Right Makes Might?

WHEN CONFRONTING EVIL, BIPARTISANSHIP IS NOT THE ANSWER. 

Witness against himself Obama has made bipartisan thinking infamous, and rightly so. When confronted to the worst extremism, such as the Tea Party, he crosses the bridge, and offers himself as a target. This way Tea Partisans need not vote for Perry, they may as well vote for Obama. Hey, everybody will win! The audacity to win! As one of the “senior advisers” of Obama, 40 years old, had the impudence to point out.

Bipartisan thinking was not invented by Obama, even in Anglo-Saxon countries. Some notables of the American revolution switched sides. Bipartisanship was already practiced by Pontius Pilatus. Earlier Plato befriended the tyrant of Syracuse, while claiming to be a partisan of the “Republic“. (Thus Christian despots did not burn Plato’s books, recognizing in him a kindred spirit.)

Confronted to Hitler, many crossed the bridge to him, in the name of openness, bipartisanship, and thus enabled him (among the first to do so was G.W. Bush’s grandfather Prescott, one of Hitler’s closest collaborators, head of American-Silesian; thus it was not surprising that Bush covered his family’s tracks by exhibiting the opposite attitude, loudly proclaiming a vast gap between himself and evil! Very crafty.)

Facile, or bipartisan, or not partisan, thinking incites some people to still make the case for Auschwitz. That they do not understand this does not excuse them. After all, most of the Germans who enabled Auschwitz did not understand that they did so. Actually they did not even know what Auschwitz was, nor wanted to conceive of it. That would have been un-German.

 People who keep on making the case for Auschwitz can persevere in this, because not enough contempt, condemnation, and, first of all, revelation, has been heaped over them, their deliberate obscurantism and confusionism, and their criminal attitude of tolerance for “infamy”. (To use Voltaire’s non bipartisan semantics.)

 Roger Cohen wrote an editorial, “Score One For Interventionism” in the New York Times. As Roger puts it:” Libya will not end the debate on intervention. But it confirms that the West must be prepared at times to fight for its values.”

 Yes. One should not even have to wait for such a confirmation anymore. May 8, 1945 should have been enough confirmation. Remember Auschwitz? The threat thereof incited the most famous intervention of the spirit of the enlightenment of the West: when France and Britain declared war to Hitler and his criminal supporters. It took five years and eight months, but, ultimately, Western democracy, and the enlightenment of the West, crushed the Nazi barbarity.

 So I expressed in a comment to the NYT, my agreement with Mr. Cohen:

“Score TWO for interventionism, as France threw out the dictator in Ivory Coast a few months earlier. So let’s recapitulate; France won two wars in a year, and the USA lost two, in a decade. Something else: France and Britain started the intervention in Bosnia, but, at the time, were too insecure to push it to victory quickly. France also intervened way late in Rwanda. Of this, no more.
Civilization needs to be enforced. “

 I was a bit taken aback: just one reader of the NYT approved what I said, whereas more than 80 clueless individuals approved what I view as a tissue of the usual irrelevance, lies and stupidities from a  guy called Richard Brauer, based in South Africa. That was more than twice the number of approvals any other comment got, which means that such mass murderous friendly thinking is widely shared by many who read the NYT.

 Brauer made his mass murdering criminal friendly thinking transparent. It rests on a confusion of notions, and inventions.

 1) The first point Richard Brauer made was that “Bosnia is still  a mess“. Thus, according to Brauer, keeping order is more important than preventing holocausts. The West should not have saved millions in Bosnia, because it is still a mess.

  Presumably, if Hitler had killed another 200 million people in Europe, it would have been less of a mess, and, thus, according to Brauer, and his admirers, a greater success. Mass murdering fascists, such as the Nazis are always fond to celebrate the “New Order“. (I was myself bombed, once, by a French fascist organization called “Ordre Nouveau“.)

 Only fascists worry about order, rather than worry about human lives. So, actually, Brauer is somebody who has embraced a central tenet of fascism. To great applaud of the pseudo left wing readership of the New York Times. OK, Stalin, a genuine fascist, was also pseudo left wing (and boasted to Churchill that he killed even more Soviets than Hitler did.) Hitler too: not only did he invent the expression: National Sozialist, but he craftily borrowed socialist and left wing themes all over, to improve his appeal, as he cynically explained himself!

 It is as if Brauer wrote this from the perspective of an old South African white racist supremacist fascist. Richard, tell us ain’t so.  

 That Bosnia is, or is not, a mess was not the reason to intervene in Bosnia for those whom superior morality guides (by opposition to those that Hitler, Ghadafi, and the like, guide). Of course if the Serbian fanatics had been left to their own instruments, they would have killed all the Muslims, and all the Croats. Indeed, as Brauer implicitly points out, order in Bosnia would be much better by now.

 Similarly if whites South Africans  had done like the white North Americans, and killed all the Indians, I mean, the black, order would reign much better in South Africa, and Brauer would rest easy. Much better order, mein Fuerer, and purity of essence, besides.

 Historically, under a UN mandate, French and British troops were interposed between the civilians in Sarajevo, and the rogue (“Bosnian”) Serb army. Heavy Serb guns reached encircled Sarajevo, impacting it with thousands of high explosive shells, from 30 kilometers away.

 The French, allied to Serbia in 1914, were leery to counter-attack the descendants of their ex-allies. But they had to save the population Serb fanatics were determined to exterminate.

 The French finally used counterforce strikes: once a flying Serbian shell was detected on radar, the computer found where it originated from, and French shells were directed there. This destroyed the Serb guns, and allowed to stop the destruction of Sarajevo. The depredations of the fanatics kept on going, though, in the rest of Bosnia, and the siege of Sarajevo was not lifted. Years later NATO had to intervene in full. (Now Serbia is 99% collaborating with civilization, and improving by the day, in its anxiety to integrate the European Union, which is the final solution to the Yugoslav problem, for all concerned.)

 2) The second point that the fascism loving Brauer made was that “It’s way too early to judge the USA a success, even on idealistic Western terms. We’re pretty far from a stable and democratic country at this point.” OK, I replaced in Brauer’s original version, the word “Libya” by “USA”. It sounds just as pertinent. If the USA is neither stable nor democratic at this point, why to require it for Libya?

 3) The third point Brauer made was that “the rest of the world sees it [the intervention in Libya] as a naked grab by Western governments on behalf of their energy companies.”

  Brauer does not seem to have observed that most of the world is the West. At least, officially speaking. Indeed, the UN Charter reflects the basic credo of the West. All the Americas are in the West (except for Cuba, which is not too clear about where it wants to be). Most of Africa is in the West (OK, except Zimbawe, Sudan, and a few limbo states). Most of Eurasia is in the West, too, philosophically speaking (even Russia, officially speaking; the notable exception being China, which is a collaborator and accomplice of the West, or, at least, its plutocracy). Did I forget Australia and Antarctica?

 This is exactly why France was able to persuade most powers to support, or the rest to tacitly approve her intervention in Libya. France acted in the name of the principles of the West, id est of the principles of the Rest. This is by now the standard French tactic. It works if and only if genuine. 

 For Brauer, and his ignorant, or malevolent admirers, if the “rest of the world” believes in a complete, counterfactual idiocy, we should consider that a problem. However real problems are not defined by counter-factual idiots.

 As I said many times, Ghadafi was giving the West all the oil it needed. 80% of Libyan oil was going to France and Italy, which had, therefore no motivation to engage in war according to those who think that the war was about oil. Actually the oil flow from Libya has been stopped for more than 6 months now, so the oil men ought to have been on Ghadafi’s side, which they were, indeed.

 The historical development of establishing a set of reason for revolution in the Arabo-Muslim world and in Libya in particular, was due to philosophers, not to oil traffickers, and other plutocrats.

 This is something important to understand. In the 1930s, when France tried to do something against Hitler, American officials argued that France was being imperialistic, and that Germany should be left to be all it wanted to be, preserved from the terrible French imperialistic intervention.  That argument was entertained as early as 1934.

 There was just one fly in that ointment; the Ambassador of the USA in Berlin, the historian Dodd, agreed 100% with his imminent colleague, the French ambassador in Berlin, Francois-Poncet. What did Washington do? In 1939, it replaced Dodd by a pro-Nazi ambassador. The best way to encourage Hitler to be firm with France.

 The fact remains that philosophers were singularly silent in the 1930s (many, most of a new generation, fought courageously, in the 1940s, against Nazism, and died that way; but by then the infuriated Nazi dragon had escaped the grotto).

 In the 1930s, Anglo-Saxon plutocrats collaborated with Hitler and other fascists, because they augmented their profits that way. This collaboration was so enormous that it allowed Hitler to survive the initial shock against France and Britain (although the Nazis losses, by the time France fell, were already considerable, comprising more than 50,000 elite troops and officers; by the time Hitler had to attack the USSR, he had won in Greece, but his victorious paratroops had been wiped out; by the time American soldiers fought their first shots with the Nazis, the French had inflicted the decisive defeat to Rommel’s Afrika Korps, deep in the desert).

 Plutocrats collaborated with Ghadafi intensely. Thus they had no interest to fight him. Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal gives an example, August 30 2011. Here we go:

 “ TRIPOLI—On the ground floor of a six-story building here, agents working for Moammar Gadhafi sat in an open room, spying on emails and chat messages with the help of technology Libya acquired from the West….

Amesys, a unit of French technology firm Bull SA, [which] installed the monitoring center. A warning by the door bears the Amesys logo. The sign reads: “Help keep our classified business secret. Don’t discuss classified information out of the HQ.”…..The room, explored Monday by The Wall Street Journal, provides clear new evidence of foreign companies’ cooperation in the repression of Libyans under Col. Gadhafi’s almost 42-year rule. The surveillance files found here include emails written as recently as February, after the Libyan uprising had begun… VASTech SA Pty Ltd, a small South African firm, provided the regime with tools to tap and log all the international phone calls going in and out of the country, according to emails reviewed by The Wall Street Journal and people familiar with the matter. VASTech declined to discuss its business in Libya due to confidentiality agreements.”

 Maybe Mr. Brauer is somehow related to VASTech, or to the oil companies which lost money due to the Libyan rebellion?

 Conclusion? France intervened in Libya not because her plutocrats wanted it, but because (some of her) philosophers made an irresistible case for it. To French president Sarkozy. Contrarily to the 1930s, when the USA was systematically hostile to France’s higher thinking, Obama’s USA cooperated, and France was able to convince enough of the rest (to get the 9 votes at the UNSC she needed; she got 10).  

 By the way, genuine French philosophers are not in love with French plutocrats, although at least two individuals (BHL and the father of Bruni’s first child), belong to both categories. Usually there is strong, solid, professional and intimate enmity between both groups.

 Mr. Brauer neglects the interventions of the Western powers sometimes assisted by African allies in the Sudan (where French troops died in Darfur), Sierra Leone, Liberia, Chad (where France fought Ghadafi for decades, recovering a part of Chad occupied by the guy with the bad hairdo), Rwanda, Ivory Coast and Libya (the two French led interventions of 2011). Among other things. Intervention also worked against racist South Africa (but failed to replace racist Rhodesia by the better regime, as Zimbawe is clearly a terrible place).

 So what motivates the likes of the ignorantly aggressive Mr. Brauer? Does Mr. Brauer, and his supporters regret, deep down inside, that France intervened against the genocidal, racist, fascist Hitler, and his Neues Ordnung?

 Or is Mr. Brauer happy to join a herd of the ignorant and facile, thus creating cheaply in him and his flock the illusion of strength and wisdom? In other words, naturally enough, Mr. Brauer whines when one attack fascism, because he indulges in the fascist reflex.

 Thought crime ought to not send people in jail always, but it certainly should not go without condemnation, and evisceration, when it boils down to making a shrine to the concept of holocaust.

 Thus those inclined to idiotic lies of the mass criminality inducing type have to be answered, even if we have to stoop very low to do so, and engage in a shouting match. Ignoring the stupid brutes all too long is what made Hitler, Stalin or Pol-Pot possible.

