economy. That is what is giving many European leaders pause.

In the USA, it has been just the same: the banks kept the money for their own operations and that of their friends. The difference with Europe is that much more money was given (sorry, “lent” at zero interest or so) to them. So indeed, American bankers are more arrogant, as those who are given more often are. 

They know they are the ones who, using leverage, create the money. They abused that privilege, for themselves, so regulators are cracking down, thus cracking down on money creation. The only way out is to create public banks.

Big corporations have no problem getting money, as… they are trusted more than most government: investors know they rule the world (and often do not pay tax, because, thanks to decolonization, they have 100 banana republic to call home, like pirates of old, in the seventeenth century).

Is the state of world finance something to celebrate? Probably not. And now the USA is facing the real possibility that a plutocrat red in fang and claw becomes president. After 4 years of Obama bending over backwards to please plutocrats, voters of the USA may be thinking: if the president thinks plutocrats are so good for us, why not being led by the real thing?

So happy birthday, Mr. President. After all, even Adolf Hitler celebrated his birthday in April 20, 1945, as Soviet shells were exploding all over Berlin. Some people are so much into themselves, they never get out.

***

Patrice Ayme