Violence Ends Worlds

PLUTOCRACY & MAN RUINED WORLDS BEFORE:
Mass destruction everywhere, all over, is how plutocracy makes the public violent and stupid, thus in synch with its rule.
Violence against people readily extends to violence against the environment, and reciprocally.
After all, one of the main reason to not hurt the environment is because, by doing so, people would be hurt. If one is willing to hurt people, one has one less reason to protect the environment. So ecologists should be concerned about the attitude to violence that people have.

VIOLENCE AGAINST THE ENVIRONMENT DID NOT START YESTERDAY, IT’S THE HUMAN THING TO DO. 50,000 years ago, Neanderthal applied the final solution to the Cave Bear problem. Cave bears and Neanderthals competed for the best real estate in Europe, caves. When Cave Bears had to do without caves, against their better instincts, they degenerated, and died off. There was even more a bear of a problem in North America.

Arctodus Simus: Guardian Of The Americas?

The largest Polar Bear (Ursus Maritimus) ever was 1,002 kilograms (killed circa 1800). During the Pleistocene, which ended with the glaciation, 11,700 years ago, there were three gigantic bears: Arctotherium Angustidens in South America, Arctodus Simus in North America and the Cave Bear Ursus Spelaeus (the largest Ursus species) in Europe (that one was eliminated by 27,000 BCE). These bears are among the largest terrestrial mammalian carnivores that ever lived. The first two were dedicated meat eaters, and could reach up to two metric tons.

Arctodus Simus, long limbed, made for running, cruised as fast as 70 kilometers an hour. It could fight off Saber Tooth cats for the kills. Those giant bears specialized in terror supremacy. Those bears, and other terrible predators guarded the Americas (North America had more than half a dozen species of huge predators). That profusion of man eating monsters is why Australia, much harder to reach by sea, was invaded 40,000 years before the Americas. Those bears had only one thing to fear, man. They kept man off the Americas until man invented weapons advanced enough to kill them, and go south from Behringia, under the cover of climate change.

Why those ursine species did not invade Eurasia, whereas the European Brown Bears (“Grizzlies”) did invade the Americas seems rather mysterious, until one realizes that Neanderthals and their colleagues had long modified, and controlled, the Eurasiatic ecosystem. Grizzlies were compatible with man (and are delicious to eat), whereas the giant meat eating bears were not.
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HUMAN INDUCED CLIMATE CHANGE: 11,700 YEAR OLD, EXPLODING NOW
After bioengineering many domestic animals, and creating new “cultivars”, or plant species (best example: corn), our ancestors had to cut trees… And kill lions. Studies have shown, and logic imposes, that lions and the like used to dominate the megafauna in total biomass, as a lion could survive on anything, from rabbit to elephant. American, and European lions were larger than the large North African lion (extinct for a century).

The end result was millions of cattle making methane, millions more than there would have been otherwise, and the climate warmed up relative to what it should have been (some specialists say that this Neolithic methane prevented a return of the glaciers to a great extent). More methane meant less glaciers, in turn more CO2 released through melting permafrost, etc.
This may explain why the CO2 density has been long out of control:

Homo Explodes CO2 Chart: We Are Now ~ 450 ppm!

When people got to Australia, it was a massacre: the megafauna was quickly eliminated, leaving only kangaroos behind.
Conclusion: man has been violently modifying the environment for a very long time, we are in the Anthropocene.
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WITHOUT PROGRESS, DELIBERATE, MEANINGFUL CHANGE, THE WORLD GETS OLD:
However, people did not get necessarily get away with it: in many places of the Middle Earth (Whatever can be reached from the Middle East within a few months of travel by Neolithic means, i.e. from Britain to India) cutting the trees accelerated, or even created desertification. Egypt is case in point (!). This was well known by the times of the Romans.
The Romans could see the mines getting exhausted, so they ran out of metals for their currency (currency crisis of the Third Century), and even for their weapons (metal crisis of the Seventh Century). After the Muslim attack, the Roman emperor came to Rome one summer to supervise the removal of metal from all the roofs of Rome to melt it, and make weapons of massive Muslim destruction.
Romanitas survived thanks to the metallic flame throwers of the Romans. Once, up to 2,000 Muslim ships were burned, as they sieged Constantinople. As late as the Tenth Century, a flame throwing Roman fleet coming from Constantinople, destroyed a Muslim fleet in the gulf of Saint Tropez, as a Frankish army, in a well coordinated pincer, eliminated the emirate Muslims had perfidiously established in Provence, so as to raid and ransom, all the way to Switzerland.

Meanwhile the Franks had invaded Eastern Europe, Rome’s unrealized dream. There the Franks got enough silver for making a currency again (China, having had drastic inflation & counterfeit from paper money would get silver for its own currency from Potosi, Bolivia, through the Philippines’ Spaniards, eight centuries later; paradoxically, by then the greatest European powers had reintroduced paper money for centuries, as their states were as strong as the 7C Tangs, who did use paper money!).

The cities of Sumer, at the root of (“Western”) civilization, were ecologically devastated. First there was salination (from too much sweet water usage), then deforestation in the Zagros and in the mountains around the Fertile Crescent caused an apocalyptic flood (the famous flood in the Bible). What had been civilization got covered by water, horizon to horizon.
Another famous (mostly) manmade disaster is the drought that put an end to the Mayan civilization. We now know that there was enormous environmental stress. The Mayans had run out of their preferred tree for construction: they used less and less mature specimen, until they had to switch to species that were not as good. The Mayans’ agricultural system depended upon the high technology of an enormous network of artificial lakes and canals. As the drought proceeded, that system failed, while war took over.
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DARK FUTURE WITH COAL, THUS PERFECT FOR THE DARK SIDE:
Clearly a similar mechanism threatens us today: we need, desperately, more advanced technology. The only thing that can save the seven billions is more advanced technology, massively deployed. Thorium reactors are an obvious opportunity.
Right now, we do NOT have to proceed with coal. Anymore. British leaders were debating getting out of coal, exactly a century ago. Now leaders, everywhere, and especially the developing world, have decided to develop coal big time. In a few years, it will become, again, humanity ‘s main source of energy! Thus we will carry the sins of the Kyoto accord.
So what is going on? These leaders are actually plutocrats. They are not just leaders. They are rich, powerful, and nasty. They develop coal because they find natural to be nasty, as nastiness is the most distinctive quality that fostered their ascent. But it goes further than that. More nastiness deployed even makes them feel good about themselves, and the most developed quality they have, nastiness, showing them that nastiness is the force that moves the world.
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THE DARK SIDE TOOK OVER ROME, PERFIDIOUSLY:
The fascist Roman empire imposed himself in a sneaky fashion. First there was a genocide against Carthage, one of the worst genocides known. It put an end to a civilization that was, in several ways, the world’s most advanced (in navigation and agriculture). Then the republican Greek city-states were exterminated (Corinth), or terrorized into abject obedience, after losing their independence. At that point, the plutocrats had to destroy the republic in Rome itself, and that is what happened in the following 130 years.
After this, the republic was not formally gone. Augustus did not make the mistake of his great Uncle Caesar, of violating tradition too far by making himself dictator for life (a notion all too close to the kings that Caesar had imposed all over Gaul, to the rage of the local Gallic Senates, causing in turn the great revolt against Caesar). Augustus called himself Princeps (First Man). First man in the Senate (and thus Rome).

Augustus’successors could only survive by augmenting the fascism, and the plutocratic index. The plutocrats around the emperor played a central role, and are always found in all tyrannies. Cultivating a small clique of “grands du royaume” buttressed the Princeps ( “grands”,as they were called in France: the Greats of the kingdom = plutocrats). These were of course the barons in England (with whom William conquered England, and their descendants) and the retinue of the “electors” in Germany (as the Frankish emperor was elected).