 Right now the partisans and practitioners of torture in the USA are loudly claiming that torture is the best way to go forward. Never mind that it is a direct violation of the Third Geneva Convention, never mind that the U.S. Army, and the most elementary logic, are against it: Cheney and Yoo (the UC Berkeley professor of law who wrote the legal opinion giving the green light to Bush) preach torture, with more boldness than ever.

 They have been encouraged to do so by the ambiguous attitude of the ever bipartisan president. Confronted to torture, Obama crossed the bridge, and said: we don’t do that, but we will not do anything about those who did that, and want more of it. Instead of dragging Bush, Cheney, Yoo, and a Federal judge I forgot the name of, to court, Obama said: let them be, let’s not rush to judgment. Actually, let’s not go to any sort of judgment.  Obama let torture walk free, as he let the banksters walk free. And now he is surprised that society is captive, and people feel that it is his fault.

 French general Paul Aussaresses admitted in his 2001 book, “Services spéciaux, Algérie 1955–1957“, to the use of torture during the Algerian war (he claimed under civilian orders from subalterns to F. Mitterrand). Subsequent to his gloating, for justifying the use of torture, the elderly Aussaresses was condemned in court, stripped of his army rank, stripped of the right to wear a uniform, and he was stripped of his Legion of Honor. All of this happened decades after Aussaresses apparently advised South American militaries about his methods of torture. In other words, torturers breed torturers. Worldwide.

 Of course, convicted criminal Aussaresses went on major media of the USA to justify the use of torture against Al Qaeda. His defense of torture arguably incited the American proponents of torture. Thus thought crime propagates. Bipartisanship about torture, as bipartisan about anything else dubious, under the pretext of coolness, is encouraging torture, and all other sorts of evil.

 France, whatever France means, lost the Algerian war (some very close family members of mine died). Although, technically, the French army had won. But it was the wrong sort of victory. That war was not a military campaign, but a campaign about right and wrong, and the usage of torture guaranteed wrong.

 In 2011, France intervened, and won, twice: in Ivory Coast, and in Libya. Why? How? By being on the side of right, twice. If one wants to win, one better be right. To start with. That Obama forgot in Afghanistan, in his colossal naivety. But one would expect nothing else from someone whose moral sense is about being bipartisan, not attributing blame, and looking real cool, no matter what. Such a moral sense does not have “right” as a fundamental notion. “Right” is all about how it looks.

 Obama encountered Hitler. What do you think happened? “Enough blame  to go around,” confirmed the president. OK, pathetic, I agree.

 Being bipartisan about holocausts is no option for the morally correct. Non assistance to people in danger is one of the worst crimes there is. Once one has justified the worst, or let it go free, and unmolested, how much worse can one do? Indulge in infamy, instead of just entertaining it?

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Patrice Ayme

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FORCE WORKS. An Intellectuals’ War. Syria Next?

PHILOSOPHY WITHOUT WAR IS ONLY WISHFUL THINKING.

Main Ideas: There is a new, fundamental human right: the right of ingerence. Thanks to the right of ingerence, the total human toll of the Libyan dictator’s assault against the People he terrorized, tortured and executed may not exceed 50,000 dead (hopefully).

The French “droit d’ingérence”, is a concept distinguished by philosopher Jean-François Revel in 1979 (his son is a top Buddhist monk). The droit d’ingérence was also advocated by Kouchner and the “Medecins Sans Frontieres, Doctors Without Borders” (and rewarded by the Nobel Peace Prize).

The right of ingerence postulates that there is a right (“droit“) to interfere and intrude in some circumstances on behalf of human rights of others. Thus to fight, not in self defense, but altruistically. In a way, of course, it is inherent to the notion of a police force on behalf of justice, thus it is as old as the notion of police, and something which was necessary as soon as primates evolved, and descended from the trees (alpha males do a lot of policing in baboon troops).

Droit d’ingérence is a typical French attitude of making legitimate some forms of aggression of a state against another state, central to the (much unjustly decried) “Mission Civilisatrice”. 

When ingerence is most justified, it involves the survival of one’s own nation (as when the Romans intervened in Gaul against Celto-Germans under imperators such as Sextus, Marius and Caesar). Ingerence is also justified for insuring others’ freedom (as when the Roman republic intervened against Macedonia, partly to free Greece, or when France intervened against Britain to free its American colony, or when France and Britain declared war to Hitler for serially invading countries).

Nowadays, due to the relative shrinkage of the world, ingerence of democracy and survival of democracy are pretty much the same notions.

European fighter-bombers flew in less than an hour from places such as Sicily or Crete, in the European Union, to bomb fascist forces in Libya. Less than an hour is of course the flight time from North Korea to Washington, for a ballistic missile. Crushing the North Korean dictatorship will not, at some point, be just about ingerence, but about survival. I know that Bush said stuff like that, but he was not just lying, but also delusional (which is worse), because his motive was NOT from altruism, but from the Dark Side. So it was ingerence, all right, but he had no right.

Ingerence of democracy is also an occasion to teach democracy to those obdurately challenged by obscurantism. For example, student (of democracy) Russia can try to explain to us in the United Nations what is so good about Assad’s dictatorship in Syria, and why we should not apply sanctions. After Russia fails to justify itself, it will have learned something, about democracy, as it hopefully is doing in Libya.

The forces of democracy are reloading, but cannot rest. Ultimately, democracy will have to reign all over, for democracy to be safe, anywhere.

Some will insist: what is the difference between the right of ingerence (in defense of human rights, and that include life and freedom), and Bush’s vicious aggressions? Well, everything: Bush was playing humanist on TV. Actually he was himself the problem. His invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan, and the American Constitution were all charged with the will to destroy. which makes sense, as his plutocratic pedigree extends over two generations.

Even more damaging are those who supported the Libyan dictator through all this, arguing, idiotically, that the West ‘s intervention against the self described “king of kings of Africa“was all for oil. The devil is, among other things, in the details.

It’s profitable to say progressive stuff, because it sounds good, or it’s all over a teleprompter, but it better be right, cogent, and relevant.The psychological grandparents of the same idiots argued that France fought Hitler because of the French empire, and the vainglorious French mentality, and for the sake of hopeless European quarrels. Thus 72 millions died, precisely because of that criminally stupid reasoning, grounded in crass ignorance. France was not about extermination camps, Hitler was.

80% of Libyan oil and gas already went to France and Italy, and the reserves  of Libya are the largest in Africa. So neither France, nor Italy, had any economic reason to disturb a system which served them well. Actually Italy was extremely reluctant to do so.

In truth the Libyan dictator was attacked for philosophical reasons, not at all for oil. The war started with the a number of professionals protesting in Benghazi, and then, after those pacific demonstrations were repressed in blood, immensely courageous rebels, typically young professionals and students, who came to defeat a large army with a mercenary army of top, highly paid, professional killers at its core .

Verily, the causal chain of events shows that it is philosophers, temporally led by yours truly, who were in the lead against Qaddafi. Reading the New York Times’ comments reveals many examples of poorly reconstructed Stalinists who are hysterical against human rights, in the guise of opposing “the West” alleged search for oil (which, as I said, it already got from the Libyan dictator; by the way, Sirya sends 95% of its oil to Europe).

I make no mystery that, for a civilization englued in delusional systems of thought, as was the Libyan dictatorship, the best way out is revolution. or more exactly, the only way out. Revolution can be gentle, and it is better, when it can be gentle. But, if the revolution cannot be gentle, the concepts of work and brutal force, as found in physics, have to be brought to bear.

Much of the so called Muslim civilization suffers from an historical dearth of genuine, thorough, secular revolution (secular means of the age, progress to what is known now). Hopefully the Libyan rising will change that. Sarkozy reminded the Libyan transition Council that he would not make their revolution on their behalf, and that the French did the 1789 Revolution on their own, as all real revolutions always are done.

Although, in the end, French help to the Libyan rebels was considerable, it did not reach the enormous help France provided to the American rebels during the American war of independence.

The American”revolution” was not really a revolution: they did not have to. If the Americans had made a real revolution, they would have freed the slaves; but they did not, because they did not have to, as the massive intervention of the French army and French navy did not force them to mobilize all their forces, physical and spiritual.

Philosophy, in truth, is about war. War against stupidity and the basest instincts, to start with. But, if need be, and it can, philosophy goes all the way.

This is how, overall, civilization progresses for the better. Some deny that there is such a thing as progress. As a forceful reminder for the clueless, in Pacific islands, where civilization had progressed less, it was often customary to eat people alive, over a period of weeks. OK, it was partly a technological problem, as there were no refrigerators, two centuries ago (and extensive salt and spices European Middle Age meat preservation technology was not known, either).

Of course, for philosophical reasons, the Romans had extinguished the man eating, and human sacrifices prone civilizations of the Mediterranean-European area. That the Romans were also predatory, is a secondary consideration. After conquest, the Roman rule was light, and fully assented to, in any case. Pax Romana was no myth… And now it is baaaack…

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Most countries in the West acted admirably in the overthrow of the bloody Libyan tyrant. It was NOT 1939 all over again, with France and Britain going at Hitler alone, while several democracies were supporting the dictator, Hitler, all the more efficiently, that it was not talked about it much. This time most countries in the West understood that they had a duty of ingerence, and a duty of solidarity to their fellow democracies, and human rights. An Arab country, Qatar, siege of the free TV Al Jazeera, very courageously aligned itself on its ally, the French republic.

All the West behaved well, with the alarming exception of Switzerland, which insisted to do a repeat of its pernicious role in 1939-45. Switzerland gets a mention from me as the most lamentable, hypocritical country in the world for 2011 (we can be fairly sure that no other country will be as mentally mediocre before 2012). In the end, even Russia and China helped against the Libyan dictator. But not Switzerland. Worse; that forsaken country pleaded for an inverted ethics reminiscent of Ireland crying about Hitler’s demise in May 1945.

Switzerland’s notable contribution to the Libyan war was to help the mass murdering dictator. Switzerland built, all over Libya, the sort of sophisticated underground fortifications Qaddafi and his clan presently enjoy, in common with the rats they often evoke spitefully. This Swiss attitude is all the more alarming, as, in many ways, Switzerland is the most democratic place in the world. So is it the mountain air, is it the fact the Swiss are just all too greedy peasants, or is it something about democracy? In any case, following the debate in Suisse, it’s clear the Swiss do not have a viable concept of civilization. My guess is that Switzerland got used to get way with greed, same as Bush style American plutocracy. Both got away, and became much richer, from enabling Nazism. And, whereas the very small fry was prosecuted, and still is, to the end of the Earth, the really big fishes, deeply ingrained criminal thought systems in Switzerland and the USA tied to the reigning plutocracy were left alone, and prosper to this day.

Two weeks before the liberation of Tripoli, La Suisse had an attack of madness, as it found, to its fake horror, that some a few pieces of Mickey Mouse Helvetic military equipment made their way to Libya’s freedom fighters, apparently through Qatar. Well, I salute Qatar. Let 50,000 die under the boot of a dictator it was just arming: no problem for Suisse. Let a contract be violated, perhaps, on a few thousands Francs of material, and Switzerland orders an inquiry.

If everybody acted as Switzerland, the few among us still surviving would say:”Heil Hitler!” I say this without meaning to be funny. During World War Two Switzerland served as rear base for the Nazis, viciously efficient. The U.S. Air Force had to bomb a major ball bearing factory in Switzerland, which provided the Nazis with precious ball bearings.

To this day, Switzerland has not presented excuses for its abject attitude relative to humankind during Nazism, and the recent evidence with Libya shows that it persists self righteously in its error, and fake neutralism (rhymes with racism and nationalism).

Intellectuals in Switzerland, should view as their primary duty to be scathing about Swiss attitudes regarding civilization and the dictators which ruin it. This being said, I love Switzerland. Precisely.

