SOVEREIGN STATES USE FORCE AND FIAT MONEY.
Rapid Reaction Force: Fighting Krugman’s Plutophile Disinformation.
***
EUROPHOBES DON’T KNOW MUCH:
Another day, another misleading editorial from Paul Krugman “Greece As A Victim” (NYT, June 18, 2012). As all good propaganda, there is lots of truth therein, just as in all good poisoned beverage, there is much goodness, to make sure the victim drinks it all. So Krugman piles up the truths, all to better lead to the same old stinger, down with the euro:
“…many things you hear about Greece just aren’t true. The Greeks aren’t lazy — on the contrary, they work longer hours than almost anyone else in Europe, and much longer hours than the Germans in particular. Nor does Greece have a runaway welfare state, as conservatives like to claim; social expenditure as a percentage of G.D.P., the standard measure of the size of the welfare state, is substantially lower in Greece than in, say, Sweden or Germany, countries that have so far weathered the European crisis pretty well.
So how did Greece get into so much trouble? Blame the euro.”
“Blame the euro.”: this is Krugman’s sing song. He has used different words to sing the same underlying music. But he, naturally, does not find the right reason to be against the present organization of the European Monetary Union, namely that the EMU was installed as a plutocratic device (by French socialists, of all people, 30 years ago!)
Krugman explains that Greece was doing fine, then it got in the Eurozone (soon he will explain to us that it was doing fine under the American sponsored dictatorship of colonels!). Here is more Krugman:”Then Greece joined the euro, and a terrible thing happened: people started believing that it was a safe place to invest. Foreign money poured into Greece, some but not all of it financing government deficits; the economy boomed; inflation rose; and Greece became increasingly uncompetitive.
Please remind me of this next time: if people come, bearing gifts to the Greeks, it’s a terrible thing.
Krugman omits an important fact here, a fact that I have never seen mentioned anywhere, except by yours truly. A fact all European authorities want to forget, because they are entirely to blame: the Drachma, the old Greek currency, was converted at TWICE its true rate. It was a question of national pride for the Greeks, etc. Other countries (including Germany) thought that was cute and innocuous.
So the Greeks became TWICE richer than they should have been, just by replacing drachmas with euros, at the rate decided by the ECB. Hence one way to look at the present crisis in Greece is that Greece is readjusting down to what should have been the correct conversion rate of the Drachma.
Why were the Germans so anxious to accept Greece in, while making it artificially rich by a factor of two? The answer is obvious. So that the Greeks could afford to buy Porsches, of course. The way the Germans looked at it then, no harm done, all goodness to Germany in general and VW in particular. This explains also why the German authorities, including at the Bundesbank, are so anxious to blame the Greeks: to deflect the revelation of their own instigation of the whole machination of the Greek mess.
***
PROFITABILITY IS WHAT THE STATE DECIDES, NOT THE “FREE MARKET”:
Krugman, mentions “productivity“, which is, fundamentally how much one’s work is valued. Valued by whom? Well, maybe by the politicians one rigged the system with. For example in the USA, most of the wealthiest people pay little (Romney’s tax rate: 13.9%) or no tax at all. Contemplate the tax bills of most Silicon Valley titans: they borrow their spending money, and don’t touch their financial assets ownership.
And as far as the so called “market” valuing things properly, some the hedge fund managers have “made” (for themselves) up to 5 billion dollars, making them the most “profitable” members of the biosphere. Part of how they make their money is by selling short entire countries, after careful conspiracies which seem to have the support of the president of the USA (as he sings the praises of the most successful conspirators, the so called “Sage of Omaha”: different countries have different notions of wisdom).
Of course, if the empire was different, hedge fund managers would be rewarded by expropriation, and long jail sentences. The argument can also be made that modern bankers are, by the standard of the Imperium Romanum, and direct descendant regimes, a period of more than two millennia (Roman republic-SPQR-Imperium Francorum-Imperium Romanum-Francia, etc.), simply counterfeiters, a crime punishable by being boiled alive, and slow, under the Franks.
***
THE STATE IS A FORCE THAT GIVETH MEANING:
Krugman explains that the USA holds together because of transfer payments: “Ask yourself, why does the dollar area — also known as the United States of America — more or less work, without the kind of severe regional crises now afflicting Europe? The answer is that we have a strong central government, and the activities of this government in effect provide automatic bailouts to states that get in trouble.”
Well the truth, historically, is that the USA stayed in one piece because of the application of massive deadly force. When the Confederacy seceded, Lincoln resisted, and won, by killing more than 850,000 people in the process. 850,000 dead is the latest lower bound in the number of death out of a total population of 31.4 millions in 1860, including nearly 4 million slaves. One can round that up to 3% dead (as the stats are known to be underestimates). This was the deadliest civil war known in the West for at least three centuries.
The second reason the USA is together has to do with being a sovereign state, and that, as in all sovereign states through history, means that the USA has the ability to give money to whoever it pleases, in whatever amounts it pleases.
Krugman will not tell you this, because it is embarrassing for its cherished Wall $treet, and for the policy he has been promoting, Quantitative Easing. In a way a toddler can understand, the policy consists in using the state to give money to friends.
Under Bush II and Obama, the government of the USA, through the central bank, transferred in excess of five trillion dollars of “monetary base” to a handful of very big banks managed by whom Obama calls “friends” (yes, at least a third of GDP). For three quarters of his administration, Obama loudly called Jamie Dimon, head of JP Morgan, a friend and confessed he could never managed the immense and glorious portfolio of Dimon (who used to live in a 20 room mansion in Chicago). Now the Main Stream Propaganda has been busy forgetting these facts (because said facts show that Obama did more, so far, for plutocracy, than Romney ever did!)
So, considering this enormous conceptual picture he royally ignores, why is Krugman “blaming the euro”?
***
500 BILLIONS KRUGMAN DID NOT HEAR ABOUT:
It used to be that europhobic Americans such as Krugman accused the Eurozone to not be an “optimal currency area“.
But, it turns out that “productivity” varies just as much in various regions of the USA. So that reasoning was so specious, that the most sophisticated Europhobes were called back to order, and changed their music. So what’s their latest music? Their new music is all about the lack of redistribution in Europe (as it is the EU redistributes only 2% of the total EU GDP). Yet, in truth, redistribution is not, by far, the proximal problem in Europe.
On the face of it, Krugman’s ignorance is mind numbing. Krugman should learn that the total aid to Greece is in the process of passing the 500 billion dollars mark (yes, 500 billions, a total aid of half a trillion). After Krugman integrates that notion it will be interesting to see if his “non redistribution” music changes! Krugman is the plutocratic canary, singing deep in the mines of the subservient soul to reassure the slaves of the established order that Europe is at fault.
***
PROBLEM WITH EMU; IT CANNOT CREATE FIAT MONEY:
“Blaming the euro” is the usual anti-European condemnation by innuendo.
So what is the real problem? In truth, the problem is how the European Monetary Union was exactly set-up. The EMU generalized a French law passed by the pro-plutocratic government in 1973 (president Pompidou had been head of the Rothschild bank). The law forbade the French state to borrow from the Banque de France. Thus, similarly, states of the EMU were forbidden to borrow from the ECB. They thus lost their Fiat Money capability.
So what happened? All states use rolling debt. The plutocrats, using a worldwide conspiracy, with the rating agencies (owned by Buffet) and Goldman Sachs (on and off owned by Buffet), and the likes of Buffet and hedge funds (shorting the sovereign debt of states, just before their rating agencies lower their ratings!), have cranked up the interest rates (up to and beyond 100% for Greece). That is why Italy, which has no primary deficit, is now in trouble.
The usual explanation is that the lenders are afraid. But that explanation is all too charitable for the wealthiest people and organizations on Earth. The non charitable explanation is that these wealthiest of the wealthy are maximizing their profits. They do this by using all the tricks they can find, as they operate in a (deliberately organized) judicial vacuum. One of the tricks is simply to blackmail states, by having organized an enormous conspiracy to jack up the interest rates European states have to pay. They will not try the same trick to the USA, because that would be do it to themselves, and Obama has drones, plus the taste to be judge, jury and executioner.
That is why they conspired successfully to force Spain, which has much less government debt relative GDP than Germany, to pay ridiculous high, debt augmenting interest rates, well above 7%. Greed. The striving towards a new feudal order.
Krugman dislike the EMU, while protecting the vast plutocratic plot, because Europe is too socialist and that means too anti-Wall $treet. He wants Manhattan to gleam in the sun, and his mansion well furnished.
It was not the arrogance of European officials that led to the present EMU mess, as much as a silent coup by the pro-plutocratic forces. Now the French socialist, who set-up this mess in the 1980 have the occasion to undo it, and do the right thing, namely gives the ECB all the prerogatives of a central bank, such as creating Fiat Money. Interestingly Milton Friedman would agree to that. Thus the present plutocratic system is amazingly to the right of Friedman!
With Fiat Money, all the European interest rates could be brought down to basically zero, as in Britain, USA, Japan (although Japanese debt is 236% of GDP, much higher than Greece).
***
FOLLOW CAESAR AGAIN, & INTEGRATE GERMANIA IN THE GRECO-ROMANO-FRANKISH IMPERIUM:
When Octavian, the grand nephew, and heir of Caesar, took power, he established a plutocracy, and was called Augustus (the one who augments). Later three of his crack legions, plus auxiliaries, and support personnel were annihilated in a three day running battle in Northern Germany. Maybe 50,000 dead, many tortured in gory sacrifices.
Augustus enjoined his successors to leave Germany alone, and keep the limes where it was, awkwardly following the Rhine and then the Danube. There is a gap between both streams, and through it, German invaders would strike again and again, as the centuries flowed. (Germanicus could have fixed things, but Tiberius feared him, and the assassin Consul Sejanus may have poisoned him, as he did Drusus, Tiberius’other son, consul, and expert general!)
Finally the Franks, the hard core of the last two centuries of the Late Roman empire, took power in their own name. The Franks, who were Romanized Sea Germans (the Salian Franks spoke Old Dutch, and wrote in Latin) followed the wise instinct of Iulius Caesar, the assassinated head of the Populares, uncle to the plutocratic Augustus, and decided to conquer all of Central and Western Europe. The Franks did most of Germany in a few years, by crushing the Goths and the Alemanni (“All Men“, French “Allemands”). To finish the task Caeasar had decide upon, took the Carolingians, three centuries later (when the roman Empire, Imperium Romanum, was officially re-established in Pars Occidentalis).
After getting their hands on Eastern European silver, the Franks were able to re-establish enough of a currency for prosperous trade (the Later Romans, like the Chinese, chronically, had run out of enough precious metals to run their economies with free markets).
Unfortunately prosperous Europe attracted invaders and scavengers (in chronological order: Muslims, Avars (a type of Mongols), Vikings). Those powerful and simultaneous invasions forced the Franks to establish a war society, the feudal order (my analysis is very different from that of Karl Marx; Marx considered feudalism within a purely economic model, preliminary to capitalism, proving he knew ver little history, and that of Rome, not at all!).
This exhausting war, democratic forces against plutocrats on a rampage is still on-going: the French led war against the plutocracy in Libya was nothing else (hey, for once that Sarkozy did something right, we may as well celebrate…) Re-establishing a republic in Syria would be more of that reconquista of democracy…
The feudal order, in turn, led to a split of the Imperium Romanum (Charlemagne’s official name of his 300 counties imperium). Rich Francia went on to reconquer Britain, while the relationship with the rest of the Imperium Romanum became murky. Sometimes differences were settled on the battlefield, sometimes the French king-“emperor in his own kingdom” would support his candidate to lead the Imperium Romanum (the addition of “Sacrum” to “Imperium Romanum” came in a superstitious period, centuries later).
That’s how Barbarossa became emperor: he was the candidate of Louis VII of France who wanted to use him against several of his uppity vassals, such as Savoyards, or Normands, the later ruling over Aquitania, England and much of Italy. Soon the splits turned into outright fragmentation. In Barabarossa’s time the feudal order had broken up Germania in 1600 states! Italy and France were not doing much better, with many independent, or quasi independent nobilities and cities. The French king would support English princes living in France in wars against their father the king living in London, etc.
As European states grew in power, one thing became clear: that growing power could be used for unending, ever growing wars. The (civil) war between France and England lasted nearly 5 centuries (from around 1320 CE to 1815 CE). The war between France and Spain around 150 years (from around 1520 to 1666 CE)… within the later was the 80 years war to create the Netherlands, which used to be the old heart of Francia known as Flanders. And so on.
The mood conducive to conflicts reached its absurd conclusion in 1945. after that a different paradigm was increasingly imposed. It is this paradigm that people such as Krugman try to understand, while not doing a very good job.
Europe is a small place. It has space for just one state, Europe. That is what Caesar thought, and Caesar was right. Caesar, arguably the best general who ever was, was also the chief of the anti-plutocratic party. Not a coincidence. So why did the French socialists set-up the European Monetary Union is a way so friendly to plutocrats? Well, maybe some who went along were just stupid, or corrupt. But maybe some were very clever, and set-up an elaborated trap according to Machiavellianism 101. Now the German mammoth has fallen in the trap. Its struggles are mighty. But in vain.
***
MACHIAVELLIAN POLITICS: CONSPIRACIES WITHIN, AND NOT WHAT THEY APPEAR TO BE:
To the discharge of the French socialists who set-up the EMU, maybe they thought that is all they could get from the Germans, at the time. Now Germany has swallowed the bait, and France’s position, in spite of Sarkozy selling the country to international plutocracy, is stronger than ever. France is the country of the future, Germany the country of the old. France has 35% more young people than Germany. The two most represented age slices in Germany are the scared, fat 50 to 60 year olds Merkel incarnates so well. Mr. Hollande, the socialist French president, has four adult children. Ms. Merkel, clinging to a past she neither master, nor understand, and rules which are beyond her, has no children.
