Real Doom

RESIST MEEK & SUPERFICIAL EXPLANATIONS:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 Doom!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anyway, awesome. And depressing.

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WAR BETWEEN THE MIGHTY CAN BE A MOST UNSTABLE THING:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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ATHENS HAD DIRECT DEMOCRACY, WE PREFER REPRESENTATIVE FASCISM:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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NO CONTEMPT IS HIGH ENOUGH:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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DIFFERENCES WITH THE 1930S:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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THE REAL CRISIS. ROGUE MONEY CREATION:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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SOLUTIONS LOOKING FORWARD:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Patrice Ayme

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

Time For Euro To Get Tough?

THREATEN TO DEVALUATE THE EURO DOWN TO ONE DOLLAR NOW.

The Obvious Solution To The Euro, And European Sovereign Insolvency Crises, Or How To Get Civilizing Compliance From Washington Such As A financial Transaction Tax. 

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Some of the American press about Europe and the euro, is borderline hateful. The Wall Street Journal, September 20, 2011, in an editorial (“Global View“, Bret Stephens) was comparing Europe to a “Madoff like event“, a “parade of horribles“. “What comes next is the explosion of the European project.”

Timothy Geithner, the pinocchio from Wall Street (also secretary of the Treasury), blocked any talk of a Financial Transaction Tax (to pay for the Greek bail-out), proposed by France, Germany and Austria. Instead Geithner claimed that what was truly damaging was the fight between the European Central Bank and the European states. So Geithner would invent anything, to avoid talking about worldwide financial piracy, and the capital flow problems it creates.

When facing such hostility, it’s high time to do something to about it. There is an aggressive method to solve the euro crisis, and rescue Europe from her enemies. I am going to propose it now, and you can probably read it in “The Economist” one of these days. I doubt “The Economist” will like it.

Speaking of “The Economist”, that European magazine, was far from hateful about the euro, and sounded even very worried (!), in its last issue. No less than 5 articles therein in just the last issue flew at the rescue of the European currency. This shows how bad things are getting, as “The Economist” has always made a point of being dismissive of the European Union.    

“The Economist” ran a cover story about the euro, where it proposed to save the euro in the exact same way that I have proposed to save it: let the states which are insolvent, default. Right away. (For technical reasons, if a strong distinction is not kept between insolvent and illiquid states, there is a danger of a contagion, propelled by market manipulators, to simply illiquid states, such as Spain or Italy.)

Instead the present method used to save the likes of Greece, is to lend some more, to those insolvent states, so that they can pay their preceding loans. Not only that’s idiotic, using new debt to pay old debt, but the math are getting increasingly worse, quickly, as the interest rates of the insolvent states are going up, quickly. Hence the states are driven ever deeper into insolvency, in the guise of rescuing them.

This is why the inevitability of default ought to be accepted soon, and being prepared accordingly. After default of the insolvent states, such as Greece, European states could rescue, and, or nationalize the banks, as needed.

To those who feel it’s a tall order, a reminder: the Greek Gross Domestic Product is no larger than that of just one French department, the Hauts de Seine (92). France has 101 departments. Surely France could keep the Haut de seine afloat, if it went bankrupt. A fortiori France could keep afloat just a few banks which lent to the Haut de Seine, the case equivalent to the Greece situation.

Another possibility “The Economist” considers is a euro break-up. Everybody, even the big bank UBS, which studied what would happen, agree that it would cause, even in Germany, a PERMANENT loss of GDP of at least 40%, and maybe above 50% (if it were combined with probable complications with the EU itself). So euro destruction is about as interesting as committing suicide.

The solution that I proposed and that now “The Economist”, in its wisdom, duplicate, is the nice method. Unfolding slowly, it will allow the Greeks to start to have with taxes, honesty and accounting a more Franco-German attitude. This is more or less what the Merkozy strategy is. Except that worthy duo obstinate themselves to claim that Greece will not default, which is impossible… for the good and simple reason that the Greek state has been already defaulting since July, a detail omitted by the ignorant.

In truth, Merkozy knows that Greece will default, but they are trying to gain time (hoping for god knows what: elections will come and those two conservatives, and arch conservatism at the service of plutocracy will be defeated, to be replaced by more pro-European socialists).

However, there is another solution about which absolutely nobody talks. It is not a nice, but it will send the problem back where it originated, with the American based plutocracy. I have restrained myself all too long, and I see no warrant of arrest coming for Goldman Sachs.

Moreover, I got somewhat irritated, because I read and heard all too many nasty fools equipped with bully pulpits, who are obviously not well. Enough with the mania of maniacs bellowing unimpeached. Time to reply in kind. I am tired of listening to selfish American pundits and policy makers, coming up with one outrage, after the next, repeating exactly the mood of 1930, when the USA brought its tariffs up unilaterally… by 50%.

We are increasingly at one of these moments, when one has to choose between democracy, and plutocracy.

Athens, the primal direct democracy, a modern state in so many ways, some more modern than we can yet muster, was undone by deep philosophical mistakes. At least deep enough for the happy quarto of Socrates, Plato, Xenophon and Aristotle, and hundreds of their less gifted commentators and duplicators ever since, not to have noticed them. At the root were several ethical failures (which are presently duplicated by the USA and, to  a much lesser extent, European powers).

The Athenian crisis had two phases, separated by a century. In the first phase, Athens was philosophically erroneous, not to say mass murdering criminal, and, as a result, lost the Peloponnesian war. Athens then got nearly destroyed, losing half of her population. Socrates, having corrupted the young plutocrats, was executed. In a sort of hubristic repeat, Germany would engage in the same sort of mix of hubris and mass murdering crime, 22 centuries later. Germany was not as philosophical, and had less to boast about, and its psychological collapse into hell was incomparbly worse (although its enemies were very generous, and it did not get punished as severely as Athens… which happened precisely because so many had Athens’ envy).

The second phase in the destruction of Athenian democracy was lower key, but terminal. It was more sneaky, underground, and a greater lesson for today.

It was a close run thing, but Athens lost a war to (by then defunct) Alexander (“the Great”) ‘s generals. And Athens lost in part, at the very least, because Athenian plutocracy preferred to live under Macedonian fascism and its militaro-industrial complex rather than fighting to death for Athenian direct democracy. OK, granted, Macedonian fascism was not as terrible an enemy as Achaemenid Persia, but it extinguished direct democracy for 23 centuries (and counting…)

Is there an equivalent situation today? Sure. For example the euro is threatened by a conspiracy of various plutocrats and their devices (including Goldman Sachs). Europeans are fighting back, but softly. Why so soft? Because of a kind of breathing together of European leaders with American superrich (Sarkozy has several direct family connections with plutocracy in general, and American plutocracy of the New York type, in particular; Cameron is outright a small plutocrat, Berlusconi, a very big one, bunga bunga, as he says).

When the Macedonian shock troops invaded Athens, the anti-fascist philosopher Demosthenes took poison. How would a really strong philosopher oppose the Wall Street order of king dollar? The order of Wall Street supreme? what ideas are worth taking poison for?

It’s the world’s simplest thing: let the European Central Bank buy INDEFINITE AMOUNTS OF DOLLARS whenever the euro is above one dollar. It would cost nothing. Problem solved.

USA visited by own devices: financial 9/11, nothing left this time, smoldering ruins of the USA plutocracy all over. Indeed the entire strategy of the American plutocratic order has been financed by others, using tricks such as the ubiquituous, but cheap dollars.

So what I propose is the equivalent of what Europe did in 1930, when it retaliated with its own tariffs. Some will say, that this is nasty, not very philosophical: why can’t we go on with the beatings and punishments? Well, nasty breeds nastier. So far, the USA has had a free ride with the world socio-economic order, for 67 years. And it’s not working. Actually, civilization is going backwards, as the USA was the only country to officially back torture and extra judicial processes, in its desperate search for military supremacy. even Hitler’s Third reich never went down that slippery slope.

If the Greek currency, the euro, was down 40% it is sure that Greece’s most important industry, tourism, would improve dramatically. Add to this a 50% default in the Greek debt which is in euro, and the Greek insolvency problem vanishes.

How come nobody proposed this? Well, plutocracy is one, worldwide. Plutocrats are jailers in arms. Plutocracy knows that it is Wall Street and its pets in government, especially the government of the USA, look at boy Geithner, who have set up the excellent system for the superrich as it is. To keep it, one has to keep a mighty Wall Street and Washington sucking its toes.

As I hinted, a massive devaluation of the euro would break the economy of the USA. Oops.

The USA is still the world’s greatest manufacturer, in added value. American exports would collapse. That would bring the crisis where it belongs. Then Americans would have to face their responsibilities. There would be a depression. But there is already a depression. Just its main source, Washington. has been more protected by various tricks than it deserves to be, including by having the dollar as the world currency, while keeping it low enough.

It is time for European leaders to stop making a plutocratic compatible discourse. Europe, even Great Britain, even Switzerland, are fundamentally socialist,  the USA is fundamentally plutocratic (watch Obama boasting about getting all his ideas from the world’s richest men). It is time for Europe to go socialist on the biggest scale, as it will have to, when recapitalizing the banks with half a trillion dollars.

In August, the new (French) IMF director, Christine Lagarde, claimed that European banks needed 200 billion euros in fresh capital. The markets are obviously unwilling to give them, leaving us with the states. In other words, as the American route of just giving to the superrich would be resisted by European streets, European banks, many of them, need to be nationalized. Now, as I write this, the IMF is saying that 300 billion euros is needed for recapitalization of European banks.

Don’t be surprised that the arch conservative, plutocratic friendly, European governments are in denial, whine that it ain’t so, and keep on pointing at Greece (which just lowered retirements by 20% above 1,200 euros a month).

The European street is anti-plutocratic, Americanism is vaguely perceived as plutocratic, as the “hopey-changey” thing (to quote Obama quoting Palin) is fading away as the smoke and mirrors it was (Obama himself seems unable to give one example of realized hopey-changey). This will get worse, as the truth gets clearer.

Obama had decided to double American exports in five years, or, otherwise said, to export the USA’s depression, while filling up his plutocracy’s coffers. Well, visit him with his own medicine. It’s only fair.

Even the arch conservative governments in Europe have to calm down their streets. After Sarkozy judiciously suggested that Palestine ought to be admitted as an observer state at the United Nations, tensions went down.

It is time for Europeans to take care of themselves. That means if treated nastily, fight back nastily. And beware of not being led by Trojan horses, as the Athenians were. Once is enough. Resist imperial fascism with all your might. Krugmania sings on all roofs that devaluation is the solution for Greece? Thus act accordingly. Devalue the euro, it can be done tomorrow.

***

Patrice Ayme

Understanding Naught.

ONE LENDS ONLY TO THE RICH. THE POOR NEED JOBS.

Here is my good friend Paul Krugman, hitting on Europe again, while unknowingly burying the USA in its errors deep down further.

Krugman and I are in very strong agreement about some points, and in just as spectacular disagreement about others. It’s complicated. Be it about his hatred of the euro, or his love of borrowing, Krugman is much more of a reaganophile and reaganobrain than he may think. (But this is not surprising: after all, president Reagan was his first employer…)

So as not to be accused of deforming Krugmania into silly putty, let me quote him in extenso:

 ” September 18, 2011, 10:59 am

Stimulus, Austerity, and Double Standards

Just a quick thought: in much discussion of economic policy these days, the presumption is that stimulus had its chance, it failed, and that’s that. Never mind those of us who say that we actually didn’t do nearly enough — and were saying that from the beginning, not as an after-the-fact rationalization. It’s one strike and you’re out.

Meanwhile, the pain caucus keeps telling us that austerity is the way to restore confidence; and confidence keeps not being restored. Ireland, for example, has imposed savage austerity, yet the interest rate on its 10-year bonds is still 6.7 percentage points higher than Germany’s, down from recent peaks but still far above its level when the austerity program began.

Yet somehow nobody in the pain caucus says hey, this was supposed to work but it didn’t, so our theory is all wrong. Instead, they just insist that we double down, continuing the beatings until morale improves.

Just saying.”

 Some say, some sink, others think. Here is my answer:

 Krugman and me agreed, at the time, that the real stimulus was tiny, and would not restart the economy. Most of what Obama called “stimulus”, something like 90% of the thing, was not a stimulus at all. See “Stimulating-the-erroneous-zones“, July 2009.