If not for the massive iron fist of NATO, Qaddafi would have celebrated his 42 years of reign on September 1. Gaddafi’s power rested on people  with so much blood on their hands, that they had nothing to lose, by drenching the desert with some more. The dictator’s power was also resting on thousands of mercenaries, some from Eastern Europe, some from black Africa, paid 10,000 euros, $15,000, a week.

Qaddafi used to be a hero of a delusional part of the left of the West, 40 years ago. Those wishful lunatics viewed Gaddafi as the successor of Nasser (as if Nasser was much to admire). Gaddafi was viewed as the captain who chased a king out (without spilling a drop of blood, meaning that the king’s army was not that ferocious that a simple captain could make a coup). Qaddafi nationalized much, directly into his own pocket. Superficial pseudo leftists overlooked those details: as many who are into superficiality, group identification provide them with a personality. Thus, in the guise of prostesting imperialism, they become themselves intellectual fascists, following brainlessly their thought leaders.

Gaddafi’s was a regime with officials one had to give a million dollars to, just to talk to them when trying to help the Libya they governed (my own father, representing a Western company, had to do make a personal check to the Libyan Prime Minister, of one million dollars, just to talk to him about conducting oil prospection).

The best wars are those started by a more progressive philosophy, and bold philosophers defending it in the court of public opinion. No Revolution, No Civilization.

The philosophical case for an armed intervention on behalf of the Libyan people against the (self promoted) colonel who had seized power 42 years ago was clear cut.

The strategy I advocated on March 8, was, in the end, followed against the Libyan bloody tyrant. France attacked March 20th, after getting the all clear from the United Nations. In the end, the UN mandate was tweaked, as special operations French, British and Italians teams operated on the ground. France, even to Britain’s alarm, and to impotent Russian anger, dropped weapons to the rebels in the Nafusah mountains, and then set up runways and sent heavy weapons, including tanks, through an aerial bridge in that Berber area (Berbers have their own ancient alphabet, which looks at least twice older than Arabic, and there is a revival of that civilization, crushed by the Arab invasion, all the way to Algeria and Morocco) .

A handful of philosophers such as Bernard-Henri Lévy (“BHL”, Jewish descent, born in Béni Saf, Algeria), Alain Finkielkraut (son of an Auschwitz Jewish deportee), and Alain Badiou (born in Rabat, Morocco), exerted pressure on Nicholas Sarkozy to not let the Libyan rebellion be smashed. I mention their place of origin, to point out that, like me, two of them call Africa home.

I have been often critical of BHL, but he was admirable in the Libyan crisis, taking great personal risks, as he often does. BHL has been influential in the French corridors of powers for more than 30 years now. Of course, being so practical a philosopher denies him some depth, but so was Demosthenes, say, with Athens, against Philippe (tyrant of Macedonia, father of the possible parricidal Alexander). Civilization needs all sorts of philosophers, some in the trenches, some at the edge of knowledge.

In France, because of a long, instructive, and often tragic history, political leaders know better than to oppose vociferous philosophers, if they want to leave a positive historical mark. Once, the police suggested to de Gaulle to arrest a mass agitating and protesting Sartre. De Gaulle replied haughtily, and correctly:”One does not arrest Voltaire.”

Well after I wrote my March 8 essay, BHL insisted that it was not too late to do something. Saif Al islam made clear declarations of intended extermination. At the last possible moment, responding to BHL’s fierce urgency, Sarkozy moved courageously, first with a diplomatic marathon, succeeding to hypnotize American, Russians and Chinese into assenting into an intervention in a timely manner. Years earlier, a French paratroop division had terminated the Rwandan holocaust, but after much of it had already happened. Two days after the UNSC vote, as a last minute conference about what to do occurred in Paris, the French president announced that he had unleashed supersonic bombers, and really very large precision guided bombs, to save the city of Benghazi. In all this, as usual, Britain knew better than disagreeing with her sister republic, and was very supportive.

It is often said that those who don’t know history are condemned to repeat it. However, those who know history are often rewarded if they listen to it. Retrospectively, the French republic should have moved unilaterally against the bloody tyrant Hitler, when the going was good, in spite of Anglo-Saxon, plutocratically minded opposition.

When Americans mention Qaddafi’s crimes, they always mention Pan Am 103, but never UTA 772 (the second French civil jumbo jet destroyed probably by Libyans). Of course, neither do Americans ever mention Qaddafi’s invasions of Chad, Tanzania, etc. Since the French don’t exist, apparently, nor do invaded Africans, perhaps they should just reciprocate… And ignore Americans in kind. All of this lack of knowledge goes a long way to explain the ignorant pseudo ethical position of all too many Americans. In general those who want to do something about the world, or not, ought to know something about it.

Another thing France learned from a very long history is that, sometimes she was on the very wrong side of history. It has been a big mistake for France not to have taken the side of the People in Algeria in 1945. If she had, there would have been no Algerian civil wars. (That, of course, will have been viewed as a catastrophe by many of the numerous enemies of Europe, France, and the Maghreb.)

On May 8, 1945, in Setif, Algeria, the day Nazi Germany capitulated, an Algerian demonstration of indigenes supported the Allied victory against the racist infamy. There were with many Allied flags, and just one, or two, proto-Algerian flags, green and white. Those two flags led to a (completely unjustified) repression by the authorities (at least one Algerian boy killed), which led to a counter-reaction (officially 103 dead “colons”), followed by a counter-massacre (officially 1020 dead Algerians). In a way, taking the side of the People in 2011 in Libya, is a distant compensation. It is also a indispensable buttressing of the budding democratization in Tunisia and Egypt, and a way to encourage reformers in Algeria and Morocco.

So, in 2011, the French republic took the side of the People in Libya. A lesson from Algeria, well learned. As I hinted above, it’s not about oil: French, British and American oil companies had perfect business arrangements with Kaddafi and his clan. Hence the U.S. Secretary of Defense, Gates, making excuses to not do anything against Qaddafi, on the ground that he was terrified of his air defenses. Either Gates was lying, incompetent, or the French much more advanced than the U.S. Air Force. Whatever it was, Libyan defenses proved 100% impotent against French aircraft, in spite of the fact that the French attacked against a 100% operative anti-aircraft system, as time was of the essence.

A recent poll showed that, when Americans were asked to name a scientist, 47% answered Einstein (dead for 56 years). Next, 23% answered:”I don’t know”. By contrast, people could probably give a long list of names of monkeys who can push a ball around. hey, they used to do this when they were three years old, and growing up beyond that is hard to do! Now, of course, people have no idea about what Einstein did, except that mass and energy are the same (it is not that simple, by the way). Even worse is their basic knowledge of science itself.

What is science? What is certain. So those who do not know science are certainly uncertain about some things which are certain. Even worse, they miss entire mental dimensions from which further scaffolding for the imagination can arise.

In physics, the definition of work is force times displacement. No displacement, no work. No force, no work. (Obvious joke: two reasons for Obama to have done no work. There was neither displacement, nor force…)

Physicists have thought hard for centuries to come up with that concept, that force times displacement is a worthy notion, best depicting work, and it… works. Such a notion is conceptually useful, and ought not to be confined to physics and engineering (as my Obama example demonstrates).

Many people who have studied many things, but no physics, are often struggling with notions that have finally been elucidated after centuries of efforts, and studies by top intellectuals, and are now so certain, tested and useful, that they have become part of science.

Unfortunately many standard philosophers have learned to worry exclusively about hermeneutics (although not the three philosophers mentioned above).  I would claim that this infection with hermeneutics is one of the reason of the disaffection of many young people, in the West, from all and any deep critique, and their bovine acceptance of the corrupt rule of their financial rulers.

What’s “hermeneutics“? It is the study and theory not of reality itself, but of interpretation. It’s like crazies studying what they think about the world, rather than making an effort to think about the world itself.

It comes from the Greek hermeneutikos “interpreting,” from hermeneuein “to interpret,” a derivative of Hermes, the divinity of speech, writing, and eloquence. When one walks next to a swamp in summer, it is valid to worry about mosquitoes. But that is not what many Academic philosophers would do, according to their obsession with hermeneutics. They would instead worry about how mosquitoes are interpreted. (Revel did not use these words or argumentation, but he argued that the confusion between physical reality and interpretation of text made most of modern philosophy an object of ridicule. So he came to the same conclusion as me.)

Speaking of mosquitoes… Weirdly, Obama, observing the end of Qaddafi’s clan claimed that “Freedom is stronger than the iron fist“. I guess, he has exerted his freedom of not bombing Gaddafi much (I had actually recommended that Obama just let France and Britain do the job, which was better for everybody). But the iron fist of the French Air force conducted around 4,000 strike missions. France also sent special forces, advisers, parachuted weapons, and finally build an aerial bridge to the Berber held Nafusah mountains just south west of Tripoli, to transfer heavy weapons to the rebels with her faithful accomplice, Qatar.

Verily, the war against Gaddafi would have failed without NATO’s… iron fist intervention. Overall, NATO conducted 20,000 sorties and 7,500 air strikes (few of them by American planes; in one slice of time, out of 1,000 NATO sorties, just three (3!) were American; however, the few American drones were very efficient at the end).

Verily, dozens of thousands would have been killed, without NATO’s iron fist. Freedom is best, no least because it comes with an iron fist. There is no contradiction, Obama, quite the opposite. The iron fist is a lesson that the ancient Greeks taught in the tremendous battles of Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis, Plataea… And when freedom cannot use an iron fist, as in Afghanistan, it is precisely because it has fangs biting its conscience, because its cause is not just.

The dictators hellish columns of tanks, bristling with numerous giant mobile missile batteries the U.S. Secretary of defense had evoked to claim that one should leave Libya’s powerful arsenal alone were irresistibly advancing… They had reached the suburbs of Benghazi. Their complete destruction in a few minutes by undeterred French stealth bombers will stay one of the most spectacular tipping points in the history of warfare. A city was on the verge of being destroyed, as many were in the last century. Rwanda all over again, a few minutes away. And then a miracle from up high, as in the Bible…

Gaddafi’s dictatorship, often grotesque, using torture massively, would have kept on going. There is no reason it would not have gone on for centuries. Such as been the fate of the region, a stable pattern of anarchic, chaotic tyranny.

Indeed, this is the tragic history of Islam: dictators massaging the Qur’an fascist principle, Sura 4, verse 59: “O YE WHO BELIEVE! Obey Allah, and obey the messenger and OBEY THOSE OF YOU WHO ARE IN POWER.” Actually, this deplorable slogan is word for word, a repetition of a much older Christian fascist principle, which had the same consequence: theocratic dictatorship, something Constantinople fell, in and out, for centuries, until it lost all control, in the 11C, as the Turks had just learn to massage the same ideas, to their immense profit.

The West veered away from the original version of Sura 4, verse 59 (I will quote the exact Christian text some other day; among other places, it is in Augustine’s élucubrations, or why to have faith in all the wrong reasons). How? Because the Franks were secularist in Christian sheep disguise. And they had more force, and more democratic assent, so they did what they wanted, in the area they governed, without having recourse to fascist mental tricks of the basest sort.

Speaking of tragedies, Dr. Saif Al Islam El Qaddafi, the son of the guide, was long felt to be, and long sounded as, a reformer. He was viewed as the hope one could believe would orient his father’s regime towards democracy. Hope all wanted to believe. Instead, he, the son of privilege, in spite of his sharp intelligence, became, when the rebellion started, very much the fulminating, crazed out, son of his father. Saif’s invectives, and orders to bloody mass murder, were instrumental in the hurried French airstrikes outside of Benghazi, and earned him a warrant of arrest by the International Criminal Court.

In any case, it was a jolly war. Nothing like being on the right side of war (yes, there is such a thing, and those indignant about the notion have it, only because there is such a thing!)

Many of the nations which ignominiously proclaimed themselves to be neutral until Hitler attacked them (Belgium, Netherlands, Denmark, Norway) this time intervened, and sent warplanes. Neutralism is another form of racism, so this was a welcome change.

As I have argued many times, one of the main cause of the French defeat in May 1940 against the Nazis was the desperate last minute help the French republic provided to countries which were neutral even after Hitler attacked them, and then asked France to rescue them.

