Unexpected happenings all over. UN Ambassador Susan Rice, reportedly involved with genocide and corruption for twenty years, is considered for Secretary of State. Does that beat Obama outlawing the European Carbon Tax? Reality is always spicier than fiction.
Transparency International produced a classification of countries according to (SELF) “perceived” corruption. Netherlands, Switzerland, Belgium, Luxembourg, Singapore, Hong Kong, are six tax havens (some with triads!) proclaimed to be less corrupt than France, or the USA. Tax havens are, like corruptocrats, parasites. Parasitism can kill a civilization.
There are 3,000 species of lice. Parasites can’t create civilization. We should not look up to them.
Trying to evaluate corruption, worldwide, and to attract attention to corruption is a good thing. If done honestly. Transparency International says that Finland is one of the three less corrupt countries in the world. In reality, the Finnish director of Transparency International, himself the director of the Confederation of Finnish Industries, decided that.
One can only conclude, in turn, that Transparency International is itself corrupt. Or at least mentally corrupt, like an old fish left out too long rotting in the sun. TI is another of these international pretentions, which international finance, and its globalized media, are keen to advertize for, as they serve them well.
The drive is always the same: the big states, the pillars of democracy, are bad, small states, where plutocrats can reign supreme, and lovely tax havens, are good. If the small state is the window of a big bad plutocracy, China, full of triads, as Hong Kong is, that ‘s even better! It’s not corrupt at all!
Just as tax havens are the best places to be born (said The Economist), tax havens are also the less corrupt, as far as international plutocrats are concerned. Similarly rotten rich plutocratic universities, propagandizing watered down values, are the best in the world, and the French ones the worst (hey, is not the Islamophobic Voltaire taught there?).
Corruption tends to be in the eye of the beholder. Transparency International, just as countless elite private universities, “liberal”‘ or “left wing” “think tanks”, are just plain tanks that the plutocrats finance to roll over the People, starting with their minds.
If Transparency International were serious, it would use objective criterions. The Gini Index, which measures inequality inside countries, would be a main ingredient. It’s obvious that any country where an extremely rich elite reigns over an uneducated rabble is intrinsically corrupt.
New indexes need to be created to judge corruption objectively. The Gini index is objective. We need more objective indexes, rather than to depend upon crooks to inform us on how corrupt they are.
One learns best through explicit examples. Here we will mention two cases, one that of an American politician who is a professional democratic party apparatchik. Starting from nothing, on government salary, the lady built a fortune… and part of this fortune is psychologically incrusted in the most determined pollutocratic corporations. (Yes, pollutocratic and pollutocrats are neologisms we will, unfortunately, find useful, looking forward, as the influence of those such as Ms Rice, and her puppet masters, seems to know no bounds.)
One such index would rest upon how rich politicians become (the Pure Corruption Index). Presumably, the acquisition of otherwise unexplainable awesome riches comes from plutocrats paying them under, or over, the table.
Just add how rich those politicians (and their families!) have become, and divide by how much they officially earned, during their official tenure. Then integrate over all politicians of that country, to get a global index. So my proposed index can be used both individually, and globally. It seems that Susan Rice, Obama’s friend, UN ambassador with cabinet rank, and potential Secretary of State scores very high that way, on the Pure Corruption Index. That Obama defends her ardently tells volumes on the sort of state that we are supposed to admire, as we are supposed to admire Ms Rice’s political-financial genius. Such is the main axe of this essay.
Nietzsche used to crow that he “made philosophy with a hammer“. But the planet needs to be defended with a battle axe.
Another index would take into account how rich politicians are (Pure Plutocratic Index). The Pure Plutocratic Index is not as bad as a criterion to chose our Lords. For example, Senator Kerry, who would make a much better Secretary of State than Ms. Rice, is very rich. But it’s clear how he became rich: he married an extremely rich woman, from Mozambique, herself heir to the Heinz fortune. Kerry does not owe anything to pollutocrats, or plutocrats. It’s unlikely he would pass laws to construct ketchup pipelines across the world, to please his sponsor (namely his wife). Whereas as we will see, what dirty Rice proposes for her pipelines is hard to swallow.
Much of the American deficit (in the last four years, it was a trillion dollars a year) comes from legal, or tolerated tax evasion (the home mortgage interest deduction comes to mind, and the 975 employees at GE in charge of tax evasion, who allowed GE to avoid taxes all together more than once).
Amazon has a multi-billion dollar business in each of France, Britain, and other countries, and it pays basically no tax, while the local bookstores it is killing do. France presented Amazon with a tax bill of $252 million, for unpaid taxes, 2006 to 2010. France presented Google with a tax bill of a billion dollars (I use Google for search rarely, as there are many alternatives).
Massive tax evasion undermines the French welfare system. And also the French military, the world’s most interventionist. It is France who made war in Ivory Coast recently re-establishing democracy, and it is France which is putting the heat on the Islamists who conquered half of Mali (roughly the size of California), and may go to war there soon. This French war activities, in defense of civilization, in the end also protect the tax havens (example: if France had not declared war to Hitler in summer 1939, Switzerland, ultimately, just like Austria next door, would have been conquered by the Nazis).
I have not been following closely the fumbling about Ms Rice as Sec. Of State to replace Hillary Clinton. I knew nothing much about Ms. Rice, except that she is a professional politician, her career having started under Bill Clinton. I don’t trust professional politicians. They are parasites within a tyrannical system, representative democracy. OK, some are sincere (Chavez, Gov. Brown of California, Hollande and Merkel come to mind; some may be sincere, although slightly deranged; Putin comes to mind.) However, in general politicians thrive from corruption, and thus politics attract those who want to thrive from corruption.