 So doing, boasting of a stimulus which was not one, Obama made no favor to the economy, while doing plenty to his rich friends he venerates, and obsessively talks about. Some are born to make others’ beds. Nothing beats making the beds of the Rich. Obama’s policy was more of the same bold, same old that Bush had got us used to. It was obvious that the rabid right would scream, further down the line, that stimulating the economy did not work. So Obama accomplished a double whammy: he called onto an impotent stimulus, calling it mighty, and now unsurprisingly the Tea Party say that mighty stimuli don’t work.

 In truth, mostly the hyper Rich had been stimulated, not the economy as a whole.

 Supposedly left-wing Obama provided less of a stimulus than arch conservative Sarkozy in France. And the French recession had been much less deep than the American one. That means that, in truth, Obama is much more right-wing than Sarkozy. And yes, at the time Obama had a super majority in the Senate, and in Congress.

 To eschew any debate on something really useful, Obama had chosen to create long drawn out fake debates on a bank-Afghanistan-Obamacare drama. After months of shooting the breeze, the decisions came down, and they had all been taken behind close doors, with the powers that had trampled the USA, if not the world, for so long. The decisions were all rabidly right-wing: banks were offered the world, no questions asked, Afghans were offered a tripling of the occupation force, the healthcare industry was offered a mandated public.

 A problem in the USA is that Obama and his (!) Tea Party find tax cuts stimulating. So they want to cut taxes, ever more. Hey, don’t their contributors, like Goldman Sachs or the Koch brothers, precisely pay those taxes? If they paid less taxes, would not they give even more to those who took care of them?

 The more Obama cut taxes, the more stimulus he thought he was doing (that’s in the stupid version of Obama). Or he claims he thought he was doing (that’s in the crafty Trojan horse version of Obama). Most of Obama’s “stimulus” consisted in diminishing taxes, indeed. And that meant further diminutions of the taxes on the rich, since most taxes are paid by the rich. (Not proportionally, but in absolute value.)

Thus Obama made an abominable situation more abominable, as the real cause of the crisis was that the rich had got too rich… We need a new adjective for this grotesque situation: ever more obaminable.

 Abominable, or obaminable? That is the question Obama and his handlers hope not too many people are going to ask. But they will.

 How did the Rich get richer, ever more, besides having Clinton, Bush and Obama making them all what they could be? Well, Clinton, Rubin, Summers, Greenspan took out the bothersome laws from 1933 of president Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Greenspan and Bush let the Rich borrow ever more. Then Obama bushed us up further, not to say ambushed us, ever more, obaminably.

 Hence the borrowing trick, beyond the reasonable, has been central to making the Rich richer. Obama made this worse by lending, or giving to the hyper Rich even ever more money, claiming that was ever more stimulating (certainly stimulating to him and his family, and their friends, as they will be, and are, well rewarded).

 In the end, the latest numbers show a government and individual debt totalling 36.5 trillion dollars, in the USA. That is 275% of GDP, far above the norm, and barely off the peak. The kiss of debt. Why would Krugman think that Ireland would be better off, imitating that?

 The European instinct has been the exact opposite: augment taxes, so that the governments will have more means to respond intelligently to the crisis. After all, if there is a lesson of the 1920s and 1930s it’s that the German government did not find the means to stop the decomposition of society and finance. And the lesson of the 1930s was that the French and British governments had not given themselves enough means to stop Hitler in a timely manner.

 The esteemed Paul Krugman then comes and says: what are the poor Irish going to do, now that they cannot borrow long and get rich that way, as easily as Germans do? Well, the answer my friend, is that Germans did not get rich that way, and it’s time for the Irish to learn that lesson. It is actually well organized austerity which made the Germans rich.

 Anyway, why would the Irish want to borrow more when their entire country is sick of having borrowed too much, and having entire housing subdivisions, brand new, scheduled to be destroyed?

 If European banks need more money, they can be “recapitalized“, and then directed (with or without nationalization) to lend to profitable economic projects only. It’s unlikely that those will be found in Ireland at this point (the Irish, per capita may still be richer than the Germans, or, even the French; however the island has to deleverage).

 To equate the ability to borrow with the opposite of pain and beating, is to have understood nothing. Serfdom was, in a way, the result of too much borrowing.

 Make no mistake: I am for a real stimulus, and I am an enemy of austerity. But the Rich is killing the world economy, and grabbing all they can from the dying body. To stimulate the world economy for real passes by removing first the predator from the patient while the ferocious beast is still eating its innocent victim alive. The Rich needs to be austerified, and destimulated. And the more they are rendered innocuous, humble and unnoticeable, the more the rest of the population will thrive (I will exhibit a graph soon which shows that finance steals directly from manufacturing.)

 To fight austerity means to have the middle class live as it used to. 

 In Greece ship magnates are actually not taxed, nor is the immensely rich church. Not taxing the Rich is what Obama and the Greeks have been calling stimulating, and it’s wrong. It is not stimulating, it is wrong. To illustrate, Obama’s budget director, Mr. Orszag, slept with a Greek shipping magnate, and had a child with her (between marriages), sent 60 billion to Citigroup, and then went to work there. All very stimulating, no doubt, and thoroughly obaminable. When I say they sleep with the rich, I have to admit they do it literally.

 Last week the socialist Greek government, following orders from Merkozy above, announced a real estate tax. What is the greatest landowner in Greece? The church. Later, however, one learned that tax would not apply to the church. There are, officially 700 million euros of church property in Greece (and this is a vast under-evaluation, as Mount Athos, per se, has got to be worth billions). So what should the French, German and Finnish taxpayers do? Instill some more modern sense to the Greeks.

 There are churches, monasteries and cathedrals in France. They are all properties of the state. So why should France give money to the Greek church? No wonder 68% of the French are against “helping Greece” at this point.

 Oh, and how did Ireland become so rich? First, massive European help (that is taxpayer money from, at the time, much richer European countries), and then tricks. One trick has been the corporate tax rate. It’s 33.33% in France. And about the same 33% in Germany (although it varies slightly locally). In the UK it’s between 20% and 27%; it’s 31% in Italy. In Ireland, the corporate tax is only 12.5%.

 So European companies flocked to Ireland to be taxed lightly (or, more exactly they nominally put their headquarters there, while raking the money from the rest of Europe). That was excusable when Ireland was the poorest country in Europe, per capita. But now Ireland is richer than France and Germany, per capita.  

 Economy is house management. Obama doubled down on the rich. However, we don’t need to improve the morale of the rich. The high morale of the Rich, their hubris, and their capture of the political process is at the core of the civilizational problems we are encountering. The beating of the lower classes has gone on long enough.

 As a much elaborate incoming essay will show, augmenting the taxes on the Rich is not just possible, but necessary. Be it only to stop them to harm the economy further, as they do with those financial markets that they have harnessed. A good way to remove the Rich from exploiting exclusively the financial markets as they have been doing, is to tax them at the average middle class income (at the very least!), and to institute a financial transaction tax. Merkel and Sarkozy have proposed it. Guess who is against the transaction tax?

 Well, Obama, of course. Next time, he is keen to see Goldman Sachs being his greatest contributor, again. It just does not bring a lot of money in, it also shows that Obama is the anointed one. Meanwhile, if you have got $5,000, maybe you can see Ms. Obama. Or Valerie Jarrett. The ladies are on sale, apparently.  

 Whereas Governor Perry is on the rise. Says he: “I raised 30 million; if you’re saying that I can be bought for $5,000, I’m offended.”

 No kidding.

***

Patrice Ayme

To SAVE The WORLD, Please DEFAULT!

GRAB CAPITAL & RENT BACK FROM THE CONNIVING PLUTOCRATS!

[Sep. 14, 2011.]

***

Abstract: The Greater Depression keeps unfolding, propelled by the deliberate stupidity of the best leadership plutocracy could buy.

In constant dollars, the income of men in the USA has fallen to the level of 1978, shortly after the USA started its covert, but massive attack against the republic of Afghanistan. This is not a coincidence: the unconscionable instrumentalization of Muslim fanatics to destabilize a progressive republic so as to grab its resources demonstrates that various plutocrats had seized control of the USA to an extravagant extent by the mid 1970s (under the democratic administration of Saint Jimmy Carter, worthy follower of the morally insane crusader Saint Louis).

This stagnation of income lasting 33 years is unrivaled in any 33 year period ever since the American English colony was born. Thus, it’s a new phenomenon.

There were never three decades of stagnating incomes in English America, including in any period straddling the so called French & Indian Wars, the Independence War, the Secession War, and the Great Depressions of the late 19th century and that of the 1930s.

This remarkable stagnation confirms that the present Greater Depression is worse than the one of the 1930s. Indeed the GDP graph is now doing worse in Britain than it did during the 1930s. And we are just getting started. Why? Why just getting started? Because the leaders of the West have adresseds none of the gathering causes of the depression, yet. (By contrast, FDR, ordered a flurry of astounding decisions in the first few days of his presidency in 1933.)

Can we get out of the unfolding disaster? Yes, with judiciously implemented inflation (as Turkey, Argentina or China have decided to do, so far successfully) or with default made so carefully that it will defang the plutocracy (the occasion presented itself in 2008 and 2009, but Bush and Obama declined to do so, although it was their fiduciary duty to do so). Once plutocracy is defanged, some of its contrived connivances, such as plutocratic globalization enabled by plutocratically friendly localized laws in tiny places, the tax havens, could be easily addressed.

A good place to start to dismantle plutocracy is Greece. The only reasonable resolution to the Greek sovereign debt crisis, is actually to default in a well organized, carefully measured manner (I have long advocated strategic default as a panacea since at least 2008).

Letting Greece out of the Euro, as dollar supremacy propagandists insist Greece should do, would be an utter catastrophe, for all concerned, except for U.S. supremacists. A Eurozone exit would be especially a disaster for the Greeks, contrarily to what Paul Krugman pretends, and the reasoning is so elementary, that Krugman ought to be ashamed of himself. Massive devaluation would solve nothing for Greece. True Greece lives off tourism, and that would improve, but Greece has to buy everything outside…

And especially Greece has to buy all its energy from outside sources. Energy is something the economy is fundamentally about (a notion which eludes most professionals paid for telling economic lies, and quite deliberately so).

Greece’s situation is completely different from that of demographically tiny, resource wealthy Iceland, the terrible financial crisis of which is still unresolved, especially in the matter of outstanding bills and criminal activities still unrevealed, and unpunished.

Iceland is often brandished by the enemies of the euro as a demonstration that countries which have their own currency do better. However Krugman and other europhobes always forget the few facts I just mentioned, when they laud Iceland and its brazen, 100% default (so far), which caused a major, still unfinished crisis.

There are many types of default, indeed. The sort of default which happened in Iceland was very peculiar, quite terrible, it is not duplicable, and I do not recommend it (and, as I said, it’s not over!) When I say that Greece ought to default, I speak of a completely different sort of default. Quite different from the grand theft which occured in Iceland. (A theft which will be fixed someday, a detail Krugman does not seem to be aware of: there are actually assets in Iceland set aside to reimburse the European governments which paid for Iceland.)

Why so much hateful hysteria on the part of the plutocratically connected Americans against European institutions? Because American plutocracy is collapsing the USA, and it is trashing around to keep controlling the world reserve currency, just as the one who drowns grabs whatever and whoever.

Paying fossil fuel in euros would be the end for the USA, as it would find itself in a similar situation to that Argentina found itself in, a century ago. However, and paradoxically, it’s in the interest of the USA to keep the euro high enough to make the European Union industrially uncompetitive. The goals are opposed, so the situation is unstable.

Default here and there would precipitate instability, overall. However, that would be a good thing, after the fright. It would allow to put banksters where they belong: if not in jail, then at least to pasture, after repossessing the property they connived to steal. In other words, high time to do what was not done in 2008!

The real truth is that Greek debt is only 300 billion dollars, a fifth of the subprime debt in the USA in 2008. So what’s the real problem? Well, Spain, Italy, and, soon, France. Of course a French default of some sort would be a world cataclysm. But a cataclysm is what is needed to get rid of the predator on our back, the world plutocracy.   

So let’s bring it on! Better this than Greater Depression forever.

