Foundation Delusion

Kneel to hyper wealth, the republic is history.

TOO MANY FOUNDATIONS ARE JUST PLUTOCRATIC EXPLOITATION DEVICES.

Main ideas: All too many foundations further plutocracy. Their nefarious influence spreads far and wide. From the University of Chicago (fief of reducing all to greed, founded by a foundation), to the four decades of American sponsored war in Afghanistan (a devious plot of the 1970s to institute oil procurement in Central Asia). The many foundations of plutocratic type drag society down the road to hell in all sorts of ways, some overt, some covert, and the worst are emotional.

Paying careful attention to emotional distorsion brings a new twist to the school building foundation tied to “Three Cups of Tea”. It should have been “Three Cups of Oil” (surprise, surprise!). I view that foundation’s main mission to be part of a giant cover-up about what has been truly instituted in Central Asia, in the name of American consumer. Indeed, real U.S. policy was the exact opposite.

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Abstract: In my book, plutocracy is the rule of Pluto, not just wealth. Wealth is only one of the characteristics of that God. Invisibility is another. Being underground, under cover still another.

And then, of course there is Hades sie, the Dark Side of the Mind. Plutocrats have many awful tricks. Foundations are one of these tricks. Foundations allow their corporate officers to rule the world ever more, while living like kings and queens ever more, including to enjoy the warm glow of the adorating masses cued by the Main Stream Media (see the Melinda & Barack school show).

But the underground has other tricks. The magazine of the plutocrat Forbes will not talk about his colleague Qaddafi’s 150 billion dollar fortune: that’s friendly, and that is wise (otherwise people would understand what plutocracy really is!).

Qaddafi, of the most powerful sort of plutocrats, the mass murdering plutocrat, hides behind the innocent, preferably masses of children. That helped him to reign 42 years. He learned his lesson well. Once Qaddafi, during one of his invasions of Chad, decades ago, was among his military, like the average dictator, without any women and children to hide behind. He was at a desert air strip. French aircraft came low and fast. Their bombs, slowed down by drag chutes, nearly killed him. Ever since the dictator has been careful  to surround himself with curtains of innocents. 

Qaddafi had been conducting state sponsored terrorism with impunity. In one of his rare appropriate decisions, Reagan bombed his command compound. Qaddafi whined disingenuously that an adoptive “daughter” had been killed. Another trick. Nobody had heard of that daughter before. Qaddafi had been informed by some traitors, within NATO, that 100 American bombers were heading his way. Qaddafi and his entourage fled, with more than half an hour of warning. Qaddafi did not explain why he strangely forgot his beloved daughter-one-had-never-hear-of-before. Maybe he left her behind, as one leaves a goat for a tiger. Most probably she was not his daughter, either. maybe she died somewhere else, in some other way. Tricky, tricky. Recently, dead demonstrators were brought out of storage to be recycled as NATO victims.

As it is, dozens of American plutocrats have taken a well publicized oath to shelter all their money in foundations, calling that philanthropic. See: they should not be taxed, they are already so good, besides supporting the world on their mighty shoulders (and if they smirk,  for your own good too, because you have not worked enough, you have not served hard enough to be able to do that, so they are doing it for you: watch their servants serve in Washington, and be rewarded with fortunes, thereafter).

The blossoming of American foundations is a devious plot to foster, advertize, and protect American plutocracy. Foundations let the hyper wealthy avoid taxes, while allowing them to gather ever more power, with the complicity and collaboration of  the political leadership.

(For another touching aspect of the foundation story, see Obama saving American schools thanks to a few millions from Melinda Gates, apparently a sort of unelected unofficial official who married well. Instead, why does not Obama propose to tax the Gates 50 billion dollars, to get some real money, for American schools? Is somebody looking for a future source of income, thus preserving it carefully for future generations of his own brood? Just asking…)

The scandal of the foundation delusion extends well beyond “Three Cups of Tea” and its sordid entanglement of military policy and propaganda in Afghanistan. The reign of foundations aims at replacing the justice of the republic by the philanthropy of feudalism, part of a cynical, concerted attempt to make the public thing irrelevant, and foster the cult of Pluto and its agents.