Nobody can accuse me not to be cynical. However, I was stunned to learn that Susan Rice, 48, holds between 300,000 and 600,000 dollars of TransCanada. Reality is indeed much more crazy than fiction.
TransCanada wants to build a pipeline across the USA to find a buyer to the horrendously polluting Tar Sand Oil (British Columbia has refused such a pipe). This fact, by itself, clearly disqualifies her as a potential Sec. Of State. Even if she divested herself, it would remain that she took side against the biosphere, and that she had to be violently separated from an investment who brought her $25,000 last year. And, to top it all of, she has so little judgment that, although she knew her good friend Obama would try to nominate her, she clang to her monstrous money maker.
It gets better: Ms. Rice and her husband, an ABC News producer, own at least $1.5 million worth of holdings in Enbridge, a Canadian company that transport Tar Sand oil across the USA. In other words, Ms. Rice will be viewed by dedicated ecologist as satanic. (Ecologists do not seem to worry Mr. Obama very much.)
Where do these people get that kind of money? A quick scan of Ms Rice’s career shows that she was employed a bit in (fake) “liberal” institution such as Brookings, and something called Intellibridge. Intellibridge was a front for selected investors, financial organizations and other corporations, a conduit for plutocratic money, to pay off the servants (and an outshoot from Kissinger Associates, the extreme right wing organization). Ms Rice’s father was a governor of the Fed, the private-public device to funnel public money to private banks.
So now Ms Rice is rich, filthy rich, she is fully blossoming as a servant plutocracy can trust. A full time leader of the democratic party. Filthy rich, literally, as Tar Sand oil, which is twice cooked, is very dirty.
So ecological organizations have meekly suggested Rice should divest from her polluting investments. It’s a human equivalent of grabbing a piece of meat from a lion: Rice may give up her reward, but she will resent those who forced her to do so. and the fact is, she was rewarded, enormously, by those who wanted to reward her, and will go on defending them, if she has any sense of decency.
Decency among scoundrels is part of the tribal instinct. Fundamentally, killing is a social activity (as killing en masse requires allies) so, paradoxically the more the killing, the higher the team spirit. Even among Nazis, decency to each other was high: they called each other “Kameraden” (“comrades”), spoke of “we” all the time.
Rice has made clear, with her obscene investments, who her team is: the team of those who, literally, want to burn the Earth.
On September 16, 2012, Rice went on five major news channels to pontificate about the attack in Benghazi:
“our assessment is as of the present is in fact what began spontaneously in Benghazi as a reaction to what had transpired some hours earlier in Cairo where, of course, as you know, there was a violent protest outside of our embassy–sparked by this hateful video. But soon after that spontaneous protest began outside of our consulate in Benghazi, we believe that it looks like extremist elements, individuals, joined in that– in that effort with heavy weapons…We do not– we do not have information at present that leads us to conclude that this was premeditated or preplanned…”
in other words Rice says that it is free expression, the First Amendment, that is culprit in causing the Benghazi attack. Nowhere does she mention that an enormous Salafist base was tolerated, or known to be, close by.
This is wrong in several ways. First the concept that a “hateful video” can “spark” deadly protest.
Second and more importantly, it is wrong to believe that there was such a thing as a “hateful video“. There was a grotesque video, the “Innocence of Muslims“, true. But the pathetic video just faithfully illustrated what is, incredibly, said about Muhammad in the Qur’an, and the most sacred Muslim texts. To wit:
Muhammad married a girl, Aischa, who was 6 years old, and had sex with her when she was 9. Yes, Muhammad killed much more than a thousand men, yes, he did not know how to read and write (differently from his first wife, a rich business woman), yes, the cousin of his wife was a professional Christian monk, and he told Muhammad that it’s Archangel Gabriel that met him in the desert, yes, God had allowed Muhammad to marry as many women as he pleased, and that pleased him a lot, including with Jewesses (and a furious friends’ wives). More can be said that is highly distressing, and the short video did not say.
OK, the video represented a sexual practice that is not alleged in the sacred Muslim texts. Thus one can only conclude that those who protest about the “hateful video” protest about a precise sexual practice, benign between consenting adults. Curious that they do, as they find completely normal that the great Prophet Muhammad had sex with nine year old girls. The only conclusion is that they are sexually obsessed (one way, they love pedophilia, at least when the Prophet does it, and another, they find licking bushes so abhorent, they call it hateful, denigrating of Islam, surely the prophet of child molesting would not do such a thing!)
It remains that when Rice, and those excited Muslims in Pakistan, call the video “hateful“, they call the Qur’an “hateful”. Outrageous company between Al Qaeda’s theses and a member of the cabinet? Not that much. The USA has long instrumentalized Islam, because Islam, thanks to its Fascist Principle (Qur’an Sura 4, v 59), is friendly to dictators and dictators can be made friendly to those who own the USA. Result? Lots of oil trading is controlled by the USA and its associated plutocrats (many based in Switzerland!), and the profits get recycled through New York and London.
So what is it with Rice? She is rich, and Rice was obviously made rich by the likes of those who want pipelines carrying the most polluting oil to be built, and Tar Sands to be exploited.
The battle about Rice is a small symbolic and pragmatic move in a vast picture.