***

***

GREECE IS EVERYWHERE, WE ARE ALL GREEKS:

Some will say: “Europe again? Who cares? Is not that the OLD continent?” Well, as I will show, we, all of us, who own anything, own some of Greece. Even Americans, all Americans, own French and German banks, and, thus, Greece.

Second, Europe in the biggest socio-economic sense is nearly one billion people. Yes, some lunatics, like the Swiss, speak delusionally as if they were not in Europe. In some metaphysical sense, obviously, because Switzerland occupies a third of the Alps, a mountain range installed in the exact geographical center of Western Europe. As I predicted in the past, last week the Swiss National Bank pegged itself to the euro. The SNB promised to buy “unlimited amounts” of Euros each time it takes less than 1.20 Francs to buy a Euro. In other words, now Switzerland has jumped in the Eurozone.

Is Suisse not getting its orders from Washington anymore? Is Krugman going to cry a river? And Polanski is going to receive a prize in Zurich next week! Only the naive would feel all of this to be unconnected.

Little known to the rabid anti-Europeans, countries such as Norway, Ukraine and Iceland are already part of various European unions. There are, inside Europe, unions of free travel, unions of free commerce, even unions of usage of the euro while NOT being in the Eurozone, plus an union of countries economically assimilated to the EU, while not being in the EU, and even other countries admitted to candidacy to the European Union.

Those unions are far ranging. For example the economic might of Turkey is greatly explained by this republic being an associate member of the European Union and its predecessors since 1963. By the way, many a European problem would be lessened if Turkey joined the EU much more. Why not include Turkey in the Eurozone? (That could help Eurozone financing.)

At the center of Europe is the Eurozone, and its core is bicephalic Franco-Germania (however it may hurt all the nostalgic of francophobic Keynes and Hitler).

Not forgetting the rich Franco-Germanoid fragments of the Benelux, which are in between, and inseparable from France and Germany, one contemplates in Franco-Germania a super power with 180 million people, and the most advanced technology. OK, French and German private banks have lent a lot to Greece, and now they are threatened by a Greek default, because they lent so much to the Greeks, that the Greeks cannot possibly pay back. Right. So?

Same with Spain, or Italy? So? Are not the Germans happy that Spain bought from Siemens, that is, from them Germans, very high speed trains? Would they have preferred Spaniards to buy trains from French Alsthom instead?

Many cautious Americans will scoff that they have their money in American money markets, so they have nothing to do with Greece. However, the truth is, all large banks, especially including all large banks of the USA, have a piece in Greece, and a fortiori Spain or Italy. Even the Chinese are deep in the Greek picture. Hence the (well justified) dressing down of the Chinese Premier to the most advanced countries: “We have been concerned about the difficulties faced by the European economy for a long time and we have repeated our willingness to extend a helping hand and increase our investment,” Wen said. In exchange China wants WTO membership.

Americans who think they are out of Greece do NOT know how money markets work. What is a money market? Well, a market of very short term bonds. Some of these bonds are Greek bonds, some of these bonds are bonds of banks which have lent money to Greece, or bonds of institutions which lend money to companies which invested in Greece, or have “swaps” with such. And so on. Thus all Americans, and actually the entire planet, are entangled with Greece and company. If a black hole develops in the middle of that system, much will be swallowed.

Third, and more importantly, a terrible paradigm is created in Greece; the innocent are made to pay for the crimes of criminals, as these criminals still have access to all the levers of power. As long as this is not addressed, the crimes, and the crisis, will keep on rolling.

***

UNREAL BANK RESERVES, REAL AMERICAN WAR:

How the banks are threatened by lenders unwilling to pay back the whole gamut of what they owe is a bit convoluted. Banks are supposed to have some capital reserve requirements, and are supposed to stop operating if they don’t. European regulators are fiercer on this than American ones. Oh, yes, because American banks would already to have to stop functioning if correct financial requirements were applied to them. So the funny thing is that the panic is about French and German banks having fewer reserves, but still much more than their American competitors. (But of course, perception becomes realization; so the hysteria has real effects, positive for the hysterics!)

In truth, the bottom line of the whole problem is that the USA is trying its best to keep its supremacy. So Americans are running around in a panic screaming that Europe is sinking. Whereas the truth is that European banks are still in much better shape than the banking-Federal Reserve-U.S. government complex in the USA.

Right now, the one year Greek Treasury Bond carries an interest of 111%: an investor in that vehicle will double her/his money in 5 months. Such an investor will bet that other European states will keep on forking money over to keep the Greek state afloat.

So why am I for a Greek default, as I have suggested forever? Actually I was also for the default of the Too-Big-To-Fail banks in the USA. Within a month of the election of Obama, I was enraged that Obama had decided to send to the banksters all the money in the world, no questions asked (TARP was just a small portion of the money lent, or given to the banksters). I saw the criminality of it all, very clearly. See: https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2009/02/24/time-for-rico/.

I was for the nationalization of the Too Big To Fail banks. Instead of just giving them the money, many times over what they were worth, as Bushama did. If nationalizations had been done, the economy of the USA would have restarted by now, and the future, even of the deficit, would be rosy. By the way, nationalization of banks is what Iceland did.

Much later, the Tea Party was created, and adopted the same line that the Too-Big-To-Fail banks ought to have been allowed to fail. Whether its partisans understood that meant nationalization of a big chunk of the financial system of the USA is another matter entirely (they are too busy being mystified by the theory of evolution, having dinosaurs galloping all over their little minds…) A dreadful possibility is always that Chinese (say) banks would swoop and acquire all the failed banks in sight. Nationalization avoids that.

So, yes, I am for the Greek default. For the same reason. That will allow to avoid in the Europe Union, the treacherous, unjust slope into the abyss, of using most available public finances to support the very men who have caused the crisis, and the very exact systems they have created and lead, and brought us all to the pauper house, where we will be to stay in residence if, and only if, we become slaves to the Chinese dictatorship (yes, I am not insulting China, it’s officially a dictatorship).

***

THERE ARE MANY SORTS OF EUROPEAN UNIONS:

Is Turkey in or out of Europe? Those who say out, know nothing. Why to talk about Turkey? Because, actually Turkey has very different strategies and capabilities which have not been tapped. And, by the way, the unaffordable Greek military budget is naively aimed at Turkey, an unacceptable situation both economically and between NATO members.

The question of Greece leaving the European Union has nothing to do with a financial crisis, even a sovereign financial crisis. Even leaving the Eurozone and having a sovereign debt default are completely different notions.

Anti-Europeans, strong and strident in the USA, deliberately confuse all these notions: they are paid to do so, making them what they are. Sexual prostitutes provide a service, and, if everybody comes ahead, it’s all for the best and a legitimate business. But when famous economists use the bully pulpits they are paid to bellow from, to tell complete lies, they are definitively turning into public enemies. What do they want, besides money? What do they do besides spewing hatred?  Do they want war with Europe? Well, that’s what they are doing.

Even the head of the bosses’ union in France said so. She said there was a deliberate, organized, orchestrated effort by “the Americans” to destroy the European Union. And the confusion of all the notions is part of it. I would not be surprised that Stark, the chief economist of the ECB who left in a huff 5 days ago, were to be found, someday soon, to have been paid by “the Americans”. Watch carefully who his next employer will be. Mr. Orszag, the Obama budget director, helped send 60 billion to Citigroup, and is now employed there, earning giant amounts of money in compensation for his gracious service.

Suppose California were bankrupt: would it leave the Union? No. And guess what: when California paid with “IOUs” (“I Owe You”), do you think California did that just for fun? IOUs are little pieces of paper supposed to replace the Federally official little pieces of paper known as dollar bills. Guess what? It happened, because California had literally run out of money of that currency union, the USA!

And no American suggested that California ought to leave the Union. Where was Krugman when Anti-Americans needed him? Anti-Americans would have loved hearing that California had to leave the Union, as straightforward Krugmania would have it. Did I misunderstand something? No, Krugman’s reasoning for Greece somehow does not apply to California (although California is endowed by a massive indigeneous energy production, from oil to hydro).

Some fear that Greece may sink that low in next few months, if Sarkozy and Merkel can’t figure it out. As low as California: a terrible thing, that would be, indeed, for the land of the Parthenon!

But then, if Greece were to sink as low as California, pro-Europeans will not fail to notice that Greece does not have anymore reason to leave her Unions than California had to leave the USA.

Thus the hysteria of Paul Krugman and his unfortunate kind against Europe and the Euro is painful to watch: is this the best the USA can produce in the way of deep thought? Merkel, and several French politicians seems thoughtful relative to Paul losing his marbles about the euro. Krugman does not realize that a fast driver can go in five hours or so, from Spain to Italy, through France. And when the Very High Speed lines presently in construction will be finished, one speaks of less than 2 hours. The time to go from London to Paris, by rail, center to center. Why does not Krugman propose a currency in Washington, and one in Boston, another in Chicago, and one in Detroit. Would not that help Detroit’s depressed economy, according to full blown Krugmania?

***

FRANCO-GERMAN UNIFICATION MEANS MONETARY UNION OF ALL: 

True some German loud mouths seem to have understood nothing since Hitler was consumed by gasoline next to the Reichstag. Hitler started his career hating France and her Versailles Treaty (still hated by many a Nazi nostalgic to this day). He ended it, defended by SS and their officers, who were native French speakers SS. The irony ought not to be lost on europhobes.

The loud mouths dream to reconstitute a larger, Aryan version of the Deutschemark. But those fools have not understood the first two things:

a) Germany has surpluses to a great extend because the south has deficits. Germany can leave the euro, fine. The Greeks will buy Peugeots and Renaults instead of VWs and Mercedeses.

b) The euro union is about unifying France and Germany. Right now France has extracted herself from the demographic black hole she was in for two centuries, and especially around 1870. French demographic growth is now strong and internal. It does not rest, as in the USA on demented immigration and the growth of non integrated recent migrants (a large part of the population of California has, technically passports from the USA, but is truly Mexican; I know some, they are charming, and I prefer them to white, racist, narrow minded Americans, but they are no such thing, precisely; in particular their value system is different, and access to higher education is barred to them, by price, as much of the public education system in the southern USA is being privatized, so their children will also be Mexican!)

To come back to France and Germany: France is, in many important ways, the superior partner. It is the result of a determination of France to never find herself in the situation on 1940, when it was defeated by the unholy union of the plutocratic USA with the USSR and Nazi Germany.

The French have carefully made themselves world masters of all the superior technologies. Germany’s superiority rests on high tech Mittelstand, family enterprises which master the middle, but not the highest. France is the spider at the center of Europe’s highest technology: look at EADS and Arianespace, etc. Giants such as MBDA, the world’s largest nasty missile company are not even on the radar of the close minded, rabidly anti-euro, such as Paul Krugman.   

Of course French spending in ultimate high tech costs a lot: look at the inertial fusion facility built in Bordeaux, which will be the world’s most modern and powerful when it comes on line within two years. It has only one equivalent, worldwide: the National Ignition Facility at Livermore, California (with which France cooperates semi secretly; NIF has made 300 shots so far; an inertial thermonuclear fusion plant will have to make 300 shots every minute to become a productive power plant…)

France gave, and is giving, herself the means: total government budget is more than 56% of GDP. As a French politician quipped in the 1990s: “France is a USSR that has succeeded”.

Germany’s government is 47% of GDP (already basically 50% more than the USA). But Germany is not building its own massive thermonuclear project, and does not make its personal supremacy stealth fighter, and personal strategic nuclear submarines, with personal city pulverizing rockets, capable of taking out 50 million people. True, France is much less efficient with its goverment: she would save a lot if she were as efficent as Germany, with much fewer civil servants.

Not that renewable energy is neglected in France: there are a lot of problems with wind, so France is late in developing that. However, the giant utility EDF has started to install giant “hydrauliennes” to capture tidal power at the bottom of the sea. A world first. If those work, France will have basically resolved its energy problem. OK, it’s a big IF…

***

KEYNES WAS A FRANCOPHOBIC PROTO NAZI:

It’s not just Murdoch’ media machine. Even the American economic left has a strange anti-French bend. This is of no small consequence, because it has made Americans incapable to point at France, and similar socio-economies in Europe, which is pretty much all of Europe, as positive examples for American politicians. The result is that economic ignoramuses such as Obama come to power, and they are advised by dedicated servants and members of the plutocracy, such as Larry Summers, somebody who should have actually been prosecuted for visiting socio-economic hardship on billions of people. As he was the dismantler of FDR’s work, and one of the main agents of the reinstauration of a worldwide plutocratic order, same as before, just worse.