Europe was built mostly by intellectuals who conspired to create situations where the easiest solution would be to “come out by the top“. The Steel and Coal Union between France and Germany (1948) was conceived to make war between France and Germany impossible, and so on.
The French Socialists are now in command of 21 of France’s 22 regions. They also control the French senate, the French National Assembly, the French presidency, and most significant cities. Even 8 of 11 MPs for the French living in foreign countries went to the Socialist Party.
In 1914, as the plutocrats, fascists and militarists in Germany marched towards war, the German SPD and the French socialists planned a general strike. This faltered as Jaures, the intellectual French socialist leader was assassinated. This time, though, as the plutocrats further their conspiracies, the socialists are in total control of France, and can plot the overthrow of the plutocratic order incarnated by Merkel with the SPD, Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands.
Granted, when plutocracy is at bay, plutocracy is at its most dangerous. The real reason the plutocrats in Germany went to war in 1914 is that they felt at bay, hounded by the SPD, which was asking for more power for the parliament. Dubious encouragement from Colonel House (photo therein the link, interesting in other ways too!) persuaded the Kaiser the USA would support him against France, and Germany’s army attacked an astounded world in august 1914.
Well, it won’t happen again. Greece is a victim of plutocratic plots, not of “the euro”, as Krugman would have it. I say plots, in the plural, because the richest people and organizations in Greece made a tax code which excludes them from taxation.
For example, Greek ship magnates own more than 3300 vessels, 15% of the world’s total. They employ 200,000 people, in Greece alone. Shipping is an example of the globalization of plutocracy. As a major shipping plutocrat, Victor Restis, put it:“Sure tax me. Find me.” He means that nobody can find him, as his life style is global, overseas.
Such plutocrats say that, if the European Union tax them, they will go to Dubai and Singapore. I say: it’s time to use force. French, British and American police and the military could find them, worldwide. Satellites and drones can be used. Ships can be impounded. Magnates can be arrested, expropriated, judged, condemned, jailed. Or then they can restrict their trading between China and North Korea.
France, by the way, just judged and condemned Somali pirates, arrested on the ground, by helicopters, within the country of Somalia (not just the high seas). Somalia pirates are easy to avoid; don’t come next to the Horn Of Africa. But financial pirates are worldwide, they cannot be avoided.
Lincoln is revered in the USA, not because he averted his eyes from infamy, but because he used force, in the name of goodness.
Plutocracy also uses force. When the interest rates the Spanish state is forced to pay reach 7.25%, as it did June 18, 2012, force is being used against the Spanish People, thus against Europe (Spain has a much smaller government debt than Germany). It used to be that finance grabbed 8% of the profits. Now it’s 40%.
The French socialist foreign minister, the extremely experienced Laurent Fabius, an ex-PM, has called Assad of Syria, an “assassin”. The French want to use force in Syria. Very good, once some secular precautions are taken. However, there is an even more crucial need to use force against “le monde de la finance”. As president Hollande said: “My true enemy has no name, no face, no party… He will not be elected, yet he governs. It is the world of finance.”
The state, thus democracy, rests on force, be it only to resist plutocracy. So it has been ever since civilization exists. Time to be reminded of this basic fact.
***
Patrice Ayme
Tags: ECB, EMU, Euro, Fiat Money, Greece, Krugman, Redistribution
Patrice Ayme's Thoughts 
June 19, 2012 at 10:02 am |
Hi there, Patrice. You may be glad to know that I am not going to bother to comment in detail on this but, since you are the main reason I have come to accept the argument that austerity is not working, I would heartily recommend that you read a recent post on Climate Denial Crock of the Week to which I responded thus:
“…Yesterday, at the G20 Summit, UK Prime Minister Cameron said ‘delay is always dangerous’ and – for a moment – I thought he was talking about ending fossil fuel subsidies. Then, sadly, reality intervened; and I realised he was talking about Greece. Maybe, just maybe, if the rest of the World can lift its eyes from the Eurozone crisis – and a fixation on austerity measures – it will see that investment in green technology really does create jobs (and provide a mechanism to deflect the approaching asteroid of anthropogenic climate disruption)…”
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June 19, 2012 at 3:51 pm |
Thanks Martin for changing your mind about austerity! Serfdom was all about austerity, that’s how it started!
Thanks also for the article linked above… I did not know the latest Japanese news on solar. I left the following comment (in moderation queue):
A good thing, but it may well be … unsustainable (France and Germany cut sharply their solar subsidies last year). All this probably paid by more debt (a tax by any other description). Japanese debt is 236% of GDP, highest in the world, and growing fast… By the way, I do not object to that: developing new, sustainable energy income is a good use of debt.
Germany in late May generated 22 Gigawatts from solar alone, for two days (about 22 standard nuclear reactors). However, solar is only 4% of the electricity generating mix of Germany, though. Solar does not really replace nuclear, because nuclear produces continuously, night and day (much better nuclear with Thorium could be developed, by the way, with no waste problem).
That enormous solar power generation happened just because of solar subsidies, in other words, a tax on electricity. That’s the way taxes ought to be used.
Another proper role of government ought to be to fund state of the art research, because no one else will.
Anyway, good luck to Japan (which is restarting its nuclear power plants, in spite of the tsunami danger, because it imports too much oil to burn to make electricity).
In other news, UK’s PM Cameron is really ridiculous. Seems all he wants to do is being a gadfly. The least he could do would be not commenting about the EMU crisis. British banks are involved in it, and, by talking with both sides of his mouth in opposite fashions, at the same time, the British PM can only encourage Scotland to secede ASAP from the grotesque Westminster/City of London show!
PA
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June 19, 2012 at 4:36 pm |
A moderation queue on ClimateCrocks.com? I’ve not heard of that before. Peter Sinclair is often savage in his use of sarcasm; but I thought he more-or-less allowed anybody to post anything!
He is very pro-Wind and Solar; and often posts items about Germany because, since deciding to close their nuclear plants in a knee-jerk reaction to Fukushima, they have apparently increased their renewables rather than their coal output (a fact he will not let you forget); and he is very anti-Nuclear (hence the pro-nuclear remark in my first paragraph [not quoted above]).
I think you are too harsh on solar and wind, because the argument that both are intermittent and unreliable is just sceptical propaganda. 24/7 solar power generation is already a reality; and it is rare for the whole of the UK to be calm at the same time. The biggest problem with both is the space required to generate the MW we need; but the solution to that problem is for governments to subsidise domestic/micro power generation; and – you guessed it – #EndFossilFuelSubsidies.
For Scotland to join the EMU in current circumstances would be insane but, if they are mad enough to vote for Independence they will deserve everything they get.
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June 19, 2012 at 4:40 pm |
“Serfdom was all about austerity, that’s how it started!”That is so good, Patrice, it deserves to be the title of a blog post of its own. See what you can do, will you? 😉
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June 19, 2012 at 4:41 pm |
You may need to close that HTML tag to stop the rest of this page appearing on bold text…?
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June 19, 2012 at 7:48 pm |
Yes, I had trouble myself. I had to copy your comment and re-edit it, then paste it back so the systematic bold would disappear. Occasionally I posted entire essays, and they came out published mangled, the computer(s?) having done their own thing. I have renounced putting pics on my blog, because it has become nearly impossible. Mysteries… (I will have to get a new computer after Windows 8 comes out?… Paying my servile duty to plutocrat Gates)
PA
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June 19, 2012 at 10:26 pm |
Sorry it caused so much trouble. Thanks for taking the time. As for images, many of mine have got messed-up as a result of changing the Theme of my blog (i.e. now the same as PH@LfD). I did start to go through them all, sorting them out one by one, but got fed-up…
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June 19, 2012 at 7:44 pm |
Hmmm… Thanks Martin! Yes, you are right, I should, but I need to clone first two of mine, and get them to scribe away, while the original can proceed with necessary human duties in parallel… Otherwise, I can indeed make the case, in a shorter post, the way you recommended them…
PA
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June 20, 2012 at 12:13 am |
After letting the dogs out around 5am this morning (the 19th), I came back to bed and read this essay in full on my tablet. Couldn’t comment at first, not because I didn’t find the essay captivating, but because it triggered so many eddies and ripples in my mind, or should I say turgid mudpools in a brain that isn’t as young as it used to be!
The essay raised many aspects of the long, complex, and mainly dysfunctional behaviour of mankind, literally over thousands of years. Thus, to me, this ‘modern’ era appears to be rapidly coming to an end. Whether man pulls back from the brink of broad destruction of all that sustains man or not, is impossible to predict. Maybe the imminent arrival of significant inflation and devaluation of the dollar, an accelerating and obvious rate of damage to the biosphere, and a much broader realisation of the levels of corruption in ‘high places’ will arrest the fall in the nick of time.
For as we used to say in aviation, it’s only the last half-inch that hurts!
But while my heart thinks we will see sense in the end, my head just can’t call it either way. The essay was yet another deeply stimulating article.
And now Jean has come and told me there’s a beer waiting outside for me – so that’s it for today! Good evening to all!
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June 20, 2012 at 12:29 am |
Thanks for the appreciation, Paul. As the essay are long and often complex, I de-typo them or make some modifications, so it’s always better to look at the latest version…
I do not know if the modern, and, or “post-modern” (whatever that means) is coming to an end, but, if it does, it will not be alone. The G20 in Baja California was eerie. Barroso, the head of the European Commission, no leftist (as he is a Portugese conservative) got angry when the other leaders piled upon Europe, to accuse her of… what they secretly desire to accuse her, because they like it that way, namely, impotence.
The European thrust, since 1948, has rested on debate, not violence. A lot of the rest of the G20 rests on violence (implicitly threatened). The Economist wrote the latest “Charlemagne” column on the fact Merkel was completely misreading history, by confusing the 1920s and 1930s, something i have long said.
They could have said more: it’s the Germans, and in particular the pro- and proto- Nazi Schacht, the man of JP Morgan, central bank chief, who engineered the hyperinflation of 1922-1923. It was a weapon against France.
What’s alarming is the level of dishonesty. As if Krugman did not know that QE has been the best friend of the 5 USA banks which have 60% of assets. As if Obama did not know he is the man of Wall $treet (Hitler was, too: IG Farben, soon Hitler greatest co-dependent, was created on Wall $treet, not some unknown street in Berlin or Munich!).
We don’t know where we are going, but, well, ignorance shall not be our engine!
PA
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June 20, 2012 at 4:26 am |
Paul: 5am!!!!! I realize just now. Wow. At least the rattlesnakes should be asleep…If cool enough… An outdoor fanatic such as me does not like viperids and other venimous creatures. Once I had to jump over a rattler… Arrived running on a single track upon the long, thick and lightning fast entity. Braking would have insured a deadly embrace, jumping above was instinctive! Sometimes the greatest audacity is the essence of responsibility. Thus philosophy is gathered, one inch and millisecond at a time…
PA
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June 20, 2012 at 10:29 pm |
I really enjoy your thoughts.
I am an American living in Quito and think your thoughts and comments are right on !
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June 20, 2012 at 10:40 pm |
Perhaps America is the Victimizer of Europe. After all, America’s banksters invented the KAKA to sell to the EU banks, knowing that it was KAKA (Goldman bet against the KAKA for its own account) and that the FED would bail them out but that Europe had no FED. One could make a good 20-20 hindsight conspiracy theory case.
But I would never do such a thing.
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June 20, 2012 at 11:45 pm |
Dear Old Geezer: KAKA? There is a soccer player by that name, and more famously (should be) a mountain parrot in rambuctious New Zealand. Now, of course, in French “caca” (pronounced KAKA) is the informal for excrement, a word well know to all French speaking children, including the daughter of your truly. Now no doubt that’s the best way to represent the crafty investments of those who sold caca at enormous price all over the world, before persuading the states to buy it all back with public money…
The Obsession in the USA of riling and ranting against “conspiracy theorists” is exactly equivalen to making no theories about the conspiracies the People are the object of. watch all the famous ones at the Bilderberg Conspiracy, hiding their faces (for example Bill Gates, the philanthropist … He loves people medium rare…)
See, among others: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/us-news-blog/2012/jun/04/bilderberg-2012-ken-s-drive-of-shame
Anyway, Barroso, historically a right wing friend of plutocracy, but head of the EU com, came all out to accuse the banks of the USA… As I read the hysteria over the USA media against Europe, and Krugman style disinformation, it’s clear it’s all intox (to use a French word which is very clear in English).
Then you have Niall Ferguson, a luminary, not to say illuminati, professor at Oxford and Harvard (the birthplace of the most famous Nazi songs) boast that the young should welcome austerity… Yeap, with a trillion dollars of educational debt in the USA… They should obviously go austere and let only the children of plutocrats and their servants learn how to read and write…
PA
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June 21, 2012 at 2:31 pm |
Niall Ferguson is the BBC’s Reith lecturer this summer. I heard the first installment. Not terribly inspiring.
There is no way you can dig your way out of a deep hole. That is what the austeritists want us to do. Rather, we all need to recognize the mistakes made during the bubble decades, write down the KAKA, let the banks fail and be nationalized, recapitalize them, and MOVE ON.
Or, failing that, start a steep inflation program that effectively makes all debt so much cheaper to repay.
But we, like the Greeks, cannot repay our debts in a world with flat or low growth.
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June 21, 2012 at 3:58 pm |
OGP: Agreed 100%. I would add that, one of the reasons we cannot repay is that the engineers of the present financial system have made it so.