The essential strategy of the USA in matter of energy used to be that it did not matter how dirty one got, as long as one provided the USA with cheap oil. That was the sense of the pact between F. D. Roosevelt and Ibn Saud in 1945. It was the time of dirty dirty: the USA had left France and Britain fight Hitler alone in 1939, while helping the later not so discreetly. Then at Yalta, the USA had given half of Europe to Stalin, knowing perfectly well that Stalin had massacred at least 22,000 of the Polish elite at Katyn (that the USA knew was revealed very recently). In the end, Europe was hopefully lethally wounded and certainly half crushed.
Thus the Uncle Sam was in better position to free the Middle East, and the Arabic countries, from Franco-British control. It needed an ally, and that ally was Muslim Fundamentalism. Carthage used to do this kind of things, with mercenaries. It famously backfired, as the mercenaries rebelled. Similarly, the USA has been facing a rebellion of Al Qaeda, a formation it basically created to wage war in Afghanistan against republican socialism, starting in the 1970s.
Co-existing with the likes of bin Laden has proven an embarrassment. Although the American people still seems unawares that Bin Laden was a product of the CIA (and its Saudi alter ego), the war against Al Qaeda has spread ever more, leading to Al Qaeda like formations all over, from Mali to Indonesia. OK, right it’s good for the military-industrial complex. However the deficit is too big to support the latter any longer, that extravagantly.
Way out? Well, the USA could have done like Europe, and chose the road of higher energy prices, deploying more advanced technology. But it did not, as it refused to take part in the Kyoto Protocol. Now in Doha, Qatar, Kyoto was just extended. It boils down to 15% of humanity doing all the efforts. 15%, yes. Mostly made of Europe, a heavy burden.
If Europe wants to let itself be exploited, that’s fine with the USA.
Europe was ruled by various philosophies, with the liberal-let’s-throw-money-to-the-rabble-and-especially banks presently in power. The USA itself is ruled by several philosophies, but the hierarchy of those is easier to figure out. Long mercantilist (a technical term), as a practical governmental policy, it has now become increasingly, since Reagan, plutocratic max. The magically rich Rice is another symbol of that choice: if the plutocrats have chosen Rice, it does not matter if Rice is obviously corrupt for all to see.
It’s actually even better, that one can see that Rice is on the take. It flaunts that the way to get ahead, is to become lice. Because Rice becomes the symbol that money rules, and so it can, assuredly, buy itself ambassadors, cabinet ministers and Secretary of State. It can buy the highest government officials, and then flaunt that fact, and people have to kneel and submit. As Sec. of State is the third authority of the state, in the USA, to contemplate something more absurd than that, one would have to observe the president of the USA invest with several of the world’s top pollutocrats.
Hence the American rush to fracking: it brings energy and autarky, yes, but it’s also symbolic of the rule of the exploitative philosophy. Ten years ago, the USA was planning to import Liquid Natural Gas. Now, in a sudden reversal of fortunes, it’s planning to export it. The USA has so much gas, from fracking, that the USA price of the stuff has collapsed 80% below world prices (the gas is hard to transport, although a desperate Japan had the Ob River inaugurate the North East passage, in winter, to bring in at least ten Hiroshimas worth of semi clean gas energy in).
USA oil production is supposed to pass Saudi Arabia within 7 years. A resource, energy and food independent country with state of the art tech does not have to worry about its currency. It could live in autarky. In this light, the will to appoint Rice can be viewed as the will to make still another pact with the Devil. For those who are real dirty, the fact that Rice is dirty, makes her clean.
After World War Two, many people who should have known claimed they had no idea the Nazis were so dirty. And how could have anybody guessed. Well, that’s why it’s called guessing, I guess. How dirty could Rice be?
During the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, Rice, a well connected arrogant know-nothing, hungry to serve powerful, crushing masters, leveraged her dad, well connected as he was, in plutocratic finance. She is, like Geithner, a princeling (same idea as in China). Ms. Rice advised the Clinton White House to stay silent about the genocide in Rwanda. She claimed to be afraid that doing so would have an electoral impact. How come a girl who knew nothing about Africa, could advise to let millions of Africans die? (I have been raised in Africa, mostly Black Africa, so I care more about that subject!)
The dirty business of the USA in the region, involves high tech minerals such as Coltan. It is still going on. The resulting wars have killed at least 6 million. (If six million Africans die in a forest, does that make any noise in Washington?)
And Rice is directly implicated. Ms Rice may have had deeper motives than electoral ones in 1994, such as helping along Mr. Kagame (master mind of the guerilla that triggered the holocaust in Rwanda twenty five years ago, now dictator of Rwanda, and also master mind of the Coltan war that killed five millions, while feeding with weapons and money the M23 force invading Kivu, in Congo!)
As the United States’ representative to the United Nations, Susan Rice worked hard last year to block the release of a U.N. experts report detailing Rwandan atrocities in the Congo. To go around Rice, the report was leaked. Question: did Ms Rice get money from high tech companies or African “new leaders“? It certainly looks like it. She certainly did not get all this money from her government salary.
In September, Rice paid fervent tribute at the funeral of the late Ethiopian dictator, Meles Zenawi (who died unexpectedly at a relative young age). She praised the bloodthirsty plutocrat unreservedly as “uncommonly wise, able to see the big picture and the long game“. “Long game“, really? By long game, she apparently made a distinguished reference to all the dissidents and journalists who disappeared after being hunted down. In Polynesia human game was pudically called “long pig“.