The idiotic French attempt to provide hurried help to those who did not deserve it, disorganized completely the French Air Force and army. The seven armored divisions of the mobile armored reserve were rushed to the Netherlands, half of the French Air Force was not even in France when the Nazi tanks broke through. (By comparison, the Nazis had only a grand total of ten armored divisions, but they attacked next to Paris, while the French armored reserve was sent to the Netherlands.)

Interestingly, Sweden, which is, hypocritically, not even a member of NATO, sent 8 advanced Gripen fighter (then reduced to 5, with fewer restrictions).

Of course, readers will remember that Sweden fed Hitler with high grade iron, for years, so that the Nazi dictator could be stronger than Popeye. Sweden also graciously provided the Nazis with the 88mm gun, and its technology. The 88 was  the AA and anti tank weapon of choice of Hitler’s armies, throughout the war.  

France and Britain were not amused by Sweden’s friendship with Hitler, and the iron diet it all too graciously provided. The French Foreign Legion, having routed elite Nazi divisions in Northern Norway, was poised to cut Sweden in two, and grab the iron mines, when France started to fall, and the Legionnaires were recalled.

In other words, sixty years after their pathetic, greedy, deliberate, willing, abject, and extended collaboration with Nazism, even the Swedes have come to realize that it was high time to change philosophy. But, as I said, not yet so for the Swiss.

The same pattern has occurred in Syria, which was feared for Libya, or Egypt. And has happened in North Korea: hereditary dictatorship. The clever son of the bloody dictator, himself a British trained doctor, has become a full bloody dictator of his own.

Now what? Well, NATO is going to reload. Precision guided bombs are expensive. On the other hand they provide with quality, progressive employment: they push the highest tech, an intrinsic good, because only very high tech, of a type we do not have as yet, will allow us to steer seven billion people, soon to be ten billion, towards calmer shores, with not too degraded a biosphere. 

Some will wonder what I am talking about, and whether the fall of Qaddafi and his sons has rendered me mad with happiness. But the inlandsis, the icecaps, will melt. Oceans will rise seventy meters… That’s the worst case scenario, OK, but, unfortunately, the most probable, in the fullness of time.

How do we know this? Because it happened in the past. It’s like earthquakes in the eastern United States, or northern France; they have happened, up and above Richter 7 (50 times more powerful than the one of August 23, 2011), so they will happen again. Total melting happened, 100 million years ago. And now there is a reason for it to happen again. And very fast, as CO2 equivalent gases skyrocket.

Seas rising in a non linear fashion, as they already are, however discreetly, means billions of refugees. And heavy fighting for resources. And soon. In other words, massive war. Except if we find a technological way to avoid that, through a combination of CO2 capture and artificial icecaps (my latest crazy idea).

Eastern Antarctica is presently gathering snow because it has got warmer, and so it snows more on this driest of all deserts. Artificial glaciers have already been created in the Himalayas, to compensate increasing desertification. They provide people with water in summer, during the dry season. Storing water in glaciers will have to be expanded industrially, on real, and artificial mountains, many kilometers high. Why not a very high mountain range in Saudi Arabia? This is just a small example of the sort of tech we do not have, but we need, and right away. So pushing tech is useful. China just decided to launch a 20 year program for a liquid thorium reactor (cost at least 10 billion; France has also research programs in this area). What’s the Tea Party and its bipartisan president going to do? Brew tea?

On the way to these calmer shores, on the other side of the good will of a technological ocean, regimes hostile to democracy will have to be sunk. Or then they will have to lay really low, and make all sorts of provisional excuses, as China is learning to do.

Qaddafi had actually started a nuclear bomb program, with the help of Dr. Khan, the Pakistani renegade. Other Weapons of Mass Destruction are within the resources of most states (Libya had also tried the chemical avenue). So the states have to be forced to cooperate with democracy. I know Bush used that reasoning (which he did not invent), but that does not make it false. I also know that the notion of ingerence is not new. The philosopher Grotius talked about it (17C). More prosaically, Julius Caesar used it in his war in Gaul (he invaded to prevent the migration of a nation moving across to their fellows in the West as he disingenuously claimed it gravely disturbed other nations of Gaul; the pretext was false, but ultimately Gaul benefited from his bloody, monstrous invasion… because the Celtic theocracy was a not an optimal civilization, to put it mildly). The Romans used ingerence systematically. And it was not really a crime. After their initial ingerence, the Roman boot was very light. Plutocracy was a different problem, and it tended to fester locally… So many people will say that Rome died of corruption. but of course plutocracy is a corruption of civilization.

Nowadays, the right of ingerence has merged with the right to survival. An ongoing dictatorship in Syria is incompatible with a safe and sound Mediterranean. Some will say: what of Israel? Why don’t you want to invade that too? Well, it’s a different problem: Israel has a high democratic index (although not to the point of having a constitution, democratic or not! Yes, tellingly, there is no such a thing as an Israeli constitution, as the contradiction between Judaism and democracy could not be resolved!)

Israel does not treat the Palestinians according to the UN human rights charter, right, but it is not very clear what is its exact responsibility in that state of affairs, and how to remedy it without a global evolution of all mentalities concerned. The way to extinguish the Arabo-Israeli conflict is obviously through a Mediterranean Union, a southern extension of the European Union, doing for the Mediterranean what Europe has done for Europe, that is extinguishing obdurate hatred down to a manageable level. This can work if and only if all the regimes democratize first. If other states in the region democratize (and that means secularize), Israel will be forced to do the same (which would rather be ironical).

So what of Syria? Well, to each day its toil. In the end, triage has to be used: the worst offenders have to be eliminated first. At this point, as the Gaddafi clan crumbles, the next target is the Syrian dictatorship. However, the situation in Syria is not as bad as it had got in Libya (Qaddafi killed an order of magnitude more in 2011 before the Western intervention). So pressure there have to be increased, and last week’s Western sanctions have first to be generalized. Russia, in particular, has to be made to understand what it all means, and cooperate.

France won against the dictatorships in Ivory Coast and is winning in Libya, but approval by the United Nations was essential to both processes. The lack of unity among democracies is why, for several years, Hitler went from victory to victory.

Democracy is a war against the constant temptation of plutocracy: you know, that sort of temptation, spending one’s vacation among one’s fellow millionaires and billionaires, on one’s remote island, wasting median family income every few days, maddeningly claiming to be concerned by the “little guy”. 

In Ukraine the reigning president seems determined to break the past Prime minister. Yulia Tymoshenko is accused of “corruption or embezzlement of funds“. Representatives of international organizations, the European Union and the United States called this arrest a “political persecution of an opposition leader“.

There too, although no supersonic bombers need to be sent, force ought to be brought to bear, to insure human rights are respected. Using the justice system in the service of the basest instincts, is bad enough. When the justice system is targeted against people vested with popular authority, past or present, it is worse.

This was the major problem in the prosecution of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the official elected with the most representative votes in the world, as with the UN Secretary General, arrested at work, under diplomatic immunity in his plane, on unbelievable sexual charges, something one rather expects in Saudi Arabia or Malaysia (which used to be customary of this sort of legal persecution of the libidinous type, all the way to execution in some cases).

And what of Gandhi and its new age pop pacifism, in all this? Well Gandhi, a self declared admirer and friend of Hitler, as I have explained many times, was a complete fraud. Worse than that: he, indirectly, created Pakistan, and was the indirect cause of millions of dead.

Mandela, another British trained lawyer in South Africa (!), was not a fraud. Mandela used violence. And Mandela was right to do, because he had no better choice. In the end, Mandela got very few people killed, and the racist whites who jailed him also came to that conclusion, and they spoke to him, all the more since Mandela had learned Afrikaner in jail. Far from clinging to the identity of his origin, as Gandhi did, against the Muslims, Mandela crossed the cultural gap to his enemies. War is best fought in enemy territory, especially cultural war.

Only force can stop force. Sometimes physical force is opposed by pure mental force. But work is never about pushing one way, and pushing the other way, simultaneously. Only Obama seems to believe that. Force is never bipartisan, if it wants to go somewhere. To do work, force has to go somewhere. Too bad Obama did not study physics. It shows.

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Patrice Ayme

Coddling The Super-Rich Is Deleterious

PLUTOCRACY IS A DISEASE, THE GOVERNMENT A CONDUCTOR, THE ECONOMY AN ORCHESTRA. BUT ONE CAN’T CONDUCT A DISEASE.

Abstract: The essence of the socio-economic crisis of the West is the rise of plutocracy. It is enabled by a number of mechanisms that the People have not elucidated, hence the passivity with which they accept further abuse. Many exploitative pathways have to do with the nature of money, how it is created, and that money represents power.

By throwing money to the plutocrats, under the pretext that, if enriched further, they will revive the economy, central reserve banks are feeding the fire consuming civilization.

Thus governor Perry of Texas is not crazy when he calls the central bank chair a traitor: throwing money at the richest, and most culprit, is what Bernanke has been doing. The ever greater amount of riches of the richest means that the rest of the People are increasingly not living in democracy, as they are increasingly deprived of money, thus power.

I explore various aspects of the crisis rarely dwelled upon, in a question and answer session.

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Question: Don Peck in the Atlantic has written a rather tame, not to say lame, review of the symptoms of the crisis in Can The Middle Class Be Saved? As he puts it: “The Great Recession has accelerated the hollowing-out of the American middle class. And it has illuminated the widening divide between most of America and the super-rich. Both developments herald grave consequences. Here is how we can bridge the gap between us.”

A defeated Peck concludes rather meekly that: “Perhaps plutonomy, in the 21st century, will prove stable over the long run. But few Americans, no matter their class, will be eager for that outcome.”

Does your insistence upon evil as a force which gives many people meaning, unveil a deeper layer of understanding of the economic crisis?

Answer: How we can bridge the gap between “us“? Us? How charming, holistic, new age, and wise in the chick sense of the term. There is no “us” there. The world is sick with plutocracy, such is the essence of the crisis. Plutocracy causes the increasing financial, economic, educational pauperization of most of the most developed part of the world.

“Plutonomy” is an arrogant concept: it means managing Satan. This new concept is a further outrageous twist on Faust. It was coined by bankers at Citigroup who made the self serving, erroneous, and grotesque analysis in 2005, that “The earth is being held up by the muscular arms of its entrepreneur-plutocrats.” Apparently, those new Atlases did not get to the word “plutocracy” in the dictionary.

However, Obama has been operating according to their book of lies. Although, most of the time, he covers himself up, with the opposite discourse. Since the crisis has started, most of the effort has consisted in supporting the “entrepreneur-plutocrats” with public money, under that exact theory, that they “hold the earth up with their muscular arms”. 

Question: How do the plutocrats do whatever they are doing to make leaders obey their wishes?

Answer: Very simple: plutocrats monopolize most of the money and capital. That give them all the power they need to make most people think, feel, and act according to their desiderata.

Not only have the plutocrats captured higher education ever more, the more sensitive it has been to private financing, but they even have tweaked the emotional mien of People. That is why Americans are not revolting.

In recent years, being “cool” has become the most valued behavior in the USA. Obama was pretty much elected on that criterion. If one comes to think of it, “cool” means that one is indifferent to whatever is going on, only guided by one’s inner compass of self “navigation” towards self advantage in one’s self obsessing world. Naturally “no drama Obama” has been the top model of coolness and self obsessed navigation (Obama extols “navigation” as the supreme value a man can have in his imaginary autobiographies).

One can now see that his coolness makes him a strong competitor in the run to worst president ever. His emotions feel fake, and if they are, as they appear to be, the fact that he found impossible to move (“motion”) out (“e”) as needed is fully explained: a man cannot move out on emotions he got from the teleprompter.