And Qaddafi, top plutocrat, and top foundation artist in all this? Is he out for good? Would not that be tragic for plutocracy? For the new foundation of the world on plutocracy? Sure. And that is why, as I write this, American envoys are secretly negotiating with Qaddafi in Mauretania. Not something European philosophers approve of, to put it mildly. But still a new twist in trickery of those who believe that the world ought to be in their pocket.

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USA: A WEALTH OF POVERTY, FRANCE: A POVERTY OF WEALTH?

One constant element of plutocratic propaganda in the USA is the sentence:”Americans are the most generous people in the world“. If one watches Fox News for a few hours, one will encounter that leitmotiv a few times. By that they probably mean that their rich sponsors have given them a lot.

Indeed, this is rather curious: so much generosity, so much poverty! The overall poverty rate climbed in 2009 to 14.3 percent, or 43.6 million people, the Census Bureau said its annual report on the economic well-being of U.S. households in September 2010 (the poverty line is $21,500 for four people). The share of Americans without any health coverage rose to 16.7 percent — or 50.7 million people.

Let’s compare with the usual suspect, the French public thing, the French res publica. The poverty line in France is set higher than in the USA at half of median income (thus would be 25K for 4). The poor seem to be around 6% of the French population… with free health care, free education, subsidized transportation, etc., the French are not poor in the American sense of increasing destitution and decreasing lifespan. The occurrence of poverty decreased in France over 30 years down from 15% (namely the present American levels).

France improved, the USA blatantly regressed, and this durable collapse is worse than the Great Depression of the 1930s (on long time series). 

Why such a contrast between US and French poverty? The USA ought to be much wealthier than France. Like Saudi Arabia, the USA has massive reserves of oil and gas, and France has none. Like Germany, the USA has lots of coal, and France has none. A hint to solve that riddle: in France the hyper wealthy get taxed the most, and that is more than 50%. In the USA, the hyper wealthy get taxed the less, and that is an average of 17%. (France has Arnault, a self made man, nearly as rich as Buffet, and without insider trading! So French billionaires are not suffering too much…)

And that 17% tax for the hyper wealthy does not even take into account the tax dodge of the FOUNDATION ILLUSION.

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FOUNDATIONS AS ONE MORE WEAPON OF THE PLUTOCRATS:

As a private company which set up “Private Family Foundations” puts it:

“In recent years, several private foundations have gained prominence in the media, and raised public awareness of their causes. Foundations, including the Bill and Melinda Gates, are often created with one philanthropic goal in mind. However, as the grantors often realize, establishing your own foundation can often make smart money sense, as well.

Plus, your last name does not have to be Rockefeller or Getty to start your own.

The Role of the Foundation:

A Private Family Foundation (PFF) is a separate entity, privately funded by you. It is created with the specific purpose of contributing to various charitable causes.

As a distinct, legal entity, The Private Family Foundation:

1. Contributes to a charitable cause and takes a tax deduction, while relinquishing personal control over your gift.

2. Minimizes your estate tax liability.

3. Avoids capital gains tax on the sale of appreciated property contributed to the charity of your choice.

4. Provides continuing employment and activity for your family members.

5. Identifies and preserves your family name for years to come.

Create and Control Your PFF:

Any Private Family Foundation must be created with a charitable “intent.” The Foundation is managed by a trustee or executive director that oversees the Foundation’s investments and distributes the Foundation’s assets.

You can even appoint yourself as the trustee of your own Foundation. This way, you maintain control over the assets contained in the Foundation.”

The Foundation Law in the USA was passed the same day as the Income Tax Law. Need I say more? The point (3) above means that if an individual becomes immensely wealthy through, say, the growth of shares in a company, he can transfer the gigantic profits without having to pay tax. Nor will his heirs have to pay tax. No wonder so many American foundations are rabidly “conservative” (a euphemism for plutocratic propaganda).

Did you ever wonder why so many hyper wealthy Americans set-up “charities” overseas in the most scenic places, and are thus forced to tough it out in the world’s most expensive hotels? (Hint: see which heavenly places the “Melinda and Bill Gates” enjoy when they go rescue Kenyans from mosquitoes!)