We are very far from a proximal, global solution such as a worldwide, global carbon tax, right away. Instead the world has been put on a somewhat similar strategy to the one the USA followed in the 1920s and 1930s: have the USA pose as neutral, isolationist, while making a bad situation ever worse, in the hope that the ultimate cataclysm, just as in the 1940s, would turn to the advantage of the USA. Dream on.
For the sake of civilization, it is better not to nominate as Secretary of State someone with genocidal connections. If nothing else, it just looks so bad, that it boosts the prospects of Pluto. Indeed the more satanic behavior is in full view, fully rewarded, the more “We The People” gets used to be led by Satan. So it would be, by making the apparent queen of genocide the third in succession to the throne. Now, of course, this is exactly what plutocrats want, it would be another important step in habituating the commons to be overlorded by the Dark Side.
Many Tibetans feel, and it is arguable, that China is conducting a genocide in Tibet (there is a technical definition of “genocide” that seems to fit very well). The pain is so great that, this year alone, dozens of young Tibetans have killed themselves by fire, burning alive. How could China take seriously a Secretary of State that was, herself, involved with genocide? How could any other nation?
***
Patrice Ayme
***
Practical conclusion: Senator Kerry who is superbly qualified, and would have been elected president in 2004, but for G.W. Bush’s dirty tricks, should be nominated Secretary of State. BTW, differently from the conniving, conspiring Rice, Kerry was elected many times, and is senior senator of Massachuset.
Note: Starting in 1990, France intervened several times in Rwanda, trying to blunt the violence. Under UN mandate. In 1994, France evacuated civilians in Operation Amaryllis, and finished the Rwandan civil war with Operation Turquoise.
Tags: Corruption, Lice, Pollutocrats, Rice
Patrice Ayme's Thoughts 
December 10, 2012 at 8:14 am |
[…] Recommended Article FROM https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2012/12/10/no-rice-no-lice-no-dice/ […]
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December 10, 2012 at 12:32 pm |
The article is idiotic. If you want to start with evil, there are plenty of people to aim for first.
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December 10, 2012 at 5:22 pm |
dear Chris: Wow. Thank you for the frank and direct message. Indeed, so many people to aim for, one has to start somewhere. It is surprising that you know of plenty of people to aim first.
Having the third personality in rank in the USA government having apparently filled up her pockets from unsavory, polluting, or even genocidal policies, and connections, seems bad enough to me.
Funny that someone such as you, who always rages against alleged corruption in Europe, which involves only salaries and benefits you deem too large, and the lack of democracy, whereas in Ms. Rice you have somebody more rich than 99.99% of Europeans, just from a career as an unelected apparichtik, started in her twenties, while apparently guzzling astounding quantities of cash and other gifts, on a scale European polticians cannot approach (except when Goldman Sachs gets involved).
Can you please try to explain that striking dissonance?
It must be a hard day for you. The European Union got the Nobel Peace Prize, today, and, differently from the plutocratically connected Obama, fully deserved it. No organization deserved it more. Even Medecins sans Frontirers did not deserve it as much.
When one sees the hatred some unbalanced Brits are capable against Europe, while dreaming of Washington, one understands what a force for peace Europe has been.
Final point: the mental, civilizational and pecuniary corruption that seems to characterize a princeling such as Ms. Rice is found on similarly in other countries, and the phenomenon is gaining.
It did not just happen in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. It’s in full evidence in China, and there, clearly, a genocide is on-going (Tibetans do not like to use that semantics, lest they inflame the Chinese plutocrats further. But that’s what it is.) The phenomenon is global: the plutocratic phenomenon has new means of amplification, and we need to beat it back mighty quick, or then it will institutionalize the most barbaric methods. Not just torture and arbitary executions, worldwide, but even worse.
PA
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December 11, 2012 at 1:13 am |
If we were really serious, we would bomb The Cayman Islands, Lichtenstein, Monaco, and (sorry Patrice) Suisse. It is estimated that tax havens cheat the world’s governments out of 3 to 4 TRILLION dollars a year.
LEGALLY.
Since the USA makes up about 25% of world GDP, our fair share of this lost tax would completely cover our annual budget deficit.
We have seen the fiscal cliff – – and it is in the Cayman Islands.
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December 11, 2012 at 2:41 am |
dear OGP: You make much more sense than Chris! I too have long suggested that we could use force against fiscal havens. There is a long list of them. actually, Switzerland is very far from being the worst at this point. withing Europe certainly Luxembourg and the sub-British Channel Islands, Isle of Man, and especially the British Virgin Islands are so bad that even cameron got angry and some in Jersey threatened independence. As I said, 12 Royal Marines could solve that one. One French nuclear attack sub could close off the entire Caribbean sea (France has six of those, the USA two dozens or so!)
The truth is the opposite: Western plutocracy (and there is some even in France! Actually France has the greatest number of millionaires in Europe, and the preceding gov overlooked even the possession of entire Seychelle islnads by some of those…) Western plutocracy itself has organized the tax havens, and the non enforcement of the tax laws, except for the little guys (anyone withe less than a million dollar income).
For example when France suddenly realizes that Amazon did not pay huge taxes, starting in 2006, it’s clear that this has to do with switching from pluto friendly Sarko to less officially pluto friendly Hollande.
But I agree 100%…
Interestingly I do believe that some of the other problems that the governments are not fixing are not fixed, to be used as fixation obsessions. The govs do not solve them, so we only worry about the problems at hand, and are diverted away from the real number one problem: plutocracy metastizing.