Suppose, for example that savers were paid 10% (for the sake of the argument!) Then quickly savers would have money in their hands, and repay all their debts. Instead what we have is the exact opposite situation; the banks make 7% (Spain), 30% (Greece, when not 100%), 6% Italy, 4% (USA), while the savers make basically 0%…
I read the Ferguson thing and started to write a reply. But what he views as the end of the world (inflation, default) I view as solution. Indeed what he said was not even inspiring enough to get enraged about.
There is even a better system than inflation and default: it’s just to put the present banks and system out of commission… The occasion was of course 2008-2009, when the banks could have been nationalized and cleaned, etc…
However, as the G20 proved, by refusing to even evoke a financial transaction tax, the present leaders are solidly in the pockets of global plutocracy (except for Hollande, and, vaguely, to please Hollande, Merkel).
On the positive side, though, Larry Elison, having bought an Hawaian island (Lanai), thanks to not paying tax to the local schools in San Mateo county, where he has his main residence, could now go buy Crete, and Rhodes, or Cyprus, or the Peloponese, before the Asturias, and then things would get clearer: we are serfs and those among us who are well educated, and appropriately adjusted, will grin and bear it for the next eight centuries…
PA
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June 21, 2012 at 10:57 pm |
The greatly revised second edition of Aftershock predicts significant inflation (10%+) and a major collapse of the US dollar within the timeframe 2013-2015.
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June 21, 2012 at 11:55 pm |
Hi Paul: I am not too familiar with the book, or the authors. Remarks though:
1) Greece is in a depression. 5 years of solid recession. However new jobs’ salaries started to collapse only in 2012 (minus 30% in 3 months). Another point: Greek real estate, in the best places was, a year ago at the same level, per area as best real estate in best USA cities. But now it’s collapsing: it’s down 50%, in best locations in Athens, in a year. It’s now in said best location, one sixth of paris prices. However, it’s still above prices in pretty good USA cities with OK employment.
Conclusion: there is a lot of inertia in the system (a lament of Kruggie Boy)…
2) US dollar collapses: Martians flee in droves, and go back to Marsachra, also known as the Martian dollar? The point is that the world’s reserve currency does not collapse. A currency is as good as one’s army.
At this point, the USA fracks, big time. It’s like a giant cave bear copulating: obviously crazed, but not at wits’ ends. The energy independence factor, with a half clean, apparently very available energy source, puts, once again, the USA above the fray. Energy is the lifeblood.
The USA does not have to beg the dark Putin for gas… Differently from Europe in general, and germany in particular.
So the dollar will not collapse. what needs to collapse is the euro. But the USA has no interest to see it go down, far from it… And the higher the yuan goes, the better for the USA. The Chinese are welcome to come and buy. At any point, the US Navy can lock down the Pacific…
PA
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June 21, 2012 at 9:41 pm |
I am thinking that the Islamic (and once upon a time Jewish and Christian) prohibitions against charging interest on money lending is a good idea.
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June 22, 2012 at 12:10 am |
OGP: Not charging for interest came from the Jews, and the idea was to help one’s tribe. They of course charged each others, one of the reasons Jews, Christians and Muslims had to live together, while loving to hate each other…
If one does not charge interest there is NO reason for PRIVATE individuals to lend money (absent a love interest, or whatever special circumstances!).
Now, of course, just as the state organizes the free market, the state organizes the lifeblood running through it, money. So the state has to provide enough money, FREE of charge, so that the ‘free” market can then work between individuals.
At this point the Fed provides free money to (private) banks, and also to the USA Treasury. The ECB has followed suite, just with banks (as per its mandate). The practice in present rich Islamist countries is not really different, and the interest as a percentage of money lent is turned into interest as a, well, interest, in the project(s) at hand: white sheep versus sheep white… Turning around the words, but not the interest…
PA
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June 22, 2012 at 2:39 pm |
Probably true, PA. Just seems unfair for the wealthy to make “money for nothing” on the sweat of the poor. If we taxed interest and other passive income higher than earned income, it might be fairer.
Hey, we did just that.
Before Ray-Gun.
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June 22, 2012 at 3:28 pm |
OGP: Philosophically, lending money is a momentary, risky, gift of one’s money to somebody else. Except if there is a love interest, no way… Indeed people generally have other loves and ties already in place, who have interest in that capital. they need a good reason to see it go, even if momentarily, to someone else, and the risk always exist that the capital, once momentarily gifted, would never return…
Thus, getting more money that one momentarily gifted is another type of interest, NECESSARY for lending. A mechanical form of interest. But that is also why lending ought to be used ONLY for situations where the creditor can grow. In particular, states ought not to use it for current expenses, only for projects creating more capital (including human capital).
Ray-gun zapped us all… Truly a tool of the plutocratic conspiracy. (I distinguish the concepts of plot and that of breathing-together, which is what conspiracy is…) Merkel, surrounded by Hollande’s evil plot, seems to be giving ground on the FTT, BTW… A good sign…
PA
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June 22, 2012 at 5:28 pm |
Tyranosopher
June 22nd, Interesting massive anti-French propaganda all over “The Economist”, with numerous articles with titles such as “Adieu La France”.
How is the recession doing in the UK? Sorry, I mean the DEPRESSION. The UK, at least as measured by GDP, is doing less well than in the 1930s… France is NOT in recession.
The Economist apparent rage against France is pure anti-French sentiment: the French just voted for the socialists to take the Presidency and the National Assembly.
The socialists took control of regions, municipalities and the Senate in other elections last year. Clearly the choice of the French People irritates The Economist. In the USA, Oracle’s Elison refused to pay taxes to school, and in general does not pay taxes, but he just bought one the largest Hawaian islands. yes, the island of Lanai.
Do you want Europeans to live like that?
It sounds as if The Economist keeps on preferring regimes a la Pinochet, as it did in the 1970s. No elections, no taxes, only plutocrats! Mr. Montebourg, by the way, is a rich lawyer.
USA president Eisenhower, confronted to debt, jacked up the top margin tax rate to 92%… After that, the economy boomed… Good to remember…
***
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June 22, 2012 at 5:30 pm |
Dominique II in reply to Tyranosopher
“massive anti-French propaganda”
Pure panic. Schumpeter more or less keeps his cool, but TE’s faithful crowd feels threatened in its very raison d’être and lashes out.
The realization that realistic alternatives to ideology-driven ultra-liberalism will now be championed by a major industrial country and no-nonsense political leaders is enough to send the High Priests of the Invisible Hand and their lay converts in an orgy of verbal abuse. The Emperor’s clothes are being shown for what they are, nonexistent. End of story.
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June 22, 2012 at 5:41 pm |
The reductio ad absurdum of the Anglo-Saxon model for decades has been a disastrous experiment with the global economy that blew up in 2008.
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June 22, 2012 at 6:27 pm |
And more proof that the world is going to Hell in a handbasket, see http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jun/18/rio-2012-earth-summit-protect-elites
That opens thus:
Rio 2012: it’s a make-or-break summit. Just like they told us at Rio 1992
George Monbiot guardian.co.uk, Monday 18 June 2012 15.30 ED
Worn down by hope. That’s the predicament of those who have sought to defend the earth’s living systems. Every time governments meet to discuss the environmental crisis, we are told that this is the “make or break summit”, on which the future of the world depends. The talks might have failed before, but this time the light of reason will descend upon the world.
We know it’s rubbish, but we allow our hopes to be raised, only to witness 190 nations arguing through the night over the use of the subjunctive in paragraph 286. We know that at the end of this process the UN secretary general, whose job obliges him to talk nonsense in an impressive number of languages, will explain that the unresolved issues (namely all of them) will be settled at next year’s summit. Yet still we hope for something better.
This week’s earth summit in Rio de Janeiro is a ghost of the glad, confident meeting 20 years ago. By now, the leaders who gathered in the same city in 1992 told us, the world’s environmental problems were to have been solved. But all they have generated is more meetings, which will continue until the delegates, surrounded by rising waters, have eaten the last rare dove, exquisitely presented with an olive leaf roulade. The biosphere that world leaders promised to protect is in a far worse state than it was 20 years ago. Is it not time to recognise that they have failed?
These summits have failed for the same reason that the banks have failed. Political systems that were supposed to represent everyone now return governments of millionaires, financed by and acting on behalf of billionaires. The past 20 years have been a billionaires’ banquet. At the behest of corporations and the ultra-rich, governments have removed the constraining decencies – the laws and regulations – which prevent one person from destroying another. To expect governments funded and appointed by this class to protect the biosphere and defend the poor is like expecting a lion to live on gazpacho.
You have only to see the way the United States has savaged the Earth summit’s draft declaration to grasp the scale of this problem. The word “equitable”, the US insists, must be cleansed from the text. So must any mention of the right to food, water, health, the rule of law, gender equality and women’s empowerment. So must a clear target of preventing two degrees of global warming. So must a commitment to change “unsustainable consumption and production patterns”, and to decouple economic growth from the use of natural resources.
Most significantly, the US delegation demands the removal of many of the foundations agreed by a Republican president in Rio in 1992. In particular, it has set out to purge all mention of the core principle of that Earth summit: common but differentiated responsibilities. This means that while all countries should strive to protect the world’s resources, those with the most money and who have done the most damage should play a greater part.
This is the government, remember, not of George W Bush but of Barack Obama. The paranoid, petty, unilateralist sabotage of international agreements continues uninterrupted. To see Obama backtracking on the commitments made by Bush the elder 20 years ago is to see the extent to which a tiny group of plutocrats has asserted its grip on policy.
While the destructive impact of the US in Rio is greater than that of any other nation, this does not excuse our own failures. The British government prepared for the Earth summit by wrecking both our own Climate Change Act and the European energy efficiency directive. David Cameron will not be attending the Earth summit. Nor will Ed Davey, the energy and climate change secretary (which is probably a blessing, as he’s totally useless).
Needless to say, Cameron, with other absentees such as Obama and Angela Merkel, are attending the G20 summit in Mexico, which takes place immediately before Rio. Another tenet of the 1992 summit – that economic and environmental issues should not be treated in isolation – goes up in smoke.
The environmental crisis cannot be addressed by the emissaries of billionaires. It is the system that needs to be challenged, not the individual decisions it makes. In this respect the struggle to protect the biosphere is the same as the struggle for redistribution, for the protection of workers’ rights, for an enabling state, for equality before the law.
So this is the great question of our age: where is everyone? The monster social movements of the 19th century and first 80 years of the 20th have gone, and nothing has replaced them. Those of us who still contest unwarranted power find our footsteps echoing through cavernous halls once thronged by multitudes. When a few hundred people do make a stand – as the Occupy campers have done – the rest of the nation just waits for them to achieve the kind of change that requires the sustained work of millions.
Without mass movements, without the kind of confrontation required to revitalise democracy, everything of value is deleted from the political text. But we do not mobilise, perhaps because we are endlessly seduced by hope. Hope is the rope from which we all hang.
oooOOOooo
Will the last person to leave the planet please turn out the lights!
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June 22, 2012 at 6:30 pm |
Whatever you do, don’t read what George has posted today!
http://lackofenvironment.wordpress.com/2012/06/22/rioplus20-a-testimony-to-human-stupidity/
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June 22, 2012 at 7:59 pm |
That’s what I posted above!
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June 22, 2012 at 8:24 pm |
No it isn’t. You have posted what he wrote on Monday. Below, I have quoted from both pieces (Monday and today)…
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June 22, 2012 at 7:23 pm |
“The word ‘equitable’, the US insists, must be cleansed from the text. So must any mention of the right to food, water, health, the rule of law, gender equality and women’s empowerment. So must a clear target of preventing two degrees of global warming. So must a commitment to change ‘unsustainable consumption and production patterns’, and to decouple economic growth from the use of natural resources.” – Monbiot (18 June 2012).
If you are wondering what could possibly justify such vandalism, you have to look no further than Monbiot’s piece today, wherein it becomes clear an astonishing attempt has been made to stand the principles of the 1992 declaration on its head by confusing – if not substituting – sustainability with ‘sustained growth’:
“This term crops up 16 times in the document, where it is used interchangeably with sustainability and sustainable development. But if sustainability means anything, it is surely the opposite of sustained growth. Sustained growth on a finite planet is the essence of unsustainability.” – Monbiot (22 June 2012).
Growthmania lives… God help us all.
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June 23, 2012 at 7:29 pm |
Of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, only France attended at the highest level. This is quite eloquent. The latest predictions. Front page title San Francisco chronicle today:”Sea Level Rise May Hit Hard In State“. Report from the “National Research Council”. 3 feet UP guaranteed before 2100, says the NRC. Methinks it will be more like 3 METERS… This will inundate the gigantic central valley… Gloogloogloo, no more California agriculture…
Anyway, Californians won’t escape the building of the Golden Gate DAM, with its powerful pumps from the thermonuclear plant in Marin County next door. OK, maybe just Thorium nuke plant… OK, I know, I am a wee bit optimistic, I am assuming California could still afford to buy a thermonuclear plant from the French…
PA
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June 23, 2012 at 1:36 pm |
You cannot have eternal growth on a finite planet. We have all known this for years. Yet, there is no cost factored into that wonderful market model for the resources and services provided by the planet itself. Just because the price of blue-fin tuna doubles from Japanese sushi eaters does NOT mean that the tuna will reproduce faster. In actual fact they will be depleted faster.
And there is a maximum rate at which waste products (such as CO2) can be recycled into the biosphere. We have only to go back to the 1960s to find we could live within that limit. Life was not bad in the 60s, except for Vietnam. We could ALL DO with a reduction in carbon burning.
Until we earthlings come to understand this, we had better scan the want-ads for another planet.