This was particularly obvious in the case of emperor Domitian (circa 80 CE), when we have actually reports of major conversations of the plutocrats around a dinner table, one of them the emperor, and they waxed lyrically that any of them could be the ultimate boss, and that those of their colleagues they had killed before, due to some conspiracies, had they not killed them, would naturally find their place again, and enjoy that meal with them.
The philosopher in chief, under Domitian, was Domitian himself, though. Those who disagreed with him, were, obviously, very bad, even dangerous, philosophers, and the sanction was death. Domitian exaggerated a bit, though. He rewarded some for their philosophy, and then eliminated them. Domitian progressively lost touch with his fellow plutocrats, so they send a professional assassin to have a picturesque fight to death with him in his bedroom.
Under the Antonine emperors that Gibbon admired so much, philosophers reached a pinnacle of power never seen before, or since. Most of them were Greek, some were billionaires, all said what the emperors, and the fascist-plutocratic structure supporting them, wanted to hear.
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ROME & ATHENS CONTRADICTED THEIR RISE’S PHILOSOPHY, SO CRASHED:
A central tenet of the philosophy of fascist-imperial Rome was the exact opposite of what had allowed Rome to rise.
The rise of Rome was technological. Rome was first a melting pot, founded on equal opportunity. that equal opportunity made it an irresistible army, of citizens-soldiers, and that army, in turn, very pragmatically, favored technological innovation, by whatever means.
An example: Rome found itself at war with the greatest power in the western Mediterranean, Carthage. Carthage ruled the sea, her navigators had gone around Africa, and she brought, by sea all kinds of goods, from Black Africa, Gaul, Britain. Carthage ruled the seas, with the world’s most advanced ships.
The Romans captured one of them, and copied it . Within a few months, unbelievably, they built a fleet. The sailors were trained on the rocky soil, in fake triremes. They were declared sailors, and the Consul who had built the fleet, was declared to be an admiral. They sailed away. A Carthaginian fleet sank them all.
Never mind. The Romans built another fleet, paying more attention to detail. Soon they invented a device, the Corvus (=Crow), that could rotate around, and allowed to disgorge the redoubtable, hyper trained legionaries on the decks of the enemy. Carthage sank.
Amusing exploits. Demosthenes had incited Athens to engage in a private-public program to build a war fleet to fight Persia. That was done, and brought the tremendous victory of Salamis, just off the shore in Athens that ended up the efforts of the savage orient to conquer the West for 2,000 years. However, doing so, all the magnificent primary forest of Attica was razed, and never grew back, modifying irreversibly the climate, and making Athens even more vulnerably dependent upon Black Sea wheat. That is, Athenian food supply came from a very great distance, the kind of vulnerability many countries have nowadays. It forced Athens to conduct an aggressive military policy, constructing an empire that extended from Egypt to Byzantium and beyond.
In turn, that empire made Athens increasingly nasty. Within two generations, that nasty spirit, and its fragile far flung extent, became Athens undoing. Athens collapsed morally first, as she engaged in a pattern of war crimes (among them: attacking Syracuse out of the blue, annihilating an island’s population, etc.).
Here to define war crimes, I use Nuremberg, 1945. Some will say that I make an anachronism. However, not so. The roots of Nuremberg 1945 were planted 2,550 years earlier. Reading many texts of the period, and a century earlier, when republican, democratic Athens was created, is revealing. The Nazi like mood that seized Athens around 450 BCE, would have looked horrendous to some of the creators of its democracy (such as Solon), a century earlier, around 550 BCE (Solon was so disgusted by Athens after installing its democracy that he left for ten years to get better ideas, and visited Egypt, among other places).
Thus we see that, not paying attention to the ecology, even for the best reason (wasting Attica to build a war fleet to defend against fascist Persia), can lead to ill conceived, unsustainable empire (the Athenian empire rested on too small a population of Athenians), and then survived just by amplification of nastiness. When a besieged, starving Athens had to surrender to the coalition of Greek city-states, it’s (Persian financed) Sparta that saved it from the vengeance the other cities wanted to visit it with; some of its own medicine, annihilation.
That is why the moral drift in the USA leadership, ever since navy brass, and the dying Roosevelt became best friend with Ibn Saud, or blatant even earlier, when the USA declared Britain and France to be “belligerent” in 1939, and sanctioned them, is so dangerous. That’s how civilization dies.
Athens recovered, but not enough before the goons from the north, the Macedonians, the lovers of horse, Philippe and his son, with their own retinue of major plutocrats (Antipater, for example) could take over all of Greece.
Athens, and the other Greek city-states, ultimately rose successfully against Macedonia. But that was the help of Roman legions. By then the plutocrats were too powerful in the Roman Senate, and they made sure that the Social Revolution in Corinth was crushed. The new philosophy was sustainable fascism, plutocracy desired.
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ROME COLLAPSED MORALLY FIRST, ECOLOGY FOLLOWED LATER:
So what happened under the Antonine emperors? The philosophers, and other Romans observed, as they said, that “the world was getting old”. Namely there were ecological disasters all over. The economy was becoming more difficult to operate, and command and control would be imposed within 150 years, as precious metals ran out. 300 years later, after the Franks had been unable to stop them, the vandals would seized North Africa, and so doing, starved all of Italy.
Could have Rome been spared that ominous fate? Well, yes, by more advanced technology, which could have been deployed (primitive steam engines existed, and Papin made a steam engine boat, in the 17th Century, using roughly the same metallurgical expertise; there is no doubt that the Romans could have made the same). But the Roman emperors deliberately blocked advanced tech.
The emperors, ill advised, thought that higher technology would increase unemployment.
That myth is entertained to this day. See Krugman’s December 9, 2012, editorial in The New York Times: Robots and Robber Barons. technology has taken a turn that places labor at a disadvantage… About the robots: there’s no question that in some high-profile industries, technology is displacing workers of all, or almost all, kinds. can innovation and progress really hurt large numbers of workers, maybe even workers in general? I often encounter assertions that this can’t happen. But the truth is that it can, and serious economists have been aware of this possibility for almost two centuries. The early-19th-century economist David Ricardo is best known for the theory of comparative advantage, which makes the case for free trade; but the same 1817 book in which he presented that theory also included a chapter on how the new, capital-intensive technologies of the Industrial Revolution could actually make workers worse off, at least for a while — which modern scholarship suggests may indeed have happened for several decades.
The debate is nothing new: Aristotle argued that, having no robots, civilization needed slaves, to do the work. The entire Greco-Roman civilization operated upon the bedrock of this completely idiotic assumption. And died from it.
So the emperors argued that, unemployment being a chronic Roman catastrophe, and people needing to work, the machines had could have alleviated work should not be constructed. That sorts of logic looks good, but it’s wrong at every turn. Unfortunately variants thereof presided to the making of the Kyoto Treaty.
All what happened was that Parthian arrows, fired from powerful double curvature composite Mongol bows, started to go through Roman armor, and that cataphracts terrorized the Roman army. Pathetically, in the end, the Romans adopted those military techniques… more than five centuries after suffering the devastating defeat of Carrhae from them.
What was the truth?
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UNEMPLOYMENT AS A PLUTOCRATIC DEVICE:
In truth, unemployment was caused directly by the plutocracy that ruled Rome, it was a deliberate strategy. Unemployment empowers plutocracy. An unemployed man is impotent, and feels completely unworthy: after all, he is no use whatsoever. How could he be trusted to make a revolution? Let alone to vote? Another advantage is that unemployment means that the plutocracy lives off globalization, distant workers, who do the job, but can be cut off anytime, and replaced by others safely. That is why Rome, and then Italy got increasingly deprived of employment and even army under the fascist empire, culminating with the removal of the capital to Byzantium, by Constantine, to make Constantine-polis, Constantinople. To make sure, Constantine also removed the entire Roman metaphysics and tradition, by imposing Christianity.
When the Franks took control, they decreased the fascist index (the kings were elected, and the function was not hereditary, and women could reign), and they decreased the plutocratic index (sons were supposed to inherit equally and daughters would do, if there were no sons). Then the Franks formally outlawed slavery (~650 CE).
Outlawing slavery, that is, cheap labor, meant technology and science had to advance. It did. Countless tech advances occurred within a few centuries: heavy draught horse, bioengineered protein rich beans, water and wind mills all over. Frankish architecture (now known as “Gothic”), hydraulic presses, gravitational and spring clocks soon followed.
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PLUTOCRACY IS BACK! IT HAPPENS ALL THE TIME:
We are in a very similar situation nowadays, to the decay that corrupted Rome.
The plutocratic phenomenon has blossomed again. The banking sector has been taken over by bandits. This is very grave: in the Roman, Frankish, Tang, and other various Chinese empires, it was the state that created money. In the modern state, starting with the Italian republics of the Middle Ages, it has been the bankers that the state mandated to create money, through credit. So now the money creating system is corrupt, and the political, and even judicial class attached to them, is also corrupt.
Proof? All over the papers, everyday. Even inside the Wall Street Journal, December 20, 2012, the most incredible dialogues among plutocrats and crooks, about manipulating interest rates, and meeting back on their yachts to laugh it off, while exchanging 6 figures gifts.
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LARGEST PLUTO CRACTY EVER, LARGEST CRIME SYNDICATE, EVER:
Then there was the case of drug laundering by HSBC, a British based world bank. It showed the drug war is a very bad joke played upon the gullible public. Assistant Attorney General and longtime Bill Clinton pal Breuer is another of these plutocratic enabler who obviously expect to be well rewarded some more.
“Breuer this week signed off on a settlement deal with the British banking giant HSBC that is the ultimate insult to every ordinary person who’s ever had his life altered by a narcotics charge. Despite the fact that HSBC admitted to laundering billions of dollars for Colombian and Mexican drug cartels (among others) and violating a host of important banking laws (from the Bank Secrecy Act to the Trading With the Enemy Act), Breuer and his Justice Department elected not to pursue criminal prosecutions of the bank…”
This is another case of international plutocracy at work, the largest criminal enterprise ever.
I say this after considering very carefully the involvement of JP Morgan, Henry Ford and company with various fascist movements, some of them genocidal, in the period 1920 to 1945; although the extent of genocide is lower, by an order of magnitude, so far, with WWII, with only a bit more than six millions or so assassinated in Africa, the intricacy, extent and penetration of world financial, economic, political and informational systems is unprecedented. (I have said this long ago.)
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IGNORING NUCLEAR ENERGY IS BEYOND GROTESQUE:
Nuclear energy is around one million times more energetic than any other energy source. So it’s the future, and it will allow to conquer the solar system, and go the stars.
Nuclear energy is intrinsically clean. It exploits decay, so its waste disappear quickly: nuclear waste becomes less radioactive over time. After 50 years, 99.1% of radiation is gone. This is in sharp contrast with coal. Arsenic, mercury and other chemicals that are stable, forever poisonous are released burning coal: under our eyes, the oceans and the Arctic are made too poisonous for life, and all what idiotic environmental NGOs can talk about is how bad nuclear is!
Well, if the Plutonium based 1950s nuclear tech is so bad, push for other nuclear technologies! Thorium comes to mind. But the first giant Thorium reactor will be ready in a decade or so. it will be made in China, of course.
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KYOTO, AN ERROR IGNORING THE MIGHTIEST ENERGY SOURCE:
The Kyoto accord decided that emissions of CO2 would be reduced after a while to 1990 levels. So far, so good. But then it was decided that the most developed countries, in other words, the West, would bear the burden, all the burden. On the ground that they caused the mess. In other words, those who set the fire would extinguish it, while those who did not could go right ahead with a new conflagration. The USA refused to ratify that unwise injustice. The Europeans, who have a long history of self flagellation, ever since they roasted most of the Jews, signed on greedily, and, glutton for punishment as they are, are suffering indigestion ever since. Now China emits three times more CO2 than all of Europe. And many times that in arsenic, mercury, etc.
Denmark gives renewable lessons to all, and depends more crucially on burning carbon than basically any other country. New burn factories are under construction. (On the positive side, this is self limiting, as most of Denmark will soon go below water, including all the Do-goodism.)
Why all the burning fires? Because of Kyoto’s most vicious flaw. Kyoto, and a later annex, Marrakesh, held that nuclear energy was an enemy. The Marrakesh Accords state:”Recognizing that Parties included in Annex I are to refrain from using credits…generated from nuclear facilities to meet their commitments under Article 3, paragraph 1″ .
However, this all hogwash. Out of say 100 different potential nuclear energy methods, the only one used is the military one, the U235-Plutonium cycle.
Conclusion? The do-gooders fanatically anti-nuclear ecologists are bringing back coal. Within a few years, after an eclipse of a 100 years, COAL WILL AGAIN BE the world’s main energy source. Most of the ecologists who were influential in the last quarter century should get their heads examined, because the return of coal is their work.
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NO PROGRESS, NO LIFE:
Fascist imperial Rome refuted technology. Thus progress. However any human society, since the Pleistocene is as if on a bike: it cannot stand still without crashing. Why? Because resources get exhausted, they always have, they always will (Malthus wrote nearly 5,000 years after Sumer flooded, from deforestation, so Malthus was right, but his were old news).
Technological progress is an ecological stabilizer.
Intelligence evolved because it enables to manipulate the world in a self serving way. In the war against the plutocratic phenomenon, what is in play is the meaning of self. And intelligence itself: the selfishness of the plutocrats is not just self serving, is afflicted with lethal shortermism. Why? because more is different.
Plutocracy is related to fascism, in particular intellectual fascism, where only a few ideas, a few moods, and a few people lead. That’s why Rome got increasingly stupid: any new intelligent discourse is specialized, it’s a techno (special)- logy (discourse). By refuting technology, Rome did not just refute progress, it refuted intelligence.
Nietzsche famously founded his philosophy on the “eternal return of the same”. Nothing could be more false; everywhere we look, however far in the past, long ago, in galaxies further than we can see, there is change, tremendous dynamics at works. We cannot go back to the past, we can only forge a sustainable future. And that means using force, and we have more force at our disposal than ever before, but, paradoxically, not enough yet to put the world on the right track.
Shooting at each other all day long to see who the good guys are, as the NRA and its fellow plutocrats are suggesting, is certainly not the way. Nor is the return to coal, more devastating than anything but outright thermonuclear war.
We are facing the greatest ecological and energy crisis ever, just when plutocracy is heating up. What to do? Full speed ahead with new technology, based in the deepest new science, and that goes all the way to throttle up in more advanced philosophy.
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Patrice Ayme

Why Austerity?

AUSTERITY IS PLUTOCRACY’S BEST FRIEND.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AUSTERITY IS THE ENEMY OF TECHNOLOGY:

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

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THE BIOSPHERE IS APPROACHING A TIPPING POINT:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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SUSTAINABLE ENERGY IS UNSUSTAINABLE WITHOUT STORAGE:

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

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

***

ROMAN PRECEDENTS:

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

HOW ROME FELL, SHORT VERSION:

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

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

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

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

***

Patrice Ayme

Real Doom

RESIST MEEK & SUPERFICIAL EXPLANATIONS:

As The Going Is Getting Tougher, The Weak Is Saying Whatever, But The Tough Will Propose Harder Things:

***

 Abstract: The Central Bank of the USA, Obama, Krugman and much of the left of the USA, let alone its banksters, claim that the present Greater Depression is a combination of over-production and lack of demand. Perhaps unbeknowst to them, this is straight out of Karl Marx. Although not without some superficial merits, that explanation comes very short to explain the extent of the crisis, which has more to do with the capture of democracy by banking.

 The resulting idiocy has blinsided us about even larger problems waiting in the wings, which are making their presence felt. Thus, it’s not about demand, as Obama, Krugman, the GOP, and the Fed believe(d). And providing more money to bankers will not change a thing, if that is all what is done. 

 A real change will come by reigniting the technological drive behind a worthy project. Yes, that will require a massive effort in better public schools, all the way to the highest research level.

 I propose a new technological drive, which is both completely feasible, and will be a game changer in what economy and survival are all about: energy. And no, it’s not about charging towards wind mills. And yes I propose this, because it will be hard, precisely. (We propose it because it is hard is what president JF Kennedy said, correctly and deeply, about his moon project. What I propose will be also much more useful.) 

***

***

 A funny development is afoot: as the severity of the crisis reveals itself, the propaganda machine, unable to deny the existence of a depression, is trying to wrestle control of the discourse by reorienting it towards safer ground… In this case… Karl Marx (as we will see).

 A well connected anointed personalities of the left, John Judis, wrote an essay “Doom!“, quoted approvingly by Krugman. As I will show below, it looks good, and many of Judis’ arguments are excellent, all the more since they are well known, and that all the way since before Karl Marx. However it is still a sly manipulation, as the Marxist conclusion (“too much over production“), while partly correct in the 1930s, eschews the real problems. Then and now. Now being way worse than then.