This is totally obvious in the enraged behavior of many Brits, who accuse europe, which has little to do with their problems. Look at Chris: he foams at the mouth about obscure pathetically small Eurocrats with scandalously too cushy salaries (up to $250K), but then talking about the hyper rich and influential Rice is no dice.
PA
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December 11, 2012 at 3:56 am |
Patrice: Good to see you tell Rice the Lice to frack off.
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December 11, 2012 at 3:58 am |
Good way to put it, Olin! Frack Rice the Lice!
PA
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December 12, 2012 at 9:27 pm |
Patrice, recently I’d been wondering “what if the makers of the corruption index are corrupt?”! Triggered by a headline that Greece has become the most corrupt country in Europe, or similar, based on the index.
Of course this fits the neo-liberal fairy story that Greece is in economic meltdown because “it’s corrupt, nobody pays tax”. If so, then surely the UK is the most corrupt country – a well known tax haven where the rich pay hardly any tax. The Cayman Islands, Seychelles, Jersey , Guernsey, Turks & Caicos etc etc All famous tax havens. All British. (not Greek)
Then we have the news that the likes of Amazon and Starbucks make billions in the UK yet pay hardly any tax. And there is a list of huge corporations who all do the same.
Seems to me the corruption index makers must be corrupt themselves! The question is “how can we know that we are being told the truth and propaganda is only used by our Evil Enemies”?
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December 12, 2012 at 10:01 pm |
Dear Haxxan: You have made the splendid reasoning that only non corrupt minds can understand! It’s thus not curious that the smart boys at the Financial Times, The Economist, the New York Times, the WSJ, all USA media actually (not just Fox News!) cannot make the same reasoning! They are all corrupt!
In your impressive list about the UK’s tax havens, you did not mention the British Virgin Islands. Apple Inc ferries at least 100 billion dollars a year through those delectable isles! But, overall, the world’s top tax havens is the USA itself. Look at General Electric paying no taxes. Look at Delaware. An investor from anywhere in the world (except, in theory, the USA itself, although there are tricks!) can invest in fracking Wyoming, and pay less tax than in Switzerland… Protected by the Pentagon, and colossal hypocrisy.
In general all the new, highly profitable USA companies (Apple, Google, etc.) pay no tax, worldwide (same for the individuals at their helms). With the full knowledge and support of the USA government. The fact Obama just outlawed European law in Europe, about burning carbon is revealing of the degree of violence deployed by the exploiters in Washington.
So the corruption “numbers” are completely corrupt. This sort of corruption is all over. Say in educational comparisons. Elite students in some countries (say South Korea) get compared to run of the mill public school students (say in France), and the then the former are found superior… Thus the implicit allegation that French intellectual performance is mediocre, thus French critiques against the Washington order are corrupted by French stupidity.
International statistics are thus pervaded by propaganda (except, say, in health, where the truth is harder to distort).
And then, of course, with Ms. Rice, we now have the opportunity to get habituated to the idea that no pollution, no corruption, is high enough!
PA
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December 12, 2012 at 9:33 pm |
Thank you for the information. It is a question I have had ( how did they get so rich on the income they make)? The history of Ms. Rice is left out of our news cycle and in place we get emotional reactional stuff except for the mistake of Libia. Again thanks Johannah
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December 12, 2012 at 10:16 pm |
Thanks Johannah: Yes, I unsubscribed from several supposedly “liberal” that is “left” organizations, which were frantically propagandizing for Susan Rice in the last two days… they were doing that by running against Senator John McCain (!!!!!). I am no lover of McCain (I spent two years campaining for Obama in 2007-2008, with colossal sums of money, all my time, plus a crucial early book to explain to other media people that Obama was no Muslim, and his early formative years in Hawai’i!!!! I had an inside track.)
However, this lunatic propaganda for Rice, uninformed and howling, decidely showed to me that those ostensibly news outfits are just in charge of plutocratic propaganda (several of this sites already barred me from commenting, three years ago, without having ever explained why, although I asked!)
BTW, the Wall Street Journal (Murderoch’s own paper) has never (!!) censored me, but the New York Times censored me hundreds of times (although I am clearly on the left, they censor me often when I am critical of the left, and only then. For example I know any comment of mine critical of Rice would not be published, so I don’t even bother…)
Thanks for thanking me.
PA
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December 13, 2012 at 11:55 pm |
Congratulations! Did you hear the news? Rice is out! It did not take too long! How does it feel to lead from hiding behind?
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December 14, 2012 at 1:57 am |
Dear GMax1: Yes, well, that’s good. Making Rice Sec of State would have been an irreversible disaster, symbolically speaking. It’s very different from the law to outlaw European law Obama signed Nov 27… which actually depends upon what the airline secretary finds out, or decides reality to be… So it’s an empty bone; looks tough, no content. Machiavellism 101. Still, as a symbol, it looks bad for now…
PA
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December 14, 2012 at 10:35 pm |
Colette Ayme coletteayme@aol.com Lu aux 3/4! Et bien , Bravo Obama! ! Si toutes ses idées sont de cette trempe , on est mal parti. Heureusement que certains guettent et veillent. Bises M.
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December 15, 2012 at 3:05 am |
It should be read to the bitter end! Il n’est pas exclu qu’Obama soit un peu machiavellique! Susan Rice had been parachuted by the plutocratic establishment at the very top of the USA, more than 20 years ago. That’s has nothing to do with Obama, but everything to do with the master pupetteers who pull the strings from above. It’s these sort of controlling agents that the Kennedys did not keep in proper focus, as shown by the disastrous Bay of Pigs CIA/mafia operation.