So if market capitalism is to survive without killing us all,
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June 23, 2012 at 6:49 pm |
Dear OGP: It’s all about how growth is defined. I use to promote “AWE”, absolutely worth energy. In a simplified version, it would count negatively CO2 production, time wasted in traffic jams, etc…
We do need tremendous technological growth, just to extract ourselves from the pit we are in. Basically hundreds of millions in the emerging world are accessing Western planetary usage levels (1960s or not). So Euramerica can preach by example. Right now, not much the case, with the USA being the worst offender.
Although Merkel has lately decided that she will not make much efforts either… A problem in Germany is to put the dearth of powerlines to bring wind energy to the south, and solar to the north. Considering how fast Merkel has switched around, there may be more drastic changes ahead. Meanwhile Germany seems set to achieve beyong EU targets on renewables… Never mind about the 26 coals plants…
Seems like nothing much will happen until the sea laps the Oval Office, or something like that…
And what we have is a version of state capitalism in market disguise…
PA
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June 23, 2012 at 10:29 pm |
Could the systematic deindustrialisation over decades of the US and the mindset behind it not form one root of the current mess?
US GDP/capita looked great in 2007 and it still does. But has anybody of you traveled that country recently? The average Joe Sixpack looks rich, but how about the median Joe Sixpack? Instead of coding up software for Goldman Sachs I guess he is much more likely to work in a Missouri coal power plant where the exhaust is lacking any filter or denox system. He is much more likely to be poor enough to be compelled to make decisions on whether to see a dentist or heat his home in winter or insulate his wooden house. The whole thing is just better covered up by short-sighted Walmart consumerism and the Beijing Politbureau as discrete credit broker.
Maybe the relation between the US consumer and the Chinese creditors is quite similar to the one between the Greek consumer and the Norther European Banks. But, one big difference: the Beijing Politbureau is a factual sovereign, whereas European Banks are leaves in the wind of the financial markets. China is able to make rational (although undemocratic) decisions with real impact. The objective long-term rationality of the Western financial swarm intelligence however is to be doubted.
Nobody will dispute that the blob of financial products traded on the planet every day is huge compared to the cup full of real-economy traded in the same time. And that this misrelation contributes to the “market’s nervous state” should also be somehow clear. Now, if we want to identify not more such symptoms, but the fundamental roots of the current miserable state of the western financial-economic system, instead of targeting single persons among short-sighted politicians in their hamster wheel of tele-supervised summits, how about targeting some important thinking modes instead, popular memes that were rampant during the last 20 years. I think we should discuss the validity of popular beliefs like: the free flow of cash through cables must by itself tend to equilibrate global wealth gradients; getting government out of the way of money is always good; the fewer rules the better; private savings-based pensions are better than the younger part of society supporting the elderly at present; private egoism (unbounded by explicitly formulated responsibilities towards society) best mobilises the invisible hand creating wealth for everybody.
My wondering, my thaumazein, goes in this direction: habeas corpus, magna carta, human dignity independent of personal abilities or personal opinion, unalienable rights including persuit of eudaimonia, government (i.e. setting up reasonable and beneficial rules and enforcing them) for/by/through the people, social market economy …. all this is stuff we learned the hard way during the last 2k years. How can the stupid simplifications stemming from the narcistic Ayn-Rand-evangelical-neocon-cynicism-Nixon-Koch-Murdoch-equity-Cheyney-nature-state-as-misunderstood-American-Dream-universe trump all that in a few years? What gives this modern version of a stupid ideology so much evolutionary fitness? What allowed it to conquer the agora?
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June 23, 2012 at 10:46 pm |
Dear Dominique: It’s certainly clear to me that the median American is less rich than the median French. The median American has a pretty big car (although Smarts and even tiny Fiats can now be observed!), and a big house, but also a big gut (100 million obese I read, and i am nearly ready to believe). But where it matters: healthcare, education, real ownership of real estate, ownership of free time and vacations, security, stability, the Americans increasingly come short, and the self satisfaction with the system that exploits them makes it unlikely that there will be a turn around soon. A plausible death spiral can be described, though.
For finance, etc, it’s urgent that the share of profit of finance be divided by FIVE (from 40% total profits to the old average, 8%). There are things to do:first a Financial Transaction Tax, France and its anti-Merkel coalition can make an agreement with, well, Merkel, and constitute the group of nine plus which will allow to overrule the veto of plutocrat Cameron. (Obama is plutocratic servant, Cameron a dwarf version of the real thing).
I have proposed a SPEED limit on transactions (to reintroduce causality, just as the finite speed of light does in physics, otherwise quantum entanglements would deny causality, and even space…)
We have to save, not just civilization. That sounds quaint, saving civilization, when one has to save the biosphere itself. I will explain in the next essay that denying human nature caused, ironically, the fall of cynical Rome…
PA
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June 23, 2012 at 11:15 pm |
The above post has been filched from a guy called “Inapht” posting on an Economist blog. I find it remarkable and inescapable in its indictment of the madness of the current economic paradigms, and its urging to think outside of the stupid envelope they have created.
I do not think we can credit the French Socialists with a devious plot to ensnare the plutocratic Teuton. As a French Socialist, I must face up to the sad truth – which is that they believed they were acting for the common good by bending over for what Inapht aptly calls “the narcissistic Ayn-Rand-evangelical-neocon-cynicism-Nixon-Koch-Murdoch-equity-Cheyney-nature-state-as-misunderstood-American-Dream-universe” (how wonderful this would read as a single German word!).
Why did they believe it? Why, as Inapht wonders, did this inept paradigm take over with such ease, and even now looks immune to its demonstrated catastrophic achievements?
My own explanation, for what it is worth, is that the paradigm did come in time to address a real frustration. As you say, poison has to taste sweet.
At the time, state-run economies were both the rule, and extremely inefficient. In the Third World, the State’s force was entirely devoted to plundering the citizenry. A country like Mali was on indefinite strike, farmers producing very little and selling almost nothing, because anybody making a profit was fodder for the military – granaries were hidden in the bush, and military officers sported Seiko digital watches, then an extremely expensive item. The only reading material in the country was Lenin’s complete works, Russian agronomy manuals (very good) and the official Soviet planning method, a hugely complex affair relying on extensive matrix inversion. The situation could be characterized as bad, with no redeeming qualities.
Less extreme but similar situations were to be seen everywhere, including in Europe. The State was stifling, unfair and expensive; that was a fact. So when smiling academics from the country of milk and honey came around and explained that it was not only useless but dangerous for the State to intervene at all, that you only had to let people work as they liked and things would sort themselves out for the common good, it sounded like pure unadulterated common sense, backed by impressive research. I know; I fell for it. I had no qualms actively collaborating with the World Bank/IMF so-called “Washington Consensus” policies, as laid out in the (now) infamous “Structural Adjustment Programmes”. Even the obvious ideological bias they came to create and enforce, and which I resisted more or less, could be seen as a necessary evil.
So there seemed to be a statesman’s paradise: do nothing, and save the world! That was the end of history, the ultimate stage of world evolution. French socialists were happy, eager dupes, like a great many (all, in fact) other national leaders; so sweet was the poison’s taste. They became corrupt AFTER their conversion to the dark side, because that was part of the price to pay: their souls. Can you imagine that Alain Minc, one of the most despised pawns of Sarkozyte plutocracy, started his career as an authentic Leftist cabinet advisor, bent on taxing the wealthy in earnest, and doing it with ruthless efficiency?
This, I dare think, is the main answer to Inapht’s query.
Confessing to one’s past crimes in a no-no in politics. Don’t expect today’s French Socialists to beat their chests and say “we’ve been swindled”. (well, some do, but not those in power; it would be suicidal and a gift to the enemy.) But we can indeed hope that the lesson has been understood. What a tremendous asset it would be in their work.
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June 24, 2012 at 6:38 am |
“The above post has been filched from a guy called “Inapht” posting on an Economist blog… ” I did not see it, can you please post it?
PA
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June 24, 2012 at 6:35 am |
France is doomed. It now has:
– the highest taxation in Europe
– practically the highest state spending to GDP ratio of Europe
– endemic unemployment
… – horrendous barriers to entrepreneurship
– very high costs for employing anyone
– a President who wants to work less, employ more civil servants and increase taxes
and is losing in competitivity to Germany hand over fist.
A reality check is needed, and Hollande will supply it at considerable pain to the people.
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June 24, 2012 at 6:46 am |
dear Chris:
France is doomed to what? Having much more, better educated children than Germany? Doomed to have a minimum wage, whereas Germany has none? Doomed to NO massive immigration, whereas Germany is doomed to it, like say, Norway? Is France doomed to have a depression, like Britain? And doomed to have serfs working for one euro an hour, like Germany?
On a more serious note, Sweden is doing splendidly, with a GDP state ratio akin to France. Difference? Tiny Sweden, like minuscule Denmark or Norway have kept the characteristic of a sovereign state, namely control of their currency. They don’t trust the friendly plutocrats to give money to the People.
Merkler, who never had any children is apparently too senile to understand this. Even The Economist argued, in a long article, and as I have long done, that she is confusing the 1920s (inflation) and the 1930s (depression). Right now, I repeat Camelot, I mean Camerland, Britain, is in a depression, worse than the 1930s. Not enough entrepreneurs? Too much masochism?
PA
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June 24, 2012 at 9:33 am |
Now you really are confusing me, Patrice. Are you in favour of a federal Europe, or not? Do you see it as the only way for Europe to have influence in the World, or not? This seems to be the position of Tony Blair (on UK TV this morning).
Given the looming financial and economic catastrophe that collective hypnosis at Rio+20 has just made inevitable, our best option is localism not federalism: Just look at what happens when the British banking system stops processing payments for one night – it causes chaos and takes a week to sort it out. Imagine what will happen when this is repeated across the EU.
We should all be worried by this: self-sufficient communities would appear to be the only plausible means to escape the approaching twin tsunamis of environmental, and socio-economic collapse… And remember, it will not happen because anyone wishes it to happen; it will now happen because our leaders chose to ignore the scientists that told them they needed to act to prevent it happening.
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June 25, 2012 at 10:15 pm |
Dear Martin: I finally localized your comment, from the link you gave to it! Sorry I am confusing you. Of course I am for a Federal Europe. I am a sort of European fanatic: it’s the Franks who launched the word “EUROPEAN”, throughout the West.
However I must admit that it cannot be a USE, but a UNE. United Nations of Europe. Because nations is what we have. It’s important to respect Slovenia, Montenegro, Estonia, etc. (Only thus can we hope to cling imperialistically to Greenland, hahaha, lest the imperialists in Washington come over, complete with CIA agents and drones…)
And also we have to be practical: there are many nationalistic fanatics around. So my solution is to federalize whenever it is the obvious course.
One cannot federalize defense; too many wishy washy hypocrites around, who persist perniciously to deliberately understand nothing to plutocracy, fascism, Hitler, etc. Denmark fought World War Two for 6 (six) hours. Then it waited for the Allies to beat Germany into a pulp.
Or more exactly, one should federalize defense between France and Britain (or England, hahaha), with full nuclear strategic capacity. Because, at this point, it’s France and the UK which are in direct charge of European defense. De facto. Such a federalization within the Franco-British entity has started, and should be pushed (amusingly clueless Europhobes decry the euro, but forget about the bombo, the Franco-British nukes…)
Soviet attack plans naively stopped at the French border, and left Britain alone. Because the Soviets were scared of France and Britain…
Blair… Not such a funny guy; so much potential, so wasted… He followed, reluctantly, Brown on the Pound, and hell has to be paid, and will be paid because of that… Local communities: that was tried before, that even has a name: the Decline, Fall, and Catastrophic Collapse of the Roman empire. We have seen that movie before… After the global
OK, there will still be ipads. Just they will cost a million euros, after being carried on camel backs by the Silk Road, just as, after the fall of Rome, common place items became luxury, and only plutocrats could afford them.
PA
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June 26, 2012 at 8:56 am |
Thanks Patrice. I very well thought-out (and genuinely funny) response. Whilst I welcome your distinction between a USE and a UNE, I still think EMU is a Tower of Babel project (i.e. a testament to human folly). EMU was a Federalist idea prematurely imposed on utterly divergent economies and, while the times were good, no-one wanted to take the medicine that might have made it work. Now, however, they are being forced to take it intravenously while strapped into a straight-jacket like someone on Death Row (so we must just hope it does not prove fatal).
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June 26, 2012 at 2:24 pm |
Dear Martin: What ails the EMU does not differ with the global problem of globalized finance. It’s just more of an extreme in some ways. I detailled the details. Globalized finance was instead successful of replacing the plutophobic discourse, which should be held, by a europhobic discourse. Pathetic; the slaves bite…themselves, uncomprehendingly.
PA
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June 24, 2012 at 10:08 am |
Dear Patrice, the post was on “Free Exchange” (the very Holy of Holies of the Temple of the Golden Calf) dated June 12, the post itself was posted on June 22.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2012/06/germans
Re Martin Lack’s post – it is not surprising that European federalism is looked down in contempt if its one and only advocate in Britain is Tony Blair. The man is as despicable as they come, and his mag-ni-fi-cent speeches about the future of Europe are, of necessity, tainted with his inordinate sleaze. Yet there is much truth and inspiration in them. After all, when Ben Franklin kept repeating “we shall hang together, or be hanged separately”, he also was in the pay of His Majesty’s Intelligence Service. Go figure.
Federalism is no rosy path, but it is the only way to survival. All other paths will land European countries comfortable (at first) menial positions in global slaving empires.
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June 26, 2012 at 3:04 am |
Dear Dominique: I will look into that. I just got a message by one of these plutophile fanatics telling me;”BS, the 92% margin rate under eisenhower was not real, etc…”
I am going to answer him, but it’s as intelligent as talking to a crazed religious maniac.