 Curious times when Marx’s ideas can be manipulated into serving the plutocracy. True, Marx did not have that concept. The concept of plutocracy. Marx believed in the struggle of the classes, I believe into something much more sinister.

 ”Doom!”was approved by Paul Krugman as can be seen in the following post, which is revealing in other ways… Krugman’s post is remarkable by his honesty (see the parts I underlined).

 After quoting Krugman, I will explain why “Doom!” is a dangerous whitewash full of disinformation. Truthiness is at its worse when it is carefully laid down to lead us astray.

***

WHEN CHAOS REIGNS, BY DEFINITION A LITTLE CAN DO A LOT:

 Here is Krugman,September 20, 2011, 4:39 pm

 Doom!

 That’s the title of a new article by John Judis about how policy around the advanced world is now aggravating the slump — and how things look likely to get even worse looking forward. It’s not very different from what I’ve been saying, but Judis offers more historical depth in the comparison with the 30s.

Actually, I’ve been thinking about that parallel — and how truly remarkable it is.

I was recently asked to give a talk on “capitalism and democracy”; that’s bigger-think than I usually do, but I gave it a try. I took as my starting point the famous Fukuyama thesis that liberal democracy — meaning basically a market economy plus democratic institutions — was an end state, a final resting point for state organization.

I always had my doubts about that, largely thanks to the 1930s: what we saw there was that a severe economic crisis could put liberal democracy very much at risk. And it was a close-run thing: slightly better strategic decisions by the bad guys could have made totalitarianism, not democracy, the end state.

It seemed to me even when Fukuyama first wrote that this could and probably would happen again, that there would be future crises that would put our system — which I agree is a very good system — at risk.

But one thing I was sure of was that the next great crisis would be different. It would be environmental, or about resource shortages, or about runaway technologies, or something; it wouldn’t be about a banking crisis and a collapse of aggregate demand, aggravated by bad monetary and fiscal policy. We’d learned too much to repeat that performance — right?

Wrong. The amazing thing now is not that we’re having a crisis, it’s the fact that we’re having the same crisis, and making the same mistakes.

A lot of the blame goes to the economists, by the way, who abandoned what they used to know — and many of whom are giving bad advice now, I firmly believe, based more on ego and political affiliation than on analysis. That is, I believe that we’re looking at a moral failure as well as an intellectual failure.

Anyway, awesome. And depressing.

***

WAR BETWEEN THE MIGHTY CAN BE A MOST UNSTABLE THING:

 “Bigger-think than I usually do?“ Bigger admission than those people with fancy credentials usually make. Honnesty in top thinkers who are after the truth allows them to perform better (but does not help their friendships, so there is a complementarity between depth of discovery and influence in one’s lifetime).

 Let’s analyze in more detail Krugman’s assertion above: “slightly better strategic decisions by the bad guys could have made totalitarianism, not democracy, the end state.”

 This has been one of my points, over the years. I will not go into much details here, just a few illustrations. At Dunquerque (“Dunkirk”), the French army made a successful defensive ring which allowed the professional British army to escape. Had that not been the case, Britain would have been defenseless… The next big Nazi mistake was not to have pushed a few more days in its attempt at destroying the Royal Air Force… Because it was succeeding. Instead the enraged Nazis switched to city bombing, which spared the RAF. And so on.

 Anxious to keep himself popular with his adoring German supporters, Hitler did not switch the German economy into a command economy until well after major disasters, in 1943. The Soviet (of course), British (unobviously), and American economies (spectacularly) had been switched to command economies years before. So Germany, after a jump start into militarization after the Nazis came to power, was slow in mobilizing all its resources.

 By the way, the necessity of this switch from market to command, shows that COMMAND ECONOMIES CAN BE VASTLY SUPERIOR to free markets. What Krugman calls “our system” was not “our system” when it really mattered, during WWII.

 Had Hitler not personally slowed down the development of the Me263 jet fighter (to make it into a bomber to bomb my dad), by more than a year, Germany would have regained air supremacy by Spring 1944, which would have changed everything (it’s not me saying it, but the U.S. Air Force).

 It is intriguing to know that the obverse is even more true: slightly better strategic decisions by the GOOD guys could have defeated totalitarianism quickly. Or just less bad luck, or fewer grave tactical errors. As when that Spitfire pilot saw Nazi armor jammed in the Ardennes’ forests. But he was not believed. Indeed stuffing all of one’s army on one road in one forest was considered an insanely demented mistake, and the Franco-British command could not possibly imagine that the Nazis were that stupid and crazy. Just what Hitler and a handful of generals hoped would happen, to the disbelief of their less mentally imbalanced colleagues. 

 Morality: never underestimate the insanity and stupidity of your lethal adversary. And the more fascist, your adversary will be, the more insane and stupid.

 BAD LUCK: the French army had fully anticipated the obvious German offensive (“Case Yellow“), down to the fact that it would have two main axes through Belgium, and exactly where those axes would be. They were ready for it, and knew they would cut off German armor from behind.  However a plane with the plans crashed in Belgium, and the Nazis switched to a wild and crazy plan concocted by Hitler and his friend the Duke of Windsor (a Nazi fanatic judiciously made inspector general of the British, hence French, defenses, and whose keenest reader was Adolf Hitler himself; Hollywood was correct to make a movie about a king’s speech impediment instead, to help cover the sordid truth).

 Now, of course, when the French high command sent its armored, mobile, seven division reserve to the Netherlands, while smartly keeping no less than half of the French air force out of France, the strategic mistakes were bewildering (there are reasons to believe it was not all accidental, just like with the duke of Windsor, the ex-king who was not tried and shot as he deserved, and it is better to make movies about his successor’s voice. Anything to avoid exploring what really happened in 1939-1940!)

 And, of course, if the USA had gone into the war by the side of France and Britain in 1939, instead of joining Hitler (under cover, but de facto), the Nazis would have been promptly defeated.

 The grand conclusion is this: World War Two was a highly unstable, chaotic adventure (in re-runs of the Battle of France in 1940 and the battle of Midway in 1942, the Nazis and the Americans lose nearly every time, so both were lucky, very lucky, and chaos going just a bit differently would have brought a different world society, now.).

***

ATHENS HAD DIRECT DEMOCRACY, WE PREFER REPRESENTATIVE FASCISM:

 Another statement of Krugman is worth pondering:“I took as my starting point the famous Fukuyama thesis that liberal democracy — meaning basically a market economy plus democratic institutions — was an end state, a final resting point for state organization.”

 This Fuk. thesis is of course the grave mistake, self serving to the oligarchies, that civilization is making: instead of having a real democracy, Athenian style, namely direct democracy, as in the paleolithic cave, for the last four million years, we have a system now closer to elected fascism. A few elected people, in connivance with at most a few thousands, completely unelected conspirators, worldwide, decide for everybody, in connivance with a much larger body of plutocrats, who would be convicts, should justice be applied to them.

 OK, it’s not anywhere as obvious as in Russia, where Putin will be dictator president until 2024 (he just announced boldly; OK, at least in the USSR, I mean the Russian Federation, one knows who is the boss, whereas in the West one knows who the puppets are).

 The result of the representative fascism we have is an increasingly deeper lack of intelligence, as the handling of the crisis demonstrate.

 There is not much serious debate of the whole population in the system we have, in contrast of what happened in ancient Athens. Only polls are consulted, but polls are the fruit of public opinion, itself heavily manipulated by plutocratically controlled media. “Greek” crisis: in truth, it’s mostly a foolish lending crisis. “Subprime crisis”: in truth it was first of all a derivative crisis. Still is. “Euro” crisis: mostly the dismantlement of a system devised by private banks for private banks, were dangerous investments were disguised as AAA+, in the guise of Euro unification.

 And so on. Palestine not a state: no problem, let’s make Palestine the object of a final peace process, that’s the final solution, for however long it takes, American style (hint about what that means: look for the Cherokees!)

  So all depends upon Obama, thinking in his king size cherry bed (which is particularly comfortable, “The Economist” told us.)

***

NO CONTEMPT IS HIGH ENOUGH:

 The thesis of Judis of the New republic is repeated by Krugman faithfully:

 ”The amazing thing now is not that we’re having a crisis, it’s the fact that we’re having the same crisis [as in the 1930s], and making the same mistakes.” But Judis, and apparently Krugman, make the mistake of believing that the crisis is only about that, being an exact copy of the crisis of the 1930s.

 Let me quote Judis extensively (as the article is only for subscribers):

 “TODAY’S RECESSION does not merely resemble the Great Depression; it is, to a real extent, a recurrence of it. It has the same unique causes and the same initial trajectory. Both downturns were triggered by a financial crisis coming on top of, and then deepening, a slowdown in industrial production and employment that had begun earlier and that was caused in part by rapid technological innovation. The 1920s saw the spread of electrification in industry; the 1990s saw the triumph of computerization in manufacturing and services. The recessions in 1926 and 2001 were both followed by “jobless recoveries.”

In each case, the financial crisis generated an overhang of consumer and business debt that —along with growing unemployment and underemployment, and the failure of real wages to rise— reduced effective demand to the point where the economy, without extensive government intervention, spun into a downward spiral of joblessness. The accumulation of debt also undermined the use of monetary policy to revive the economy. Even zero-percent interest rates could not induce private investment.

Finally, in contrast to the usual post-World War II recession, our current downturn, like the Great Depression, is global in character.”

  Well, yes and no. Yes, all the preceding is true. But, THIS TIME, it’s only a small part of the story, and not the worst.

  However, this simplistic a minima analysis is what has led the Obama administration, and others, to believe that demand is the only problem, just as in the 1930s: augment demand, and the crisis goes away. so Judis’ interpretation is not different from Bushama, or Krugman, or many others: just the depth of the crisis changes.

  Lowering interest rates thus was viewed as essential. But it’s not. Jobs are essential. There is no need for interest rates to be manipulated to get jobs. Command economies have demonstrated this before, ever since (Consul, general and imperator) Marius’ legions dug a canal from Arles to the Mediterranean sea (102 BCE). Or, before that the Chinese, the Mesopotamians and the Egyptians built massive canals, in what were, obviously, huge government programs.

 The first Egyptian canal is 6,000 year old. Egypt built another large canal in 1,700 BCE. The Shatt-el-hai Canal was built, linking the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, in 2,200 BCE. Command economies work, and they work more.

 My interpretation is not that interest rates are too high. Anyway, interest rates  are basically zero, and so they have been, basically zero in Japan for 21 years, and the crisis is still there, there.

 My interpretation, instead, is that we suffer from a misallocation of capital, not so much quantitatively, than qualitatively. Krugman, instead, like Obabla, believe that if we send just so much more money to their banksters friends, a miracle will happen, and the bansters will walk on the water, make bread, distribute fishes, and offer the wine.

 But the bread is laden with pesticides, the fishes soaked in mercury, the wine is just a rising acid sea, and banksters make only gifts to Obabla, and the other friends they have.  

***

DIFFERENCES WITH THE 1930S:

 Judis forgets a number of details, each planetary sized. There was no worldwide energy crisis in the 1930s, nor CO2 poisoning, nor a demographic crisis. Weapons of Mass destruction did not exist, and the biosphere had not started to die. Neither the Nazis nor the Soviets ever advocated extra judicial treatments and torture (as the super bully did recently, and practices worldwide for all to see, and learn). OK, Nazis and Soviets were not tender footed. But they did not dare being that devolved for all to see.

 Conveniently, Judis forgets also other ecological dimensions, completely. Among them:

 The USA decided to make food into fuel, so food prices jumped, worldwide, and have reached a permanent higher slope. Which has already led to the starvation of many, and dozens of millions, very soon, according to the specialists. But never mind: the USA has lowered the percentage of its oil exports from around 60% to 47% (with lots of “fracking”: finding oil and gas for an inefficient economy is well worth fracturing the entire USA!) And then, of course there is the cost of fossil fuels, which has thrown economies in recession, more than once.