Bises
PA
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December 15, 2012 at 3:10 am |
Patrice, I’m afraid that your response utterly misses the point that I was making. Forgive me for not having the time to respond in detail to the elements of your replies, perhaps later today.
The core of what I was offering is that all the anger in the world at all the governments in the world is pointless. The only way out of the terrible economic and ecological mess that we have got ourselves into is for each one of us to make changes to our lives NOW.
Such as:
Committing to reduce one’s energy usage by 10% each year,
Actively seeking ways to get from ‘A’ to ‘B’ in more efficient means – car sharing, buses, walking, bicycles and more,
Making a commitment never to use aircraft for transport ever again,
Installing solar heating and solar PV,
Turning the home thermostat down a touch and putting more blankets on the bed (or in our case having more dogs sleep on the bed!)
Better home insulation
Buy local
Grow local
and on and on and on.
It’s never going to be someone else’s issue, Sec Rice or not. All the plutocrats and politicians can drown in their own rising tides for all I care. It’s always going to be ‘What can I do?’
I love the passion of your writing but (and I’m sorry there’s a but) what would inspire me is what you are doing to reduce your footprint upon this planet.
Here endeth my rant!
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December 15, 2012 at 3:46 am |
Dear Paul: You seem to miss the difference between small and big. There is a famous saying in physics: MORE IS DIFFERENT.
You have seriously irritated me by saying in public (in Martin Lack’s “Lack of Environment“) that “I agree that frequent references by PA to the German Nazis are both bizarre and irrelevant“. That was totally more than bizarre and irrelevant itself, as Martin Lack had precisely used my oft made remark that the ecological war will kill up to 100 times more people than the Nazis did(that’s five billion, most of humankind). So Martin used my observation, and then you both howl to the moon, like two canids in love, that this has nothing to do with my “frequent references the German Nazis, both bizarre and irrelevant“…
That reminds me of the oft filmed scenes in Hollywood and Bollywood movies, of women who succumb to their seductors while saying:”No, no, no, no, never…” So I understand the need to affect revulsion while succumbing to the seduction of the coldest logic.
Since you like so much my “bizarre and irrelevant” Nazi scenes, shematics and comparisons, here is one, just for you. In it an analogy is made.
Eichmann famously treated Jews very correctly when he knew them personally. He paid a Jewish girl to give him Yiddish lessons (so he could better know his preys), he even went to Auschwitz when a jewish friend of his was put there, and asked his superior, Himmler, to make an exception. These were small things, they made Eichmann feel he was human and tried his best, according to Kant’s moral system.
Paradoxically those small things gave horror good conscience. Meanwhile Eichmann was organizing the killing of millions. Still, when he proposed the exchange of a million Jews against trucks, that was refused by Ben Gurion and the Brits. the latter obviously rejected the bigger picture. Ben Gurion cynically aggravated his case by saying that he preferred dead Jews to Jews going to Britain.
So MORE IS DIFFERENT. Dirty Rice, now defanged, is the very symbol of plutocrats filling their pockets while committing ecocide and genocide. Meanwhile you personally live, like an ancient English Lord, on a vast domain, complete with a torn off bridge. You are not even in the .1% who own a personal stream and bridge! Power to you, I envy you. I wish I could live like an ancient lord too, but I can’t because I so not have the means. But understand that living small, and ecologically minute, means being in a high rise, in some city, with an apartment so exposed to the sun in winter that the electric bill stays small.
So believe, my footprint is very small. I do not even gave myself the luxury of having one pet bird (of course I would not have a dog, as it would eat more meat than billions of human beings on this planet.
And, once again, what counts is the big picture. The USA has made a big big big choice: FRACKING TO THE MAX. it’s a huge deliberate strategy. Fracking is the ultimate military choice. Even the Swiss have understood that!
So you can come back to me, and tell me that your numerous dogs are now eating locally grown tofu, I know it would be “bizarre and irrelevant” What’s neither bizarre, nor irrelevant, is the USA has made the choice that is the most extractive and exploitative. I am not even criticizing, just observing…
More than small irrelevant gestures to give oneself good conscience, what really matters is understanding what is going on. physically, and psychologically, and strategically.
PA
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December 15, 2012 at 4:37 am |
Ah, I get it now, Patrice: You think the USA is embarking on a race – between it, Canada and Australia – to see who can sell the most finite resources to countries that still have money to spend? Unfortunately – for USA and Canada – this policy (of mistaking Nature’s capital for a source of income – E.F.Schumacher) has already proven erroneous. Therefore, albeit two years later than the rest of the developed World, Australia has now discovered that selling itself to the highest bidder just makes its economy look like that of Angola or Azerbaijan. In other words, this is not a race to become the next superpower; it is a race to the bottom. It is the last throw of the dice in what Schalk Cloete has identified as the Ponzi Scheme of globalised Capitalism, which will collapse when the less developed economies run out of money (as China now has done).
In search of the Lucky Country (7 June 2012)
Martin Lack
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December 15, 2012 at 5:52 am |
Dear Martin: You get it. Some of it. I disagree about the mumbo-jumbo on “capitalism”, “collapse”, etc. Marx had a restricted understanding of “Das Kapital”, and the collapse has been stridently predicted since. As a physical scientist, I think in term of energy. Fracking makes geopolitical sense, if one is cynical enough (you said as much yourself a few months ago). It is precisely because it makes sense, that it is so dangerous.
This being said, fracking, well done, could be used to KILL COAL, so maybe ecologists should use it that way. The swiss are proceeding full blast, and fracking there could start in 5 years. it’s not just Britain.