PA
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June 24, 2012 at 10:39 am |
Dear Chris, you sound very French; yours are Le Figaro’s favorite talking points. Which means a reality check is needed indeed.
Having lived in Belgium, I was advised to keep paying my income taxes in France. Very sound advice. The endless lamentation that the French are the most taxed European taxpayers fits the French mindset perfectly, and therefore is never questioned, but it is pure demagoguery.
The issue of the state spending to GDP ratio is a red herring that the Ayn Rand crowd loves to dangle under our noses despite its ripe smell of old age. If a public service is better performed (ie at better efficiency and fairness) by public entities than by the private sector, it contributes to a LARGE SS/GDP ratio, but not to a BLOATED one. In France, recent reports on the growing inefficiency (except in serving their shareholders) of the private concerns which took over from the State in core activities (highways, railways, hospital building & management, water management etc) point to a bloated PRIVATE sector. Many large cities, Socialist and otherwise, have decided not to renew their contracts with large French water management companies (which have excellent capacities at technical maintenance AND price-fixing) and revert to the much decried public management system. In short: the issue is not, as the Ayn Rand crowd keeps squealing, that of the size of the public sector; it is that of the efficiency of its performance.
Unemployment is a consequence, not a cause.
Horrendous barriers to entrepreneurship, very high costs of employing anyone. You have to wonder why France still is a preferred destination for foreign investors. The truth is that French entrepreneurs are like French farmers or fishermen, eternal malcontents. Did you ever see a farmer who’s happy with the weather? when they’re not begging for a rain relief they’re clamoring for a drought tax. This whine is the perennial French whine, a kind of societal game. Even suburb youth has its version. Only those who want to believe it has truth (foreigners and Figaro readers) give it any serious thought.
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June 24, 2012 at 3:18 pm |
I will add my own reply to Chris but first should declare that Chris and I know each other pretty well from the days when I was one of his visiting teachers at the French Institute, ISUGA. See http://asia.isuga.fr/en
In reading all the comments and, as urged by Patrice, trying hard not to be over-awed by the fabulous levels of knowledge and the quality of the debate, I will descend to something far more basic (golly, I don’t mean to sound so obsequious!). 😉
That is this. The evidence from across the world is that on many fronts; the reality of government, true democratic representation, welfare for the disadvantaged, long-term planning, protection of the biosphere, planetary sustainability, etc., etc., ‘mankind’ isn’t working.
So let’s give France some breathing space to pursue what their people have voted for and judge the country in one or two years from now. They really can’t do worse than so many other countries!
Best wishes to Chris, by the way.
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June 24, 2012 at 3:36 pm |
Paul: words of wisdom, indeed. The reforms engaged by Hollande seem steps in the right directions (like a limit of 1 to 20 in public companies salaries, and government officials taking the train or car whenever possible, and stopping for red lights).
However, these reforms are very modest (not that Hollande could do more without risking ostracization, or assassination…).
I think a more direct representative system, as in Switzerland, and, or drastic controls on officials’ spending, as in Norway, is in order. if French officials live and work like Roman imperial officials, we will get the same results…
now of course, that is what is happening on board the USS USA where imperial plutocracy reigns unabated; the president goes around for days, with his personal public army to persuade plutocrats to finance him some more, in exchange for favors we can only guess, considering what happened before: Romneycare, privatization of NASA from new plutocrats, Solyandra, Tesla, GE no taxes, Google nearly none, the Jobs’ family, none, Lanai-Elison, quasi none, banksters with presidential cuffs interviewed deferentially on the Hill by those they pay, etc…
Fortunes of countries can change quickly. As long as the USA fracks away happily, nothing untowards will happen, for the USA, short term. But the country is getting poorer slowly, where it really matters… For example with education and a trillion dollar of private educational debt…
PA
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June 24, 2012 at 2:10 pm |
Sweden is a country with very high taxes and very good social benefits. The people BELIEVE that a welfare state is their assurance of a good life – good child care, education, health care, and retirement/nursing care.
They willingly pay their high taxes because they value what they buy.
How did they get to that place, whereas the rest of Europe seems to have taken a sharp right turn?
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June 24, 2012 at 2:30 pm |
Not the right question, OG – they got there like anybody else, through give and take between various parts of society with diverging interests.
The right question is, why are they not regularly fingered and denounced as the pinko euro socialists that they are?
Could it be because they’re the epitome of Nordic, and therefore off limits?
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June 24, 2012 at 2:40 pm |
Sorry OG, I may have answered too quickly – I now see you meant, how come the Swedes themselves see their model as beneficial, when other countries’ voters seem to turn away from it.
Answer: those were hoodwinked with promises that letting go of the safety networks would make them grow wings, and they’re realizing it now. Except in those countries where slavery to Da Boss is the established cultural norm. I honestly think the rightward trend of these past years is over now. Too many lies, too much sleaze, no delivery on promises. I have yet to see any country where ‘easing’ the labor market has led to higher employment rates… and that’s only one example.
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June 24, 2012 at 4:38 pm |
Dear Dominique; The last presidential campaign in the USA cost 6 billion dollars (I read). The corruptocracy between politics and Wall $treet and its banks runs very deep. It’s not even something that Marx, for example, anticipated. It’s a weird form of deviationism, the mutation of democracy into plutocracy.
Other types of capitalism, injecting a heavy dose of socialism are possible. The best example, besides Sweden, is Germany. Conservative Merkler, sorry, Merkel, pursued the reform of the socialist Schroeder… And socialized more, in some ways. (She gained advantaged by a “Euro inner devaluation” as I explained in an essay).
Some of this is detailled in https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2012/01/28/welfare-state-fares-well/
OK, got to run, birthday party for baby’s best friend in a distant location…
PA
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June 25, 2012 at 2:02 pm |
Dominique: The right wing turn is not over in the USA. It’s actually Obama “signature” achievement. By approving of Obama blindly, the left has learned to aprove of right wing nuttiness, blindly. Now the slaves are ready for Romney! In Europe, we will see. (And we had a bit the same phenomenon in Spain: the Socialists were right wing, they were replaced by an officially right wing party!)
Cameron is here for another 4 years… Maybe that will encourage Scotland to secede…
PA
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June 24, 2012 at 2:47 pm |
dear OGP: I think in Scandinavia (“Nordic Council”) only Iceland took a sharp turn to the right. And that led to disaster, after privatization of the central bank (which is part public, part private in the USA, apparently explaining why Jamie Dimon, head of JP Morgan, wear huge presidential cuff links…). The others socialists there, to stay in, or regain power, have incorporated lots of innovative methods.
Finland has a very expensive school system, which concentrates on children having difficulties, it brings the best learning. Swedish health care is highly participative, to improve its finances and efficiency, and scores best in the world. Denmark makes it easy tio fire workers, but then provides state help, including excellent income while learning new skills, to fired workers. And Norway is so rich in everything but children, that it is in category of its own (contemplate Breivik for the other side of the coin).
Contrarily to Reagan (Ray-gun)’s mantra, a job is a job, and if the government provides it, it’s better than if it does not exist. Or if it exists only in China, for the Chinese. The Swedish patent office has turned itself in a profit generating center, by helping attorneys worldwide, in patent searches. Many countries have actually public enterprises masquerading as private, the bankers, worldwide, and Greek ship owners being the best example.
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June 24, 2012 at 10:25 pm |
I guess what I was getting at is that the Swedes embrace what I consider to be the essence of FREEDOM – namely, the knowledge that the state will provide for them in their old age so they won’t be a burden to their kids. The state will educate their kids so the kids won’t be a burden to the parents. The state will provide health care, so they won’t have to worry about dreaded diseases.
We in USA have COWBOY FREEDOM, as personified by Ray-Gun on his cardboard horse, riding off into the sunset. Our so-called freedom is freedom from the dreaded taxation by the state.
Only we are left to fend for ourselves. NOBODY will take care of us. We pay less in taxes, but we get FAR FAR less in services.
We have been duped.
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June 25, 2012 at 6:27 pm |
Old Geezer: And let’s not forget that Malboro man rode into the sunset, riddled by cancer! Yesterday I was talking to a very hot shot USA MD.he explained to me the trick on how to work as a doctor for only four days a week, 9 to 5, and make a million dollars, per year… In Kansas! He then said much more, but I have to process the information… Anyway, I was surprised by what he told me next (even deeply cynical, evil-made-us myself was surprised…)
Am I a journalist? Can a judge force me to reveal my sources? So I will see how I can reveal some of what I was told, protecting all…
When corruption spreads in a country, from the head preaching by example (see Clinton mounted on his hundreds of million of dollars, feeling our pain, like Jesus!), it goes everywhere… Anyway, why the USA spends 50% more on health care than France, with clearly worse outcomes, is clearer than ever. And Romneycare won’t fix it…
People are getting duped, ever more. Fortunately, for the established order, the American People has been told nobody serious believes in conspiracies, and only French youth are immature enough to burn cars, when all riled up…
PA
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June 25, 2012 at 6:13 pm |
Vergingetorige in reply to Tyranosopher
Quite in accord, I suggest to “rich people” writing comments to have a look at some films of Ken Loach in order to see how English “normal people” are living.
But is clear, English never had the courage to cut the head of a king, they prefer to read gossip over royal family in the week-end!
If a lot of young childrens suffer the context of drug trafficking and are very poor, if teenagers are pregnant at 12 years for ignorance or impossibility to have acces to abortion, it is not problem for the noblesse.
They prefer to evade the reality of the country by playng criket.
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June 25, 2012 at 7:54 pm |
CnKQ7pSia6 in reply to Tyranosopher
Hey I have an idea – if increasing the highest tax rate to 92% causes an economic boom, just imagine what prosperity would be generated by increasing the maximum rate to 100%!!!
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June 25, 2012 at 8:04 pm |
CnKQ7pSia6: Einsenhower was right to raise the top margin rate to 92%, history retrospectively shows. Yet, silly it would be to raise the tax to 100%, as it would kill the goose with the gold eggs, as you no doubt know. Check ideas for content before being contented by them for dubious fun.
One has to milk the cows just right: not enough, and they will stop producing, but not so much that they would die.
Right now, the plutocratic cows have become wild and rogue. They trample all over: Larry Elison of Oracle, master of the America Cup, cut the local school budget by nearly two million dollars, because he just said he hated schools, but then he bought the Hawaiian island of Lanai. he should be roped up, and brought back to the stables.
Plutocratic cows have to be lassoed, and domesticated again. To start with a 75% tax rate, as Hollande proposes, is a good first step. Entrepreneurs will probably be exempted, AS LONG AS they re-invest in their business… (My guess).
Just as Obama was advised by self obsessed plutocrats, and, or, their obsequious servants, Hollande is advised by a good part of the French elite… but they are not plutocrats (that’s the difference with Sarkozy)…
OK, the philosopher, BHL is (also) a plutocrat, and there maybe others. But Obama was, and is, only surrounded by the genuine, largest version of the worst plutocrats (Dimon, Buffet, Gates, GE’s Immel, Google guys, facebook guys, Musk types… the latter getting 2 billions, 2,000 million dollars from the USA gov, because he is so cute!). It shows.
Better be surrounded by Enarques poor in assets, rich in theory…
Tbe point being that most of the luminaries surrounding Obama became immensely rich through forms of corruption (even Gates more or less borrowed (let’s cautiously say) IMB DOS to create MS DOS, and then used various monopoly maneuvers… and Buffet, as I said in “Sage of Obama”, https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2012/05/09/sage-of-obama/ uses routinely ways, which, in all justice, should put him in jail for the rest of his days, after confiscation of all of his wealth (which he wants to “give” to …Gates)) Those luminaries enlighten many leaders of all stripes, that the way to get ahead is through further corruption…
PA
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June 28, 2012 at 5:29 am |
75% taxation, 98% taxation, Do not forget all this is about who will run this money. I don’t like the Wall Street “Plutarchs” to run the public money, viz;
Yet i trust even less the politicians, who in principle never created anything out of nothing, but are great initiating conflicts and wars, and turn riches to rubbish. The European Union is a political experiment, where the politicians go against their own natural lust for power. Just look how many enemies it has. If to speak about conspiracy, this what it is. How easily this conspirators, blame out of contest the Euro for all their own follies. Do not tell me, that when creating the Euro, without federalism and central budget control, they did not know that the crisis is inevitable. They just couldn’t do better because of the egoistic national governments, who wouldn’t give up any of their “sovereignty”. By the way who needs economic sovereignty except of the European political “Plutarchs”?. What for the Greek people need sovereignty, if not for to let their “Plutarchs” to milk its treasury.
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June 28, 2012 at 5:50 am |
Dear Rodeneugen; Ah, I wish they would be “Plutarchs”, that is, I guess, historians; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutarch
But they are only plutocrats… Those who want the Dark Lord of the Underground (where riches are), Pluto, to rule.
The proximal essence of the crisis at this point is that the plutocrats, represented by bankers, have confiscated money, and keep it to themselves.
The problem was confronted by emperor Diocletian. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diocletian He solved it by a command and control economy. The franks had a different solution: plenty of Fiat Money, diluting silver. Those who made fake coins were boiled alive. China had only copper, so went to paper money, but a giant inflation at the end of the Yuan dynasty made paper fall in disarray, and the situation was solved only by importing huge quantities of silver from Potosi, Bolivia, thanks to the Spanish…
At this point the crisis is easy to solve, as I recommended, but that requires to augment considerably the power of the ECB, closer to that of the USA Fed. (But less corrupt, because privates don’t sit on the board of the ECB!)