Obama thinks that if forces NASA to give billions to his plutocratic pals, or to whoever wants to make something renewable, he has caught the future. All he has caught is the hope for a shinier toy in the playground. It’s infantile. Also, completely corrupt: what’s the meaning of forking public money, through NASA to a guy who is not an engineer, and laughs as a goat bleats? Or to a non engineer such as Musk, just because he looks good. Musk, like Murdoch is not really an American, just a plutocrat hitching a hike on the back of American taxpayers. 

The Europeans, in striking contrast, have given a lot of very deep, professional thought to improving their socio-economy. They did not just become fascinated by proto or pseudo Nazis telling them, a few generations ago, what they wanted to hear. (Allusion to Keynes and the so called “Austrian school of economics”.)

Where does that American francophobia comes from? Well, the key is that left, “democratic” economists in the USA admire Keynes, and therein, a contradiction. Germans who dream they can do it without France, are just pursuing a dream that KEYNES started, and Hitler implemented. OK, a Keynesian nightmare that Hitler tried to implement.

Yes Keynes, Nazi in disguise. Keynes: Nazism’s own professor of anti-French science. I just read “The Economic Consequences Of Peace” Keynes is famous for. What a piece of Nazi trash! Keynes calls the re-creation of Poland, Romania and other occupied nations in the east “scatter brain”. Why? because it would deprive Germany of economic power! Is teaching Keynes teaching hate speech?

The glorious Keynes whined that it was “victorious France” who wanted to impose what he viewed as a monstrosity, the independence of those previously subjugated nations, the freedom of Germany’s former slaves. And the great man moans. Soon Hitler would foam just the same. Did Hitler read Keynes? Many of his criminal co-conspirators certainly did.

Keynes was afraid that France, having, according to him, unlawfully, unwisely, unjustly recovered Alsace and Loraine, occupies German land which have been German for more than 1048 years, he says. What an idiot! Imperial Germany was founded in Versailles in January 1871, 48 years before Keynes put his Nazi ideas on paper.

No wonder that, after being instructed with such trash, Hitler was completely surprised that, after all, Great Britain joined France in declaring war to him in 1939! Did not his advisers read Keynes?

If one wants to go legally technical, and constitutional, “Germania” was certainly part of “Francia” by 800 CE. The Carolingians even invented German (and not just the Carolingian minuscule which even Keynes used, making him another victim of “victorious France“).

The division of the Frankish empire in three pieces was viewed as another case of the standard way to handle inheritance among the Franks. Something they had done for 5 centuries. It was not viewed as definitive. It was made explicit, at the time, that the Western Franks were to stay prominent (they were supposed to elect the eastern king, or emperor, something which soon bored them to death!)

Having many kings was also standard among the Franks: kings were elected, in theory, and having many kings was like having many presidents. However, it was viewed that the king of the western part was “emperor (in his kingdom)”, due to the fact the Franks in Francia (“Salian Franks”, or salty Franks) had fought hard for 4 centuries to unify all of Germania to Francia (Julius Caesar’s old project) .

***

NATIONALIZATIONS A EURO SOLUTION, PLUTO THE WAY OF THE USA:

To come back to Greece; a Greek default has nothing to do with Greece exiting the Eurozone.  True, the Drachma was converted at too high a rate, because of misplaced national pride: one has to live with it. True, the Americans want to break the European Union, and they may as well start with the Eurozone.

A Greek default may leave some major French and German banks with insufficient “tier one capital” to operate according to international regulations, and the markets indicate that they will be unwilling to provide them with it. So what? If it cost little to buy BNP, the French government can find what it takes, before China does, as the German government was able to find enough money to buy Hypo Real Estate. Hypo Real Estate was among the 30 largest companies in Germany. It was fully nationalized in 2009.

Great Britain and Belgium also chose to nationalize banks consecutively to the 2008 crisis. The friends of plutocracy, Bush and Obama, the greedy Bushama, instead offered to their banksters friends as much public money as they needed, without taking possession of their banks in the name of the American public they were so generously offering all the money of. But that is the problem of the USA: no more money for anything else. Bush and Obama, real friends of the Tea Party have not followed down the Marxist, government friendly path traced by those far left liberals known as presidents Reagan and Bush Senior.

Now Dimon, head of JP Morgan Chase, who Obama called repeatedly “my friend”, in his pro plutocratic penis envy, says that the bank of international settlements is “anti-American”. So not only Paul Krugman is going on a pseudo hyper nationalistic pro American rampage. They should be reminded that there is nothing nationalistic at going crazy. Hitler, too, posed as a nationalistic, but he was anything but. In truth he turned into the destroyer of Germany. Anti Hitlerian French were better German nationalist than all of Hitler’s supporters.

BNP is as big as the biggest American banks, but the French republic will nationalize it in a flash, if needed. France, as a state, will also make a lot of money that way (nationalizing very big banks is always profitable, it seems). And then what?

A nationalized BNP will be directed to lend more to people and projects which can pay for themselves, not just to cheating plutocrats they are conniving with. The connivance between banksters, plutocrats, and their servants in government (Obama) is ongoing in the USA, so the economy is falling apart there. Does Europe want to join the USA on the plutocratic road down to hell?

In the 2008 banking crash, banks, and not just in the USA, but also in Europe, got money from the states. Instead of replenishing their cash reserves, as required by International regulations, they paid their managers fortunes, paid large dividends to fellow plutocrats, etc. Now the cash reserves of American banks are 3%, just a bit more than what Lehman Brothers had in 2008 before it failed. They should have 8%, according to regulations, and common sense. And they are supposed to go to 10%. Swiss banks have 20% in reserves (explaining a lot the rush to Alpine gold!)

In other words, the banksters were treated with immense generosity last time, even in Europe.

So will Europe force the People to give money to the rich, so that they can become even richer as in the USA?No. Enough is enough: been there, done that. Thus Greece has to default. The Greek people ought not to pay while its plutocrats, and untaxed, wealthy church, keep on cheating.

***

NOT ENOUGH EUROPE YET TO AVOID A GREEK DEFAULT:

How could Greece avoid a default? Well, Greece could avoid a default only with the help of not-yet-in-existence European structures.

An example of such a structure would be treasury bonds for the European Union, or, at least, the Eurozone. But they do not exist: there is no European Treasury, no European Treasury Bonds, no European Federal debt. Of course, there is no Federal Europe. At least fiscally speaking.

France has 1.6 trillion euros of French treasury debt, Germany 2 trillion euros of the German equivalent. The USA has around 14.5 trillion dollars of U.S. federal treasury debt (but that does not count more local debt).   

It is because there is a U.S. Treasury and U.S. Treasury Bonds, and a transfer system, that California, and several other states, have avoided default. So far. But, of course, at the rate of augmentation of the deficits in the USA, it should not take much longer…

Some Germans, stuck in the Prussian-Hitlerian model, may want to build a greater Germany. They would not end up exactly like before, because Germany’s power is not what it used to be. In France, however, more than ever, the political class knows that salvation lays in Union. France has basically a discrete union with many African states, Francafrique, and it should be boosted. This is the deep reason for the Libyan adventure, as the oil propelled Khadaffi dictatorship messed up much of Francafrique: whereas he spent not much on Libya, Ghadafi was lavish with those in other countries who he wanted to influence.

Another obvious French idea is the Mediterranean Union. Here, Libya again is an obvious centerpiece. Right now France is pushing hard on dictator Assad, while writing the Palestinian state proposal. The Americans are going to be all astonished when they find themselves pushed out of the entire Middle East… which will happen if they don’t cooperate with France (because French leadership on the question is gathering lots of followers).

To come back to Greece, the concept of “Greek bail-out” is misleading. if one wants Greece to be bailed out, Greece has to pay less in interest on the money plutocrats lent it. The so called “bail-out of Greece” is actually a bail-out of the existing plutocratic structure in Europe, or, even, in the world. But plutocracy is not as strong in the EU as in the USA, as the British, Belgian, Icelandic, and German bank nationalizations after 2008 showed. So let’s nationalize some more.

***

EUROPE INTO THE ABYSS, INSPIRED, & ASPIRED BY THE FREE FALL OF THE USA?

I did not even watch the Obama speech. Sometimes a human being has seen enough. How many times does one need to go at the zoo, and see the chimp throwing excrements at the public? Ok, nowadays, most zoos are better designed, and just as there are teleprompters, and human beings can be selected, who make excellent robots, chimpanzees are behind bullet proof glass.

Obama and his handlers have got crafty. They sent early versions of Obama’s teleprompted speech to a number of people, who went all pink and warm inside from receiving the favor of what they feel is a great man. So Krugman admitted that was the case for him, and, flattered to no end, in spite of himself, he fell into celebrating Obama’s speech. In a colossal flourish of naivety unbound. Thus the pundits are also prompted at a distance (tele), for all to see.

Colossal naivety? Indeed, Obama is the bipartisan president, so, in particular, the president of the Tea Party, which is the one controlling Congress. His ridiculous propositions do not impress me except as more of what is burying the USA. As usual most of what Obama proposes is tax cuts. This time he is busy undermining the financing of Medicare and social security, to give a bit more money to those already employed now, so that they will have diminished Social Security and Medicare tomorrow.

How does that help the unemployed? Where are the jobs? Oh yes, president Tea Party will ask the Tea Party to raise taxes to pay for a little bit of needed construction. Obama is intelligent enough (I hope!) to understand that will never happen. So, by suggesting to do something he knows very well will never happen, he is lying to the People. OK, pundits are paid to not notice this so loudly, that it gets reinforced.

On the other hand, he should be able to spend many happy vacations in Bali again in the future, with many domestics. Obama is not, and never was, an average American. I used to think I lived like an aristocrat in Africa, because we employed a cook and a house helper. Then I read Obama’s books, and I was left with a weird feeling: something did not add up. He presented himself as poor, but he did not think poor. Interviewing plenty of people who knew him when he was 10 confirmed the weirdness. Young Obama behaved more like young Bush than young me.

Then the New York Times finally did his job and enquired about Obama’s childhood. In Indonesia, his mother was married to a millionaire, a well paid Indonesian front man for big American corporations to hide behind. According to the NYT, Obama lived in a mansion with four lived in domestics in  secondary housing on the premises. That explains a lot, especially in the conjunction of posing as a victim of the system in one’s fictional biographies.

So, as even Maureen Dodd of the NYT asserted, Obama’s motivation is to join the highest plutocracy. He does not mind if he betrays all his supporters: for him, they are just suckers, too bad for them that they sucked the wrong tit. As he said in his books, and in unguarded speeches, it’s all about navigating.

Those who play to the “adult in the room” have always reminded me of chimpanzees playing with tuxedos with utmost seriousness.

In truth, the wise know that navigating is about a journey, and the journey to a destination, and those who eat part of the crew are unwise. All of this escapes the small men.

In the district of the (republican) speaker of the house, Mr. Boehner, there are 89 “structurally deficient bridges“. Ryan, leader of the republicans in Congress, has 95 “structurally deficient bridges” A virulent blonde republican has 192 structurally deficient bridges. And she is still hysterical against public spending. She cannot even understand that the private sector does not own these bridges.

Some of these bridges carry more than 50,000 cars a day. It has already happened that one even larger bridge with a giant interstate freeway on top collapsed. More is to come. Obama says: let the banks play with each other, faking profits with their electronic casino, so they can keep their mansion, yachts, private jets, tax heavens. Boehner says:”We should not spend.“But the banks do spend, to, and with, each other, in their derivative universe.

***

TIME TO RESIST, AND REBEL: “INDIGNEZ VOUS!”

In France last year an Auschwitz survivor, Stéphane Hessel, published “Indignez Vous!“, a small book advocating that it was high time for common people to rebel against the plutocracy. Mr. Hessel is 94 years old, full of life and youth. Many of those who are young today are, instead mental dead wood, as they confuse feeling good inside and having a moral system. See David Brooks’ editorial in the NYT, “If It Feels Right…” Says Brooks: “The rise of moral individualism has produced a generation unable to speak intelligibly about the virtuous life.”