 Judis also forgets the military element: in the 1930s, the USA was at peace. Right now, the USA is at war, all over, and in a very expensive way. Aside from the official soldiery, the Pentagon employs no less than 291,000 private mercenaries. With the intelligence agencies, one gets to about all the budget American taxes pay for, one trillion dollars. Making war against the world is expensive, as Hitler found out. Of course, as he was the first to point out, he did not have the means of the USA. Thus what we have now, mad bull losing its way, in more ways than one, is the real thing.

 In the 1930s, Americans could afford health care. Right now, thanks to (industry) gold plated Obamacare, health spending relative to GDP is climbing vertically: I saw a graph where, in the latest year, health care spending went from 16% of GDP to 18%. At this rate, before the end of Perry’s first presidency, only Congress, the White House, and plutocrats will be able to afford health care.

 Judis also forgets the democratic deficit: Obama, in his star struck simplicity, goes around, quoting the richest men in the world, calling them “my friends“. We are all supposed to be on our knees, swooning with love, as most of disposable GDP is sent towards the superrich, and we are told to follow spiritually the superrich, and tax them more, just as they said.  if Buffet says so, teaches Obama, so it ought to go, because who knows better. If Obama knew a bit of history he would not have waited Buffet and gates to teach him that taxation has to be progressive, just to stay in place. This has been known, and practiced, for 10,000 years. Except in plutocracy. Thus plutocracy was the apparent state of Obama’s nominal reign, so far, since the plutocrats themselves had to tell Obama that it looked bad.

 Next: wolves to come to the sheep pen, and Obama informs us that those quadrupedic wells of wisdom are coming to be shorn. And he shall recommend to do as they said.

 Judis claims the entire problem is over production. As in the 1930s, he says. But that is a complete misinterpretation of the crisis of the 1930s, first of all. That was more caused by the wrong decisions, coming from hubris, rather than by anything else. Now this master cause we have come to enjoy again. Stupid hubris to the point of dementia.

 The interpretation a minima of the crisis by Judis, claiming meekly that it is just as in 1930s, is very convenient to the plutocracy.

 It stands Marx on its head: you see, according to Judis and al., the problem is that workers worked too much! I hope Judis gets invited to a lot of parties in Manhattan, and the Hamptons, by the superrich and influential: he has done well for the malefactors of great wealth.

 Let’s fire more workers, indeed, Mr. Judis. Before they get angry and set fire to that “democratic” ultimate state Fukuyama was paid to be so proud of. 

 In truth preisdent FDR refused an over-production interpretation of the 1930s crisis. According to FDR, the real crisis emanated from the “money changers“. In other words:

***

THE REAL CRISIS. ROGUE MONEY CREATION:

 The more they lend money they do not have, with the benediction of their conspirators in government, the richer the bankers get. It’s as simple as that.

 Krugman seems to have been converted to this view two days ago, as in a rare seizure of truth about Europe, he reveals the “Origins Of The Euro Crisis“. …”it is very difficult in real time to convince people that capital inflows pose a threat, no matter how obvious the numbers seem.”

 In other words, money created in arbitrarily large quantities causes large tsunamis, tearing all societies in their way. We are far from Karl Marx’s critiques. But Krugman fails to see the connection with the fact that Judis is wrong, and that it is also wrong to use the Fed to send arbitrarily large flows of money to giant private banks, which are themselves permitted to use as much leverage as they want, directing those tsunamis each time they see a new landscape primed for devastation.

 This is why Japanese banks lent to real estate speculators and “zai tech” artists before 1990, and frantically all over South East Asia in the 1990s. Big banks all over EU and the USA duplicated the method in the late 1990s and 2000s, with the complicity of central banks and governments. A flood of money was for all actors to have. That is the influential actors, those who can invite the president of the USA for a sleep over.

 Then the president will invest half a billion in your society (say a solar company financed from those friends who had him at dinner, and made him feel important). Don’t worry: now that these solar companies are bankrupt, the venture capitalists will be the ones to see their money come back (contrarily to usual usage of venture financing where early investors lose all). Thus, they will be able to get their “democratic” president re-elected. No the taxpayers will not see their money come back, it’s lost for good, and this is only justice, they are only suckers, what are they going to do? Vote for Perry? Really? 

 The money rushed particularly towards untapped markets: derivatives, subprime, and European periphery. There was no cause of worry: in 1996 various indicators were as bad as in 1929. What did the head of the Fed do? Greenspan provided more money so that the party could keep on burning the house. He used as pretexts, a whole succession of crises: South East Asia collapse, Russian collapse, and LTCM. Long Term capital Management was a hedge fund full of friends and Very Honorable People.

 Then there was the year 2000 crisis (no kidding), and the Internet Bubble. Greenspan kept on forking the money. Naive creatures such as Nobel Paul Krugman have asked for more of the same, and I am all for it.

 However the way the American Central Bank has been sending the money is through the private banks. Or more exactly the same small conspiracy of bankers, a gang of banksters. Look at Rubin and Summers to see what I mean: already ultra powerful under Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan, those financial manipulators reached even higher even before the ignorant, but surprised Bill Clinton was elected. Then they took control of their Obamabot, a tele prompted device: a more advanced technology than Clinton. If one is to believed recent revelations, Rubin, Summers and their Geithner device, outright ignored the Obamabot, as happens in star Wars with idiosyncratic robots, when they scoffed at his erratic orders.

 What happened since 1996 (which was in many ways like 1929, as far as the indicators were concerned, as I said) is that at each episode, at each crisis of liquidity, the banksters were encouraged by the governments to throw more money, more investment. The correct course would have been, instead to regulate tightly the money flows according to higher principles. That is what the PRC, the People Republic of China, does.

 But how do banks create all that money? Through leverage. So the leverage got globally ever worse, at each further step of curing over lending by more money creation. Derivatives have reached more than ten times world GDP. The superrich and their servants in government loved it, as they became ever richer (since they serve themselves as the giant cash flows pass below their noses). This points immediately to the most obvious aspect of major problem: the super giant leverage is private. That, in turn, points at the solution, as I point out in conclusion.

 As the conditions become adverse, the latest leverages, most giant, most adventurous, more leveraged than ever, have to be inverted. As Kash Mansori (approved by Krugman) points out, in the case of the European debt crisis.

***

SOLUTIONS LOOKING FORWARD:

 As usual when there are crises, opportunists move for easy pickings, and the kill. American plutocrats and their supporters see an occasion to “explode” the European Union, for example.

 So what to do with all this insanity? There is a number of simple measures which are in the air in France and Germany, or even the UK and the USA:

 a) Getting rid of those who say we don’t need a Financial Transaction Tax, like Geithner. A FTT will discourage banks from engaging in fake trades with each other, and from extracting all profits or capital from legitimate investments in the real economy. It has to be implemented right away, as Merkozy says.

It’s a torpedo to fire at plutocracy that even European conservatives agree should be fired. European conservatives like money, they don’t like to hang from lamposts.

The Eurogroup should not hesitate to use the threat of force (by forcing a lot of financial euro business to be conducted in the Eurozone, and also by threatening to facilitate a lessening of euro valuation, as I said in the preceding essay).

 b) Getting rid of those who, like the German Vice chancellor, Rösler, ironically head of the “Free Democratic party”, want to abrogate the rights of completely innocent people and nations’ rights. OK, like Hitler, Kaiser Wilhelm, Stalin, Sarkozy or Obama, there are some doubts about his true origins, at least in his mind, so he is anxious to show he belongs, because he is more patriotic, and no patriotic act is high, or hard enough, for him to commit in front of the admiring crowd.

 Krugman is now mellowing a bit about the euro, saying that the “the euro is going to have a chance of working only if the ECB delivers much more expansionary and, yes, inflationary policies than the market now expects. If you don’t think that’s a possibility, say goodbye to the euro project.”

 ”Euro project“? What about the “dollar project”? How is that doing? That would also be helped by small inflation, too, as long as capital is well allocated. But, to do this, gross misallocation of capital by itself, for itself, should be stopped, and that means a FTT. and also, for the USA, a Value Added Tax, to foster savings (total USA debt, including “Government Sponsored Enterprises” is well above 400% of GDP, arguably only less than the total debt of the UK and Japan).  

 c) Push fundamental research and development, give society a project, indeed, and a dream that will bear fruit.

 Improbably president Kennedy ordered the USA to land on the moon, with exalted firecracker technology. It worked. It was sort of useful , be it only by broadening humankind’s vision.

If Obama were really smart, he would have proposed a similar project. He should. The prime candidate is laser triggered thermonuclear fusion. It’s not plausible that it will not work on an efficient industrial level. (The USA, UK, and French programs are already talking to each other; one should make it into the next moon like project, an occasion to teach Krugman the difference between “project” and “currency”.)

 Some of the naive will say: thermonuclear, what for?

 Well, don’t believe the propaganda that there is plenty of oil and gas. We are past peak cheap oil. Now, indeed, we can have centuries of unbearably expensive (financially, socially, ecologically) oil, and gas and coal. But unbearable is the word. Starting in 2016, the prices will augment vertiginuously.

 Meanwhile demand is exploding: cars are supposed to quickly double to two billions, as emerging countries get to drive. China and India build four coal plants, a WEEK. Soon there will so much mercury vapor deposited from burning all that coal, that fish will be inedible, anywhere.

 The 30% more acidic oceans are now rising 5mm a year. Yes, the rise of the waters has accelerated.

 We need a new massive energy source, and it’s going to be nuclear, one way, or another. No more of that Roman energy stuff. We can do better than Inuits 1,000 years ago, who already burned oil. Because the superior Viking did not copy Inuit technology, they disappeared from Greenland. Our case is worse: we have nobody to copy. OK, maybe the Inuits, if it comes down to that. But don’t forget that mercury fish. Well, when one’s brain is full of mercury, one has forgotten what forgetting means, good point. Long live coal, down with nuclear, as completely idiotic pseudo ecologists say.

 And don’t tire me with the obsolete 50 year old plant at Fukushima hit by the giant wave after the giant quake, and without having done any of the mandated work on emergency generators: pictures show that the raccoon dog, the Tanuki, is back, frolicking among the reactors… Same in Chernobyl. Maybe we could explode a few thousand nuclear reactors, so wildlife would thrive? just wondering. Won’t happen with mercury, though, indeed… Actually a low level of radiation is well known to improve health, through the triggering of subtle repair mechanisms…

 Thus the number one strategy ought to be to declare a state of socio-technological emergency, and push for more brains in science, and shower the whole area with all this money the Financial Transaction Tax will send in the direction of common sense. With a clear target: tame thermonuclear fusion in 10 years, for power generation. It can be done (it’s just a question of augmenting a firing rate, and receiving the neutron efficiently).

 Late Imperial Rome died, in part, from its devastation of the ecology having caught up with its mostly stagnant technology: the “malefactors of great wealth” (as president Theodore Roosevelt called them) hate thinking (and rightly so, from their point of view of greedy crocodiles!) Rome was mastered by, submitted to, malefactors of extreme wealth. Some Roman bishops had 400 slaves. Malefactors of great wealth hypnotizing the People into superstition, away from reason, knowledge and wisdom.

 The Franks and other Germans developed more appropriate renewable technologies than the Romans had (wooden constructions and water wheels everywhere), and soon completely new technologies the Romans never even dreamed of (deep ploughs, massive labor horses, beans, etc.)

 A massive technological project to pull us up is bigger-think than Krugman, or Obama, and a fortiori the rest of the government of the USA usually do, but that is (part of) what is needed.

 Ah, and what of the super giant private leverage now incapable of supporting its own weight? Well default it, thanks to public funds which will acquire title and control (what Obabla did not do… yet). Once the European public fund for stability (etc.) is deployed and massively leveraged into many trillion dollars, one will have such a (trans)national public bank, which, under the People’s control, will be able to return banking to the real economy, and maybe even sanity. As it will crush all the hedge funds in the way, especially after a Financial Transaction Tax has been instituted.

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Patrice Ayme

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To answer a reader, just now: There are about 100 potential nuclear fission technologies all much safer than the present ones. China has a national Liquid Thorium Reactor project (project: learn, Krugman, learn…). France also finances a bit such research. The advantages of LTR reactors are enormous (they were studied initially as engines for planes). But of course nothing would be fusion (besides ITER, and the laser approach, there are other realizable fusion technologies within profitable energy production grasp.)