Just before Lincoln, an American president tried to encourage slavery, making him the worst president; Obama’s attempt to force Americans to purchase life saving services from private, profit making owners is akin to the same, namely the denial of the basic human right to life, used for profit. I view that monstrosity (which is in the process of being found unconstitutional, as judge after judge knocks it down as such), a direct consequence of Obama’s coolness. Iguanas can’t be in charge of human rights, they are too cool. The Nazis used to consider coolness a top quality, of course.

Besides extolling nihilistic values, such as coolness, as the highest values, the plutocrats have technically made the democratic economy impossible. In their rush to ever more power, the plutocrats have stolen most of the money, leaving not enough to everybody else to operate the economy.

Q: Does not that sound pretty much like the old criticism of Marx and his many French predecessors?

A:  In many ways, the situation is worse now. The capitalists, in Marx’s time needed the workers, now, they don’t.

Q: How come?

A: There are machines and slaves in China, both of which were not factors in Marx’s time. Plus, in Marx’s time, the planet was not going to explode, now it is. The plutocrats are not just exploiting workers nowadays, they are destroying everything.

Q: Are you not abusing the word “Pluto”? Aside from poetry, does it have a technical content?

Satan is a seducer, and he is crafty. He seduces people to act against their best interests. This has been in full view for centuries; see the ancient myth of Faust. So there is a technical psychological content, as I sketched with the reverence for inhuman coolness.

Financially Pluto is a major factor; Pluto lives underground, and can make itself invisible. This is exactly how the banking system works. As the cover article in today’s Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal admits: “Banks around the world are being whipsawed by the fact that much of the bank-funding market is opaque… That forces nervous traders—and even regulators—to piece together a view of a complex, global banking system using threads of data, anecdotal information and even rumors.”

Opacity is one of Satan’s characteristics, allowing it to deploy its abusive schemes, and a quality adverse to democracy. It is central to the exploitation system by plutocracy because People cannot fight what they can’t see, or cannot even conceive. 

Q: Do you have a problem with capital?

A: No. I do not. Capital is as old as the first tools, the first weapons. Property is as old as the first cave. I have a problem with the distribution of capital. I do not share the condemnation of private property made by many philosophers. It is as if they had never heard of cavemen. In the concept of “caveman”, there was a property, the cave. Although I salute these philosophers’ contribution to the slogan of the French republic, Liberté, égalité, fraternité. Which I approve of.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau famously wrote in his attractive style: “The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, thought of saying ‘This is mine,’ and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not somebody have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this imposter; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.”

This was also the point of view, claimed by nomadic American hunters, especially when mounted on horses, and talking to the whites. But the Iroquois came out of their mountain redoubts, and exterminated entire Indian nations that the French Jesuits had civilized, and settled on their lands as  peaceful peasants. The Iroquois had never invaded these lands before. That horror and misfortune is outside the explanatory schemes that Rousseau dwelled in. Instead it belongs to the instinct of intellectual domination. The Iroquois wanted to demonstrate they were better thinkers, they had the best system of thought, and there is nothing better to achieve this, than breaking one pacific opponent’s skull in two.

Indian tribes fought each other to death for horses, if not hunting grounds.

Some animals have to be territorial, because, if they were not, the resources they need to exist would be spread too thin, and their species would die. Humankind, which was 2 billion a generation ago, will reach 7 billion within weeks, and may be reminded the hard way that man is, and has to be, highly territorial. Whenever the Earth belongs to everybody, that is nobody in particular, it suffers the tragedy of the commons.

Humanity had always to be territorial, and even racist, in some sense, which has varied, according to specifics. Humanity was de facto  specifist, to use a neologism: all the competitive species, dozens of them, in particular the Australopithecines, were eliminated. To make the Earth in a human garden, deadly enemies next door eating one’s lunch presented no viable option. (Kipling makes specifism the main message of his novel, “the Lion”.)

All of this to say that demonic tendencies are never far below the surface, by necessity of the human condition. One ignores them at all imaginable costs, as Obama is in the process of demonstrating, from the Hindu Kush, to the Potomac.

The Marquis de Sade’s in his 1797 text L’Histoire de Juliette, agreeing for once with his intimate enemy Rousseau, uttered : “theft is only punished because it violates the right of property; but this right is itself nothing in origin but theft.“ Sade was not up to his usual level of natural objectivity. Nature does not steal, it produces, monsieur Le Marquis. A lion produces territory, to feed itself, just as a fire produces grassland, because it fed itself.

Lodging a protest, a provocation, as he admitted later, French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon summed up the naïve point of view: Property is theft! (“La propriété, c’est le vol!”) in his 1840 book What is Property? Or, an Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government.

To attack the principle of private property is silly. When it got cold, and Homo Neanderthalis wanted to improve his lodgings, he went into the caves, and chased out the gigantic Cave Bears. Enough of sleeping outside for 250,000 years! This happened around 50,000 years ago. Did Neanderthal steal the bears? He did more than that, as intended. The Cave Bears, with no place to call home anymore, went the way of the Indians later, and were exterminated. Civilization could rise only after most of the ferocious beasts had been eliminated (it is thought that, at some point lion like predators were the most abundant species: a lion can survive by eating just rabbits, as wolves do with mice).

It took a lot of work, for Homo erectus to make the first clothes, the first stone weapons (both necessary to conquer the Caucasus, as Erectus did, two million years ago!) And, a fortiori, to make vast swathes of the earth into a garden. Those individuals could be motivated only if they worked pro privo (for the individual). in other words: privately.

Q: So maybe the plutocrats are the new Neanderthals, and common people need to go the way of the Cave Bears!

A: Keep your sarcasm down. The Cave Bears did not go down without a fight. As you could see in London riots (5 dead), the People is having enough of the exploitation by sleek plutocrats such as Cameron, who find everything “disgusting“, but for their own classy predation. All around the world, nations are chafing under plutocracy, from India to England.

Democracy cannot operate if capital is not spread around enough. Capital represents potential power, and democracy basically means people power. If the People has basically no capital, the People has no power, and there cannot be any democracy. Plutocracy and democracy are completely incompatible.

In recent decades, there has been a massive switch of power to fewer and fewer individuals and families in the West. This had some clear consequences: young people are less relatively knowledgeable and passionate than their forebears in the sixties, so they have tolerated more readily the increasing abuse they are subjected to. In the sixties what president Johnson did in Vietnam was intolerable, but, at the same time, he was creating a “Great Society”, spending a lot on the people, and the program was basically extended by Nixon. For example, Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency, and today’s young republicans want to shut it down. Young people nowadays watch all this with the concern of cows contemplating trains whizzing in the distance.

Q: What causes the present imbalance of capital?

A: Three principal effects concentrate capital ever more: unfair and unsustainable taxation, using the rich to create money, and globalization, aka inverse colonization. All of this under the watchful mind’s eye of plutocracy unchained, whose malevolence has no more bounds than its dissemblance.

In the USA, the foremost process is very simple: the top 400 incomes in the USA pay 17% average tax. It is legal tax evasion, organized by a Congress “coddling the super rich“, as Warren Buffet put it. American politicians coddle the super rich, because they hope they will be rewarded by joining the super rich; see the immensely rich Clintons.

The influential chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, republican Darrell Issa, comes complete with as the New York Times puts it: a “nonprofit family foundation, which seeks to encourage values like “hard work and selfless philanthropy,” [which] earned millions from stock in DEI, which bears his initials. Mr. Issa’s fortune, in fact, was built on his car alarm company, and to this day it is his deep voice on Viper alarms that warns potential burglars to “please step away from the car.”

In recent months, The New York Times has examined how some lawmakers have championed particular industries, pushing measures to protect and enrich supporters. In Mr. Issa’s case, it is sometimes difficult to separate the business of Congress from the business of Darrell Issa.”

Mr. Issa is worth nearly a billion dollars, and generated a billion dollars in financial trades, just from one Merrill Lynch account. He is from southern California. According to the NYT, he would buy a clinic, and then direct public funds to build a great road going to that clinic, this sort of things. He is in charge of financial ethics, appropriately enough in a plutocracy.

Q: OK, there is great legal corruption in the USA, but that does not explain the crisis in Europe.

A: Indeed, legal corruption is the best way to describe the political and fiscal scene in the USA. Most of these deplorable practices are illegal in Europe.

However a second sort of mechanism exists to make the rich ever richer, and that mechanism exists both in the USA, and in Europe.  It has to do with the public mandate some private individuals are given to create money for everybody, an intrinsically perverse mandate, because nobody has elected those banksters, and they have become much more perverse in recent years. Those crafty ones discovered that the cows were not watching, and they kept most of the money to themselves. 

Q: You are alluding to the fractional reserve system, a notion even economists don’t ever speak about.

A: Well, that’s how money is created. Economists paid by the system are not supposed to demolish the system. But there is something nearly as unhealthy in the non separation of bank and state as in the non separation of church and state.

Q: You quote many causes for the crisis, and I know you have more up your sleeve, can you simplify?

A: As I keep on saying, THE ROOT OF THE CRISIS, WORLDWIDE, IS THE SAME: THE RISE OF PLUTOCRACY. That malevolent dragon has to be pushed back in the subterranean sojourns, where it belongs.

Thatcher and Murdoch, in the early 1980s, turned Britain in a plutocratic heaven. It was a summit of dishonesty: resting prosperity on making a country into a haven for world class thieves (the USA, by the way, does the same; at least in the EU, plutocrats are forced to pay the Added Value Tax, heavier on luxury).

Then Blair and Murdoch delayed the day of reckoning by buying the people on credit (and making Wall Street dirtiest derivative work, besides ingratiating themselves to American plutocracy by going to invade Iraq). Meanwhile Clinton gave full power to Rubin (Goldman Sachs) and his assistant, the well connected Summers, to dismantle president Roosevelt’s financial and economic revolution, so that their class could stuff itself with all the money they wanted. They just forgot that even enormous leverage limits how much money there is.

At the bottom, money represents power, that is energy, and there is only so much to go around. If you take all the energy away from the People, they may not be able to make a revolution, indeed, as happened under Rome, but neither will they have the energy to operate civilization, as happened under Rome, too.

Basically the same pattern happened in all the leading democracies. Even upper middle class Londoners and Parisians cannot afford to live in their own cities, which were sold to tax free world plutocrats, in connivance with domestic plutocrats. (Long ago an African “emperor”, Bokassa, had offered diamonds to his girlfriend (?) French president VGE.)

The effect is worse in London, as said foreigners were taxed there even less. Entire buildings in those democratic capitals turned out to be the property of Middle Eastern or African potentates, or, as I prefer to say, plutocrats. For example president Bongo of Gabon was found to own for hundreds of millions euros of property, in France alone (he had properties in Britain, and more than one hundred million dollar in the USA).

Q: Why this irresistible rise of plutocracy?

A: I have explained this in much older essays, and will give a little refresher in a few paragraphs. The rise of plutocracy is a tendency always, ever since capital and property became extensive enough in the Neolithic (hence the rage of Rousseau, Sade and company above). It’s basically a mathematical effect. In general plutocracy won, and demonic wealth ruled thereafter. This why democracy is rare in civilized times, although it is the natural state of the genus Homo.

Even Athenian democracy died this way, as the Athenian plutocracy, however modest, surrendered to the ferocious and mighty Macedonian plutocracy, which had made them an offer they could not refuse. OK, the Athenians had been defeated in a first naval battle, and they surrendered after the second one became indecisive. The philosopher Demosthenes, an enemy of fascism, took poison as Macedonian shock troops seized him.

Q: Does the decline and fall of Rome fit your model?

A: Yes, plutocracy caused the fall of the republic. However, the army came to represent the People, something already obvious in the writings of the Gracchi, or, later, in 100 BCE, when seven times Consul Marius, victorious on invading Germans, a “New Man” fought the hyper rich.  After Augustus, the army fought the Senate, representing the plutocracy. They weakened each other, and the rise of foreign soldiers, or their descendants, and of the Eastern Empire, and theocracy, made it into a 5 way fight. Which became a six way fight, as the Persian Sassanids and then the “Saracens” (“Sons of Sara”) got into the brawl. After a century of darkness, and theocracy, the Franks came out on top.