“Indignez Vous!” has become the banner of the indignant ones who demonstrate throughout Europe.

Here is Stéphane Hesselin his own words, last year:

“Ninety-three years. I’m nearing the last stage. The end cannot be far off. How lucky I am to be able to draw on the foundation of my political life: the Resistance and the National Council of the Resistance’s program from sixty-six years ago…

The motivation that underlay the Resistance was outrage. We, the veterans of the Resistance movements and fighting forces of Free France, call on the younger generations to revive and carry forward the tradition of the Resistance and its ideas. We say to you: take over, keep going, get angry! Those in positions of political responsibility, economic power and intellectual authority, in fact our whole society, must not give up or let ourselves be overwhelmed by the current international dictatorship of the financial markets, which is such a threat to peace and democracy….

We must realize that violence turns its back on hope. We have to choose hope over violence—choose the hope of nonviolence. That is the path we must learn to follow. The oppressors no less than the oppressed have to negotiate to remove the oppression: that is what will eliminate terrorist violence. That is why we cannot let too much hate accumulate….

To you who will create the twenty-first century, we say, from the bottom of our hearts, TO CREATE IS TO RESIST.

TO RESIST IS TO CREATE.”

Hessel is generous to speak of the “financial markets”. In truth the plutocratic class is more like it. There is an important difference between retirement funds and those manager-owners managing them, and conniving banksters of the financial system. Much more, if it is really much more, is completely different.

***

GREEKS ARE NOT LAZY, BUT AMERICAN TAXPAYERS ARE NAÏVE:

The Greeks work much more than the Germans, so why should they work even more while being admonished that they are lazy spendthrifts?

According to OECD.org, in 2008, Germans worked in the average 27 hours a week, 1492 hours per year, while the Greeks worked 41 hours, 2120 hours per year (French work 30 hours a week, 1542 hours per year, Americans USA: 35 hours per week, 1792 hours per year. The British work 32 hours per week, South Koreans, 44 hours per week; philosophers work all the time, 140 hours per week!)

Greek GDP was down 5%, two years in a row, increasing the relative size of the Greek debt. So austerity, per se, is not working. The same will happen in all countries which try that “austerity as prosperity” trick, worthy of lost chimps.

G20, G7, G whatever, have not done anything about banksters: after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brother, American plutocracy saved itself by harnessing American taxpayers, and the entire American money creation machine.

Multiple rounds of deliberately obscurely and misleadingly named “Quantitative Easing” directed trillion of dollars towards the very bankers, and the very banking system which had created the crisis. Banks got short term money for free then turned around, and  invested it long at a higher interest rate, with the government, generating fake profits. Armed with those, they could keep on playing the derivative markets, and fake some more profits. Indeed, as they play with each other, it’s a zero sum game, no economic value is created, as money is just a symbol, not a reality.

There is a lot of misinformation going on. As a rule, American economists, even of the leftist, pro-government sort, are hostile to the European construction, even when they are esteemed advisors in Europe (Krugman has advised Spain), or teach there (Stiglitz, another economy Nobel, teaches in Paris). They always say that they love Europe, and want it to succeed, but then hates the fact Europeans want to have just one currency. What’s next? Just one flag? Are not only Americans allowed to have flag and currency, as the Very Serious Country it is?

There again, they follow Keynes, who used to rage that so many nations had been freed from German imperial subjugation in 1919. How can these American economists be received nicely in Eastern Europe, knowing that, following their racist master, they would like it subjugated?

***

ICELAND VERSUS GREECE:

Could Greece exit the Eurozone? Sure, that is what the USA want. And the USA is doing its best to make it so, having unleashed its plutocracy (why have the Europeans not yet brought warrant of arrest against Goldman Sachs’ executives?) And its wolves howl that way.

Paul Krugman, disingenuously claim that all Europeans are different and they should all have their own currency from Malta (population: 400,000) to Germany: population 83 million. Does Krugman know how many nations there are in Europe? Or all luxury hotels feel the same? Does Krugman know that poor Europeans, now that they have the euro, male comparison shopping among countries, to buy, say, a cheaper car? I don’t think the plutocracy cannot even imagine how the commons live.

Krugman lauds the default of Iceland, and its massive devaluation. He forgets, or rather, refuse to consider that, after Iceland basically stole billions to millions of EU citizens, their governments stepped in, and that those powerful governments are still determined to recover the money. In case Krugman does not know, Great Britain is 200 time larger than Iceland, and, ironically is (partly) in charge of the… defense of Iceland. 

In the second quarter 2008, Iceland’s external debt was 9.553 trillion Icelandic krónur (€50 billion), more than 80% of which was held by the banking sector, mostly in 3 more or less private banks. By comparison, Iceland’s 2007 gross domestic product was1.293 trillion krónur (€8.5 billion).

Krugman is always saying that the fact Iceland has its own currency and so was able to solve the crisis by devaluing its currency. This is deeply dishonest. A glance at the Wikipedia article shows that Krugman’s view of the situation is an affabulation. That is Iceland has improved, but not because of the currency dropping. Actually, Iceland was so desperate that its currency was going to the bottom of the ocean, that it went on its knees to enter the Eurozone.  It was told it had to enter the EU first. Since, arguments have blossomed about whale killing, and the negotiations are ongoing.

And, by the way, fixing the root of the crisis was just differed. Countries such as Great Britain, who reimbursed her 300,000 stolen depositors (as many as Iceland has inhabitants), have evoked the anti-terrorist act against Iceland, and are still determined to recover their losses. Other aggrieved  countries are the Netherlands and Germany, or Norway. French veteran magistrate (and presidential candidate) Eva Joly was named by Iceland to head a serious economic crime unit of 20 detectives to find out the causality (hence culpability chain) of the whole thing.

If Greece had its own currency, it will have one positive consequence: tourists would flood to Greece, because that currency would be worth very little. Krugman would say:”I told you so”.

However Krugie boy forgets that Greece basically makes nothing, so Greece would still have to buy everything outside, and that would be very expensive. then Krugie boy will jump up and down, and squeak:”How did Iceland do it, then? Nananana!”  

Well Iceland has giant geothermal resources, and also mountains, with a very wet climate. Over 80% of Icelandic electricity is generated by hydro power. Whereas Greek energy has to be fully imported. And with a collapsed currency, that would be ruinous. So there would be tremendous inflation, and the Greek central bank would have to raise interest rates very very high.

In other words, Krugman panacea is just an absurdity. Hopefully the Europeans will be able to resist the American plutocratic conspiracy, its siren songs of the mentally undeveloped, and not fall into the abyss.

***

WHEN THE USA FIGHTS FOR ITS LIFE:

A default for Greece would not mean that, as Iceland did until now, and Krugman always fail to mention, Greece would run away with all the money. Far from it. Wiping out 50% or so of the Greek debt ought to be fine. Next time the banksters will have to be more careful, or more brazenly conniving.

It is clear to me that huge banks and their bankers try to become more influential, more Too-Big-To-Fail, by lending more. That was clear with the subprime madness in the USA. Madness for the victims, crafty for the biggest bankers, the banksters.

How do plutocrats operate, when they have achieved plutocratic sustainability?  They extract a rent from the multitude. Such individuals are who, historically, the French called “rentiers“. Tellingly, the meaning of the word “renter” in English is the exact opposite (inverting meaning is a good way to confuse). Paying rent of own’s life is close to the idea of serfdom: one does not own anything, and one spends all of one’s life paying rent to the overlord. This is basically how Americans live. And then they have been imprinted to feel proud, insuring they don’t understand a thing about what ails them.

American propaganda says most Americans “own” their homes. Instead Americans actually rent their homes to banks. The average American homeowner now has 38 percent equity, down from 61 percent a decade ago. Thus in truth, American own only 24% of their housing market: they rent at most than 75%, and most of it at a totally overvalued rate. The money is sent to the friends of Obama such as the daemon Dimon, who then live in mansions, and buy the president (who loves to be bought so he can live in mansions too! Even “The Economist” has started to make fun of Obama’s luxury bed!)

Well, it’s high time to stop paying rent to the plutocracy.

As I write this, hordes of armor clad American sharp shooters are fighting on roof tops inside Kabul, killing Afghans who are stupid enough to believe American propaganda and feel they own their country. I have live access to both foreign and United States media. It was amazing how much the attack was downplayed and misleadingly represented in the media of the USA, which said things one could see were blatantly not true: non American TV showed clearly hordes of Americans fighting, contrarily to what was said in the USA, where it was falsely claimed most of the fighting was made by Afghans, and giant American helicopters turning around the battle were just sightseeing.

Well worth spending lots of money, treasure, lives, and brains on it, indeed, this little adventure in Afghanistan, designed to show that, like Carter, Obama deserved his Nobel Peace Prize, because, like Carter, he attacked Afghanistan much more. Thus the dollar has to stay both strong and weak, and the euro better disappear from sight, as its rise could mean that other countries could follow Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and switch to the euro for oil payments.

For the same reason that switching to its own currency would be ruinous energetically for Greece, for the dollar to lose its solitary reserve currency role would be energetically ruinous for the USA. Hence it would be ruinous for Paul Krugman. The energy budget for heating and cooling the mansion in which he lives would become considerable. Let alone the fact that his sponsors would be disappointed that he did not deliver a demolished European currency. Funny how it all makes sense.  

“Indignez Vous!”

***

Patrice Ayme

CALLING 9/11

ENOUGH CHILDISH GAMES ALREADY!

Abstract: Some of what is below will shock Americans. But most people, worldwide, are aware of these facts, or are penetrated by the only mood compatible with these facts. If the USA wants to fight the world, it will not win, especially if it starts from a counterfactual logic.

I have documented this assault many times, for example in “Obama Commemorates 9/11 His Way.” But the USA, as a propaganda machine keeps on whining it was the very definition of innocence, and that an unfathomably cruel, unexplainable attack came to them on 9/11/01. Other nations which committed crimes, have explored them with more enthusiasm, in the last century. But of course, that was after the crimes stopped, and their instigators were put out of power.

The answer to 9/11 by the USA, turned into an attack on the world and civilization. It was entirely inappropriate. Many crimes against humankind were committed, in the name of vengeance, by the USA. “Dead Or Alive”, “If Not With US, Against Us!”, “Geneva Conventions Are Quaint” as Bush and his co-conspirators put it, and acted accordingly. Nearly none of these crimes were prosecuted (except for a few dimwit soldiers caught with video tapes).

The appropriate answer to 9/11 would have been a massive police action to redress a criminal act by a gang of a few people. It was certainly criminal, on the scale of an attack against human rights, to go destroy Iraq, a natural enemy of bin Laden, and make Americans so stupid that they would support that insanity enthusiastically. It was also criminal, on the scale of crimes against mankind, to create a mess in Afghanistan, and use the country mostly as a shooting gallery to test all sort of new weapons and justify a gargantuan military budget.

As it was, 9/11 could be viewed as a shameful attack for the modern apologists of socio-political Islam, which showed its true colors. However, 9/11 turned into something worse, and that was not the work of the Muslim Fundamentalists. 9/11 became an even more shameful event, a reply by the Western powers denying the superiority of Western civilization.

Let me explain. Attacking countless countries for no good reason, made, and is making, a bad situation much worse (the hyperlink I gave above is to Scientific American: we are talking about a scientific phenomenon here). The USA replied to a gang of criminals by war, a massive attack, ongoing, against hundreds of millions of people. A gang got criminal, a country outdid them, on an enormous scale.

(Yes, Iraq + Afghanistan + Pakistan is already well above 220 million people. And now war is made with robots, worldwide, just like in science fiction horror movies; the U.S. government conducts attacks with robots against entire countries, without even a semblance of democratic process, and its usage of thousands of non uniformed private mercenaries to do so is deeply troubling: the uniformed SS were judicially found to constitute a criminal organization after WWII).

When one dollar is spent in Afghanistan or Iraq, 85 cents is spent on the military-industrial complex in the USA. Much of the rest goes into corruption. A cause well worth dying for, indeed, and the American policy led to the death of millions. Is that what the Americans are celebrating on 9/11 when their leaders quote Allah’s psalms? Do I misunderstand something? 1,300 governmental organizations and 2,000 private companies are part of the state police in the USA (exercise: translate “state police” into German…) Of course it cost money, a trillion dollar a year, two-third of the primary budget of the USA, hence the American deficit.