Roman Decay, Frank Renaissance

WHEN AN ETHICAL REVOLUTION TRANSMOGRIFIED ROME INTO EUROPE, ASHES INTO BRAINS.

Abstract: For all its sins, some compounded by Christianism, Rome had to get out of the way of civilization. And it did, thanks to the Europeans.

All important countries can extract important lessons from Rome’s fate. Many of the quandaries found now within the USA, or on a planetary scale, already occurred within the Imperium Romanum. Rome did not solve these entanglements without a marked civilizational devolution into ill fated successor regimes.

Oriental Rome, and Islam, became parodies and nemeses, of the Roman republic, conceptually speaking. The third successor regime founded and named Europe. And rebooted civilization ethically, allowing technology to progress so much that Rome was soon left behind.

Detailed analyses of what afflicted Rome carry within solutions. Clearly those solutions would have had to be enacted, as early as 150 BCE. Rome’s great victory in the Second Punic war, after much slaughter  and devastation, led it to privilege empire over democracy, and plutocracy, over reason.

Whereas the remedies to Rome’s ailments look now obvious, we are very far from applying the similar remedies which are needed now. And the cause of this is the same: a conniving plutocracy takes the decisions, and it is not interested by what is best for the many. The essence of plutocracy is to hurt the many, and call that life. This is particularly clear in the USA.

As the subject is gigantic, I will concentrate on the period when the Late Empire turned into the Dark Ages, and the Franks pulled out of them savagely. Although the facts I mention are true (and readers are invited to correct them if not to the best of their information), some of my interpretations are unique. For example, I consider that the decline and fall of Rome lasted more than six centuries, including therein the whole civil wars period, and the entire empire. In that perspective, Christianism was just the nail which prevented the corpse to open the coffin, when the grossest superstition became the deepest reason.

I put the end of the Dark Ages in 486 CE in Gaul, when the Imperium Francorum launched its reboot of all of civilization. This new chronology is well supported by philosophical reason, and increasingly by recent archeology and historical research. Recent science show that, contrarily to legend, progress in most ways had fully restarted in the High Middle Ages, and had left Rome behind. And it did so on a much better, much more sustainable basis, therein its success.

***

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Inquiring Mind: How can you be so sure of what happened?

PA: Certainty is indeed hard to achieve. The Christian fanatics destroyed most of the evidence. Books got nearly completely destroyed in Occident.  In the Orient many books survived only because the enemy of Rome, the Persian Sassanids, provided books and intellectuals with shelter against the ravages of Christian monks.  This led to a terrible war between Constantinople and Persia, and the Arabs won it.

After the Arabs took control, they viewed books and intellectuals as precious riches, since the memory of Muhammad was fresher.  However the Caliphs had their own agenda, and they selected against works too revealing of the democratic, republican, and secular nature of Greco-Roman society. 

Historian have had a bias against analyzing the fall and decline of Rome. Colossal works of bishops of Gaul, concerned that they had been wrong all along about turning the other cheek regarding the Visigoths, have started to be studied and translated from Latin only very recently. 

There are new sources of knowledge besides books. New, impressive archeological work has brought unexpected revelations.

 

Simplicius: Such as?

 PA: Parts of the empire, in today’s Syria were extremely rich, and getting richer, as the catastrophe was imminent, in the Sixth century. This means that the empire, in the Orient, functioned well, at least economically, down to the time in which it plunged into religious strife and foreign war.

By then the Franks had established their own civilization and total military control over the core of the Eurozone. The Occident had switched to wood construction, which left fewer traces, misleading naïve historians to believe that the populations were lower and more miserable than they really were.

Part of the switch from stone to wood was a switch to a sustainable local ecology. Rome ran a global civilization, as good as the long range trade it depended upon. By the Fifth Century long range trade of grain had been greatly diminished, by various invasions and destructions. Then it came to a halt as the Islamist terror crushed the fertile southern two-thirds of the Roman empire. A paper blockade forced the return to parchment.  This perspective, that Islam caused misery in the West, is called Pirenne’s thesis. It has obvious merit as an aggravating factor, but as cause only secondary to Christian terror and oppression, which, ironically, is the main cause of Islam itself.

 

Simplicius: Your friends will be few, and you better keep on hiding in the mountains, the way you trample the most sacred religions, and those who are ready to kill for them. And who we both respect.

PA: Good people make good things from Christianism and Islam. Truly good believers will not mind harsh criticism, because very bad people have made very bad things from Christianity and Islam. 

 

Simplicius: Why to study the Greco-Roman civilization? Did it not collapse miserably? Why should it have any bearing on the Land of the Free?

PA: It collapsed instructively, and those who took command kept those instructions in mind.

The real history of what happened to Rome in the West is never told the right way. In truth, there was no frank collapse of Roman governmental authority in Occident. Quite the opposite.

The real Dark Ages obscured the Late Roman empire. In Occident, the Dark Ages were characterized by the bishops having often the highest secular authority: government by bishops, for bishops. It was a time when Ambrose, bishop of Milan, forced the Augustus, the highest Roman emperor, the fearsome Theodosius, to penance, under the threat of excommunication. This supremacy of the cloth did not happen in the Orient, where emperors stayed the highest authority, and ruled a fascist theocracy which inspired Islam ever since.

By the time the empire of the Franks was established, a new philosophical basis had been found for civilization, much of which never seen before, and it was being imposed militarily. People came to call it Christianity, but it was something else. What is usually described as the Dark Ages was a frank renaissance.

The Franks took political control of the church, as in the Orient. But they did not operate a fascist autocratic system. Clovis, as his father, was elected. The Frankish society was basically a society of armed free peasants, very similar to the Roman society, in the heydays of the Roman republic.

 

Inquiring mind: How can you say that Rome did not really fall, when everybody knows that the last emperor in the West, Romulus Augustus, was deposed in 476 CE?

PA: The notion of “emperor” is a modern one. And it was not a notion which was ever well justified. Not having an emperor was less of a problem than having too many (see 69 CE, the year of the four emperors!)

The Romans used a number of terms for different high officials,  such as Tribune, Consul, Imperator, Princeps, Caesar, Augustus. In theory, the republic was still going on, under the Principate (starting with Octavian-Augustus). Who ruled at the very top, and in which guise, was pretty much haphazard. One knew the imperator when he had been acknowledged by the biggest and best army. Who was the boss was fundamentally determined by soldiers. Soldiers were found throughout the empire, helping civilians and the private sector, they were not just in big military camps out there.

When Augustus died, Tiberius kept a low profile, not too sure what he was, besides Augustus’ legal heir, and his top general. The plutocratic republic went on on its own, without an emperor. But if there was to be an emperor, it could only be Tiberius. So the senate kept on begging Tiberius to take charge. In the end, so did he, but not in all ways.

There was never a clear path to succession in the empire, until Constantine switched the system to a dynasty (which had no coup, for three centuries, in the Orient).

When 450 years after Tiberius, Romulus Augustus was deposed, no arrangement was made to nominate a successor. But that meant nothing, except that Roman authorities in Constantinople did not want an Ostrogoth to be recognized. Emperor Zeno should have recognized the Ostrogoth Theodoric, but he did not, although the later had helped the former control Italy.

Emperor Justinian, based in Constantinople, regained control of all of Italy 75 years after the traditional end of the Roman empire in Occident. At that point Roman imperial rule had been re-established over much of the old empire. Except for the part that  the Franks, also representing Romanitas, ruled from Paris.

Thus, under the Franks, Romanitas kept on going.  In the Seventh Century, the Roman Senate still existed in Rome, and the Roman emperor, coming from Constantinople, visited the city of Rome herself, to gather metals from the fabulous buildings’ metallic roofs, to make Grecian Fire super weapons. The empire was fully mobilized against invading Jihadists conducting a Blitzkrieg.

The so called “Land of the Free” is a direct continuation of Rome.

By 486 CE, the “Frees” constituted the official Roman army over a large part of Western Europe, including Gaul. Their commander in chief, whose name was Chlodovechus (the name morphed into Clovis, Ludovicus, Louis, and Ludwig), although elected, was himself the son of a Roman imperator, Childeric. When Clovis was given Consular rank by the Roman government in Constantinople, he had become the official Roman leader in the “Occidental part”.

 

Simplicius: The “Frees”? Never heard of them.

PA: You are like Molière’s Mr. Jourdain, who spoke prose his entire life, without knowing it. French fries also known as freedom fries, remember? Unwittingly, the dim witted American “neo”-conservatives were making a correct point, a very deep point. Frank, French and free are synonymous.

The Franks called themselves the Frees, because, after 486 CE, and for a little while, the Salian law they went by, gave them more rights than Roman law gave to standard Roman citizens. They phased out these privileges very quickly, as they established a symbiotic relationship with Roman society. So within two centuries, every citizen became “free”, a Frank. Slavery had become unlawful.

 

Simplicius: If Clovis was a Roman grandee, how come we never heard of that either?

PA: The notions of imperator (coming from the republic, the top general with right of life and death on his troops), Consul (top magistrate and executive), Caesar and Augustus were different.

Clovis was both imperator and Consul. The Empire of the Franks was never officially at war with Oriental Rome, precisely because of the Consular powers the leadership of the Franks had; the Franks represented official Roman power, especially after they eliminated other German “federates”, and the Visigoths were extinguished by the islamists.

The domination of the Franks was boosted in 800 CE, when Constantinople recognized Carlus Magnus, Charle-Magne, as Imperator Romanorum. Since a woman reigned in Constantinople at the time, it was a bitter pill to swallow in the Orient: the “Augustus” of the entire Roman empire was a Frank! And he led an army so mighty, he had succeeded to conquer all of Germania, something Rome had always failed.

When the eastern two-thirds of the Imperium Francorum made their own (sub)-empire, they grabbed that title for themselves (although the French king kept it too, becoming “empereur en son royaume“).

The Franks often campaigned with the Oriental Roman empire, against the Muslims. However, in 1204, the Franks seized Constantinople.

 

Simplicius: You went on a tangent, with your Land of the Free still on-going-as-we-speak. Can we go back to the decline and fall of Rome?

PA: It is not a tangent. The Franks recovered many elements of the Roman republic. At the same time, they reintroduced elements of human rights natural to Homo Sapiens, which had been artificially negated in the millennium of Greco-Roman civilization.

Thus the Franks founded a stronger civilization, rising on several pillars which had eluded the Greco-Romans. The Franks made a global civilizational reboot. That’s why they claimed to have originated in non Greco-Roman Troy (as the Romans already had).

 

Simplicius: Why is Rome so relevant to what is happening today?

PA: There are many close analogies between what happened during the fall of the Roman republic, and what is happening now.

There were two main types of problems with Rome. Problems coming from the unbalanced Greco-Roman craziness, and problems related to plutocracy. There was a synergy between both, which made the society increasingly idiotic, just at the time when the Romans observed that the “world was getting old“. Ecological exhaustion was requiring new technology which the fascist governance of the empire was unwilling to favor. Instead it favored its opposite, superstition.

Interestingly, there are similar elements of imbalance in the American variant of European civilization. The biggest flaw of the Greco-Roman civilization was slavery. It led to an over-exploitation of man by man, and a brutal society, even after the economic importance of slavery waned. There is the same problem in the USA, as exemplified by the reigning Reaganism, and its metaprinciple that greed makes for a better society.

 

Inquiring Mind: What do you think was the primary cause of the decline of the Roman empire?

PA: It’s a complicated subject, because the decline came from a number of factors, acting synergistically, and causing in turn other factors, which are more in evidence, although they are not fundamental.

Gibbon claimed that Christianity caused the “decline and fall of Rome”. However, the decline was clearly engaged much earlier than the apparition of Christianity, as Gibbon implicitly recognizes when he claims that the apogee of the empire was under the Antonine emperors. Marcus Aurelius had to spend his twenty year reign, on the battlefront, on the Danube, fighting invading Germans, all too close to Italy, the heart of the elongated empire. That was 150 years before the imposition of Christianism.