Thus we can see that the basic Foundation Law is a sham, a tax shelter for the hyper wealthy one is supposed to adore as if it were the Golden Calf. That is another advantage of the growth of foundations. It incites the commons to admire the hyper wealthy, and view in them heroes whose immense generosity saves the world.   

As foundations are protected from taxation, those devices of the hyper wealth, or the instruments they created, themselves typically tax-free, never stop growing. They are to the American jungle what ever-growing crocodiles are to the Australian swamps. Thus their strident pro-plutocratic propaganda is always louder. (See the Heritage Foundation, which is always careful to put the usual suspect, the French republic, at the bottom of all the classification it makes, and then Heritage is widely quoted in turn by the Main Stream Media of the USA, itself plutocratically owned.)

Then “The Economist” wonders in its April 28, 2011 issue: “Angst in the United States. What’s wrong with America’s economy? Its politicians are failing to tackle the country’s real problems. Believe it or not, they could learn from Europe.”

Really? “The Economist” used to sing the praises of the bloody dictator Pinochet (hey, another plutocrat!) and used to hate European welfare. For that neoconservative magazine to say this, that europe has got it more right, that Europe of the welfare state, the situation has got to be dismal. And so it is. “The Economist” praises welfare models against unemployment, that is massive government programs of retraining found in several countries.

However, “The Economist” does not realize the depth of the sociological problems of the USA. The cult of the foundations, that is, the cult of the Golden calf, is one of them. And that cult keeps on eluding “The Economist”. (Although the magazine has bemoaned the importance of wealth in the access to higher education in the USA.)

The dominance of the society of the USA by unlected, uncontrolled wealth has reduced democracy to shambles and fumes. That is why the white, educated USA is not reproducing anymore (as digging in the Census’s statistics show), making the problem even worse. Which schools would the educated white middle class send their children to? To do what thereafter? To serve the hyper wealthy by becoming valet park attendants?
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NOT SO FUNNY PHONIES:

Recently the revered Buffet, the USA’s richest financier, has been exposed in a way even American naifs  can comprehend: his closest collaborator, with whom he worked for decades, engaged in a form of massive insider trading (buying for his own account stock he would then get Buffet’s fortune to purchase).

I view Buffet as the world’s greatest insider trader, the ultimate splurger at the financial buffet. But, since its collaborator in this matter was the Bushama administration, and the untouchable puppet master Goldman Sachs, I shall thread lightly for now. The spider web of foundations extends throughout the USA, with poisonous spiders all over. As I said, Buffet connects to Gates. Both connect directly to Obama.

Another who became famous, and even central in the propaganda machine of the plutocracy of the USA, was the author of “Three Cups of Tea”, a required reading at the Pentagon, the entire world was loudly told. That Greg Mortenson, a medic, a sort of mountaineer, discovered and proclaimed that schools were better than bombs. Wow: all America was fascinated, by such Christian secular wisdom, that it broke into applause, and a Greg Mortenson cult grew: one American medic cures the world, teaches the little Muslim girls. How strong is America! And how good! See American money save the world, thanks to American generosity!

It turns out that the whole thing, top to bottom, may be phony (surprise, surprise!) Indeed why not to set-up good schools in the USA first? If education is that important? And why not to impose good schools in Central and South Asia through local government programs? Well, it sounds fishy, does not it? As we will see, the answer is convoluted, but central to the quagmire.

Jon Krakauer was impressed initially, and gave Greg Mortenson $75,000, but then, as he relates in “Three Cups of Deceit“:

Mortenson [used] his phony memoir to solicit tens of millions of dollars in donations from unsuspecting readers, myself among them. Moreover, Mortenson’s charity, the Central Asia Institute, has issued fraudulent financial statements, and he has misused millions of dollars donated by schoolchildren and other trusting devotees. “Greg,” says a former treasurer of the organization’s board of directors, “regards CAI as his personal ATM.”

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IS CAI SPELLED CIA?