Is the USA turning into old fashion Assyria? All military, no brainy?

Criminally insane societies have existed before, and only rarely do they succeed to transmogrify into higher, more sustainable types. Generally they get lethally entangled in their own lies, delusions and evil ways.

***

***

ONE OF THE MANY TIMES WHEN A PRESIDENT OF THE USA PLOTTED WITH AL QAEDA OR ITS SPONSORS:

Interesting what you can watch on French TV: a long documentary from inside Al Qaeda, including extensive revealing interviews with bin Laden closest confident and bodyguard, Abu Jandal (that is, “Father of Death“), who considered bin Laden his uncle, and thus his father. Although he turned FBI informant in the meantime, his heart is still with Osama. He presently lives in Yemen. His heart is still with bin Laden, but he is wondering if it is all morally correct, and he remembers asking hard questions to bin Laden about the killing of hundreds of innocent Muslims, and wounding 5,000 Kenyans.

The most revealing part of the documentary was the interview of the CIA officer, Mike Scheuer, who directed the hunt against bin Laden under Clinton (and thereafter). From 1985 to 1992, Scheuer had worked in the jihad against the socialist regime in Afghanistan and its Soviet allies. He admits that bin Laden killed Russians, that was all what counted for most American officials, and so that was good enough to make him a close ally of the USA, as far as they were concerned.

Scheuer revealed to French TV that his team had localized bin Laden and top Saudi princes, in March 1999, in Kandahar province, Afghanistan. The Princes set-up a landing strip for their huge C130 planes. Out of them came immensely expensive carpets, a lavish camp, complete with huge tents and a 30 meters communication mast. Those worthies were hunting fauna with falcons in the desert.  At the time, bin Laden, having engaged in massive bombings against American embassies, was already American public enemy number one. The satellite showed exactly where bin Laden’s tent was, on the side, far away, with just one or two bodyguards, and his very regular comings and going to join the others in prayer and other events.

Scheuer asked Clinton for the authorization to strike, and Clinton did nothing, for a full month. The CIA became much more insistent, and suddenly the camp was evacuated in a hurry, between two passages of the satellite. A few days later, Saudi Arabia announced the purchase of eight billion dollars worth of F16s fighter planes. Mike Scheuer cooly said, on French TV, that Clinton warned the Saudi Crown Prince, through Richard Clarke.

Scheuer added that it “appeared obvious”  that the purchase came in exchange for the warning. Some would say that, in the USA, one does not need traitors: the president himself commits high treason. But that would be considered anti-American by many, so I will abstain from drawing such a conclusion publicly (I want to thank a partner at an international law firm for advising me about a typo in an earlier version of these remarks).

***    

THE USA AND 9/11: TIME TO CALL 911, & TREAT THE INSANITY:

Are the Middle Ages descending some more above New York? The Caliph went there, and spoke on September 11, 2011. The Caliph is a very serious person, venerated by all, at least formally so. The Caliph intoned psalm 46 of his sacred book:

“God is our refuge and strength! A very present help in trouble. Therefore, we will not fear.” (Read more.) He will not fear, especially because he was talking behind armored glass. So it is in plutocracy: trust God, and back it up with brute force.

So it goes with Osama, or whatever the particular spelling of his name at this point. Hope you don’t fear my more advanced philosophy, oh primitive Caliph from before the Middle Ages!Philosophy goes through bullet proof glass.

“God is for us a refuge and a force!”  is how Osama talked, how Osama thought, and apparently it is still the way he talks, and the way he thinks. In other words, assassinate Osama, and he is still here, preaching with the same words, from the same book, in the name of God, refuge and force. Not only Osama was made into a martyr, but he talks louder than ever.

God as refuge and force: It is clearly the same idea, and the same sense of justice. Be dumb if you want, but philosophers will notice that you laud the very psychological mechanism, and the very same God which allowed 19 fanatics to crash planes into buildings. So do you disapprove of that act, crashing planes in the name of psalm 46, or do you keep on preaching that psalm, the reason for that act, as far as most, or all, of the 19 assassins were concerned?

Americans may revere Obama, as Egyptians used to revere Mubarak, and the Soviets, Stalin, and the jihadists, Osama. It’s not just in the USA that the established order is clinging to its metaphysics. In Morocco, Mohammed VI (yes, six!) has rolled forward a “new” constitution, but Islam is still what it is based on (besides having all the powers in the hands of that plutocrat, Mohammed VI). That means: women not to inherit as men do, among other things.

As Muhammad Atta and is 18 accomplices crashed their planes, no doubt they screamed in their heads: “God is for us a refuge and a force!” The force was with them! What is the difference with bin Bush and Bushama? Same language, same ideas. (“bin”, or “ben”, means “son”, I point out for those who don’t get the joke, that Bush was the son of Bush, himself the son of still another Bush, that one a pal of Adolf Hitler, another strident lover of “God”, and also of the Qur’an.) Of course, some will cynically observe that Muhammad Atta and his co-criminals killed much fewer people, and have carried war to just one country.

If one loves the reasoning and reject its products only when inconvenient, one ought to be the object of spite. At least from philosophers.

Stupidity has to be reinforced, in the USA, on every September 11. Upon stupidity does leadership as the Americans know it, strongly depends, with its force and its “God”.

Bin Laden was killed in the very center of the center of Pakistani military power. Yes, Pakistan and its Inter Service Intelligence, which the USA used already forty years ago, to attack Afghanistan. And Americans still don’t understand that they are manipulated, or, do not want to understand the various evil conspiracies that their own government set-up, because they are still persuaded they profit from it, and they can just hate the pawn, bin Laden who turned against them, so that hopefully no other pawn will turn again.

When the snake bites its own tail, has it learned anything? Apparently not, and the venom is going to its head.

***

BUTTERFLIES KNOW BETTER:

Meanwhile I visited one of these new museums where one can walk through a rain forest, complete with live parrots, birds, and tropical butterflies, with my little 23 months old well of wisdom leading the way. At the bottom of that particular installation, there was only water, with enormous fishes, some up to 2 meters long. And pretty butterflies were flying all over. A friend saw a fish trying to swallow one.

Butterflies are all wings, antennas, and bellies.  Their heads are not prominent, they are barely visible. Still, none of the butterflies fell in the water. If we think about it, this is quite remarkable:  the only explanation is that butterflies make a theory that it would be very bad to fall in the water, so they don’t try it.

How come butterflies are so clever and American leaders are so stupid? The only plausible explanation is that American leaders are paid to be stupid, and are deliberately stupid, as when Obama insists that the USA was attacked out of the blue on 9/11, as if the USA had not been making war in Afghanistan for 21 years, and in Iraq for more than a decade, killing millions in various ways (many of them children).

But how come individual Americans do not see that they are falling in the drink? How come the butterflies themselves are more clever than Americans?

How come it’s only individual Arabs who are trying for spring? How come only individual Arabs have stopped listening to leaders who speak in the name of so called “god”?

It is well known that G. W. Bush intended to invade Iraq well before 9/11. Iraq had nothing to do, whatsoever, with 9/11, except as the later provided with a convenient excuse for invading the former, by telling all the needed lies, however enormous, just like the friend of the grandfather of Bush recommended to do.

The first meeting to plot the invasion of Iraq by the resident of the White House was on September 17, six days after 9/11. It is as if Bush needed 9/11, and was ready for it, his way. Does that explain the coolness Bush affected towards reports on his desk about Al Qaeda plotting an attack on the USA?

Reminder: no aerial defenses were ready in the USA, whatsoever, in anticipation of 9/11.

9/11 had been tried on Paris in 1994, seven years earlier, and was prevented by the usage of French lethal force. The French Air Force and missile forces had been ready for decades. Intervention times are in minutes, or even, when specifics attacks were feared, in seconds. Same in Israel, of course.

The USA is the land of conspiracies. There is a well paid plot against undermining those who think the climate is changing. Some climate scientists even get death threats. The reason? American fossil fuel plutocrats are used to kill to stay rich. If they are running out of Arabs to kill, they can always threaten to kill Americans.

In the USA, there is even a plot against the theory of evolution. As Obama says:”God is refuge and a force!” Stupidity is a force which gives plutocracy meaning.   

After the attack on a few buildings by a gang of criminals, the USA reacted by attacking many countries. It was entirely appropriate: it was more of the same criminal insanity which, precisely, led to 9/11.

Reminder: only a few thousand Americans have died from the Middle East war the USA engaged in, so far. By adding the dead on 9/11 plus the dead soldiers and mercenaries in Iraq and Afghanistan, one does not reach 10,000 Americans dead. Yet (but trust Obama to make it so). By contrast, ever since the USA attacked Afghanistan on July 3, 1979, yes, in 1979, the USA has visited 9/11 everyday on the Middle East, so to speak, or, at least once a month,  on millions of people.

The Americans may have the oil to burn, and 9/11 to celebrate, as they do, but Middle Easterners count their dead at the hands of the USA, by millions. Indeed. That is what Americans ought to try to understand.

Besides, the dead on 9/11 is not all the work of bin laden and his co-conspirators. The World Trade Center towers were very poorly designed: they collapsed from a fire. The Empire State Building was hit by a bomber decades earlier, and there was a very important fire, and the elevators fell down, their cables melted. But the architectural design of the 1930s, in distributed load bearing, was careful, and far from the silly tent like structure of the World Trade Center.

Why a tent like design for the WTC? Because the plutocrats attached a lot of importance to an open floor plan. Trading floors, ladies and gentlemen, it’s all about trading things one did not create oneself. Osama Bin Laden, a structural engineer, expected only the upper floors to burn, and the steel to melt:”It’s all we had hoped” said Bin Laden in a taped discussion. Bin Laden never expected the towers to come down (and he was the most optimistic of his fellow plotters; the others had no idea how vulnerable the New York skyline was; perhaps, had they know, they would have arranged things to strike a bit later, causing much more deaths, as up to 50,000 people worked in the towers… By the way my own spouse nearly worked for a few weeks in the WTC towers a few months earlier, and I did visit the WTC, so I am not completely disconnected from the whole thing in another universe.)

***

CRIMINALLY INSANE SOCIETIES WITH DEEP SELF DESTRUCTIVE PATHOLOGIES HAVE FLOUNDERED BEFORE:

So the USA is becoming insane, quoting with approval the very idea it claims to be the victim of, psalm 46. In its latest “stimulus” proposal, Obama, the pseudo democrat, proposes tax cuts to the funding of Social Security and Medicare. He finds that stimulating, and it is the largest part of his “stimulus”, and also the only part which his bipartisan partner, the Tea Party, will pass. More insanity. Or maybe not: if he pleases his masters enough, Obama will vacation in Bali much more. What is truly insane is that the American People does not seem to notice the manipulations.

OK, Israel, a would be democracy without a constitution, is also going insane, thinking it can steal land and water forever, and nobody will notice, because it has some understandings with the dictators around. Meanwhile the dictators are going, and French diplomats are helping the Palestinians prepare their case for a state (which will open all sorts of help, finance and trade for them; it’s not all about annoying Israel).

Let’s step a little backward: how does insanity arise in nations (example Germany a century ago), or even in multinational empires (example Achaemenid Persia)?

Assyria was nation with its own language which founded a giant empire which reigned over many other nations. It lasted about a thousand years. It became ever more successful with successive waves of increasingly demented, or let’s say, over ambitious militarism. It even invaded and occupied distant Egypt. In the end, Mesopotamia to its south, and all the rebellious national powers, all around, revolted. They could not defeat the Assyrian army, so they destroyed the Assyrian population first, to starve the hated enemy. Nowadays very few people call themselves descendants of that Assyrian super power. Although there are still plenty of Egyptian, and they seem to remember that they come from a super power which lasted millennia, and which, differently from Assyria, founded its power more on the mind, and less on the fist. A lot of what is called Greek mathematics originated in Egypt, Egypt is a co-developer of the alphabet, and it had a very long and friendly close cooperation with Crete, Europe’s master civilization. Moreover, a lot of what is called Jewish civilization evolved in Egypt much earlier, including monotheism. Plus Egypt had some very powerful female Pharaos. Assyria stays only famous for terrorizing Egypt, and the entire world, with its military-industrial rampage.