Moreover Marcus Aurelius’ son Commodus became co-emperor, and then emperor, making such an insane maniac of himself that he was assassinated in a vast plot. At this point the throne was put for auction, and a rich plutocrat bought it. From there on, but for the stern reign of the African imperator Septimus Severus, things got worse. Inflation, plague, dozens of emperors, an emperor defeated and transformed into a foot stool by the Persian archenemy… All of this derangement was festering well before Christianism was imposed from the top.

 

Simplicius: So Christianity has nothing to do with the “Decline and Fall” of Rome?

PA: Before Christianism, the empire was the theater of a conflict between two fascist entities, the military-industrial complex, representing the People, sort of, and the Senate, representing the financial plutocracy.

By the time of Diocletian, around 300 CE, the empire had been re-established in its military splendor, and extended from Scotland to Mesopotamia, Morocco to Armenia. However, Diocletian augmented the idiocy level, by making Rome an empire under God (Sol Invictus), whom he personally represented.

Constantine got the idea that the Christians’ existing administrative structure, with its dioceses, and its naturally fascist God, would be a better fit for the fascist empire. Then he decided what Christianism would be, selecting his interpretation of “Orthodox Catholicism“, as self proclaimed “bishop” and “13th Apostle”.   

The empire was hobbling along, getting progressively worse, before Christianity was imposed, and a succession of fascist emperors found they could use it to humiliate minds. By the late Fourth Century, the very respected head of another religion said that civilization had fallen into a “Dark Age”.

Christianism has nothing to do with the political “Decline” of Rome, but everything to do with its “Fall” into complete insanity and anti-intellectual barbarity.

Orthodox Catholicism helped fascism, making it more intellectual, more thorough, a cause with a moral justification. Constantine, the emperor, using fiscality, made, de facto, Christianism into the state religion, within a decade (although it took another 60 years to do it formally).  Then he killed his very competent son, the Caesar Crispus.

 

Simplicius: Non sense. Constantine is a saint in Orthodox Christianity. How could he have killed his son? Can’t you just respect religion, for a change?

PA: The fact is, Constantine had his son executed. If superstitious people want to be respected, they should stop acting like barbarians, and that starts with ignoring evidence of the barbarity of what, or whom inspire them. Constantine was up high in the viciousness scale. a religion which sanctifies such viciousness should not be surprised to practice lesser sins, such as pedophilia.

Crispus had proven a very competent general and admiral, a winner of major battles.

However, Constantine had been educated at Diocletian’s court, as an implicit hostage. Even as a teenager he was feared by the top emperors in the empire, because of his ferocity and legendary physical prowess. Emperor would have connived to have him fight a lion in single combat, lead impossible cavalry charges in swampy land…

Constantine believed that one assassinated first, if one wanted to survive best. He fled the emperor Galerius for his life, hamstringing all the horses he left behind at each relay. Soon he was back at his father’s headquarters in Britannia. His father was the other Augustus.

Constantine killed his nephew, and steamed his second wife like a lobster. It is therefore appropriate for Orthodox Christians to view him as a saint. Christ wanted unbelievers to be burned, Constantine introduced another innovative cooking method for miscreants.

Crispus was not enamored with Christianism. It is highly likely that he would have reversed Christianization, as the Franks, the shock part of the Roman army, were skeptical of Christianism as a method of government.

This attitude of the Franks was no idle threat. Julian The Philosopher came to reign that way. Julian was one of two nephews of Constantine who survived the next wave of massacres inside the imperial family, ordered by the very Christians sons of Constantine. Julian went to Paris, and after a string of military victories against Germans, his Franks named him Augustus, starting the Parisian revolutionary tradition. 

Between 310 CE and 486 CE, the Franks were integrated in the top of the Roman army, and rolled one plot after another to get rid of Christian theocracy. But Romans were not ready to be led by Franks. Finally Clovis grabbed Christianism by the horns.

 

Simplicius: You are confusing me. The Franks converted to Christianity with Clovis. Traditional historians present the conversion of the Franks as a great victory of Christianity.

PA: Yes, it’s a myth the Franks themselves created, starting with Clovis. They claimed to be submissive sheep. 9,000 of Clovis shock troops dressed just in a simple shirt, and walked on bare feet, to be baptized with their king on Christmas day in Rheims. 9,ooo nearly naked Frank super killers walking the streets, and taking a bath in the middle of winter carries an ominous message to those endowed with less robust constitutions.

In a similar fashion, the wolves would disguise themselves into sheep if they could. As they came to have dinner with the flock. The Salian Franks were the Roman army, they made the bishops of Gaul an offer the men of cloth could not refuse. Then they seized total control of Christianism in the regions they ruled, which was everything in Europe, but for Visigothic Iberia and parts of Italy controlled by “Longobeards” or Constantinople.

The Imperium Francorum was not a theocracy, though. It was a deeply secular regime masquerading as a theocracy. Its local saints (Saint Martin, etc.) allowed it to enforce its neo-Christian morality.

 

Simplicius: We are always told that the Roman empire succumbed to invasions. Did Christianity cause the loss of battles?

PA: It did so indirectly, by further removing the empire from the republic which had originated it. A fascist empire is weaker intellectually and morally than a democratic republic. Superstition is intrinsically made by, and for stupid people, and foster more stupidity. Fanatical Christians were pretty stupid, uncultured people. The three young surviving sons of Constantine got a Christian education eschewing pretty much all of Greco-Roman civilization, so they were uneducated brutes. That is why those sons massacred all of Constantine’s family, but for the very young Julian, and his half brother Gallus. Stupid brutes endowed with maximal power.

You cannot foster an empire of the stupid, and hope to win battles. The USA should meditate that one, while there is still time, under God, Allah, or whatever.

Emperor Valens lost two-thirds of Oriental Roman army and his life at Adrianople, August 9, 378 CE. Valens had rushed in before the Occidental Roman army, led by the mighty Occidental emperor Gratian could arrive on the battlefield. Valens wanted to keep all the glory to himself. So he got into battle with an exhausted, thirsty army, on a hot summer day, and forced a battle without preparations, although the Visigoths wanted to surrender, and nobody knew where the Visigothic cavalry was. As it turned out, the German cavalry surprised, by happenstance, the left wing of the exhausted Roman army, from behind.

 

Simplicius: What’s your point?

PA: Valen’s attitude, believing in miracles, and making little of life, was characteristically Christian.  The Christians read in the Bible that their super hero, Jesus, son of whatever, would come back only after the world was destroyed (“Apocalypse”). It is natural to suspect that the many absurd, self defeating, criminal and idiotic decisions they took in the Dark Ages were motivated by that revelation.

The Christians burned public libraries, put in power men in black, hordes of vampiric monks. They killed entire regions on the ground of slight differences in doctrine. That made  them less worthy than the barbarians at the gate.

 

Inquiring mind: Can we go back to the fall of the Roman empire? If you do not believe that Christianism was the fundamental cause of the decline of Rome, but just amplified the primary cause, fascism, how do you reconcile this view with Gibbon’s belief that Rome reached its apogee under the Antonine emperors?

PA: Indeed, I completely disagree with Gibbon about what the apogee was.

Recently an Airbus 330 crashed into the Atlantic, falling all the way into the ocean in an apparently irresistible fall.  The disaster started when, after losing its speed indicators, and then its computers, the plane pitched up, and gained altitude quickly. Then it stalled, and lost lift. Gibbon is confusing that fatal rise, the early Principate, and then the Antonines, with a great success. Although it was indeed an apogee of fascism, it was also a decline, fall and catastrophe for civilization.

 

Simplicius: Can we remove aeronautics from the metaphors we will use in history?

PA: No. Metaphors allow to translate entire specialized and correct bodies of logic to another realm. Even the Bible uses them. Making metaphors is exactly how mathematics work. Mathematics is a set of systematically prepared metaphors, that’s all. Using new and wild metaphors allows to use mathematics where no official mathematics exist yet.

You see the three pilots of the Air France flight applied the doctrine imposed worldwide in such a case, which was to keep the nose up, and apply a lot of power. As it turned out, in two successive accidents, that doctrine is completely wrong.

Gibbon was writing in the eighteenth century, and believed that a fascist empire was the highest form of civilization. That sure made him popular within the British empire. Remember: a British admiral was hanged, because he had lost a battle, “pour encourager les autres“, as Voltaire put it. Hanging lots of children also encouraged others to behave. Gibbon was modern in his denigration of organized superstition, but not in his apology of fascism.

 

Inquiring mind: Have the flight directives been changed?

PA: A year before the Air France disaster, there had been a mysterious A320 crash over the Mediterranean. These planes are never supposed to crash, but for gross human error, or acts of god. The brand new plane had on board extremely experienced pilots, aviation authorities, including a civil aviation inspector, from Germany and New Zealand. Nevertheless it stalled during a test flight, in day light, good weather, with a perfectly functioning plane.

After analyzing that crash, and after its AF 447′s preliminary findings, the French Bureau d’Enquêtes et d’Analyses pour la sécurité de l’aviation civile (BEA) guessed what happened in both cases. The world aviation authorities changed their recommendations. The new doctrine privileges  the recovery of a correct angle of attack, rather than the old, and erroneous approach of training pilots to power their way out of a near-stall with minimum loss of altitude.

It turns out that the forward position of the two engines beneath the wing in such planes as the A320 and the A330, tends to make them pitch up, the more power is applied, thus contributing to the stall. The new recommendation applies to Airbuses and Boeings.

 

Simplicius: So let me get that, you think that the Roman empire somehow stalled? And the crew could not recover it, because it used the wrong understanding of the situation, so the more it applied power, the more it stalled like these ill fated jets?

PA: Exactly. Even well meaning emperors made a bad situation worse, by applying too much power, and not enough intelligence. They should have recovered the correct angle of attack, the correct attitude, first (as the Franks did).

Those well meaning and all too power hungry leaders would include the Antonine emperors (1C), or Diocletian (~ 300 CE), Constantine (4C), or even Julian (who attacked too readily in Mesopotamia, getting killed there, possibly by treachery, instead of comforting first at home his abatement of rabid Christianity). It’s hard to make a stupid society intelligent by becoming more brutish.

 

Simplicius: What happened to your habitual obsession with plutocracy, in this explanatory scheme?

PA: Plutocracy is the fundamental reason why civilization degenerated into fascism. I was just explaining what happened further down the line of truths and consequences, why power itself made a bad situation worse.

Rome had lots of power, and power kept on being reapplied for centuries, for trying to make work what did not work. In the Sixth Century emperor Justinian started with a pretty good situation, but, by applying more and more power, he destroyed the empire ever more, in the guise of reconquering it.

Plutocracy is not a particular tribe, nor a particular religion. Plutocracy is a mathematical effect. It happens in all and any society. It concentrates ever more power in ever fewer brains.

Ultimately plutocracy fails, because, having only a few brains in power, it lacks brainpower. So one ends down with a stupid society. Plutocracy subsumes mass, and massive, stupidity. That is what happened to Rome, Orient and Occident. A stupid society is less able to handle an exterior challenge, be it ecological or military.

Plutocracy is always abated in societies which perdured. The Vikings used to reduce the plutocratic effect by using up (so to speak), and then burning, the concubines of the chief. Indians did pretty much the same (until the Brits outlawed the time honored, religious tradition). Comanches killed the horses of the chief, sometimes thousands of them.

The Franks redistributed wealth, and power, by equal inheritance, a huge difference with Rome. Middle Age Europe switched to a civil wars, revolutions, and a confiscation model, to redistribute wealth until the modern taxes on inheritance.

When the Mongols (and their Franco-Georgian allies) destroyed Baghdad, the Khan accused the Caliph to have just accumulated wealth, instead of taking care of his people, before putting him and his family to death.

 

Inquiring Mind: Did the Romans lose their technological edge? Did that make the situation worse?

PA: Indeed, the Romans lost their military technological superiority. Parthian arrows from composite bows could pierce Roman armor, and so Rome could not submit the Parthians. After 300 CE, the Franks had pretty much the best steel, and the better weapons. It was a good thing that they were more faithful to older Roman republican ideals than the leadership of Rome itself. But it is also why they dominated the Roman army, from inside, starting with Constantine. Thank God.

 

Simplicius: Why did the Romans lose the technological edge?