That some of the French socialists who set up the euro deliberately plotted the present crisis as a possibility, I doubt. But that they knew that there would be a crisis, no doubt. The idea, as usual, was that Europe would be forced to exit by the top. But that was without anticipating an obdurate German chancellor, who behaves more like a resisting donkey that an enlightened leader.
PA
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June 26, 2012 at 3:33 am |
john4law in reply to Tyranosopher
BS. The American economy would have been devastated by such an effective confiscatory rate much more so than any nuclear attack the Soviet Union could have launched at the time! The 92% nominal max rate was a paper tiger covering up the reality that with so many Mount Everest sized loop holes and preferences and exemptions in the tax code, most of the wealthiest ( the Rockefellers and Kennedys among them) paid very little or NOTHING. This is a canard of an argument used by those who do not respect property nor free enterprise in the least!
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June 26, 2012 at 3:34 am |
john4law: As devastating as a nuclear attack? Do you know what a nuclear attack is? “Would have been devastated”? So how come it happened, and there was no devastation, just the opposite? To say what was, was not, because it’s worse than a nuclear attack: even my two year old daughter would laugh. Immediately.
If one looks at the USA revenue as percent of GDP, one sees a striking jump under Ike, just as one sees a striking collapse under Bush-the-guy-who-invaded-Iraq-just-because-he-had-the-rage (because military-industrial plutocrats are mighty, and Americans gullible).
The economy blossomed under Ike, collapsed under Bush. Ergo, high taxes on plutocrats are good for democracy.
And this has been known for 25 centuries, it was an old Roman republican law. You may not know Rome from the Soviet Union, a nuclear attack, or a heart attack, please excuse me blinding you with science.
PA
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June 26, 2012 at 3:13 pm |
I wonder about the recent Economist article which started with the clarion call “Investors beware: François Hollande is set to take France in the wrong direction even faster than you feared”.
http://www.economist.com/node/21557338
This is no longer the harmless shots across the bows that TE liberally sent to badmouth or intimidate the French and/or the Socialists; this is a full broadside, meant to be self-predictive and actually turn a significant amount of foreign investing away from France.
It is well agreed that shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater is way beyond the limits of free speech; in this case, TE is shooting live ammo at a Government it doesn’t like; it is an act of war.
My wondering is about the legitimate use of the State’s mandate of legitimate violence in such a case. I don’t advocate doing a Rainbow Warrior on the venerable weekly. A targeted assassination, even though that method has its favors, would go a bit too far. But I think there should be means for sovereign States to act in self-defense of their countries when targeted by such direct aggression. Otherwise they’ll just encourage more. Kind of like the meekly unopposed Soros bank heist on the sterling pound.
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June 26, 2012 at 4:54 pm |
Dear Dominique: I agree with you. I have been thinking along these lines myself, for quite a while. This is a war, and actually people die (see all the Europeans reduced to suicide). OK, there is no Auschwitz fuming in the distance. Yet. At least in the West, for all to see. However, during the six years up to 1939, Nazi violence was rather subtle, and many, at the time, said there was none, and “total democracy” (Goebbels) reigned instead.
In comparison, targetted assassination of FAMILIES by drones, ordered, one by one by the, de facto, great plutocratic leader (that we are supposed to re-elect, because he is better than the worst!), constitute a new level of habituation to arbitrary, absolutist violence. what is even more alarming that the thing itself is the habituation it leads to. Americans go like:”OK, if one has to take a guy out, and the best way to do so is to explode his family ancestral home, let it be.” Exploding families then becomes kosher… something even Israel is more careful with, these days…
Globalized plutocracy is, at this point, going all out in exerting violence. From my greater historical perspective, Hitler, and Mussolini (and even Stalin, who cooperated tightly with Americn plutocrats, the likes of Harriman, as Lenin himself pointed out, all amused) were just a phase in what still ails us.
What ails us originated way back, when Italian republics used financial leverage and bonds to pay for their armies (starting circa 13 C). But it was excusable: after all, they were fighting plutocrats, to death. Since then, 7 centuries later, that system, after enabling the success of (then) tiny Netherlands against England, and a repeat performance against much larger France, has run out of countries to master, and civilization to spread, so it has become extremely malevolent.
I did not read that Economist article, and will do so presently… Thanks for telling me…. Rectification: I did read it, and I may have commented. The article was short, crammed with deliberate lies (such as claiming boldly that Hollande was putting retirement back down to 60, when the truth is that in rare and exceptional cases, in backbreaking jobs, that will be the case…)
PA
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June 27, 2012 at 5:12 am |
Eisenhower did not raise the top bracket to 91% – it was already there from wartime policies. In fact, it was 94% in 1944 and 1945. Somehow, I am sure that few if any people actually paid that amount. There were still a lot of tax lawyers around with special ways of avoiding it.
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June 27, 2012 at 6:13 pm |
Dear OGP: I did read a text where Ike said he had to raise to 92%, because of the debt. However, you are right on principle; it was a tiny rise. But I noticed a revenue jump at that time, so he may have broaden the appilcation of said tax (which may have been caused by a better economy, which was booming in the early 50s, when car production, in 1954 passed… that of 1929…)
A commenter said there were loopholes, and of course, there had always been loopholes… but never as much as there are now… Deducting business expenses is a viscous slope: necessary, but it leads to abuse.
I know personally German business people who live like kings, worldwide, thanks to the business deductions…
PA
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June 27, 2012 at 2:33 pm |
what an interesting blog and and I love your confusion and your contradictions –(got a lot by myself) – and as you mentioned there are no stupid qestions I have a few.
First of all about this ‚conspiracy thing’ – I also believe that there are a lot of rich white dudes out there – who have the situation pretty much under control BUT only as long as they haven’t. –(remember 2008?) – and the fact that s… happens in a more and more uncontrollable and absurd way gave me the hope that we enter a world of total DADA! And I know that ‚teh market’ is evil – but only because there are so many gamblers in that game who have this illusion that money is worth a lot.
So the question here – couldn’t it be that most of the stuff we complain about happens by accident? Or – IF there is some kind of a ‚coordination’ it lies in similar tribal or cultural backgrounds.
Let’s take for example your complains about Paul Krugman.
I also believe he is no friend of the Euro but only because he is a friend of the unemployed –(as I am) – and he thinks that ‚moral politicians’ like Merkel –(a ‚sister’ I respect) – are too ‚sparsam’!
And what do you know – at the same time I really like Hollande –(and his politics and policies!) – Sooo there is this really confusing question: Having very little problems with either Krugman, Merkel or Hollande – am I too much of a ‚creature’ of these crazy times?
(or is my problem that I’m half German and half American and there is nearly a member of every European nation in my family BUT somebody French?)
e euro:
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June 27, 2012 at 6:03 pm |
Dear pieceofcake, thank you for your thoughtfull contribution, and welcome! The half German, half US point of view is also more than welcome. It’s good to have comments from all perspectives.
In the USA, anybody labelled a “conspiracy theorist” is one armed door away from a total lunatic. Such a person will lose most honorable friends, and may be left just with the underclass to exchange ideas with.
This is due to the fact that most Americans:
1) know very little history, so they do not realize that history is little else, at some indispensable junction level, but the history of conspiracies. Although macro factors, and accidents play a huge, often inescapable role in history, conspiracies is how the human elements get in.
2) the USA is rich in conspiracies, and most Americans feel, or have been led to feel, that they profitted from them. To throw a suspicious look at society or history is, interpreted, by the basic American, as a very dangerous, anti-patriotic, naive approach, with no profit perspective. Full of sins, in other words.
It is the exact opposite in France, where suspicion connects with the exactly opposed emotions.
As far as Merkel is concerned, I wrote an essay called:”Merkler?”. Merkel is destroying Europe, day after day. As usual, it will also lead to the destruction of Germany. So, just as the screaming Hitler, she is actually anti-patriotic, and the loud applaud of the Reichstag changes nothing to it. If she wants war, she may gets it, and the anti-German coalition is much stronger than in 1939, already. Just like Hitler, too, she is not really from (West) Germany. Her dad was somewhat wacko; went back to the commies to preach… Christianism.
Now she says that, as long as she is alive there will be no eurobonds? One has to be careful about what one says… Sometimes… The fact German carmakers were nailed by Switzerland for unfair economic practices, is telling…
The two latest German chancellors played a somewhat dirty pro-plutocratic conspiracy, to the hilt (see how Schroeder lives, and who employs him… Putin?). Merkel now attributes this to remarkable German virtues, but France could have done pretty “well” with no minimum wage and jacking up the Added Value Tax as a disguised import tax…
Anyway, it’s a debate…
Not everything is bad in Germany, as a tribunal just found sexual mutilation of children by Jews and Muslims was an “unacceptable injury to a child”.
To finish, a tweet:”Confusion is better than delusion.”
PA
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June 27, 2012 at 8:48 pm |
Still an interesting thread here. Yes, we Americans are woefully lacking in knowledge of history (and thus doomed to repeat it). And we continue to blindly follow the Ray-Gun mantra of “Government is the problem, not the solution” like lemmings to the sea. That is why I brought up the success of Sweden, whose history managed to avoid serfdom even though having kings, and whose people treasure the “welfare state” as an article of personal freedom.
How intelligent!
Also, I think Germany is taking a lot of bad raps lately. Germany has always been a problem because of her huge size and central location. After Bismark unified an otherwise disjointed collection of feuding Baronies in 1871, it was only a matter of time until Britain’s rule was challenged. Hence the tragedy of WWI.
Few remember the “Morgenthau Plan” by which Germany was to be rewound back to a bucolic farm state, de-industrializing the Ruhr valley by smashing all her factories. Even fewer remember how devastated and starving her people were for more than two years after the war, and until the Marshall Plan started her on the road to recovery.
Full disclosure – Americans were less interested in the recovery of Germany than they were in STOPPING COMMUNISM and creating a market for US made machinery.
OK. I got that off my chest.
We all gasped a little when the wall came down and the inevitable re-unification was on the table. Was this a good idea? A big and POWERFUL Germany? AGAIN???
I think it was a good idea, 20 years later looking back. To her credit, she took her communist family into the house, caring, feeding, and providing for millions of German speakers who were otherwise unable to do anything for themselves. (One can also argue that West Germany got well trained workers whom they could exploit because they were used to low wages).
But it worked. And here we are. And I do NOT THINK that Merkel is ignorant of the fact that Germany NEEDS the Euro Zone to hold together. She HAS TO figure out a way to pony up the money. This is not a time to berate the peripherals as being lazy or lying about their budgets. This is a time to suck it up and keep Soros and his sharks from eating Europe one country at a time.
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June 28, 2012 at 12:17 am |
Dear OGP: Several things are entangled there. First that Merkel would have to find the money. She does not. At least not the way it’s presently done.
1) put a banking union in place immediately (OK, with money, some from states, because it’s rushed).
2) say a bank in Spain defaults. Let it default. Take over the day to day operations, using money from 1). No small saver loses any money (less than 100,000 euros).
3) repeat.
Now, as far as not getting Germany getting bad rap, not so. In a way Germany has cheated too. It’s not just Greece. I explained how it happened: it expanded by selling stuff, while reducing inner consumption dramatically, and raising trade barriers (inside the EU!).
The crimes of the german cultural area go all the way back to Luther (threatening to torture Jews). In the 18C, to defeat France, Britain (using financial leverage, plutocracy) paid Prussia. Prussia activated big bad antijudaism, and big bad antipoleism (not a word before now). So the rise of bismarck around 1953 was no accident. Metternich had been very bad, very antijudaic, antipole, even antiprogress, his excuse being that he was antifrench…
By 1880, Nietzsche (who had volunteered against Napoleon III/France in 1870) had turned resolutely against the incroaching madness in Germany. And incroaching madness is what we see now.
There is no solution now, but to let inflation go (among other things).
***
President Franklin D. Roosevelt August 1944:
“Too many people here and in England hold the view that the German people as a whole are not responsible for what has taken place – that only a few Nazis are responsible. That unfortunately is not based on fact. The German people must have it driven home to them that the whole nation has been engaged in a lawless conspiracy against the decencies of modern civilization.”
Then a directive was drafted: “…take no steps looking toward the economic rehabilitation of Germany [or] designed to maintain or strengthen the German economy”.
The directive JCS 1067 was formally issued to general Eisenhower in the spring of 1945. It was applied only to the US zone (although attempts had been made to get the other Allies to accept it). The occupation directive remained secret until October 17, 1945. It was made known to the public two months after the US had succeeded in incorporating much of it into the Potsdam Agreement.
On March 20, 1945 President Roosevelt was told that JCS 1067 was not workable: it would let the Germans “stew in their own juice“. Roosevelt’s response was “Let them have soup kitchens! Let their economy sink!” Asked if he wanted the German people to starve, he replied, “Why not?”
Such hatred was amply justified in 1945. Germany has now to enter hatred in economic computations. This time again. I, personally own my third German car (and in no sense a basic model). I am increasingly upset to hear the stupidities of Merkel about German superiority; did I feed that monster? And I am thinking that Nissan makes excellent cars too… And my primary car is now an (excellent) Ford…
PA
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June 27, 2012 at 9:11 pm |
Dear Patrice –
the latest conspiracy theory in Europe is – that an Anglo-American conspiracy is trying to destroy the Euro because with so called debt levels of Europe around 4 percent and the US more than double their is no rational reason for ‚teh market’ to attack one European country after the other and downgrade it and hike up the interest rates. And I always have to smile about such ‚theories’ – because why would ‚teh market’ – by killing the Euro – kill itself?
There can be only one explanation it must be a world wide conspiracy of idiots – and I actually –(kind off) believe in that!