Another example of deep insanity was Rome. Both the top Greek cities and Rome rested their socio-economy on slavery. Unsurprisingly, those enslaving republics turned into enslaving  plutocracy. It was a pathology: superior Crete did not rest on slavery and its associated exaggerated plutocracy. Neither did the Celto-Germans rested their social organization on slavery. And it is indeed how the Greco-Roman slave society finished: the Germans, namely the Franks, took over and outlawed slavery (Jesus Christ, a supporter of Caesar, had nothing against slavery, although he complained about the rich, and, one could say, plutocracy.) Thus evil Greco-Roman society transmogrified into a newer version of the advanced Western civilization, closer to the much older Cretan model.

The Aztecs practiced industrial cannibalism. That was their undoing: Cortez was able to recruit enormous native armies made of the potential dinners of the Aztecs. Without native help, the Aztecs would not have been defeated. Cannibalism was also the God, the refuge, the strength, of the Aztecs, as their economy would have been otherwise incapable of producing enough proteins to support an army of 250,000 professional killers (I mean: soldiers).

Nazism was another example of criminally insane society. As with the Aztecs, the insanity was central to their power: mass murdering racism allowed Hitler to provide his supporters with wealth. For a few years.

In all the preceding cases, the pathologies which affected them led to the destruction of the societies. Sometimes a pathological society reforms itself under a less virulent form. Stalinism provides an example, the North American English colony and its ensuing enslaving, genocidal racism, is another: both societies reformed themselves.

However cases such as Assyria show that a society can relapse under virulent form over centuries, until it gets finally destroyed. This sort of precedent is most troubling for the USA, which does not seem to have reached a sustainable morality, or even the proclivity to generate enough curiosity to elucidate the causality at work in what ails it so deeply.

***

VENGEANCE MAY BE JUSTICE IN THE USA, BUT NOT IN CIVILIZATION:

A number of very deep mistakes, of the exploitative and hubristic type, led the USA to 9/11. Since then, even worse mistakes have been committed, by the USA, such as acting out of vengeance, rather than justice, throwing civilization to the war dogs, and showing no inclination to learn anything important, as the assassination of bin Laden by a small man, and the hysteria with which it was welcomed, showed.

When the president of a major country acts like a mafioso, a capo di capi, silencing an encumbering accomplice, a stray soldier, justice has a problem. Arresting criminals is important, be it only because we have to analyze their exact reasons, so that they can be addressed, and neutralized in the future.

One will never repeat enough the following. Operatives of the USA’s “intelligence” agencies taught bin Laden to terrorize by attacking civilian objectives (schools!), in Afghanistan. American “intelligence” operatives thought that was smart, just as the USA thought it was smart to create a war in Afghanistan. By July 1979, the American intervention in Afghanistan was direct (instead of just through Pakistani intelligence). Why cannot Americans focus on those facts? Because they can only vote for the bipartisan party, and his bipartisan president?

Reading the preceding, the reaction of normal, well educated Americans will be intense disgust against the misfit who wrote these lines. It does not matter if the message may be correct, it is just an anti-American insanity to utter it. Such insanity has to be rejected by upright Americans with the single mindedness of ancient Germans rejecting entirely the suggestion that something like Auschwitz could even exist. Not such an insane comparison: Amnesty International knows of 70,000 cases of individuals processed in American torture centers, worldwide, outside of any legal set-up. In truth, it’s most certainly hundreds of thousands who have been treated unlawfully.

Van Jones, the green energy Czar of Obama had to resign just because he signed a petition in 2004 asking to make a congressional commission about a possible role of the government of the USA in 9/11. It depends what “government” means, and what “role” meant.

Historically, it’s the USA which attacked Afghanistan in cold blood in 1979, causing the death of MILLIONS of Afghans. Historically, the USA and Saudi intelligence recruited the pious bin Laden and turned that son of a plutocratic family worth more than 40 billion dollars into a fierce jihadist attack dog. Historically too, outside of the USA, it is well known that the CIA had figured out that some particularly dangerous associates of bin Laden had moved to the USA, and did not tell the FBI (this was finally reported on “60 minutes” on 9/11/11, by Lara Logan, after the first version of this essay came out on Greenwitch Meridian Times!)

Islam, like its mentors, Christianity and Judaism, are war like terror religions. So that fanatics rediscovers this periodically is no wonder. Maybe it’s time to understand that the West rose higher, because Christ was just a device, a crowbar… for a higher purpose.

The worst thing for the highest civilization is to make a shrine to insanity, on the ground of multiculturalism. Multiculturalist respect was not extended to Aztecs, so why should we extend it to fanatics of other religions who also practice human sacrifices? Because 9/11 was just a big human sacrifice. Where the Celts would regularly burn 100 inside a mooing metallic bull, bin Laden and company burned 3,000, once. I love beautiful mosques and cathedrals. However I hate it when people are reduced to mooing.

Multiculturalism is intolerable, says transculturalism.

Disrespecting civilization destroying insanity ought to be a moral principle against demented interpretations of Americanism, or Islamism, or any ism of the lowest type. And the more millions practice them, the more disrespect we should flaunt for these inferior forms of intellectual fascism.

To put it clearly, if crudely: if the solution to the problem of cannibalism, or sacrifice, is to kill the cannibals, or human sacrificers, once and for all, so be it. This is basically what the Romans did with the Celts and Carthage.  To warm up, we can kill the respect directed to them. One should also kill all respect for those who have decided to devolve, as the USA did with the Patriot Act, torture, summary imprisonment, executions, and a thorough refusal to examine why their boy Osama, whom the CIA lovingly trained went berserk.

***

 9/11: PRICE & PRETEXT FOR MORE PLUTOCRACY:

Why such stupid policy of replying to religiously inspired crime with global war? Well, just look at the budget of the military-‘intelligence’-industrial complex: it became gigantic in the USA, leaving the rest of the planet, the economy, and common sense far behind. The pseudo democratic resident of the white House made the situation worse (his specialty).

Thus it turns out that stupidity was clever, from the point of view of military industrial devils and their plutocratic supports. The same applies for the assassination of bin Laden: it turned him into a martyr, into the one who had to be silenced, because he was so right (what else?). That, too, was very stupid, except, of course if the goal was to extend the war for decades to come. And so it is that as Osama is dead, Obama quotes exactly the psalm that Osama would have wanted to quote for the tenth anniversary of 9/11.

The plutocracy loving government of the USA, by creating war situations all over, and then engage in combat, has created a mechanism to justify the enormous existence of the trillion dollar military-“intelligence”-industrial complex. Should one sees 9/11 part, in some sense of a vast conspiracy to keep the USA on a war footing? I expose, you decide. Remember Clinton tipping off the Saudi Crown Prince about the danger bin Laden was in, though. But, right, you won’t hear it on American TV. When a tree falls in a forest, and no American is there to hear it, it probably did not happen. It’s only when big towers fall in the niddle of New York that Americans notice something is up, or rather down. In other words, not kosher. Wait until Israel implodes. But I am getting ahead of the facts…

So what do we hear now? A French citizen has just claimed that he brought millions of dollars, in cash, from African presidents to Chirac (before he became president) and Villepin. Both men are going to sue, they have to, so we should learn more. Hopefully the rot, in Europe will not stink to the same high heavens.

The war between plutocracy and democracy is ongoing. Pluto manipulates underground, makes itself invisible, enlightenment and openness fight back, as the Babylonians knew this already so much, 4,000 years ago, that they made a religion out of it. Times to embrace that more advanced wisdom, and forget Osama-Obama’s psalm 46, and its Biblical sense of vengeance as justice.  

A good start would be to start an investigation upon the accusation of high treason proffered by one of the highest officers at the CIA against a former president of the USA. In a much older society such as France, investigation of former head of states is nearly routine. Actually Chirac is not just under investigation, but on trial, for corruption. Accusations against Bush and Clinton are much more serious.

***

Patrice Ayme

***

Immigration Deception?

 Curious, but revealing incident in a park, somewhere in the USA. I was walking with my daughter, when I came across a group of very black children, accompanied by an older white woman. Usually American “blacks” are not that black, and to see a whole group of charcoal like children was exceptional. All the more since they spoke French, not English. Actually, they did not understand English.

 Having spent most of my childhood in French speaking West (really black) Africa, my interest was raised. My toddler, from her towering 23 months of ancient wisdom, was delighted to meet French speakers, and show them around the playground. Her antics made her instantaneously popular: she was using with proficiency a playground made for children at least 5 year old. Extremely charming: she conducted her business with great seriousness, beaming with pride. 

 I asked the teenagers what they were doing in the USA. I had expected them to be visiting for summer. I was surprised when they demurred. They said I should ask the American lady, who loomed in the distance. I found that weird. I asked the lady. She told me she was an immigration lawyer, and these children were “political refugees”. She had requested the U.S. Immigration to offer them political asylum. 

 PA: “Political asylum? Which dictatorship are they from? They cannot be from Zimbabwe, they speak French!” 

 Lady Lawyer: “They are from Haiti.”

 PA:“Haiti? But Haiti is a democracy! They just had a presidential election! With international observers, and the UN all over! There was no violence, whatsoever.” 

 LL:“You think so, but it’s not like here, it’s very poor there!”

 PA:“So you are saying that the poor ought to get political asylum, just because their country is poor?” 

 LL:“Yes, of course!” 

 PA:“Don’t you think that is abusing the concept? Besides, as a Socialist French Prime Minister, Michel Rocard, once said:”La France ne peut pas receuillir toute la misere du monde!” (“France cannot welcome all the world’s misery!”, meaning that just because people live in misery, they should not be welcome in France.) I don’t see why the USA ought to accept all the world’s misery, either.”

 LL:“The USA is not France. This is the New World! The more immigration, the better the American economy gets!” 

 PA: “Well, after World War Two and the Algerian civil war, the French economy was destroyed, but recently, in spite of little immigration, the French economy has clearly been doing better than the USA: free healthcare, free infant and toddler care, free schooling, much better life spans, less poverty, etc.”

 LL:“Americans are very generous people. They want to help Haiti.” 

 PA:“Well, so are the French: not only do they help Haiti too, but they are sending 15 billion euros to Greece, while paying for it with a 12 billion euros austerity plan. That help for Greece was just last week. Moreover, overall, France is a country where the poor get much more help, and the hyper rich pay, like in Great Britain, 50% tax or more. In the USA, the richest 400 incomes pay only 17% tax, and the democratic president, in a flourish of hypocrisy, claims that this will revive the economy.” 

 Lady Lawyer: “Well, a rising tide lifts all boats, the more people come into this country, the better it is for everybody.” 

 PA:“Sure the corporations love to have more janitors and valet park attendants come in, and maybe the economy of the USA can survive all this generosity. But certainly not the ecology, and the quality of life. 30 years ago, there were 17 million people in California, now there are 38 million. This makes California into the fastest growing state in the world. The entire world. It is pretty clear that California has not withstood the shock. Now they are closing schools in some villages in the mountains. There are a lot of mountains in California. Children will have to drive 30 miles, over snowy roads, which may be closed at the first Pacific storm, to go to school, next winter. Other cities are closing their police departments, some cities are bankrupt. Even the ultra conservative U.S. Supreme Court has ordered California to release more than 50,000 prisoners held in inhuman conditions. And the Post Office of the USA may close within 6 months. From lack of money. Why not help Americans too?” 

 At this point the immigration lawyer just walked away. I wondered not why she did. Perhaps to exhibit her generosity, and reconstitute her dominance, like the head chimpanzee exhibits his strength by dragging a branch, she went to help my daughter down a slide. She had not noticed that my sweet angel is a slide master, and could do without someone waiting for her at the bottom. 

 The lady lawyer do-gooder, anxious as she was, to receive the little goddess in her arms, forgot she had a heavy reflex camera hanging around her neck. The representative of justice and love ended smacking generously the heavy black contraption in my toddler’s face. The innocent angel cried profusely, to everybody’s consternation, while her lip swelled. 

 I thought that was a telling moral to the story: to be good, it’s not enough to want to appear good, or even to mean to be good. One has to act well, too. Or one may end mean.

 So what do I think about all this? Should I go all the way to the bitter end of that lady’s reasoning, and proclaim impoverished Americans to be political refugees in their own country?