Q: Were not the Franks very rich? Did they not own Europe?

A: For people who ruled what they called Europe, the Franks were austere, relatively speaking. Most of them were peasants with a frankly unsubmissive attitude. They had a high birthrate, and their inheritance law forced equal distribution of inheritance. Charlemagne’s capital, in Aix, was modest for someone who was the only legal Roman emperor, and controlled most of Western Europe. Over seven centuries of Frankish queens, kings and emperors, I do not know one example of extravagant luxury from one the many monarchs. Many were major war chiefs present on the battlefield, sometimes for decades. Charlemagne spent 50% more time at war on horseback than Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor who spent the most time fighting.

Many Frankish head of states (for example Bathilde, Charlemagne, Charles the Bald) supported intellectual activity on the largest and highest scale. Their philosophers were condemned, many centuries later, by the abominable fascists of the Inquisition, representing a most vicious type of plutocracy, the theocratic type.

In general, plutocratic tendencies cannot be avoided. Democracy has to prevent plutocracy actively. Societies, for 12,000 years, have had active forms of sacrifices and taxes to keep plutocracy from killing society.  Obama, a way cool guy, cannot prevent plutocracy anymore than the average iguana, and for the same reason; even if he wanted to, his metabolism is too cool, his passions so little developed, that he cannot get to move. Without e-motion, there is no motion. As everybody can attest.

Q: Forget Obama. Now everybody is starting to agree with you that the guy (to speak like him) is clueless, hopeless without any belief, because we can’t, and it was all about: “Yes, we can!” because he can’t, so we had to step in, but we were not made president by electing him, a point he forgot. You did not answer fully the question on the rise of plutocracy.

A: There are two phenomena at work. One has been in evidence for 12 millennia. It is purely mathematical. It has to do with the nature of the exponential function applied on the notions of capital and interest. You have three ingredients there which are as fundamental as possible: the exponential, the most important function in mathematics, capital, that is potential energy, and interest, without which the human brain would be just impotent jelly, plunged in the abyss of terminal cool.

Q: So you claim that the basic problem with plutocracy involves deep mathematics, but has been well known?

A: Yes, sustainable societies have known forever what capital is, and interest too. Long lived societies also grasped the intuitive properties of the exponential function, such as being its own derivative, so growing the faster, the bigger it gets. Mathematics often makes explicit and systematic notions which were guessed long before, if they were of vital interest.

The ancients in Carthage reacted to the exponential by throwing the eldest of the hyper rich in the fire. Or, more exactly, in a machine which would throw them in the fire. Wives of Viking and rich Indians would also not enjoy the riches of cool inheritance, but the bite of flames. Same idea: prevent wealth to get so ingrained in a few hands that society would come to a standstill.

Q: Is the mathematical tendency for plutocracy to feed on itself why all societies bring up margin rates for taxes for higher incomes?

A: Of course. The exponential function, acting on the interest capital brings, imposes an EXPONENTIAL TAXATION, just for the distribution of riches to stay the same. So strong redistributive taxes are mathematically necessary to prevent democracy to turn into plutocracy.

The hyper rich in the Late Roman empire refused to pay taxes. That dearth of state income was the main proximal factor in the fall of the Roman state, as the political leaders of Rome had to subcontract defense to various German tribes, and even the Huns. When the Franks took over, they took over as the legal army of Rome. They decided to collect tax themselves, as Rome would not do it. Thus the Frankish army became the state. If the USA’s government revenue keeps on collapsing, it is likely that the U.S. military will also take over. An efficient military always operates as a socialist meritocracy.

Q: let’s compare apples to apples. Is the USA more of a plutocracy than in the past?

A: The USA did not have much wealth inequality in its first century, at least among voters (white men with property). Carnegie, the first billionaire, at the end of the nineteenth century, would now be called a left wing liberal, somewhere to the left of Soros. He was an important author, guru to his wealthy contemporaries, explaining the populist bend of early American billionaires.

The top income-tax rate was 91 percent under the republican Eisenhower, in 1960. It was 70 percent in 1980, after Nixon and Carter, 50 percent in 1986, after Reagan and Bush Senior, and 39.6 percent in 2000, after Clinton had sold democracy short to plutocracy, and is now 35 percent. Income from investments is taxed at a rate of 15 percent, and most of the hyper rich have connived with the IRS to claim that rate for their income. The gutting of the estate tax by Oblabla, the democrat from make believe, insures that the USA is transforming itself into an hereditary plutocracy  under our unbelieving eyes. Indeed remember: wealth breeds wealth faster, the bigger the wealth. This is actually how the social inequalities of the feudal society evolved. Just to stand still, a heavy tax need to be applied so that the rich does not grab more and more of the riches, generation after generation.

Q: What is wrong with that?

A: Let’s leave aside the intrinsic violation of the Aristotelian Constitution of the USA that this would be, as it would deny “life and the pursuit of happiness” to the many. Human beings are not psychobiologically made to be submitted. They suffer stress, debilitated health, they become much less intelligent, much less human in the most noble sense of the term… So the USA would become a nation of debilitated morons, ultimately to be defeated on the battlefield.

Q: I thought you admired Nietzsche? You should admire the return of an aristocracy…

A: I am far from agreeing with all of Nietzsche’s ideas. Moreover, Nietzsche precisely alluded to what I just said. We are actually in agreement. On that point as many others, I am more Nietschean than Nietzsche. The slave mentality, slave religion, and spirit of the herd which Nietzsche condemned, he condemned for precisely the reasons I said, although he used different semantics. On top of that, we are not talking about aristocracy here, which is the rule of the best. The mediocre tricks applied in Libya by the Gaddafi clan, and those applied by Western plutocrats, have nothing to do with being the best. We are not talking about Charles Martel’s knights here. What we have been confronting in the last decade has been naked kleptocracy, the rule of the thieves. They did not just a little bit of money, but too much to keep on operating civilization itself.

Q: You think that the hyper rich are thieves, because they become ever richer using not merit, but riches to become richer, and they have got so rich that there is not enough money for the world to go ’round. What about the guy which founded Facebook? Was not that a beautiful American success story? What about Google?

A: What about worshipping Standards & Poor, as you are at it? That’s a whole can of worms. It would take several pages to explain that some sort of organized crime is at play in some exaggerated valuations on the private market. Facebook, like Google, was founded by discrete, but very rich individuals, venture capitalists we don’t want to mention, but we that have personally encountered. They are the real power behind those thrones. the valuation of Facebook, up to 50 billion dollars, according to the usual suspect at Goldman Sachs (both judge and party in Facebook), is an organized criminal plot.

If you want to talk about great American companies, think Intel, or GE (in spite of GE’s propensity to go overseas).

Q: You said that the very way money is created contributes to converting today’s world into plutocracy. How does that work?

A: Money is traditionally created, by private financiers leveraging from public money, laws and regulations prevented financiers to keep (most of the) money to themselves. However laws and regulations to prevent plutocracy were removed by the plutocrats and their (servant).

To make things worse, there is only so much money to go around. Banks create money by leveraging, presently with a multiplier of about 30, it seems, in the USA. So, if the central bank and treasury give a trillion to the banks, they loan 30 trillions. By contrast, in cautious, democratic Switzerland, the multiplier is only 5 (five!)

And of course, the derivative market is in excess of 600 trillion (the banks mumble disingenuously that, once one has added and subtracted everything, it’s more like 30 trillion; the fact remains, it’s at least twice the GDP of the USA!) Banks seem to be loaning mostly to that.

By stealing more and more of the money, the super rich have left the rest of the population with less and less money, hence power. The solution? Hyper tax the hyper rich, or face mayhem. And not just in the markets. Also tax heavily the transfer mechanisms which allow the hyper rich to steal the poor.

Q: Many economists and pundits observe that a DELEVERAGING EVENT is ongoing. Paul Krugman uses the label “Minsky event”, for a deleveraging crisis. Why do you not insist on that point?

A: Krugman wants to advertize Minsky’s views, which are not really his own, but ought certainly to be better known. Deleveraging is part of the crisis. However, deleveraging, although important in the USA, is not the essence of the crisis.

How do we know this? Well, there is a crisis, but THERE HAS BEEN VERY LITTLE DELEVERAGING, SO FAR. Actually, quite the opposite. Indeed, individuals are trying to deleverage, in the USA. But they have not (yet) been very successful (private debt relative to GDP has gone down very little). Moreover, individuals are not deleveraging in Europe (traditionally, the Franco-Germans families have assets, but little debt, so there is nothing to deleverage). Moreover, the states piled up debt since 2007, especially the USA and the nations making up the EU. For example Spain went from a debt around 30% of GDP to 65% of GDP, between 2008 and 2011.

Thus one needs to look somewhere else for the main causative set of the crisis. Much economic analysis, not only does not go to the bottom of economics (which is energy + ethics), but do not even go deep enough to understand even the main factors causing the present Greater Depression.

Q: If deleveraging has not caused the crisis, why do people talk about it so much?

A: Pernicious actors hid much bigger causes behind smaller, rather irrelevant ones. For example, American economists obsess about Europe and the euro in a thoroughly negative way, due to their nationalistic bias (USA first!) Even supposedly left wing economists in the USA do this. Of course, they are paid to howl that way, by their plutocratic sponsors (don’t forget Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, etc. may be great universities, but they are also plutocratic devices). The European Union has a constitutional social welfare, which is anathema to American plutocrats, and they are afraid that the American People could catch the fancy that they would prefer such a society.

Q: So deleveraging will never be a problem?

A: I never said that. Quite the opposite. Deleveraging will contribute to the crisis considerably, if and whenever it gets underway, and stupid political decisions just taken insure that it will, should they be implemented. Decisions coming out of false analogies, such as Obama claiming that the government ought to balance its budget, just as a family does.

Q: Why does not the government need to balance its finances?

A: Because the only correct way to reduce debt is through growth. The less growth, the more debt. Obama, and the Tea Party do not understand the role of government. The government makes banks possible. Government makes the entire financial system possible. The problem is not debt, it is what you make with the debt. If you make nothing with it, you are in serious trouble. This is the case of the USA presently. Even Bush Junior can claim that he put the USA further in debt to pay drugs for seniors. Obama, on the other hands can only show you dead seals in Afghanistan, a surrealistic spectacle that would have thrilled Salvador Dali by its absurdity.

The government is to the economy in general, and the ‘free’ market in particular, what a conductor is to an orchestra. It is also composer and paymaster.

Q: Is there a similarity between the American and European crises?

A: In truth, there is a European banking crisis, just as there is  an American banking crisis. Trillions have already been directed towards American bankers, not yet as much towards European bankers. There is also a deficit crisis, as many states (including the USA) run high “primary deficits“.

The European banking crisis has not been as bad, because the banks there are more regulated. moreover, Great Britain, Belgium and Germany nationalized derelict mega banks.

Q: What’s so great about nationalizations?

A: Once a bank inside a nation has been paid for by the People of a nation, it ought to become property of the People of that nation. Once a mega bank has been nationalized, it can be ordered to lend to the real economy. by contrast, in the USA, Bush and Obama paid personally the crooked bankers much more than their banks were worth, and now those same bankers refuse to lend to the real economy.

Bush senior and Reagan had nationalized 2,000 banks during the Savings and Loans crisis, very successfully (this inspired Scandinavia to do the same during its own financial crisis, a few years later, and an ill informed, pathetic Obama to make fun of the whole thing, 20 years later).

Q: Do you hate the rich? Are you jealous?

A: No. I am extremely weathy myself, at least where it really counts for high self esteem. A form of wealth no money can buy.

In an editorial,  “Stop Coddling the Super-Rich”, Warren Buffet, the third richest individual in the world, goes into the injustice of American taxation. This has been true, for more than a decade, and was mentioned hundreds of time on my sites. Buffet does not mention further injustices, such as tax support for fossil fuels, or for companies making money overseas.

