Obama Unchained?


Abstract: Kneading a violent, but, sadly, factual movie of Tarantino with Obama in an explosive conceptual mixture…

Quentin Tarantino, in his best movie so far, explores how slavery worked in the USA. It exposes slavery as not just a grotesque paradigm of plutocracy, but also its essence.

The violence of slavery in the South was deliberately engineered to appear as insane and as terrorizing as possible. There was a deep reason for the apparent insanity. Insanity sometimes has its reasons that reasonable reason can’t reach.

(The reason for this is synonymous to the incompleteness theorems of metamathematics: the space of all reasons is bent, just as the cosmological universe is, and has an event horizon, for closely apparented…reasons.)

Crushing Infamy Wisdom Makes

Crushing Infamy Wisdom Makes


Insane violence, just as in Mali, where terrorists have destroyed hundreds of mosques (!) named to the collective patrimony of humanity by the United Nations, destroyed extremely old books, cut feet, hands, raping children [witnesses say], making “battlefield brides” from 10 year old girls, recruited 12 year old boys as soldiers, etc. And for the same… reason.

Confronted to such a degree of maniac violence, reasonable people tend to, well, reasonably submit, as the terrorists hoped, to start with. So criminal madness, made to look as mad as could be, is the force multiplier of ultimate oppression. A secondary enabler, in the particular case of the American South, was the American justice system, which pretty much rested on arbitrariness and ultra-violence, in an uneasy balance of evil with outlaws and slave masters.

Tarantino shows that the only way to advance out of the deepest infamy is to explode compromises, not to say compromission. President Lincoln was forced to draw the same conclusion.

The case of American slavery reached grotesque violence. Even greater, but righteous, violence was the only way to deal with it. This is the lesson of history. (The Civil War killed nearly a million, about 3% of the population.)

In Mali overrun by satanic terrorists, negotiating with those fanatics who value no life, not even their own, means to reconquer the country, using maximum force. Nothing short of this will do. Wisdom means using maximum force against those using maximum evil.

President Hollande said:”On me demande quoi faire avec les terroristes.[Short pause, as if the question was eerie]
Bien, LES DETRUIRE!” [Looking around bewildered, as if he could not believe he was asked to profer such an evidence.] (“I am asked what to do with the terrorists? Well, DESTROY THEM!”)

Destruction is how to deal with evil. Nothing else will do. Waiting too long with DESTROYING Hitler and his Nazis, just made it worse. And so it is always, with any genuine evil. the fact pacifists refuses to understand this makes them into evil collaborators, cowardly, but, even more fundamentally, plain lazy. Too lazy for brainwork.

Half of the word “plutocracy” is made of “evil”, let me insist to those who are overlooking the notion. Tarantino made a movie about plutocracy in action. That is, evil in action.

Obama, was, of course, elected to do away with plutocracy, but that aspect of his mandate long eluded him… even if it means violating his campaign promises (which were so compatible with my views in 2007-2008). (OK, now that he is on top of the crab heap, it’s much harder to do. Power does that; half of my family stopped talking to me, lest I indispose Obama, or the miserable crab heap below…)

In a tax deal, Obama just augmented taxes on salaried people, even some earning very little, but mostly eschewed taxing plutocrats & their corporations. A move in the wrong direction?

Will Obama emulate the fictional hero, Django, and unchain himself in more ways than one? The medical jury is out. The latest symptoms of Obamania are that the desire to be perceived by the masters as the only adult in the room, an infantile syndrome that Tarantino fingers extensively as fundamental to what made slavery possible, is still alive and well in Obama’s brain. Sad, oh so sad.

I advocated that for guns, Obama should open fire on the gun maniacs. He seems to be doing just this.
For the debt ceiling, what about emulating President Eisenhower, proclaim an emergency, and raise the tax on multimillionaires to 92%? There sure is a much worse emergency now.

We surely do not want that, when historians look at Obama’s reign, they just think: 1858 (explanation below). And, certainly, that’s not what Obama want, either? Time to get unchained!
***

SLAVERY WAS SYMBIOTIC WITH INSANE VIOLENCE, & THAT WAS DELIBERATE:
“Django Unchained”, is an excellent movie by Quentin Tarantino. Excellent, but mean, cruel, somewhat demented. The movie is addressing a set of facts, slavery in the USA. Mean, cruel, completely demented facts. Ingrained, set in stone. A galaxy of evil. That complete dementia enabled slavery’s nature, and nothing short of that would have done it. Tarantino is just depicting an insanity that was.

An insanity that was perfectly self sustainable. If the North had not destroyed the South, that evil was perfectly sustainable, it could have lasted 1,000 years.

We have an even worse dementia nowadays, when the leaders of the world, with their empty minds, believe that there is nothing wrong with burning 400 million years of accumulated carbon. Maybe they can personally profit, but their memories will not. Someday, no doubt, after 70% of humanity had to evacuate their homes from the rising acidic ocean, they will be viewed as the worst monsters history ever produced. Their names will live in infamy, long after Hitler’s name is forgotten.

Some have told me, in light of the primary school mass murder by a war weapon, that it was a sin to even mention such things, because, you know, they are so terrible. This exact reaction is what made Auschwitz possible: Hitler’s Germans did not want to talk about terrible things.
Web sites have even censored me for mentioning the gun problem! As if me, who has never touched a gun, was somehow culprit of atrocity by explicating, and condemning, the machinery behind the atrocity. Similarly, Tarantino is getting accused of guns and slavery, for showing both in action.