PA: A preliminary question is why did they acquire it to start with. Under the Roman republic, officials were motivated by doing their official jobs well. So they tried to equip the army with the best weapons. When they saw a better weapon somewhere, they adopted it, adapted it, and rendered it superior. They did this with the Spanish sword, Carthagenese ships, etc.

Under the empire, starting at the top, with the emperor, officials were more pre-occupied by their position in the crab basket, than by doing their official job well. In a fascist empire, the moral system in force is self advancement by persuading the few, or by somber conspiracies, while piling up more riches, be it only to buy everybody, whereas  in a functioning democratic republic, the moral system is all about doing the good job one is elected for, verified by the people.

Simplicius: Are you saying the military-industrial complex was corrupt in the Roman empire? 

PA: It certainly was, starting well before Germanicus’ assassination under Tiberius.  Germanicus was to be successor to Tiberius. He was a wildly successful general, recovering Germany, hence his name. He decided to launch a campaign by himself, instead of quelling in blood a rebellion of the legions. Top generals were pretty much to know that fate in the empire, and weapon procurement became an afterthought.  

One can see a similar phenomenon in the present USA, where many weapon systems are extravagantly financed, although they are known to be ineffective against maximal threats. F22, F35, and big aircraft carrier fleets are example. The F22 has never seen combat, although it’s the most expensive fighter plane.

The F22 could not even be engaged in Libya, lest it be shot down, whereas the French used Mirage and Rafales against a fully functional anti-aircraft system. The French use active stealth, anti-noise. The Chinese have made no mystery that they would sink U.S. carriers, using ballistic missiles. The Americans have no defense against ballistics. Too busy spending money on pork barrels. This may have the perverse effect to entice the Chinese to attack Taiwan, as they believe that the island will get no support from the USA’s obsolete F18s.

 

Simplicius: Where does the USA stand between these the two extremes of total plutocracy, and full democracy?

PA: Pretty much on the way to Roman style plutocracy, a republic in name only.

Just look at Obama’s Director of the Budget. After helping to direct dozens of billions, if not hundreds of billions, to a particular bank, Citigroup, Peter Orszag accepted a job there, although he has no experienced in banking.

Never mind: he will be rewarded with millions. And Mr. Clean, Obama, who was going to have nothing to do with lobbyists, sees nothing to talk about there. In Great Britain, Obama’s ex director of the budget would have been thrown in jail (there is a specific law against this sort of bartering).

In the Roman empire, this sort of things was systematic. Public service was replaced by private service. Roman emperors would even be jealous of their generals, and restrained them, so that they would keep the glory to themselves. There was a bit of that showing up, when Obama personally directed, and made it known that he supposedly micromanaged, the raid against bin Laden.One can see the cult of personality rising. In truth bin laden’s capture was a deal with the Pakistani ISI, but it was presented as the personal, heroic, herculean work of the emperor. Just like in Rome.

 

Simplicius: how do you know the ISI sold bin Laden?

PA: Logic per se is enough. Let’s make a Star War analogy. If you found the leader of the resistance residing comfortably in the center of the empire’s Death Star, you would naturally suspect that the emperor knew about it.

As it happened, some French journalist TV crews where in the same city the night bin Laden was eliminated. They drove in early the next morning and asked witnesses. everybody agreed that the entire city is under secret service lock down, and the TV crews, with hidden cameras got some pretty enlightening sequences on the spot. Don’t expect any of this to show in the media of the USA anytime soon.

 

Inquiring mind: So what is exactly the connection between plutocracy, fascism, economy and technology?

PA: Well we have a four dimensional space here. A society such as imperial Rome was an object in that 4 dimensional space. Rome showed, for centuries, that plutocracy and fascism, although related, are different dimensions: the former was centered around the senate, the second around the army. Economy and technology were also independent, but related dimensions. Rome was a technological society. When its technological organization collapsed, it collapsed.

 

Inquiring mind: Did the emperors discourage technology?

PA: Just as they discouraged their generals (when they did not outright execute them, as Nero did with his top general), the emperors discouraged technology itself.

Some Roman emperors explicitly advocated technological stasis. They said it was to preserve employment. Machines would steal employment. Engineers got rewarded for NOT revealing their inventions. A very large factory complex powered hydraulically  was found in Provence. By the Third Century, the Romans used water power extensively, for example for fulling or sawing wood, and stone. 

 

Simplicius: And did your “Frees”, your Franks, changed that? Did those illiterate savages advance technology?

PA: They sure did. And it was not just the Franks themselves, but the regions in which Romanitas had penetrated, under the wing of Christianism. So technology progressed in Ireland, or Anglo-Saxon areas. The introduction of ship mills (originally launched by Justinian’s general  Belisarius, as the Muslims controlled the land, hence the streams) spread to those regions. So did tide mills, by the Sixth Century in Northern Europe.

The Franks did not stay illiterate very long. (The case of Charlemagne was special, something about his dad wanting to make a real man of him, and not a weak intellectual.) Differently from other Germans, the Franks wanted to penetrate the higher reaches of Roman society, so they pushed their children towards education, and mingling with Romans in all ways (something below the dignity of the Goths).

Soon technology was advancing again strongly. The Frankish army annihilated the Moor and Arab armies in a series of famous battles and campaigns, something Rome had proven unable to do even once, on land. In the process, French steel proved itself even better than Damascus steel, and the Franks invented heavy cavalry, perched on monster horses.

Biotechnology was a particularly Frankish achievement. The Tenth Century was “full of beans”. Newly engineered beans, that is. Because slavery was unlawful, and it was not recommended to try to domesticate a Frank, the Franks domesticated instead all sorts of animals, including oxen and very convenient draw horses. Developing new, deep ploughs to go with them. Europe covered itself with windmills and watermills.  

When Europeans made it to China, they were amazed to see that the Chinese did everything by hand, including moving huge tree trunks, hundreds of people lifting them, something which was done with few people, animals, and mechanical advantage in Europe.

By 1,000 CE, the energy at the disposal of individual European was the highest in the world. Rome had been superseded, the world was left behind. And this was accompanied by a theoretical and empirical understanding never achieved before, while the rest of the world was going around in circles.

Abelard used to be called “our Aristotle”, an acknowledgement that French theory had superseded Athens by 1120 CE. The oscillatory mechanical clocks of the 13th century contained a lot of hidden understanding of physics. And so on.

Thus the colonization of about half the planet by Europeans in the next nine centuries, and the global triumph of Western civilization was no accident, and its seed was ethical, and planted by 486 CE. Some will say it was not just the Franks, but that the Irish, and the like, saved civilization. However Saint Patricius, the so called Saint Patrick, was formed in Cannes, Provincia, where a famous festival is still held nowadays.

As fascist Rome decayed, Romanitas expanded in the guise of Christianism, and soon was found all the way to Norway, Ethiopia, and Mongolia. The Franks were particularly good at using it ahead of their armies. And told the natives that Charlemagne would be mollified, if, and only if they had converted first.

The  fundamental superiority of Western civilization invented by Europeans after the fall of the massively fascist empire, was a new covenant giving more clout to individual minds. That covenant was a reversal of massive fascism, the strategy used by the Egyptian or (all too many) Mesopotamian super states from the start.

Thus, at a more advanced stage of civilization and technology, the Europeans were able to renew with the sort of freedom founds at the roots of Egypt, its most creative time, or the innovative freedom of the Sumerian cities, or of the Cretan thalassocracy. 

The covenant for the mind rested on empowering individuals through more freedom , while keeping in sight that the freedom of all means the equality of much.

 

Simplicius: Did not Tocqueville warn against too much equality  at the cost of freedom?

PA: Tocqueville was a young aristocrat who spent a few months in the USA. He is viewed as a deeper thinker than he really was. After the first massive revolution of 1789 dialed back the extravagant privileges and riches of the French plutocracy, he could only be bitter.

The white Europeans who had emigrated to North America, had just established a government, the grandly named United States of America. Tocqueville saw columns of Cherokees, the original inhabitants, forcefully deported in a scene which would be repeated only in the death throes of Nazi Third Reich.  The white invaders of America were using their freedom to treat the inhabitants to extermination through deportation. However Mr. young aristocratic philosopher could not find within himself the deep mental resources necessary to say anything about it.

 

Inquiring Mind: Were the Franks more equalitarian than the Greco-Romans?

PA: Incomparbly much more so. The leaders of the Franks were typically great warriors and, or consummate  politicians, they were also very rich, with sometimes nearly as many residences as Senator Mc Cain. However, because of the equalitarian inheritance laws, the wealth and property would be quickly distributed , and also made women rich, powerful, and influential. Hence, the most important Frank after Clovis, was queen Bathilde, who outlawed slavery.

Thus an important part of the new ethics was that women also ruled. I think I counted seven female sovereigns in 150 years. And they were not figureheads. The Imperium Francorum was a multipolar oligarchy where many ruled, from men of the cloth to kings, dukes and counts, quite a few of those self made persons (such as the runway English slave Bathilde).

The continual redistribution of riches fed the incessant Frankish inheritance quarrels. This has been confused with a weak state in later times. But such was not the case. It was a new style of state, which has a lot in common with today’s European Union (albeit with constantly changing borders which meant nothing).

Frankish civilization was enabled by constant arguing about ethical points. Kings would come out, and point out that “Saint Martin would never have done that, because of this, and the other thing, so we should not do it either. Instead, being very wise, he would have done what we are going to do.”… Differently from Roman imperators, Frankish leaders justified themselves ethically. All what Roman soldiers expected from their imperators were  greed satisfied and conquest achieved. It was a completely different world.

In the first ten centuries, after the domestication of church and Rome alike, the Franks, east and west, and their successor regimes, built many of the democratic institutions of Occident.  They also established a sustainable economy. Or, at least, sustainable for 8 centuries of demographic expansion, before the conflation of dramatic problems of the Fourteenth Century. This, once again, demonstrated the superiority of their civilization over greed and exploitation based Rome.  

More powerful, more appropriate, more sustainable, hence more  advanced technology: such is the way of the wise, running away from the problems of previous technology, towards a more understanding future always. Wisdom without science, and conscience, is only the ruin of freedom, and of the cities themselves.

***

Patrice Ayme

***

Simplicius: Do you make a difference between Christianity and Christianism?

PA: I prefer “Christianism”.  The French use “Christianism”, and it helps us with the notion that it is a system of thought among others. Such as “Islamism”, or “fascism”, “Marxism”, “Communism”, romanticism, scientism, relativism, existentialism, nihilism…

4% Inflation Best

ECB, FED, BAD.

Summary: The psychological effects of inflation are misunderstood, and misemployed, causing underemployment. Gentle inflation is best, ultra low inflation is bad and dangerous. There are philosophical, and technical, reasons for that.

Gentle, but significant, inflation stirs the economy as needed, and advantages advancing technology relative to the forces of sedimentation of the obsolescing past.

The inflation target of the European Central Bank, 1%, is way too low. The US Fed is just as bad, with its zero interest rate policy, which mostly serves its friends in the plutocracy. As it is, the zero interest rate policy does not provide money to the real economy, and other things need to be done.

One of the things to do: target inflation around 4%.

***

EURO SINKING, EUROPE RISING:

The European constitution enshrined the erroneous notion that the European Central Bank could enforce the value of the euro without worrying about the European economy in general, as if one could have a currency without an economy (the mandate of the Fed of the USA is to watch over the currency, and the economy).

This conceptual imbalance, a currency with an economic disconnect, led to an overvalued euro, while putting the Chinese economy on steroids, and allowing American plutocrats to splurge through the elaborated web of corruption they sneakily set up for themselves worldwide, leveraging themselves on the strong euro.

The Sino-American circus at the Copenhagen climate conference pretty much torpedoed decades of European evolution towards greater efficiency. It was pretty obvious that Europe’s entire strategy to switch, at immense cost, to sustainable energy and low CO2 production, was a casualty of plutocratically driven Sino-American expediency.

Europe was condemned to keep on sacrificing itself while China rips its intellectual property (example: duplicating Siemens Very High Speed trains!), demolishing moreover its industry by unfair competition, due to the undervalued Chinese currency, and the USA could keep on enjoying quasi free energy, while polluting the entire planet with its addiction to deadly fossil fuels, while rampaging militarily throughout Central Asia, looking for more, as it enjoyed the protection of the overvalued euro.