Buffet does not mention why it is so bad to have a few making an immense amount of money while most do not. It is not just unjust: concentration of capital and power is gripping the entire socio-economy of the USA. The remark applies to the whole planet, by the same mechanism. The reason is this: a very rich person can only rise by so much aggregate demand. After all that person and family are only a few. 

When Bill Gross, founder of PIMCO, another money manipulator, bemoans the lack of “aggregate demand” in the economy of the USA, he is an hypocrite, because it is actually his fault. Indeed, Mr. Gross, worth personally more than 2 billion dollars, can only demand so much; how many people will he employ to lick his toes?

In 2009, 25 hedge fund managers in the USA earned, personally, more than 25 billion dollars, and they were taxed 15%. Some will celebrate American ingenuity. What they do not realize, though, is that this money was stolen from everybody else, or, at least retirees with pension funds, and all those that could have been paid when working for these retirees.

In Great Britain a youth who stole bottled water was condemned to 6 months in jail. Others got four years for “inciting riots”… on the Internet. Not that any riots directly connected to what they wrote happened, as the police and “justice” readily admits. This, on Facebook pages (a funny concept, as Facebook is the site, on which the alleged incitation occurred, thus ought to have been condemned too; but Facebook is good for revolution in Syria, not London). In a step soon to come, people who click on this site will be jailed automatically…

Q: Are there objective, factual differences between the attitude to the crisis in Europe and the USA?

A: As I said, some banks were nationalized already. Some major French banks, are among the most crucial in the world (not just because Italy owes them 400 billion dollars, but because they are central to the derivative market). One thing is sure, though: if they need major help from French taxpayers, they will be nationalized.

France, under the presidency of de Gaulle in 1945, did massive nationalizations, which were very successful. Nobody has forgotten that, in Europe.

Q: why is the crisis so deleterious in the Anglo-Saxon world?

A: Australia and Canada are doing great. Tightly regulated banks in the later. It is not just a question of commodities doing well. these are also more honest countries. They both declared war to Hitler a few days after France and Britain in September 1939. Canada landed soldiers in France in 1940, and again in 1942 and 1944!

The irresistible drama of plutocracy in the USA is a direct long term consequence of the collaboration between American plutocracy and European fascists before, during and after World War Two. The fact the USA stabbed democracy in the back in 1939, by helping Hitler, and hurting Poland, France and Britain, was never dispassionately pondered. This American duplicity was never explored, let alone explained seriously, so it has persisted, like a malignant cancer, always there, always growing.

Ever since the spirit American plutocracy, you know the stuff they learn at the “Skull and Bones” society or at Harvard, kept on a roll. That many Nazi songs were modified Harvard songs are the sort of telling details which were swept under the rug. That weapon smuggling from the USA, using American owned companies, armed the Nazis during their hyper violent rise to power is another subject which is ignored. That the Bush family fortune is splashed all over in Auschwitz blood, is something best never evoked in good company. Prescott Bush, and many other American plutocrats were Hitler’s closest and most important collaborators.

In spite of American plutocratic help, Hitler’s Reich last 12 years. American plutocracy on its own, had a better run, but much of it has been, in a sense, Nazi fuelled. Tough. Once again, nobody wants to say this. But many European leaders have these notions, unexpressed, deep in the back of their heads, and American leaders such as Bush have got to have some notions about the friendship between Prescott and Adolf. This has led to a deep, mostly unconscious, so far, conflict between Europe and the USA.

At the root of the Conflict between the USA and Europe is the question of whether plutocracy or democracy will lead the West. Something similar happened between Rome and Greece. In the first phase, Roman plutocratic fascism won. In the second phase, Greece recovered her empire, and Rome was displaced by the Franks. In the third phase, European civilization gobbled everything up. But now, Europe is confronted to a rogue colony.

because, under the façade smiles, it’s coming to the fore. The Americans, paid by their plutocrats, are trying their best to demolish the euro (Goldman Sachs’ organized lying to European authorities about Greek finances being a case in point; using derivatives, with their enormous leverage, to demolish European finances is another example). If they fail in a timely manner, everybody will be able to observe that the primary deficit of the USA is the worst of the planet. We are talking epic failure on a Zimbabwean scale here. The American deficit augments at the rate of 1% a MONTH. Yes, a month. Next years, state finances will collapse.   

Q: Which other deleterious consequences do you see to plutocracy?

A: Plutocracy is fundamentally anti-intellectual, as its power rests on People not understanding what it dies to be so powerful. So plutocracy is against intellectual, philosophical, and scientific progress. It is friendly to stupidity, superstition, superficiality, selfishness.

 

There is evidence that scientific, medical, and technological progress has slowed down, and this, in my opinion, can be traced to the rise of plutocracy, as it was in Ancient Greece, which became distinctly less clever when it got ruled by the plutocrats (“Hellenistic Kingdoms“, Rome).

This is not just lost opportunity. We are in a race between our knowledge and our demolition of the biosphere. As cognitive expansion has abated, the chances for irreversible demolition have augmented. This plutocratic show is just a waste of opportunity, and precious time.

***

Patrice Ayme

GDP: Gross Demonic Proclivity?

Why Was The USA Down Rated?

BETTER ECONOMY FROM BETTER IDEAS, OR NOT.

***

HOW TO GET OUT OF THE GATHERING ECONOMICOLOGICAL CRISIS?

Simple: superior ideas ruling. So:

1) Plutocracy is fundamentally anti-intellectual, thus anti-ideas. Crush plutocracy, drive it back underground, where it belongs, by definition.

2) Foster education and creativity in the West. This means free, and best education for all, as used to be the case in France or the USA in the past, for decades, when those countries were domineering. Yes, it means more government, more taxes, as it used to be in the past. Go teach that to Obama and his bipartisan wet dream, the Tea Party. The hard way: don’t give them a penny, heap contempt on them.

3) Price intellectual innovation correctly, worldwide. Declare economic war to those who refuse to go along.

Yes, it will be a bit delicate with drugs. But accords, government to government, can solve that: if India and China are doing so well economically, they can pay their way. By definition: we are just talking about balancing trade here. India cannot crow about its success in matters economic, buy major companies in the West, fire their workers, and then steal drugs, because it whines that it has no money. (I do not mean that drug companies are not thieves, especially in the USA, that is another subject.)

Allowing much superior ideas to rule is the solution, the only one, not just for saving the West, but for saving the planet.

Oh, what of that neologism: economicological? The words economy and ecology are closely related: eco means “house”. “Nomy” means “manage”, and “Logos”, even the Christians had to kneel to. Thus the distinctions between economy and ecology are artificial. And that point of view has drastic consequences; when coal burning is fully priced in full ecological context, its impact is clearly worse than nuclear energy, by orders of magnitude (especially when one considers that nuclear can be immensely improved, but not so for coal burning: there is just one way to burn fossils, there are many ways to go nuclear! Most of them undeveloped).

***

WHY WAS THE USA DOWN RATED?

It’s a bit the same question as why was Obama down rated. The questions are closely related, in many ways. It’s all about taxes.

By refusing to augment taxes on his “friends”, the hyper rich, Obama deliberately decided to down rate the USA, and he is still at it. He clearly became president, in a desperate situation, where clearly spending had to be lowered and taxes increased. He did the exact opposite.  To make matters worse, he spent all the money on useless wars and his plutocratic friends, especially the bankers.

Obama is a child of Reagan, economically speaking. A consensus was created, starting with Reagan: government is the problem, taxes are bad. Reagan himself, and his advisers, did not believe his own grossest propaganda, as the record shows, and his advisers are themselves saying today (as they disagree with the Obama-Tea Party economic line of less taxes, less government, less economic activity). A curious thing: Reagan’s old advisers sound like leftist, relative to Obama.

People like Obama, and children such as his “senior” adviser, the greedy child Plouffe, barely 40 years old, were not reached by the full reality of Reagan’s rule. They did not have the attention span for studying it carefully. They were not interested, anyway: they are all about themselves.

Obama’s autobiographical books are just fantasies about himself. There is clearly no further horizon than an imagined Obama (I know very well people who were intimate with Obama at the time, and his books are totally fanciful). There are no preoccupation about the big wide world, it’s all about the imagined hero, toughing it out in an imagined tough world.

In truth Obama lived in Indonesia with four lived-in domestics (according to the New York Times, 2011). It was not yet as many domestics as in the White House, but he was clearly on his way. Obama’s mother had married an Indonesian millionaire (he was there just so that a truly American company could claim to be Indonesian, according to evidence, and the NYT).

Then, of course, Obama went to the top private school in Hawai’i, starting at age ten (consider the expense until graduation!) So Obama was truly a child of privilege, something that counfounded me this year, when I realized it. I had believed in his books, sort of, and believed he had a really tough youth, brushing off the many dissonances along the way. No wonder that as president he made it so that hedge fund managers could keep paying a maximum 15% tax rate. (Some hedge fund managers take as much money as would pay for 150,000 teachers!)

Obama had obviously to do little thinking during his whole career: it was all about posing. And now he is posing in the White House, waiting for some more good things to come to him, the hero, and some people are getting angry, for some reason that he cannot understand, nor does he care to.

Instead of understanding the complexities of the world, or even of the Reagan administration, the Obama operators just heard the roughest outline of Reagan’s propaganda. So they deduced, with their tiny brains: taxes are bad. That is why Obama lowered taxes lower than Bush, and keeps on repeating like a deranged parrot that taxes have to be lowered further, “to put more money into people’s pockets“. He repeated that, even after having been slapped by the USA down rating, which has everything to do with taxes (or, rather, lack thereof!)

Well, we can see who is putting money in his pockets: conniving Obama’s men such as the plutocratically sleeping (literally!) Orzsag, who sent dozens of billions of taxpayer money before joining his present employer, Citiroup. (A behavior illegal in Great Britain: there Orzsag would have been put in jail!)

In a striking contrast, to the aggressive greedy naivety of the Obama crowd, the whole planet knows that American taxes have to be brought up. But the American consensus against taxes, and against government, has set the USA on a quick course to oblivion. It threatens both the deficit, and, paradoxically, economic growth (growth is the only way to get out of the deficit).

The USA was down rated,  because the prospect of rising taxes in the USA is nil. The USA will keep on doing the wrong thing, full power on, commands completely in the wrong position, just like the crew of that doomed Air France jet, whose crew did the wrong thing all the way into the ocean.

OK, the Air France crew had many excuses, such as alarms screaming when they did the right thing, and silent when they persisted with error. But the USA does not have any excuses: what ails the USA is very well understood, worldwide, and only the USA is dumb enough, or arrogant enough, to keep on claiming that it should be doing what nobody else is doing.

Whereas in the case of the Air France jet, everybody is culprit to some extent, not just Air France and Airbus (which are criminally prosecuted by the French government), but also world air safety authorities, which should have seen the problem coming, or even the American FAA, which insisted on wide pitot tubes for the A330 jets, causing the stuffing of these with ice!

Compare the USA with Italy. Italy increased taxes on the rich, bringing them up 10%, a week ago (as part of huge austerity package). And PM Berlusconi, a conservative, and a plutocrat, worth more than ten billion dollars, cannot be accused of naïve leftism. He is anything, but. He also had engaged himself to never rise taxes. But, as Berlusconi readily admits, the situation has completely changed.

So where is Obama? Somewhere way to the right of the  PM Cameron, a British conservative, who, differently from Obama, plays it, as he said he would. Trojan horses are fewer and far between, though. Trojan horses are all about posing.

***

WHAT DOES GERMANY HAVE TO TEACH?

Well, Germany is doing well right now, propped up, as it is, by precision machinery, best in the world, that it can sell at high price. How did Germany get there? Through more than a decade of austerity, starting in 1990s. Everybody was asked to take a cut, including the higher-ups, and including the unions. Many German companies took engagements to stay inside Germany.

Union representatives sit on the board of German companies, by law. Where does that German attitude comes from? Well, organized labor resisted Hitler, sort of: Hitler could not break it and thoroughly Nazify it.