And I know that conspiracy theorist are labeled ‚lunatics’ –(not only in the US but also nearly everywhere else) – and the major reason –(perhaps) – most of them are really weird people?
It seems to take a certain type of person to believe –(for example) that Bush was ‚behind’ 911. And that’s not a value judgement – there are all kind of weirdos out there and I actually try NOT to have neither a German nor a US point of view – I see the whole problem more from the viewpoint of an Anthropogist. And from that viewpoint Krugmans and Hollands and even Merkels ‚attitude’ makes a lot of sense. And as a (half) member of the German tribe of ‚Schwabs’ I –(sometimes) also believe that having NO debt at all is a really desireable situation. And about giving her so much ‚credit’ for destroying Europe –(the world?) might be giving her too much credit. Don’t forget that she is just representing the will of ‚the people’ who don’t want to pay other peoples bills and that’s very unfortunate –(but ‚anthropological’ spoken ‚very understandable) – and my conspiracy theory about Germany destroying the world is that they built such damn good cars that idiots everywhere are lured into this death spiral of conspicious consumption and I REALLY worry about the biosphere!
BUT perhaps – if ‚teh evil market’ self destructs –(with the help of Angela) – we ALL will be saved by the depression because I figured 10 percent less brainless growth will give US a lot more years to enjoy the game the people are playen –(and NOT only teh Plutocrats!)
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June 28, 2012 at 1:26 am |
Dear pieceofcake: the USA deficit is larger than most European countries, and its total debt level higher than any but Greece, Italy, Iceland, Ireland. However the USA makes as much money as needed, and, if you don’t agree to buy stuff with these dollars, drones and special agents (many not even American) stand at the ready to do away with you.
The EU has three main problems:
1) does not have a real central bank making as much money as needed
2) no army to persuade doubters
3) an abject socialist agenda that revolts righteous plutocrats
So plutocrats want to reduce EU to a big free trade zone, as it used to be.
Last time plutocrats got seriously out of control, that was called Nazism and Fascism. it was not very good. More than 10% of Germany died, among other problems. And make no mistake: as the lamentable mental performance of all too many Merkels and Bundesbank clowns show, the German mind was severely addled, ever since.
Which fools cut the branch on which they are perched so high?
PA
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June 27, 2012 at 9:49 pm |
and thank you Old Geezer -(and mainly my German half says ‘thanks’) – for understanding why people do what they do -(not only Germans) – and the nicest thing I can say about contemporary Germans – they REALLY don’t want to rule this mess – a contraire to a lot of historical -(hysterical?) – references to Hitler and the Nazis.
They just want to work in peace and quitness and stuff the money they earn in their mattresses – and even as they are used to give a lot of the dough away -(to their eastern brothers and sisters – or to Europe) – they still love ‘their money much too much – BUT that’s what happens to people ‘under the (American) influence’!
And again – I don’t blame them – I luuuve to party myself and it’s kind of a drag that teh party is over -(even if it made me repent and join the cult of less!)
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June 28, 2012 at 1:32 am |
Dear peaceofcake: 77% of Germans agree that mutualization of debt is bad idea, so mutualization of profits should be too. But this is not the point; there is a huge crisis, immediately, now, and Germany is not responding to the crisis appropriately, but selfishly. And that is a “once again” situation.
PA
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June 28, 2012 at 12:22 am |
Conspiracy theories can indeed swarm around deranged minds. But to filch wisdom from Henry Kissinger and his famous ‘even paranoids have enemies’, even conspiracy theorists can get it right. As Patrice reminds us, History is a succession of conspiracies.
I only have to recall the Nuremberg trial. Those who know about it at all probably would say that the main indictments were war crimes and genocide. They would be dead wrong. The core indictment, which took most of the judges’ time and sent Nazi head honchos to the noose, was “conspiracy to wage aggressive war”. Said conspiracy was dissected and proven in great detail by US lawyers. (it also set a precedent which GWB ignored at his peril… there’s no statute of limitations on crimes against humanity, which his coalition of the bribed certainly was, according to that binding and completely relevant precedent)
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June 28, 2012 at 1:47 am |
Dominique is entirely correct. This is also why GWB is experiencing travel difficulties. His lawyers were told he risked arrest if he used his visa prerogative, and landed in Switzerland. All Americans can stay 90 days in Schweiz, but special favors for extended stay are provided to war criminals.
PA
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June 28, 2012 at 12:57 am |
You don’t have to wear a tin-foil hat to believe the “conspiracy theory” that the Americans are out to destroy the Euro as a RESERVE CURRENCY.
Fact #1: In Sept 2000, Saddam Hussein announced to the world that henceforth, Iraqi oil would be sold for Euros or Dollars – take your pick – he didn’t care. At the time, the Euro was worth 82 cents, so the bargain shoppers paid in Euros. By 2003, the Euro had appreciated to $1.28. Countries were starting to accept it as an alternate reserve currency.
Fact#2: One day after the US invaded Iraq, the deal was cancelled. Dollars only, please.
Fact #3: With US boots on the ground, the dreaded nightmare scenerio, the REAL WMD which was that Saddam could have flooded the market with cheap oil (he was in control of 280 Billion bbls, all of which are 1500 feet down and easy to lift) was over.
Fact #4: There are about 60 trillion US Dollars in global circulation. About 10 trillion have been printed by Bernanke after the Lehman crash. Yet, 10 year T bills fetch 1.8%, an historic LOW. Control of the world’s oil supplies and the forced denomination of oil in US Dollars has created a permanent demand for this fiat paper.
So, tin-foil or not, you could make a case for a US plan for world financial domination.
I just did.
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June 28, 2012 at 1:58 am |
OGP is entirely correct on this one too. It will be interesting to see what happens next in Iraq. The USA is implicitly threatening Iraq by threatening Iran (one more of my conspiracy theories). Indeed, where is the US Armygoing to operate from exactly, in case of large operations against Iran? Certainly not Afpak…
The establishment of the $ as reserve currency was a cheating operation, and the guy cheated upon was nobody else than Keynes. Krugman, of course never mentions this (for krugman, Keynes is god, but the dollar is also god, and he
is unwillinghas no interest to process the contradiction). Keynes was head of the currency commission at Bretton Woods. he wnted something similar to IMF drawing rights as world currency. The USA wanted the $ as reserve currency, and Keynes, absolutely not. So several substitution of textss, and then documents happened…PA
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June 28, 2012 at 2:50 am |
and talking about my dear Professor -(again) – he really is some kind of ‘god’ in this mess where everybody -(as you say) acts selfishly to the utmost degree – But that’s what happens if people want to drive ‘Porsches’ -(as you said) – and they are not satisfied with a good and solid Audi -(as I am!)
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June 28, 2012 at 2:20 am |
I have a friend who works for one of the big ‘gamblers’ -(banks) on Wall Street and we have a running bet if ‘THEY’ -(‘teh evil market’) will be successful in ‘crushing’ the Euro – and we bet for a dinner at the ‘Modern’ -(excellent Alsacian food) that ‘THEY’ won’t be able to.
But I still don’t know if ‘Americans’ are out ‘to destroy the Euro’ as a reserve currency. There are so many players in this ‘game’ – and most of them are just playen for ‘teh money’ -(wherever it comes from) – and for sure Patrick we have ‘a crisis’ and the Germans behave ‘selfishly’ – but so do ‘the Americans’ – and about every other European country you can think about. BUT as ‘everything’ has turned into some kind of game about money I hope I will win my dinner – and let’s ALL join the cult of less – afterwards – a cult with all these weird German virtues like ‘frugality’ and the attitude of good soccer coaches!
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June 28, 2012 at 5:38 am |
Wau, and i thought this kind of half truths and misinterpretations are only in children’s books.
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June 28, 2012 at 2:11 am |
My latest Tweet:
Breathing together: con-spirare. No need for a plot. Plots are different. To breathe together, conspirators talk, dine, play golf, together.
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June 28, 2012 at 2:37 am |
conspirators all over the world talk, dine, play golf…. -(what’s about soccer – you don’t like soccer?) – together. And just last week a big part of my family -(Americans, Greeks, Spaniards, Irish and YES also a few ‘evil’ Germans) conspired in Southern Germany to change the world. -(for the better – for sure!) – Our only problem is – that lately so many others -(and not only ‘Plutocrats’) are doing the same – So basically there are ALL these ‘conspiracies’ out there and the decisive point seems to be who has the BIGGEST one.
BUT I’m actually a pretty optimistic ‘sister’ – and as history has proven with a lot of improvements in the last 40 years – that the conspiracy of the ‘better’ people will prevail!
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June 28, 2012 at 3:22 am |
dear pieceofcake: No doubt that, since France offered the olive branch with the Community Coal Steel, around 1948, things have been looking up in Germany.
However, not so in many countries. Some, say in Africa, have taken an ominous turn. Others, even the immensely rich USA, are getting impoverished in a median way. Sure the GDP still goes up, as the plutocrats swallow more and more of everything. But median middle class salaries for men have been going down. That has lots of negative social repercussions. Student debts will soon be a trillion dollars.
Did I mention Greece was in a depression, and so is the UK, and Spain has 25% unemployment, and the only reason that the youth in Spain (50% unemployment) are not burning stuff is just because they are not French (yet).
but right, if we conspire right, through the Internet, we may overcome!
PA
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June 28, 2012 at 2:12 am |
kbalm:
You are out of your mind. 92%? Are you attempting to be funny? Everyone would leave the country no doubt.
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June 28, 2012 at 2:16 am |
kbalm: Reading comprehension, once again. Facts are facts, and neither dogs barking, nor gods fuming, can ever change them. President Ike (or Yakes as you no doubt would have it) had a 92% tax rate.
Let them leave the country! A Dutch company is looking for volunteers for Mars, on a one way ticket…
PA
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June 28, 2012 at 3:45 am |
Dear Patrick –
and I think I wasn’t thinking about ‘the economies’ when I wrote about ‘improvements’ – because I’m -(subconsciously) kind of mad that ‘teh economy’ seems to dominate EVERYTHING in these times – or let’s say the value of money is highly overrated – and I have two Spanish cousins and one Irish one who are currently unemployed and all of them are not burning ‘stuff’ because the Irish one blames his own stupidity – that he really thought that you can become rich and famous fast by buying all kind of ‘flats’ in ‘wherever’ and the Spanish ones joined the cult of less -(not voluntarely) and they are moving to a Greek Island!
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June 28, 2012 at 4:24 am |
AND the tragic irony is – that everybody who is serios about the well being of the ‘biosphere’ actually would have to welcome the economic depression – because it gives the biosphere a big brake.
I don’t know if you ever have been to Spain but how ‘money’ and bad architecture -(seems to come together) – wrecked this once beautiful country is beyond believe – and as a little girl I always dreamed about motivating people all over the Western World to consumate at least ten percent less each year – and now -(in a strange way) my dream might come true -AND we are still rich beyond believe. We just haven’t managed yet a social and fair distribution of our wealth and even in Greece – there is so much money in Germany -(from Greeks) – that this might be the worst of all conspiracies where everybody who got ‘teh dough’ just tries to keep it for himself –
and for nobody else!
(how nice it rhymed!)
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June 28, 2012 at 7:15 am |
Pieceofcake; Agreed. Horrendous developments along the Spanish coast. And another beef I have against Merkler and her 26 giant coal plants to come. This is a way worse situation than 26 new nuclear plants, but nobody seems to be paying attention in Germany… Looking forward, only very advanced tech will save us. THAt has to grow. But the right type of tech.
PA
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June 28, 2012 at 4:24 am |
Europe, Victim Of …. Whom?
Hm, very original way to look at history of Europe. Liked the connection of all the Events to its starting point, the disastrous (from Roman and European point of view) battle at the Teutoburg Forest. Who knows how would look European history if not this arrogant failure “Plutarch”, Publius Quinctilius Varus. Connecting the outbreak of another disastrous war to the conservative “Plutarchs” of Germany, who felt threatened by the socialist in Germany (by the way many of them Jews) seems worth to consider. Yet I have to oppose your continues odor of conspiracy I can feel throughout your writings. It is pity you use your knowledge to propagate the dangerous idea of belief in conspiracy, that practically doesn’t exist and can’t exist. To my experience, many wicked egoistic people driven by their personal greed are at the top of any political or economic empires, but these are the last that can cooperate to the level of conspiracy. Their instinct to compete is to strong for it. The only real conspiracy in the latest history was done by the Nazi and Communistic revolutionaries. They both used it as a legitimate tool to arise hatred. By the way the Nazis used Rothschild’s name as part of their conspiracy theory, twisting completely the historical facts, (he never did money out of Waterloo, in contrary he almost bankrupted because of it), see the following;
THE HOUSE OF ROTHSCHILD
Money’s Prophets, 1798-1848
By Niall Ferguson
“The most widespread Rothschild myth was that Nathan, after receiving news by carrier pigeon of Wellington’s victory at Waterloo, made a vast fortune speculating on the rise in British government securities. The reality, says Ferguson, was quite different. The Rothschilds’ couriers did alert them first to Napoleon’s defeat, but since they had bet big on a protracted military campaign, any quick gains in bonds after Waterloo were too small to offset the disruption to their business.
Rothschild capital did soar–but over a much longer period. Nathan’s breakthrough was a deal to supply cash to Wellington’s army in 1814. Waging a high-risk campaign of exchange-rate transactions, bond-price speculations, and commissions, the family garnered huge profits from this governmental financing. Then, from 500,000 pounds in 1818, Rothschild capital rose to 4,330,333 pounds in 1828–about 14 times the resources of their nearest competitor, Baring Brothers, which had been a close second. Their strategy: financing the postwar stabilization of Europe’s conservative powers. That meant luring monarchs and ministers, such as Austrian Chancellor Metternich, into their orbit. What made the Rothschilds ”the dominant force in international finance after 1815” was ”the sheer scale–and sophistication–of their operations.””