The ramifications are much more sinister than even the astute Jon Krakauer has it. The strategy of the government of the USA is a conspiracy, or it’s not. Pseudo charities such as Mortenson’s are part of an obvious trick to mislead Americans, and others, about the real policies of the government of the USA in Central Asia. (Russia, and now China are also very good at disguising agents as aid workers… something the French don’t need to do, as they have their military in many African countries, when they do not collaborate tightly, as they do with Algeria, Morocco, or say, the Ivory Coast, now that French rockets have cleared said coast…)

The real use of Mortenson’s organization, as far as the thinkers in Washington are concerned, is as a propaganda operation, and a lot of the targets, is the public. The gullible public is in the USA, and South Asia. CAI hides the reality, which is, in its historical whole, the exact opposite of what CAI claims to want to do. Thus Nixon insisted:”I am not a crook!”. American policy is Nixon, writ large (and this is literally true: it’s Nixon and the still influential Kissinger who launched the plutocratic collaboration with the Chinese dictatorship… Nixon also launched HMOs… officially, Carter launched the war in Afghanistan in 1979, but some digging would no doubt excavate Nixon again).

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HOW CENTRAL ASIAN OIL WAS WON FOR THE WEST:

By having the Pentagon read “Three Cups of Tea” ostensibly, American progressives and American conservatives were led to beleive that the American defense apparatus went according to Mortenson’s credo: “schools, not bombs“.

The progressives felt good, the conservatives, even more so: American charity at its best. Not only are these people trying to kill us, but we keep on building schools for them. American do-gooders got persuaded of the opposite of reality. A first aspect of reality is that there are more American private contractors in Afghanistan than soldiers, and they are not building schools, but making war. Indeed,  the historical reality of American governmental policy is the exact opposite of the Americans-bring-schools-not-bombs myth the CIA, and the CAI, are trying to push.

Historically the Afghan war started when Pakistani intelligence, certainly incited by its boss, American intelligence, organized some primitives and thugs to prevent girls to go to school in Afghanistan. It all started with a  policy exactly opposite to that which is ostnsibly Greg Mortenson’s misson, and that is why Greg Mortenson is such an important cover-up, with sponsors in the highest places. Nothing better for a cover than the exact opposite of what is below.

Why so mean? Why did American intelligence promote an anti-girl policy? Because killing those who taught girls and attacking schools destabilized Afghanistan into civil war, into religious war, and towards a primitive, proto-Islamist state. If you want to rule, start by inciting potential opponents to fight each other. Nothing like religious war.

Some will say: “Wait, there is no oil in Afghanistan, just rare earths, the stuff green cars are made of!” Yes, true. As in the countries occupied by China next door. However, there is a lot of oil and gas, just immediately north of Afghanistan. That area was under Russian lock and key, before American intelligence started its Afghan adventure.

American intelligence knew all too well that Islam was the way to destabilize Central Asia. Destabilizing Aghanistan would gibe the USA a plausible reason to organize a Jihad. A somewhat similar strategy had been used against… France, in Algeria and the Sahara.

It worked then, sort of, against the French, and it worked again, and this time, much better. Mostly secular Afghanistan became a battlefield dominated by the USA, its army, its intelligence agents, its proxies, and a 250,000 strong army of Jihadists. The richest Saudis got a green light to spread money and jihad around, all the way to the Caucasus, and beyond.

This has been going on for four decades, although deliberately ignorant Americans became aware of Afghanistan only in 2001. Not only was Afghanistan destabilized, but so was all of Central Asia, and even the Caucasus. The Jihad spread all the way to London, even New York (distracting, but giving no the excuse to send official armies all over the region!)

Now American oil companies are all over Central Asia, north of Afghanistan, and the Russians are mostly out. Who said the Afghan war was not a great success? (The pathetic Russians were reduced to trying to cut the oil pipelines in Georgia, with their tanks!)

So it is the highest heights of insolence to now have the American Army crowe that it does good because it allows American civilians such as Mortenson to build schools for girls! If Mortenson’s Central Asian Institute did not exist the American oil strategy, the American Central Asian strategy, would have had to institute it. If something exists, look carefully at whom it really profits (and the same goes for foundations!)

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GENEROSITY FOR REAL:

Governments can be much more generous than individuals. It is a physical fact: a government is much larger, first of all. Secondly a government trying to be generous has a non-profit mission: office holders are not stakeholders. The officers of a government trying to be generous do not go in the best hotels in private jets, as the Gates do. And do not pay themselves hefty salaries to reward their own generosity, as most foundation types do.