 First, to import Haitian children as if they were political refugees is a travesty of the status of political refugee.

 Second, that taking children away from Haiti does not help Haiti. An empire of 310 million ought not to steal its substance from a country ten millions.

 Third that the resources given by the government of the USA to help Haitian children should be sent to Haiti to help them in their own country, where they belong, and where it would help Haiti more, by a multiplier effect. 

 Fourth, I immediately perceived an enormous cultural gap: the Haitian children were delighted to play with my baby, in a way I have never seen American children do it. American children tend to be standoffish , and are conditioned to engage in much less physical interaction, to touch much less, preferably not to approach, to even avoid eye contact, let alone unguarded speech outside of automatic banalities. 

 The Haitian children were all over my blonde child, and delighted by her enthusiastic French babbling. I could not resist thinking that the USA was not their country, they were not made for it, they would have to lose a lot, to stay in the USA, and survive what would be, for all practical purpose,  a hostile culture. 

 I actually mentioned this to the lady lawyer, and she retorted that the children will have to stay with the Haitian community. 

 Which brought me back to what was this lawyer was trying to do? OK, maybe she was motivated by greed, sorry, her profession, being paid by some organization(s) to import Haitian children. Or maybe she was truly delusional, and she really thought she was doing good. Indeed, how does it help the USA to put more of a burden on its exhausted social services? How does it help ten million Haitians to have American ladies come, swoop, and steal their children? 

 So now the numbers. In 1940, the USA had 140 million people. In 2011, the white Americans are 196 million, the blacks are about 20 million (I am using rough numbers, from memory). At this point the white population is not growing anymore (maybe because it is not getting enough help from the shrinking social services!) But the total population is 310 million, including 50 million Hispanics (who basically did not exist in 1940, they have been imported since). 

 Why so many Hispanics suddenly? Cheap labor, that’s why. Massive immigration has filled up the coffers of the corporate USA. This strategy of importing quasi slaves has stooped all the way down to infamy: the USA has refused to ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). The USA is the only country to refuse the children rights, with… Somalia, another country involved in ever less government, and ever more military spending. 

 Of course, Somalia is famous for its sea born pirates, while the USA is famous for its financial pirates. So both countries have, indeed, something else in common, besides child labor. The USA closes its collective eyes as Hispanic immigrant children go work the fields, with, or without their parents, who are paid little more, and just as trapped.

 All this immigration, far from lifting the population which was already there, as it used to, seems to have made its life harder. Why? 

 Well, in the past, the distant past, the government of the USA, thanks to presidents such as Jefferson or Jackson, had seized from Native American Indians, and others, gigantic portions of North America. Then they distributed them for a song to whomever wanted to take possession of them. This instantaneously made citizens of the USA, the richest, and healthiest people, in the world. By far. As more came in, they filled up the extremely needed manpower. 

 Nowadays the situation has completely changed. First, there are robots, and the like. Secondly the government is not in the habit of making free gifts to the middle class, as it did with FDR (when the government employed millions, in a few weeks), or the GI Bill (sending GIs to college for free), or LBJ’s “Great Society”, or even various social programs of Nixon. 

 Ever since Reagan, the government’s ideology has changed. It has become anti-governmental, and more and more resources were devoted to the rich (reaching a paroxysm under Obama, who cancelled the inheritance tax on billionaires, and lowered taxes on the hypoer rich more than Bush did, in his anxiety to show them he is such a good boy!)   

  Thus the main stream population of the USA, the white middle class, was less needed, and actually feared as a potential source of demands, requests, revendications, not to say unions, uncool behavior, or even outright rebellion. So the middle class is being robbed of power, and progressively starved.

 That starvation is an ongoing process, thanks to Obama, and his bipartisan partner, the Tea Party, who have never seen a tax on the rich they did not want to cut, paid for by cutting public services… to the point the economy of the USA is now grossly misfiring. For example cutting public transportation makes it hard for low income American workers to go to work, or to have any money left once they have transported themselves (and thus are incapable to contribute to economic activity, beyond their own work). But the rich lawyers in their fancy cars (as the lady above in her white Mercedes), or the multimillionaire president aspiring to become a hyper millionaire, don’t care to understand any of this.

 To import Haitian children is more of the same importation of humans to serve the for profit machine of the last three decades. It does not differ fundamentally from importing slaves in centuries past. Just replace the whip by dissemblance. Some will say: Oh, but the slaves had it hard! Not necessarily so much that they would rebel. Indeed, rebellions of black slaves in the USA were very rare. 

 Remember Jefferson’s children-slaves, who followed him back to the USA, willingly from France? Although they hesitated? Why? Because he made them false promises about freeing them, once they would be back to America. He was a full grown man, with an abyssal bend, they were just children. They believed him, and he lied. Maybe that should be mentioned in his beautiful memorial in Washington? Why not? 

 After talking to these Haitian unfortunates in the only language they knew, my impression was that they were made false promises too. And they seemed to guess it, but it was too painful, and pointless, for them to contemplate. Nobody relishes exploring the potential betrayal of those who profess love, and in whom one has believed. And, of course, they were only children. Three of them could not have been more than 13. 

 When I think back on it, a few days later, my impression is that I witnessed a pretty serious crime. The crime of a would be do-gooder, but still a crime.

 As the white Mercedes left, Athena pointed towards it a sanctimonious finger, and with a steady gaze, tears drying on her pink cheeks, declared: “Lady nose hurt bad!” Truth comes from the mouth of children.

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Patrice Ayme

QUANTUM NON LOCALITY.

ONE & THE SAME, ACROSS THE UNIVERSE.

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Abstract: Why Quantum Physics violates locality. Twentieth-second century primary school version.

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 LOCALITY: What does locality mean? It means that what happens at a point is determined by what is happening in a neighborhood of that point within a small enough distance, as determined by light. Moreover, it means that the universe U is made of points: U = Union points. Points, by definition, are singletons (they have no elements in the sense of set theory), and they have dimension zero: nothing belongs to a point.

 SPACETIME: Generally the universe is called “spacetime”. However, this concept, spacetime, introduces the assumptions of Einstein’s Special Relativity, as boosted by Minkowski, established before Quantum Physics.

 In particular the spacetime hypothesis assumes that the universe is a product of what is called in mathematics the “real line”, which assumes, among other things, what is called a T2, Hausdorff topology. Two different points are separated by different neighborhoods (to use the appropriate concepts from general topology).

 Quantum Physics violates both LOCALITY and SPACETIME.

 How do we know this? When one analyzes the smallest processes, one finds that, in plenty of cases, the SMALLEST PROCESSES, THE INDIVISIBLE PROCESSES, SPREAD IN TIME OVER ARBITRARY BIG REGIONS, ON THEIR OWN (THAT IS WITHOUT ANY INTERACTION WITH THE REST OF THE UNIVERSE). Are they then big, or are they small? Verily, therein a mystery of the Quantum.

 In this innocuous concept I just uttered, they spread as big as they want, although being as small as there is, one finds the entire origin of Quantum non locality. No need for fancy mathematics, or even any equation. The idea is as dramatic as can be.

 Indeed, non locality boils down to a matter of definition. As the indivisible process spreads out, it stays one, well, by definition. It means that touching it anywhere is like touching it everywhere.

 When two particles comes out of such an indivisible process, they are called “ENTANGLED”. The semantics gets in the way. What we do not have is actually two particles, but two possible experimental channels, which can be widely separated, where, if we experiment, two particles will show up, and widely separated, if the channels are so.

 Thus we see that the two channels are entangled, and touching one is also touching the other.

 What are some of these cases where the smallest, indivisible processes spread out macroscopically? Well, they are so common, that they seem to be the rule, not the exception: 

 Diffraction (the 1 slit experiment) is such a case: the slit is small, diffusion gets big. Arbitrarily big.

 The famous 2 slit experiment is another case: the slits are close by, the interference screen is at a large distance. Hey, the 2-slit could be a galactic cluster. A cluster made of galaxies, each 200,000 light years across. 

 Any fundamental process where two particles separate after interacting. (In particular the simple set-up of the Einstein Podolski Rosen thought experiment, such as the Bohm total spin zero variant.)

 It is highly likely that such an effect is used all over biology, to transport energy close to 100% efficiency over macroscopic distances (an allusion to the fact that this is not only about pure science, but the economic fall-out will be considerable, once this is so well understood that we can dominate the processes involved).

 Not all Quantum processes spread all over space. Bohr got the Nobel for his patchy, haphazard atomic theory which worked, because electronic matter waves self interfere coherently onto themselves (these matters waves, the de Broglie waves, are called orbitals, and they make the body of atoms, what we call matter, and sharing orbitals is much of what we call chemistry).

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 Thus we have found the following, from the most basic set-up of Quantum theory:

 A Fundamental Quantum Process, is one, until interacted with, even if it is spread over space. This is what Quantum Non Locality is all about.

 Some crystals can make out of one photon, two photons with opposite polarizations, and they could then be sent in two different channels, a light year apart.

Parallel transporting along the two channels the polarization directions, we would always find them opposite. A more subtle relation between the polarizations holds, and was found to be true even when the polarization angles are moved randomly during the photons flight time (Aspect experiment, for which Alain Aspect got the Wolf Prize in 2010).

 By making all sorts of supplementary hypotheses about local hidden parameters and local measurements of polarizations, though, on finds that should not be the case. This contradiction is called the Bell Inequality (I like Bell very much, and I approve of his quest, which is also my quest. I apologize for his many admirers, by presenting his efforts in an arguably demeaning light).

The preceding, most simple way to look at Non Locality, gives an excellent reason to not do that: the logic of the Quantum is as simple as it gets: as long as I am left alone, says the Quantum, I am one. And indivisible.

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 What does it all mean? First Einstein and company in their “EPR” paper, talked about “elements of reality”. They did NOT talk about ELEMENTS OF SPACE. They did not have the notion. I will argue they should have, but of course, the fact that they did not have it was central to their (erroneous) reasoning. 

 Einstein and company wondered how a particle could communicate with another, even across light years. Wrong amazement. Particles are not “communicating“. Actually, they are not “particles” to start with.

 For decades I have advocated a radical solution, as exposed above, aligning the definition elementarily: the two particles are one and the same, they are in the same place at the time of the Quantum interaction, and stop being so, as a result. The topology used in physics, the same that the dinosaurs used, the T2, separated topology, is not appropriate to the real universe. OK, it was appropriate for pterosaurs. But it’s not appropriate, across the universe. BTW, the pterosaurs, the best fliers, by far, that this planet has known, went extinct, although they were obviously very smart.

 Is this the end all, be all? Quantum Physics a la Bohr reigns, and nothing else can be said? No. If the bare bone theory above is true, the entire theory of spacetime is false: space is not made of points, and it is constructed interactively. The case of time is even more so. Imagine there are no heavens made of points, only the sky you make, etc. Thus more has been said. 

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Patrice Ayme

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 Note 1: An enlightening analogy: The question of using the Quantum set-up to transmit information superluminally, or what Einstein called “Spooky Interaction At A Distance” has come up. The preceding, as it is, sticking to strict Quantum theory, demolishes both views, with crushing simplicity.

 How? OK, let’s make an experimental metaphor. Suppose we have an infinitely rigid bar between the two entangled particles: each time we experiment with one, we turn the bar, and so it turns at the other end too. Simple. Some will say: ha ha ha, but then I can look at the bar, and I see the bar turn, and so information has been transmitted. Not so fast. We are dealing with as elementary a Quantum process as possible, which means the particle was not observed, before the bar turned. So we see the bar turn, but we do not know if it was, or not, turning before. To tell if a signal was sent, one has first to define a state where one can say no signal was received.  

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 Note 2: I was a rough to the point of inaccuracy with the Bell Inequality above.  There is a subtlety, which can be seen easily say in the case of spin. Spin measurements in various directions are not independent of each other. Thus, if one measures spin in the close channel, a measurement of spin in another, random direction in the distance channel will show that influence, and a local determination of spin in the distant channel by parallel transport will not exhibit this. BTW, introducing the notion of parallel transport in the conversation, which is the whole point of the “local hidden parameter” debate is from yours truly.

 Note 3: And let’s not forget to smile about the naïve who developed frantically supersymmetric superstrings super budgeted super having-nothing-to-do-with reality… While forgetting to think about the fundamentals as described above.

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