I am with you if you resist financial Barons unjustly exploiting their position, causing by their short term, greed driven behavior agonies to people, viz;
https://www.facebook.com/CleanTheEconomicMess
but in the same breath I have to oppose your purposeful misinterpretation of facts. And let me here to cite your phrase at the beginning of your article;
“As all good propaganda, there is lots of truth therein, just as in all good poisoned beverage, there is much goodness, to make sure the victim drinks it all.”
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June 28, 2012 at 7:12 am |
Rodeneugen: before accusing me of “purposeful” distortion, maybe you should present ONE distorted fact? The Nazi/Communist conspiracy (you admit the existence of) was much larger than usually said, because hundreds of major English, German and American plutocrats and corporations were in it. Also England supported diplomatically Hitler in crucial fashion until 1936, and the USA, as a state until… 1941 (in all justice in 1940 some USA support went to France and the UK, and then ever more, at least to the UK. USA supported the Vichy putch though.
One can make conventional history, neglecting important things, for example the State antijudaism in Prussia, hatred of Poles, etc., and then turn around, and claim hitler was an incomprehensible accident. Such is the normal way to do history. One can call the invasion of england in 1688 a “Glorious revolution’, instead of the plutocratic-Dutch conspiracy it was. And so on. I stick to facts, and tell them for what they are. So, if I distorted, show it. Also accusing Old Geezer in too general a fashion suffers from the same vagueness. as far as i know, all he said was true, I would be the first to scream if I thought otherwise…
To claim there are no conspiracies is total delusion. Why do you think Bush I and Reagan prosecuted more than 10,000 bankers, and Obama, zero?
PA
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June 28, 2012 at 8:50 am |
Dear Patrice, Conspiracy theories are not about the facts, but about their interpretation. The William the Orange is a very good example, and a neutral one, since it happened more than 300 years ago. You may say it was plutocratic-Dutch conspiracy and all about money, but on the other hand it prevented from James II to hand over England to his beloved cuisine Louis XIV and to the Catholics. Or the British American support to Hitler. Yes even at 1939 it was unfortunately hard to understand what a horrendous monster grow at the heart of Europe. Yet at that time, to those who were ready to face the facts and realities, (not as the European communists), already was commonly known the dimension of the crimes of Stalin. It is easy to judge Roosevelt and even Chamberlain from today’s perspective.
As to old Geezer, I don’t believe in the sincerity of your answer to him. You are to well informed to take seriously what he wrote about the Iraqi war. I read somewhere that this war cost was about 500 billion US$, all the economic calculations of profiting from the war can’t come even close to this sum, so all the Geezers theories are nothing more than childish mumbling. Nice of you nursing him, it is very educative, but not very informative.
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June 28, 2012 at 4:01 pm |
Dear rodeneugen: If I understand well you are saying that the Iraq war could not have been engaged because the economic computations to profit from the war did not work out? But:
1) Iraqi oil has mostly stayed in the ground since, allowing to increase the profitabilty of fracking
2) Iraq is not using the euro for trade anymore
3) Do you really think that the money was lost for everybody? There is literally a class of war profiteers in the USA.
And do you mean that, because the Titanic cost lost of money, he could not possibly have sunk, or that Hitler engaged in war because he thought he would lose, or that Napoleon anticipated to lose the Grande Armee in Russia? And so on. Wunschtraum, aber nicht Wundermittel! Meaning wishfull thinking can lead to disaster… But not necessarily for all.
BTW, the old Tyranosopher site has reactions of mine, at the time (I do not control the site, so the texts are as they were then), and no doubt will support what OGP was saying.
PA
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June 28, 2012 at 5:15 pm |
To say that James II, king of England, intended to give his kingdom to Louis XIV, and that this justified the invasion, aka, “Glorious Revolution“, sounds like raw Orangist propaganda. Funny there is still propaganda on this, 300 years later, some will say. But not really, because the “Glorious Revolution” is when plutocracy and the military got entangled with the fractional reserve system and huge leverage. And those who profit from this, want to hide that. So they make sure all the parrots know their lesson well: “Glorious Revolution”, bla bla bla…
PA
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June 28, 2012 at 8:19 am |
dear rodeneugen and patrick – exchanges of historyinterpretations always remind me why I’m so sceptical about historical references – because they are soo… ‘dated’? and the Nazi-Communist conspiracy is a pretty ‘good’ example. ‘Nowadays’ – as everybody must have noticed – even ‘good’ countries who basically agree with each-other have a hell of a time to ‘conspire’. First of all – as Patrick’ mentioned – we got ‘teh intertubes’ and secondly in a world where conspiracies have to be ‘entertaining’ and we need to know every little bit of it IT tends to fall apart in all kind o ways. Like – who is still talking about the ‘Merkozy conspiracy’? -and if Angela darling doesn’t watch out she might be as fast a blimp in history as Schroeder or the dude who thinks he is the American ‘Prezident’!
AND it’s this unbelievable speed of turning things around which never seemed to be possible last year!
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June 28, 2012 at 11:13 am |
Very much so, and as to the Iraqi war, it started because of a stupid President, who has no capacity to conspire whatsoever. After all you need IQ above 70 to invent a good conspiracy .
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June 28, 2012 at 2:35 pm |
that made me smile – because I’m terrible in ‘conspiring’ -(too!) – and your point actually is THE point. There never would have been the financial collapse of 2008 IF ‘Plutocrats’ would have the ability to ‘good’ -(or clever) conspiracies!
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June 28, 2012 at 3:49 pm |
Fact is, there was a Merkozy conspiracy, and even a plot. Those liars presented aid to banks too big to fail, and too close to not be friends, most of them not Greek, as an aid to…Greece. That was totally obvious, but miracle of miracles, nobody in the MSM noticed, until after Hollande was safely elected. Then suddenly the New York Times discovered that most of the “aid” to Greece “came right back“.
And if you think Putin and Chinese leaders are not into continual plots and conspiracies… Just follow the assassinations; good stuff.
Even the UN, which had observers on the spot, at the time, cannot determine who made a severe massacre in Syria last week.
The canard that history died was invented by Fukuyama, because he was paid to promote the ideology of the instant, the mental equivalent of fast food. Another plutocratic plot. A large part of top private USA universities are little more than plutocratic plot factories (been there, seen that; even met Friedman). Even the most famous Nazi songs were adaptated from… Harvard songs, in the 1920s… Geese will be always happy to goose step behind their leader. That is, until the day they get cooked.
PA
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June 28, 2012 at 4:59 pm |
I think I was using ‘Merkozy conspiracy’ to illustrate how absurd the use of the term ‘conspiracy’ has become because I think everybody would agree if I would say a ‘good’ conspiracy needs a minimum of secrecy – and if in the case of Greece some ‘MSM’ didn’t notice that a lot of the aid went back to German banks it was more or less ‘idiocy’ -(or some reading disabilty) – because everybody who can read just needed to go online and there it was – all the conditions and the rules of the package. And this is what’s so irritating – in the bad -(good) – ole times you never EVER would have tought that a dude like Sarkozy and Angela would be ‘unter einer und derselben Decke’ -(‘making out’) – but in these
modern times everybody -(who bothers informing himself) – knows everything even about the most private parts.
And I just don’t know if that qualifies for a ‘conspiracy’!
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June 28, 2012 at 5:58 pm |
pieceofcake: the idea of the word “conspiracy” is people so close together that they can be viewed as breathing together. That also involves the MSM, as when “access” is provided, it is literally “breathing together” that is. So, in that particular case, the MSM hid the (obvious to specialists) fact that the aid was not aid to Greece, but aid to foreign (many German) banks which had speculated in Greece, Spain, etc.
Anyway, it’s an open and shut case. Some can claim there is no moon. Lions know there is, and they hunt.
The huge bank Barclays just recognized they manipulated interest rates (more specifically the LIBOR). They will pay a huge fine (380 million dollars). however, in a further conspiracy, the upper management, after a deal with their co-conspirators in the USA and UK government, will face no criminal charges (although they stole billions to millions).
In a sign of hope, the Labor Party in the UK suggested that the banksters at Barclays should face criminal charges. But they know where the bodies are buried, like all good conspirators, the the financial conspiracy will roll on. BTW, I know one conspirator tied in to Dexia (Franco-Belgian TBTF bank,”saved” with 8 billions of taxpayer money; failed because of American subprime loans, BTW). He is building himself a 55 million dollars home on the Cote d’Azur… (Just downhill…)
Naivety is good for the sheep, but not for the lion. To be eaten or to eat, that is how their ecological roles differ, and thus their brains
Here is another tweet: Conspiring is what oligarchs do (Richard Feynman said). A strength of the internet: now commoners can conspire too, through electronic means!
PA
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June 28, 2012 at 2:39 pm |
Oh – and please no comeback with the idea that the Plutocrats profited from that collapse – I know some of them who had to sell their Rivas -(and their wifes had to interrupt shopping) – AND nobody who is ‘profiting’ dares to make his wife stop shopping – or even worst sells a Riva Aquarama if he doesn’t have too!
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June 28, 2012 at 10:45 pm |
Before this thread vanishes into the blogosphere, let me add that according to Aris Anagnos from the American Hellenic Council of California, Greece spent a lot of money on military hardware to counter threats from Turkey regarding several Greek islands in the Aegean sea. Needless to say, German and French banks were quite willing to lend the money for those purchases. Makes this tin-foil hatter wonder if Turkey was goaded into saber rattling by those very same banksters as a precondition of the industrial development loans she received.
Inquiring minds want to know.
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June 29, 2012 at 12:40 am |
OGP: Greece spends I think 4.5% GDP on the military. Too much, but not really the problem. Although no doubt something like what you say is a bit at work. Yet, Turkey did invade Cyprus, and is still there. Turkey is an army that invaded. In a way, the invasion ended less than a century ago, when millions of Greeks and Armenians were kicked out, or killed, from the homeland they had for at least 3,200 years.
Turkey is not too clear. The Cyprus invasion is very recent. The Kurds, although Islamists, are also a very old people of the region, also at least 3,000 years old. The Kurds, clearly ought to have their own country (then they can apply to the EU!)
The fundamental Greek problem is no taxation of the plutocracy. Their proximal problem is the plutocratically funded monetary system in Europe. It’s the same problem more than 100 millions Italo-Spaniards are confronted to. Things will start to change when:
1) Merkel gets half a ton of Greek yogurt on her all too ample shape, each time she shows her uncomprehending face.
2) banksters go to jail.
3) banksters see their properties seized
As I said I was floored by the Belgian guy building his 40 million euros property down below, knowing all too well, as I do, that it was financed by taxpayers. And he boasts about it!
PA
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June 29, 2012 at 2:15 pm |
Thanks for putting that all in perspective. Yes, the Greek constitution specifically EXEMPTS shipping from taxation, and that’s where the billionaires are.
The day that the banksters go to jail and their property seized is the day that piigs fly.
But we cal all hope.
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June 29, 2012 at 3:29 pm |
OGP: No hope, no life! Right now, as one of the commenters on this site more or less put it, it is viewed as unreasonable to set the “mob’ on the plutocrats. However, the true mob is that of the plutocrats, and wisdom is to assign the sword of justice to them: creative destruction, the behavior they fancy. It seems that four more years of Obama will condemn us to the lamentable spectacle of the president of the USA, truly a child, singing the praises of plutocrats.
See “Sage of Obama”:https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2012/05/09/sage-of-obama/
PA
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June 29, 2012 at 5:36 pm |
Soccer match harbinger of EU compromise deal to support banks?
Patrice,
As I was watching the Germans flub their half-final soccer match against Italy (Germany has never beaten Italy in a championship match) along with a large crowd of locals on the village marketplace, the thought entered my mind that this might prove to be some kind of omen for Merkel’s objections to EU proposals to give way.
Today while the Germans lick their wounds over their loss the markets are jubilant that a deal (at least in the near-term) has been worked out to use bailout funds to re-capitalize the banks without adding directly to sovereign debt and as expected, to install joint banking supervision. It remains to be seen what kind of compromise can be worked out between the German and positions.
Hollande got the “growth” he wanted but (another compromise) it will come largely from existing funds.
While chances of the EU collapsing are lower in the near-term (it could be a long, hot summer) structural imbalances in the EU are among core issues that pose further risks and badly need addressing.
Jeff
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June 29, 2012 at 5:40 pm |
Dear Jeff:
The EU cannot collapse. That would be a casus belli. Just like the American Civil War. It’s high time Germans learn lessons from their (fascist and racist) history. It’s not because they connived just right, with no minimum wage, an abusive Mittelstand, barriers to import (by jacking up the AVT when they should have lowered it), unsupervised banks which corrupted the locals, car companies, which corrupted the locals (see Porsche in Greece, BMW condemned in Switzerland…I drive a BMW, BTW) etc., that they are better beings than southern Europeans.
Indeed, you are right, being crushed by a 100% black Italian man, super Mario, and the Squadra Azzura was a good lesson to the German subconcious.
Italians and Spaniards are not inferior. They are just today’s targets for the plutocratic plot. They are coming for the Germans too. Germans, after their Hitler experience should have learned that. after all, more than 10% of the german population got killed in WWII. And that because of the same ugly mentality that has resurfaced recently.
PA
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July 15, 2012 at 5:17 am |
[…] Europe, Victim Of Plutocracy (patriceayme.wordpress.com) […]
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March 10, 2013 at 1:04 am |
Very good blog!
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March 10, 2013 at 8:34 pm |
Thanks!
PA
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