A government can make sure that its generosity is not corrupted (there are laws against that, worldwide). And a government can be much more organized too. Besides, a government can enforce generosity, through taxation.

For all the big talk about their generosity, the American hyper wealthy are sucking the USA dry. They are like hyenas with a clamp on the throat of their victims, and they cannot talk.

The government can make sure that those who have it by far the easiest can contribute he most. After all, it’s the overall organization of society which allows them to have it by far the easiest. It is not that the sweat of their brow is a torrent, whereas sweat only pearls on the brow of others. Heroes exist, true, as Nietzsche, Ayn Rand, and zillions of others have pointed out, even before Ramses II’s tremendous non victory at Kadesh in Syria against the Hittites. Everybody agree that the Pharaoh in his electrum chariot, defended by his Greek bodyguard, saved the day.

But most of the greedy who crave power through money are not cut of that heroic cloth. They are more like rats who will do anything to get to the cheese, under the cover of darkness. (And therein a serious cancer, in the mind of our civilization, as  I point out in conclusion.)

Heroism should be encouraged, thus rewarded (although not exactly as in the USSR). But heroes do not lift the world: heroes they are, yes, but Atlases carrying the economy and sociology of the world, no.

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MISSION CIVILISATRICE, YES, FAKE GOODNESS, NO:

Americans discover that it feels good to instruct the ignorant. Good. But nothing new. The “Mission Civilisatrice” of Nineteenth Century French colonialism was not invented yesterday, and it worked (mostly). All of Senegal was conquered, or, more exactly pacified, by 5,000 Senegalese soldiers led by ten French born officers. Thus out of many local potentates, and seven nations with different languages, one national entity, Senegal, was born. With mandatory public schooling and free health care. Not bad for a country where, in the boondocks, slavery was one of the main industries, a generation before.

Although I smirk at superstition, I recognize that some religious organizations have contributed very positively to the civilizing mission (some Christian, some Muslim). Some of the clergy means the goodness they advocate (and it has nothing to do with the superstition in the name of which it is done).

But peace was also, and mostly, conquered at the point of a (well aimed) gun. In India, the British did, at the point of that well aimed gun, what 35 centuries of Hinduism and 24 centuries of Buddhism had not done. The British took out the murderous infamy of the caste system (a system the abominable Gandhi defended with all his meekness, down to his humiliating assassination).

The British also disrespected violently Indian superstition, by outlawing the  time honored religious tradition to burn the young widows alive with the corpses of their old rich husbands. Actually the Brits pushed their meddling so far as forbidding any burning of widows whatsoever, alive or not. Talk about colonial arrogance!

Overall, except for the occasional holocaust against Neolithic people (in the USA and Australia), the civilizing mission of the West has been pretty effective to foster more advanced civilization (the intellectual trade went both ways: African music spread worldwide, for example). However, this is not what is going in Afghanistan. (It is going on in Libya, though.)

Americans have been victim of plutocratic propaganda, and really believe that their “charities”, these foundations made initially to turn around the estate tax, and other taxes, work. No. If you want charity, institute a 50% tax rate on the well-off, as in Europe, and cut down on the personality cult. Then insist on the generosity of the government.

Government generosity is a splendid success in Scandinavia. After taking great care of their own citizens (generally wealthier than Americans, with much less poverty) those countries give a considerable part of their GDP in true generosity.

In the USA, the much vaunted generosity of Buffet, Gates and company is just a mask for one the most unfair societies in the world, getting even more so every day. Obama and his demoncrats have been kinder to the rich than even his (future) billionaire of a predecessor (by lowering tax rates even more). Just look at how many Americans are in prison, or in serious trouble (parole, etc.) with the justice system: about ten millions. These rates of incarceration are, by far, the highest rates in the world.

Foundations have their place, but not how they are presently set-up in the USA (other countries have other arrangements). The Foundation law ought to be changed, so that foundations cease to be tax shelters, and influence-peddling oppression devices of the hyper wealthy. Obama should learn to avoid the wealthiest tax dodgers, instead of advertizing them as somehow worthy of presidential praise.