Germany went down as a civilization because of plutocracy, the real force behind the crazed Prussian generals who attacked Europe in 1914, and behind the Nazis. Germany learned the lesson of the rule of Pluto the hardest way: more than 10% of the German population was killed, and German civilization went from the highest, to lower than beasts. 

In the former case, that of the Prussian attack in 1914, the plutocracy behind the generals was mostly German. In the latter case, that of Nazism, there was a big Anglo-Saxon component, carefully swept under the rug since (since it has contemporary consequences of the heaviest type).

For example Hitler was paid by Ford considerable money, $50,000 a year, maybe the equivalent of half a million today, as early as 1921. In exchange Hitler advertized Ford’s nefarious theories on the Jews, and gave Ford huge sway inside Germany, and orders from the Wehrmacht, once he was in command, 12 years later.

Many respected German intellectuals noticed this, and called attention to it. So Germany has been leery of plutocracy, and has respected its unions and fostered a common social bound, and co-responsibility. The same extends to France, to a great extend. If anything, today’s Germany learned from France that way.

In 1936, as Germany enjoyed Hitler, France was led by socialist Leon Blum, a Jew who introduced massive social reforms which are now the norm, throughout the West.

In 1914, French and German socialists tried to stop world War One with a strike. It failed, in part (at least) because the immensely charismatic, clever French socialist leader Jean Jaures, an intellectual, was assassinated by a crazed French hyper nationalist. Genuine German socialists and progressives could only watch with envy, as Blum introduced a new civilization, and Germany was sunk, deep into barbarity.  

So a higher lesson? That France and Germany have to do it together, keeping plutocracy underground.

Meanwhile,  the plutocratic component, a culture of privilege and its grandchildren of wealth, that component which fostered Hitler is what presently ails the USA. It came to believe it could get away with anything, exactly what German based plutocracy believed for a few generations. And it has been tempted by the military solution, just as German plutocracy was, and that is why it spends a trillion dollar a year on defense, with money it does not have.

***

Some Ideas Work, Some Don’t:

In all justice, German socializing tendencies were launched by Bismarck, a robust fascist, and his national health care system. The German socialists were very powerful, and a factor in panicking Prussian generals and plutocrats into war in 1914. Now, of course, the Germans had learned enormously from Napoleon and the French revolution he was riding. They learned in particular that Germany could be unified, and unified enthusiastically as an empire of comrades, ready to take on the world (under Napoleon a very bad typhus epidemic killed the Grande Armee, greatly made of German youth, as it invaded Russia).

Not all French ideas are good. The 35 hour work week is the law in France. It has been for a decade. The idea was that, by diminishing the number of hours people worked, companies would have to employ more people. That underestimated French ingenuity.

The 35 hour work week did not work in France. Not at all. It just lowered French GDP, and fostered a decrease of income per head, and thus of wealth per capita. Companies reacted by just augmenting productivity, not employment. It was basically rescinded under Sarko I, and will not be reinstated under the socialists, should they come to power again.

A much better idea is the present government line in France. It is to foster free university education at the highest world level, and build the highest value tech products in the world (so it is the same line as Germany, but for the top most technology, whereas Germany focuses a bit below). France borrowed for doing this (“Le Grand Emprunt”). A good usage of debt. And the socialists agree.

In truth, this strategy, of scientific and technical superiority, fostered by education, is the oldest French strategy: it was practiced by the French Third Republic, the French revolution, even the ancient regime, and characterized the Franks, as they harassed the Romans, shortly after appearing on the world scene, way back. 

***

GDP MENTALITY & INTERNET DEVOLUTION, AND HOW TO FIGHT THEM:

Prime Minister Cameron loved the Internet, as long as it caused havoc overseas. Now that organized bands are rising a sort of popular tax on the haves (people with devastated businesses will be mostly reimbursed, one way, or another), Cameron wants to shut down “social networks”. OK, true, much of the Internet is a vast devolution of the mind. Some people on Facebook, with thousands of followers, think it’s really important that they purchased a new guitar, or that the mocha at Denico is not all what it could be.

Human beings have propensities. Some desires were all the stronger, the less they could be satisfied in the wild. Well known examples are the cravings for sugar and fat. Sugar demanded to fight it off with untamed bees, it was nothing too readily enjoyed. but there much more subtle cravings, such as becoming the center of attention. Modern tech allows nobodys on Facebook to satisfy it, or Obama, or Hitler, or Stalin, to believe they are intellectually splendid. When artificial machinery allows to satisfy readily those hard-to-satisfy-in-the-wild cravings, things go out of (ecological) control, and there is a possibility that both individual minds and the society at large are in the process of self destroying, because those rare cravings are not meant to be abundantly satisfied; just look at Obama celebrating his 50th birthday in front of an ocean of American flags. Last European to do such a thing was Hitler. But, of course, there is a craving to take oneself for God: the tribe needs a very bold, slightly crazed leader believing in himself unrealistically to confront the lions, and persuade them that he is completely crazed, and thus too dangerous.

With the Internet, society has caught the information bug. Or is it just the gossip bug? In any case, much of the Internet is a form of diarrhea.

An article in the New York Times, the “Elusive Big Idea“, attracts attention to the fact that the very idea of idea is getting killed. Nietzsche, in his times, already attacked newspapers for fostering stupidity, baseness, devolution, the “last man”. Some will scoff, but less so, when they realized that out of German newspapers came the early twentieth century German mind, famous, among other things for the crimes against mankind, in 1914-1918 and 1939-1945, as Nietzsche had predicted with great vigor, and bellowing condemnations.

So how to get out of the present devolution? The NYT author says that information is killing thought. More exactly, idiotic information is killing deep thought. So is cut and paste. Obama’s electoral campaign was obviously a cut and paste job (from sites obviously including mine, which has left me deeply infuriated). Cut and paste artists cut and paste not just things they don’t understand, but things they can’t understand, and precisely because they can’t understand them. And the most notorious play one on TV, with the teleprompter, as Obama does.

So what is a possible remedy? One certainly has to go back to the great polemists of the past. Voltaire, Sade, Hugo, Nietzsche. They did not hesitate to use insults. Hugo called Napoleon III, an elected president who proclaimed himself “emperor”, after suspending the republican constitution, “Napoleon Le Petit“.

If civilization cannot use insults, who can? Certainly the established order does not hesitate to use whatever: the main opponent in Malaysia was accused of sodomy (a grave charge in that state where Muslims are judged according to Sharia inspired law); Sade was accused of madness by Napoleon. Sade’s crime? He had immense renown, as one of the main instigators of the French revolution, and one of his most courageous leaders, fighting to death to stop Robespierre’s terror. Sade opposed Napoleon’s wars and his despicable madness as a ruling gangster. So Napoleon caged Sade, thanks to his insults. Insults, like torpedoes, can work.

So how to protect civilization from the slide into mental superficiality favored by the Internet, in combination with the GDP mentality? Ah, what’s GDP mentality? GDP stands for Gross domestic Product, or, properly considered, GDP = GROSS DEMONIC PROCLIVITY.

GDP mentality says that products have price. No price, no product. In particular ideas, having no price, are not products. Anything which cannot be priced is unworthy. But a traffic jam, which costs a lot, as measured by the wasted gasoline, is worthy, and that is why the USA loves to produce so much of these, increasing its glory, at least in its mind.

Well, Obama would say that the bipartisan spirit, above the fray, is where the highest belong, and he has indeed to do nothing, while filling his pockets; it is just another form of the GDP mentality. In truth, civilizational Trojans have nothing to say: Thry are just rolled in by the naive, and regurgitate their deletrious contents in the middle of the night.

Verily, just the opposite is true. One opposes the fray, one does stand above it like a cloud. One opposes the fray, by going into the fray: “I welcome their hatred“, as FDR said.

Thus, what is needed is not the coolness of Obama, claiming implicitly that nothing untoward is happening. Quite the opposite: plenty of contempt is what is needed. Too many people are getting away with base, stupid, even racist comments. Which are not considered so, because of the stature of the offender. How is stature determined? Once again, from GDP. Extremely well paid pundits commanding high incomes are taken seriously because of this, and the power TV gives them.

There have been zillions of such examples since 9/11. For example, that bin Laden was a renegade CIA employee was systematically erased.

A prominent example, rich in dreadful consequence, was Obama laughing that Sweden nationalized its banks because it had “only 3 or 4 banks” [laughter]. That was a total lie. Sweden needed to nationalize just 2 mega banks, as the USA needed to nationalize just a handful.

Racism has its advantages that reason has not. After exuding spite on Sweden, and thus the Swedish idea of handling the property of the People right, Obama gave crooked bankers all the public money they wanted, without asking anything in return. Great man. Or maybe just great horse.

Telling it as is, and heaping spite on stupidity, and the worshipping of the basest instincts, is now a moral order. Respecting imbeciles, and imbecility, is evil. Because crime is never far removed from imbecility unbound.

Superiority is not arrogance, if it can be justified. Real superiority is what the best ideas are made of.

***

And why has education gone down, instead of going up, as needed?

Because education went down; watch Michelle Bachman, a neurologically smart, culturally idiotic, know nothing who won the republican sort of election in Iowa (to run for president, no less: dumb gets dumber!) OK, maybe she scored because she attacks Obama fiercely, as deserved! Thus dumb brings dumber.

The world is sick with a grave attack of global plutocracy. See how the plutocracy leveraged for its own profit the crisis of 2008, that it had itself created. Speaking of leverage, the fractional reserve system allows bankers to create money nearly as they wish, and, contrarily to pre-plutocratic times, they are allowed to keep the money to themselves. When did you see one of the supposedly left wing economists (Krugman, Reich, etc.) mention this?

Thus there is not enough money, in other words, capital, for most people and the institutions supporting people. Such as education.

But this is no coincidence: education sponsors revolution. Plutocracy fears only revolution.

The Chinese students who are so good in math profit from a superlative math teaching educational system. One of the last aspects where the People’s Republic justifies its name. Those opportunities are not available anymore in the USA. Why?

Because the plutocrats fear revolutions, and the best way to prevent such unhappy occurrence, from their evil perspective, is to bring up masses of young people who know nothing, and have lost even the notion of being elevated in their desires.

The plutocrats have been very successful that way. In the USA. “Cut & Paste” Obama is a case in point; his heart has not been educated, and he believes in nothing, as his ideas, short of making a billion dollars for himself, come too short to support lofty beliefs. Hence his dependence on the teleprompter, as even Michelle Bachman, the ever more popular cultural idiot who makes an asset to not believe in the biological theory of evolution, points out. Correctly.

In China, the plutocratically serving dictatorship maintains order with a firm hand, so the youth is allowed to gather some advanced technical knowledge. The dictatorship has it easy, as the condition of the Chinese People is increasing by leaps and bounds.
Whereas the West is slowly boiled by plutocracy, as happened to the Roman Republic, 22 centuries ago. Yes, time flies. The USA was down rated because it has too much Gross Demonic Proclivity to dig itself out of the hole it is busy deepening, from its domination by the basest instincts, and the passivity of its own population, which bleats, but does not flinch, as it is fleeced. Even  instruments of plutocracy such as rating agencies had to admit this, to keep a semblance of authority.

High time for a revolution.

***

Patrice Ayme

Love Can Be An Authority

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

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

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

***

***

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

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

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

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

***

Mr. Obama, Where Is Your Hoover Dam?

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

FDR As Anti-Plutocrat:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

Quoting The Devil Approvingly:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Debt and investment are separated by fools only.

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

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

***

The Violent Truth; A Drunk Is Under The Bridge:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

Debt For Nothing (Continuing):

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

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

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

***

The Empty Suit Is A Right Wing Cataclysm:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

The Empty Suit: Right Of The Tea Party?

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

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

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

***

Anders Brievik’s Massacre In Norway:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

Frack Me Up!

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

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

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

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

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

***

Desalination Requires Energy:

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

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

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

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What Is The Essence Of Quantum Physics?

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

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

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

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

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Existence Is Quantum, Or Is Not:

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

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

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Does Authority Rest On Guns, Ultimately, Always?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Patrice Ayme