Something needed to be done. The Sino-American arrogance was enabled by the overvaluation of the euro. European products could not compete. The European economy was stagnating, and its substantial essence was invigorating Chinese and Americans, whose economy progressed by leaps and bounds.

The euro had to go down, European advisers concluded. Miraculously, suddenly, Europe observed the presence of Greece in its midst. It was always known that Greece was a desperate case, as it converted its drachma into euro at too high a rate (making the Greeks instantaneously rich and unemployed). But it had not been observed yet, as it deserved. It’s good to have a desperate case in one’s closet, to frighten the vampires with.

So now the euro is going down. Patriotic Europeans ought not to be satisfied until it reaches parity. Come to think of it, a few years as undervalued as the euro was overvalued, should do wonders for the European economy. (Let see what happens to the plutocratic USA, as it faces competition from correctly priced European products!)

This being said, the ECB inflation target of 1% is deeply erroneous. Inflation actually spurs demand: it is no coincidence that so many German products were sold to the parts of Europe with the most inflation (the PIIGS). Without that inflation, Germany would be doing much less well.

Just an example: Spain has bought Very High Speed trains from Siemens (which reach 250 mph, 400 km/h on the Madrid Barcelona line). Spain could have bought equivalent VHS trains from Alstom, the French company which is the competitor of Siemens. So now Spain has a deficit, and some Germans whine. Would they prefer Spain to have bought French trains? (By the way, the Chinese deconstructed and mass produced Siemens VHS trains, in an apparent violation of intellectual property… and now they propose to sell said stolen property to the USA).

***

THE EURO: A MINIMUM WHICH NECESSITATES MORE.

After 1,000 years of intra European wars between people who wanted too much, the meta principle of construction of Europe is to proceed minimally, as needed. No more, no less. The euro was established because one cannot have dozens of countries each with its own currency, in a small place: that was the necessity.

Another more drastic reason is that the French and the Germans (and the Benelux, Austrians and Northern Italians) do not see why they should not have a common currency, although they see plenty of reasons to have one. As far as the French and Germans are concerned, to have different currencies is as smart as having West Texas with a different currency from East Texas. But then France, Germany and the Benelux, that’s 180 million people.

So now 16 countries are in the Eurozone. More are in it informally (such as Romania). Estonia should formally join in 2011.

The euro was established as a currency, without governance, except an honorable promise, that everybody would be saintly, and keep yearly budget deficits below 3% of GDP (and 60% GDP for total state debt). That promise was broken, as soon as France and Germany found it was in their best interest to break it. At that point a crisis was certain: the magic spell had been broken. If France was going to allow a 8% deficit, Germany 6%, why should not Greece have 9.4%? After all the paragons of financial supremacy, the USA, has 11% deficit, and Britain, 12.8%…

So the crisis exploded, after the Copenhagen disaster. Greece was called a disaster, and the money manipulators scurried for their little lives, unknowingly doing the work of French intellectuals. The euro finally went down. A bit too fast, though: scary interest rates of the order of 21% on some Greek government debt were seen. It was time to slow things down.

The French have long promoted ECONOMIC GOVERNANCE. The way many see it in France, French taxes act as a subsidy for many other European powers. And not just because of the completely independent French nuclear umbrella; Britain has long behaved as a less regulated extension of Wall Street, with plenty of fiscal paradises attached to itself (Anglo-Normand islands, Isle of Man; arguably all of Britain was a tax heavens for non UK plutocrats), something that exploded in 2008: the AIG unit that cost US taxpayers around 180 billion dollars was based in London, to fully enjoy deregulation, New Labor style.

The trick to lower the euro degenerated in a sovereign debt crisis, and Europe finally reacted to it. Merkel went to Moscow to celebrate victory on the Nazis with the Russian leaders, as NATO forces paraded on Red Square in front of the Kremlin, as they should. Sarkozy cancelled, stayed home in Brussels to handle the debt and fiscal crisis, leaving French troops to parade without their president.

That was the Franco-German duo at its best: France, seconded by a trusting Germany, in command, making the Lisbon Treaty instantaneously obsolete, as required by the crisis at hand. The European Central bank was suddenly given powers it never had, and that the Lisbon constitution excluded (but which all real central banks have), such as buying bonds from member states (the US Fed has long been selling and buying its own bonds, in a gymnastics incomprehensible for those not abreast of these mysteries… but it is crucial; the Fed also bought for no less than 2,400 billion dollars of mortgages.)

France and Germany together are a superpower. Others have to join. This is how the EU works, how the Schengen Treaty and the Eurozone work.

***

CONTROLLED FLIGHT INTO TERRAIN (CFIT):

Inflation is collapsing:

BLS, Cleveland Fed.

This is bad: should this go on a bit more, there is no way out.

*

American economists ought to worry about deflation, instead of penning anti-European rants with no deep philosophical underpinnings. The European Union had deep philosophical roots, 2,000 years before there was Hitler, and he got crushed, he and his fascist racist ideological company. As soon as Germany and France became again politically identical, there was no reason left for the Verdun Treaty’s partition (August 843 CE). So now we have a united Europe, and American economists should worry about depression in the USA, not worry about fostering disunion on a continent far away, in the apparent hope that the USA will triumph once again.

Uncontrolled deflation is flight into terrain, and low inflation targets invite it. It is clear to me that the 1% (!!!!) inflation target of the ECB is a philosophical, and technical mistake. Recently the ECB was congratulating Estonia for having achieved that target: bad.

First technically: inflation can be controlled, by rising interest rates. Once Carter had nominated Volcker to crush inflation, Volcker was able to do so by rising interest rates to 23% (causing 2 recessions and making Carter lose the election).

Deflation cannot be controlled, though. A simple analogy: in a plane, if one is high enough, one can go higher. But if one has gone down too much, one crashes into the ground. A plane can fly higher, but a plane cannot fly underground. Economists need to be brought back to earth safely.

To pursue the aeronautical analogy, an economic bubble is like a stall for a plane: one goes up too high, too fast, forward motion in the medium becomes insufficient, lift disappears and one falls.

Forward motion, in economics, is real progress made into the physical world (some of it Sisyphus style, as in repairing potholes, curing the sick; some of it grandiose, as when switching to new, more advanced technologies, some of it necessary as in teaching the young, and the deciders). The economy, as the plane, needs to provide lift, lest it crashes (the world economy is the largest machine, and, as all machines, it can fail). When the Soviet economy failed, lifespan, health, income and creature comforts collapsed. Economy is not just about profits, contrarily to what plutocrats think (supposing they think)

There is another more subtle effect illustrated by the aeronautical analogy. Applying the full power of zero interest rates when already crashing from a bubble gone wrong, can make the situation worse.

There was a strange crash of an Airbus A 330-200 in Tripoli, with a fatigued, sleep deprived crew, facing the rising sun, with a foggy mist on the ground. The pilots apparently mistook all too long the desert for the runway. After removing the last safeguards of the plane’s computerized brain, they came next to the ground, realized their error, and applied, too late, the full power of the Airbus, which is enormous. The plane reared steeply, more than 20 degrees, said the captain of an Alitalia jet behind, and roared up. But its tail hit the ground hard, tearing from the rest of the airframe. Still dragged fiercely by the engines at maximum power, the jet pitched down, and drove into the ground, pushed by its engines, disintegrating into remarkably tiny pieces.

Controlled Flight Into Terrain. What happens when you apply maximum thrust while crashing into the ground (A 330-200, Tripoli, May 2010).

***

Morality: if one has already started to crash into the ground, applying more power will only cause further damage.

Translating this analogy to economics: in a free market, fractional reserve banking system, the maximum thrust is given by the zero interest rates policy. The more one lowers interest rates, the more banks can lend (since they get money at zero interest, free money, from the state). Fine, that’s the theory. But to who do they lend, and for what? Absent government control, they will do what they have done best lately.

Unfortunately in the present morally corrupt system, the banks look for the strongest profit, for themselves, and that is not obtained by investing to optimize the real economy. Instead publicly financed private banks invented a casino in the sky where they attribute each other imaginary profits.

Thus, the stronger the banks, the more they do what they do best: giving to their friends, to their politicians, past, present and future, indulging their addiction to derivatives, shadow banking, and various other conspiracies between each other, to create fake profits, while the central banks shower them secretly with free money.

In other words, the lower the interest rates at which the central bank gives money to the banks, the more the banks do exactly what caused the crash. Or rather, the crashes: the financial crash of 2008, and the slower and more formidable crash of the entire social and economic system of the West (which has been going on for more than a decade).

This is true in Europe, where the enormous "private" financial institutions fed the economic imbalances of the PIIGS (Greek GDP per head is way higher than Greek earnings, through borrowing and subsidies). Thus the real economic and fiscal problems of Europe have nothing to do with not providing low interest rates (they are nearly as low as they can get), rather the opposite. The same holds in the USA.

Instead, the economic and social problems arise from the moral values of the main economic actors, what they do, and the activities which have been encouraged, creating imbalances, but mostly a lack of forward lift (hence the Tea Party, the return to no government, the early Neolithic).

Forward lift in economy is provided by better (more powerful, efficient, ecological) technology (necessary, as the old resources and methods get exhausted). So, to sustain the economy and the way of life, one needs to provide continually better, more complex, technology (this flies into the conception of Tainter that higher complexity kills; instead, it saves lives, and provides economic lift).

How does one provide more advanced, more complex technology? Well an ever more advanced thinking system is one necessary factor, dire need and regulation are others. One can even get a little help from the free, for profit market free enterprise as in Silicon valley, where greedsters mix with inventors to produce gadgets.

But INFLATION ITSELF CAN HELP TECHNOLOGY BY MAKING THE GENERAL POPULATION THIRSTY FOR INNOVATION.

***

INFLATION INFLATES THE DESIRE FOR BETTER TECHNOLOGY:

Inflation advantages the implementation of more advanced technology, because inflation forces people to continual reevaluate their old habits.

Conventional economic theory has it that people look for the cheapest product, or for better products, or a mix of these characteristics. Right. But, before looking, people have to WANT TO LOOK. Or have to be FORCED TO LOOK.

Conventional economic theory has forgotten that detail: if consumers don’t need to bother, they may well not bother. Inflation is a spur that forces economic participants to look, and makes actually the entire public into savvy , even philosophical, economic participants, lest they drown in rising prices.

Indeed, old habits depend upon old values, and old consumption patterns. When inflation permeates the economy, all prices rise, and create a dynamic ecology, by changing continually the environment, forcing speciation of new technology, that serve new habits. It is exactly what happens when speciation in biology is forced by environmental changes.

Increasing prices force people to continually look afresh at whether their old habits are WORTH IT. People see the costs and prices of what they used to like go up, and they ask themselves: why not to try something else?

Often they find the old less worthy than the new. How? New products depending on higher technology benefit from automation and simplification of production. The latest TVs have very few parts, several orders of magnitude less than the old ones, and this is true over all of engineering. Hence the prices of the most modern products rise less. Some will say that the price of these products and services would go down in a zero inflation world, and it makes no difference. Sure, they would go down, but there is a difference.

Te point is that consumers do not have to look at the costs of the new products and services, so they may, and will, ignore them, MUCH MORE than in a world where the products they are used to rise in price.

Also, as inflation works its magic, people will question MORE paying through the nose for traditional, hence less efficiently provided products and services. Basically a good measure of inflation forces the hand (manual labor) to compete with the mind (intellectual labor), and the hand is found wanting.

Gentle inflation continually swirls the economy, for higher performance.

1% inflation target is a clear problem: it risks to forever extend the Great Depression we are in. For all the preceding reasons, 4% ought to be the inflation target. This is not enough, but it will help.

***

PA

P/S: A well known interest of gentle inflation is that it makes sovereign (government) debt manageable, through nice and easy default, compensated by increased economic activity. This is all the more necessary since the present austerity packages will only make the deflation worse, and are untenable, if not compensated by significant inflation (which will have to be engineered by government programs, as during the New Deal, or with the help of national banks as in India or China; clearly these examples show what needs to be done, in the West, again).

Inflation can be compensated with subsidies for the poor, as France did in the pre-Trichet era (Trichet was head of the Banque de France for 10 years or so before becoming ECB head, and is an anti-inflation hawk of the excessive type).

PA