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FOUNDATIONAL DEMONIZATION:

Last, but not least. I have exposed above reasons to disapprove of the grip foundations are having on American (hence World) society. Foundations are tax shelters, they exert undue influence, their replace public policy by private whim, they help buttress the spectacular claim that plutocracy that it is a philanthropy. Foundations incite people to go on their knees and beg the plutocracy as if it were the Golden Calf. The Bible warned us about Golden Calves. And rightly so. 

But there is worse. Foundations select for guidance by the worst. Even if it is guidance for the best, all too often it is guidance by the worst. And no, I am not just alluding to the Qaddafi Foundation.

Selection by the worst? Why? How? Why did parts of mankind ended being led by murderers such as Qaddafi or Hitler? Was that bad luck? not at all. They led the way they did, precisely because they were the worst. Only the worst can commit mass murder to satisfy their ambition, or, even worse, can view mass murder as a worthy ambition. 

There is an ominous connection between extreme ambition, the will to move mountains, and achievements akin to having mountains crumble on the many.

Evil exist in this world, as Obama himself recognized. Evil has a mission: submit the many into oblivion. That mission was evolutionary selected because of its ecological advantage. It leads to the yearning for power; submitting the many feels irresistible.

Hence the obsession some have to gather as much power as possible. (The bell curve of the frequency of unhinged domination was tilted just so by evolution that there are enough of these to insure just enough of whatever is necessary in the human character to provide with, which is also very bad. However, that shift into badness, just so, is adapted to war with sticks and stones, not thermonuclear weapons, and that is why democracies have to be pitiless, but not for the reasons and with the low standards Athens used.)

Those people obsessed by dominating others are going to compose most of the cohort which amasses great fortunes (as the 2011 book on Bill Gates by his closest collaborator, Paul Allen reveals). Should those types lead humankind? Some will mumble that Pericles, although overambitious, was a great political leader, that he inflected civilization the right way. True enough. But Pericles was just the mouthpiece of a number of top philosophers, and he mistreated Anaxagoras enough that the latter embarked on a suicidal hunger strike. Similarly, Caesar, Charlemagne, and many others were moderated by top philosophers.

Now all the plisophy which rules is from Wall Street, finance, oil tycoons, medicine greedsters, in other words, aspects of Pluto.

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PUBLIC RULE VERSUS PRIVATE WEALTH:

In any case, although most foundations have a political role, be it only by displacing proper public institutions, the fact remains that many, if not most of the influential ones, are intrinsically associated to artists of greed rather than the duty of good.

In a democracy, a republic, the power of elected officials is kept in check, first, by the public. Not so in a society dominated by foundations by the rich, for the rich.

The public, in a true democracy or true republic, also decides which emotions should dominate society, by financing them properly. Not so in a society dominated by foundations by the rich, for the rich.

And this is one difference with europe that “The Economist” should mull over. European powers finance the emotion of care, by financing public health care, or taking care of the unemployed (with income support and retraining: see the Netherlands).

Whereas, in the last thirty years, the political system in the USA, propped by foundations and their creatures (such as the university of Chicago) has financed the financiers, thus fostering the emotion of greed, and what goes with it, the greatest fraud ever conducted (the fake collapse of the financial system in 2008, and its “rescue” by politicians, in the name of the ignorant public, mobilizing much of the power of the American economy, ever since, something the Tea Party tried to understand, before failing to do so, no doubt thanks to its plutocratic sponsors such as the Koch brothers, and something that most of the public does not understand at all, in part because it would be too painful to switch to the revolutionary mode).

Foundations put ever more power in the hands of those who have proven, by their very successful careers, that they are the most obsessed by power, greed, domination and submission. Or in the hands of those who are the most devious (see Krakauer’s book above). Thus public control slips, and so does the enticement and reign of the mind’s noblest emotions. Hence foundations bring humankind ever lower, down the road to hell, the worship of the worst.

In a republic, if one genuinely wants good to be financed, one starts by learning not to kneel to Pluto and its the Golden Calf. One needs better emotional foundation than that.

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Patrice Ayme

Tags: Foundations, Global Plutocracy