Nature’s capital has always been a source of income, and there is a race between exhausting it, and advanced tech.
PA
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December 15, 2012 at 5:30 pm |
Thank Patrice. I agree that Marx failed to acknowlwedge the reality of Limits to Growth just as much as did those he labelled as being obsessed with making money. As a physical scientist, I too think in terms of energy. I am not sure when I said fracking makes geopolitical sense but, I guess that, somewhere along the way, I acknowledged the realities that make politicians like George Osborne ignore the advice of experts within the Environment Agency and the Committee on Climate Change.
Fracking may well kill coal; the hysteria surrounding it (or global debt) has certainly now caused a slow-down in the mining boom in Australia. However, as numerous commentators have observed, fracking may have a small physical footprint on the Earth’s surface but, when you factor-in all the tanker journeys to convey the product to market, it does not have a low carbon footprint.
If nature’s capital “has always been a source of income” then, you could argue, we humans have been on an unsustainable resource depletion path from the day we started deforestation 7000 years ago. Either way, however, our problem today is that a 50% growth in the human population (from 7 to 10.5 billion) in the next 50 years has very little chance of being sustainable – unless we all stop eating meat and build an awful lot of solar-powered water desalination plants.
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December 15, 2012 at 5:37 pm |
Dear Martin: Humans have changed the Earth’s climate since they started to kill lions and forests so they could herd more cattle. Now that anthropogenic change is a super exponential, completely out of control. Civilizational crashes due to depleted resources are 5,000 years old (Sumer) and happened mainly in the Middle earth area, the most civilized place. We are in a race between advanced technology and a global depletion and extermination. Any optimal solution, looking forwards, will have to involve much more technology than just thermonuclear bombs.
PA
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December 17, 2012 at 3:54 pm |
Geologists are now referring to the “Anthropocene” age – i.e., the last 200 years of the Holocene era. They are convinced that archeologists many thousands of years from today will see our brief moment in time as a distinct layer in the strata of geological history.
I tend to agree.
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December 17, 2012 at 6:30 pm |
Dear OGP: Some paleoclimatologists say that it seems that the Anthropocene is rather like 8,000 years old. vast cattle herds managed by humans made lots of methane, which prevented serious cooling. Lions had to be killed first. The force of Pharaohs was closely associated to lions, and they would be buried with lions, just to make sure they had something to hunt, in the Great Beyond. Outside of the Nile Valley, the desert was getting ever worse.
When the pyramids were built, lots of wood for fire and construction was used, probably annihilating all the forests of the area, changing the climate (already dessicating by itself) irreversibly. So say the greatest Egyptian specialists. Today.
As far as I am concerned, the anthropocene was well started by the time, 50,000 years ago, when my ancestors the Neanderthals eliminated the formidable European Cave Bear.
Preparing a drastic essay on guns…
PA
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December 16, 2012 at 10:49 pm |
Rice’s prominent role in the Clinton Administration’s handling of the Rwandan genocide and later developments within the larger context of strategic meddling in Africa has been outed by French investigation journalist Pierre Péan in his recent book “Carnages”. While it can be (feebly) argued that this was done with the US’ best interests in mind, the picture of murderous cynicism which emerges is chilling.
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December 17, 2012 at 4:21 am |
Thanks Dominique! I did not know about this book. It’s clear that lady of hell personally enriched herself from genocide, and, if she does not like it, she can sue me. I did not know about that book. But, very clearly, the recent antics of Kagame and Uganda with Kivu are related to Rice, and it’s all terrible.
Anyway, she is out. She is finished. Her rage is astronomical. France lined up the entire United Nations Security Council to get the green light for attacking the Salafists in Mali (now more than 10,000 fighters!). 14 out of the 15 nations in the UNSC agree with France, and the French are going to visit Algeria to get Algeria on board too.
However, the USA blocked the UNSC from signing on France’s plan. Foaming at the mouth, Susan Rice, 48, USA ambassador to the UN, cabinet member, called the French plan “CRAP”, and vetoed it. I would suggest to indict her for aiding and abetting war crimes over decades…
BTW, that will not stop France, and war in Mali is just a matter of time. What needs to be done, needs to done.
PA
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January 10, 2013 at 3:13 am |
As always, I find your writings so thought provoking that I am not finished by the time you post something new. I remembered your references to John Kerry in this article and somewhere else that he wouldn’t be interested in building ketchup pipelines, but I ran across this article today and remembered vaguely the Heinz story in Venezuela. What are your thoughts on Hugo Chavez? And can we really trust even the husband of a plutocrat?
http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/13800-big-oil-big-ketchup-and-the-assassination-of-hugo-chavez?tmpl=component&print=1
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January 10, 2013 at 5:09 am |
Dear Richard: Thanks for the encouragement! And for the reference and the questions. First about Kerry: Let’s suppose Warren Buffet (about whom I have made a few nasty remarks) offered me a billion dollars as long as I would write the occasional fair and balanced essay about his case. I would do it. But if he asked me to stop writing, I would not agree. Similarly, if one proposed me 50 million dollars to enable African dictators, in the hope I would turn Rice-like, I would refuse.
My definition of plutocrat is more than the rule of wealth, it’s also the rule of Satan, the choice of the Dark side (more on those two concepts in essays soon).
Christ trashed wealth. But he respected Caesar. I think he exaggerated with both notions. Too critical of wealth, not enough of Caesar.
For example Howard Hughes was definitively a master of wealth, but he used it pretty well, not just to seduce movie stars, but also to build aircraft prototypes, some of which he piloted himself, setting records. Ultimately he set up the Hughes Foundation, which has been an asset for science, medecine and humanity (or so it seems at first sight).
The problem with Henry Ford, JP Morgan, the Harriman Brothers, and countless other USA plutocrats was their support of Hitler, and even setting up of Nazism, so intense and extensive that Nazism would probably never reached a critical mass without them.
Similarly the plutocratic owners of the Copper Company in Chile were not just rich and corrupting all the way to Washington. They helped set-up a civil war and bloody dictatorship (all this for having that company the largest copper company in the world and still nationalized, as Dr. Allende had it to start with!)
The question is not so much trust. For example Obama does nothing direct about the environment, he is a firefighter with a pail, while spaceship Earth is burning. We don’t need to trust them, we can just look at the facts of what they do. I expect Kerry and Hagel to be as reasonable as Washington can get.
Chavez will probably die of his cancer pretty soon (just a guess, but he seems to be doing real bad). The Supreme Court just said that it did not matter than he did not take the oath, so it looks like his VP will succeed him… I don’t know too well what to think of Chavez’s policies. Some are very good (genuine socialism), some are very bad (say oil subsidies).
There is more than one Chavez in South America nowadays. Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador have fully certified leftist leaders. Isabella de Argentina is a case of aggravated Peronism. I mean modernized Peronism. Even the plutocrat leading Columbia is not that bad (he is certainly better than the FARC!) I lived a bit in South America when the USA held it as a private backyard. A minister of justice of one the countries told me they could not do anything, because the Yankees would get them killed the first “Antiamerican” thing they did. And that guy was right wing and fully “Castillan” (white, from a plutocratic family).
That was then, this is now. Things have changed, and America del Sur is not the USA’s personal realm anymore. Verily, Chavez appeared after things had already changed, he was more consequence than cause. How did things change? Well, in part because of courageous commissions in Washington DC, like Sen Church’s commission. In part because of the ramping up in power of other powers than the USA, or of ideas, other than that of the USA’s when the later was really affected with bad manners…
PA
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January 10, 2013 at 3:40 pm |
Dear Patrice,
I much appreciate your insights, you are right to point out that yielding to the dark side is the sin, not the money. I hope you are right about Kerry he always seemed like a decent person. His confirmation hearing should be interesting. Swift boated but now embraced by conservatives. I just read that Eric Holder was a partner at Covington and Burling and represented Chiquita International against charges of supporting a terrorist organization, so I guess it’s not strange that he hasn’t pushed investigations of illegal renditions or torture or illegal CIA activities in South America.
Since I began recently trying to construct a consistent political philosophy after a lifetime of vague dualism, I often feel lost as the layers of “reality” are peeled away (often by you). You always provide insights at a deeper level I am slowly getting used to the idea that the best I can do is to try to determine who is acting from love and who is acting from greed or hate or ignorance. As someone once said: “never listen to what they say, just watch what they do”.
Thanks again,
Rich
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January 10, 2013 at 4:47 pm |
Dear Rich: Welcome to Comment Side (something a bit similar to the Dark Side) of this site! Yes, you point out at something very important, in connection with Holder, the INTERCONNECTIVITY OF POWER.
Let me give an example I touched upon relative to Rice, Susan. The situation in Rwanda.
Just today French Justice re-opened an enquiry about dramatic events surrounding the shooting down by (one ot two) missile(s) of the plane carrying the Rwandan and Burundi presidents. That launched the Rwanda holocaust in full. There is plenty of evidence that France and the USA were immersed in that to their eyeballs (See: Rice, Susan). So the plane was shot down. Withing 30 minutes, two French gendarmes and the wife of one of them were assassinated. A French doctor certified their death. Except we now know that this Dr. Thomas has certified that he never wrote that certification (and he can prove it!). Family of the deceased were made to sign documents under pressure. Why? The two gendarmes had special equipment, and they monitored the communications between the plane and the Kigali control tower.
This all smacks of the immense powers of a few, acting on the behalf of those living in really big mansions, and not flying commercial (thanks to Coltan, and other rare earths, etc.) And it’s not just about finding who did what and how on the behalf of whom: the war in Congo is going on, full blast. Just like a firm tightly incorporated to a western bank that pay no taxes whatsoever is spiriting most of the profits from the copper extraction in Zambia.
And the question is: did “decolonization” in Africa (among other places) consist into (mostly Western) plutocracy getting rid of bothersome administration by European governments (which blocked the titanic corruption we have observed ever since)…
As I will try to explain in an essay soon, the concept of the Dark Side sheds a light on a lot of (plutocratic) politics, while offering keys to how to eschew them.
I think Kerry and Hagel have seen a lot of the (figurative or literal) bodies buried and they know where they are, and they don’t approve wholeheartedly, so I think that these are pretty good choices, considering (short of making Chomski Sec. of Defense and Michael Moore Attorney General!)
Thanks again!
PA
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February 6, 2013 at 2:42 pm |
I’m impressed, I must say. Rarely do I come across a blog that’s equally educative and engaging, and let me tell
you, you have hit the nail on the head. The problem is something
which too few folks are speaking intelligently about.
Now i’m very happy that I found this in my hunt for something concerning this.
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April 9, 2013 at 8:37 pm |
[…] Jérôme would be just another wealthy politician, legal thoroughly, and cabinet minister. (See, Rice, Susan, for further edification; plutocracy is legal in the […]
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