This confusion between fact and fiction irks me, and also irks Quentin Tarantino. And rightly so. Those who conflate critique and practice should get their heads examined.
The confusion between act, and practice, on one side, and fiction and analysis on the other, is how philosophers such as Sade or Nietzsche, and actually, pretty much all philosophers, have been identified with what they detected, analyzed, and condemned.

Carefully entertaining confusion between message and messenger is a tool of oppressors. The very first thing about the brain, is that the brain massages the message, while becoming a messenger of whatever it kneaded inside.

Conflating incoming data and brainwork on said data denies the very nature of the brain, and imposes crushing, self oppressing stupidity.

Back to “Django Unchained”. The movie is the occasion of making important points about civilization:

1) civilization comes and goes. The movie opens with two cow boy types mounted on horses brandishing big guns, while half dozen characters stumble between the riders, shuffling like hobbled penguins, all day long, and then deep in the freezing night of Texas. They are black slaves, their chaffed and bruised ankles, chained together. The grotesque spectacle is long depicted, as it is telling of the cruelty of slave traders. Slave traders were allowed by law over much of the USA in 1858.

2) when civilization goes, the degeneracy that follows hides below a veneer of the opposite of what it is.

The enslaving South was in the habit of fancying itself as somewhat French in taste. Masters called each others “cavaliers” (French for “riders”), and affected French manners. (A modern equivalent is Hitler, always talking about peace, and posing himself and Germany as victims; in truth the opposite of what was happening.)

As Tarantino points out, the upper society of the South did not know any French. It was offended to be reminded of this fact. Hiding behind a French veneer was how to fake civilization, when that enslaving society was just the opposite.

Under Merovingian queen Bathilde, an ex-slave, in 658 CE, slave trading had been outlawed in the gigantic Merovingian empire.

The slave trading depicted in “Django” happened exactly 1,200 years later. In other world, the upper society of the Southern USA was primitive, and offensive… By Merovingian standards!

Revealingly, I have met the same sort of character in the present day Silicon Valley. They waxed lyrical about French cheeses and wines, while flaunting their French ways, until, well, I hinted that the real thing, the real French culture, was about rationality, emotional, or not, first. Then, they hated me, without any limit, the exact effect Tarantino warns about in his movie. Over the decades, I had the dubious pleasure to experience this effect with 90% of the upper society people in the Bay Area who know where France is located.

Let me say in passing that, whereas the movie is fiction, the ambiance it describes in the enslaving South is not so. The World Socialist Website found the movie “miserable… pointless and stupid”. But, unfortunately and revealingly, that is just how it was in the USA then.

The ambiance depicted by Tarantino is a historical fact, and that is why the Secession War turned into the bloodiest civil war in the history of Western Civilization. Yes, plutocrats owned and whipped “niggers” and, to this day of today, if one has a drop of African blood, in the USA, one is black, that is “niger” in Latin. And yes, the oppressed themselves cooperate with that scheme, to this day of today, when they dutifully call themselves “niger” (“black”), when they are multiethnic, as much of humanity is.

Tarantino has no time to give a lecture on why the south fancied itself as French, precisely because it was the exact opposite of the spirit of France. But it is a historical fact that it did. However Tarantino gives an explicit pointer that this pseudo-French veneer is both fraudulent, and very important (and this pseudo French dashing incited arrogant Southern plutocrats to launch the Secession War):
The second main character in Django Unchained, a charming (and humanitarian!) bounty hunter, endowed with the power of law, points out to Mr. Candie, a plutocrat played by Leonardo DiCaprio, after seeing a black slave being torn by dogs:

“You name our main fighters after Alexandre Dumas’ characters, but Dumas would not have approved what you did today, to give a black man to dogs… You see, Dumas was black.”Candie has nothing to say to this. That Dumas, the very epitome of the Cavalier Spirit, was black would have been shattering to those who believed in racially justified slavery, had they known of the fact. And the truth is even worse: Dumas’s father, a mulatto, was one of the top general of France, and one of the most dashing “cavalier” who ever was.

3) Plutocrats of the South of the USA believed that their immense brutality and disregard for human life, including their own, would always allow themselves to dominate. This illusion was shattered with the tremendous cavalry charges of the Secession War. Top Southern generals, full of bullets, draining of their blood, kept on riding proudly as their boots filled with blood, giving orders. But, ultimately, they died. And the likes of them was never seen again.

4) Tarantino got somehow accused of the Newton primary school shooting, on the ground that Quentin depicts violence, so he is bad, and the shooting was bad. That, of course, is logic worthy of slightly unbalanced two years old, who can’t distinguish contemplation from participation.

Tarantino movies have long dialogues to expose this sort of demented, quirky two year old logic, upon which our world rests. Those who don’t like to think in depth find these dialogues deeply upsetting, because that is precisely how they think.

The great decisions to make war in Iraq and Afghanistan rested on two year old logic. And there may be hell to pay about them, because, not only were perfect defeats engineered at enormous cost, but the triumph of two year old logic was elevated for all to see. The problem with the latter, is that it can then be used by terrorists, or even other states (North Korea, China?).

Actually Pakistan, in its preceding attack against India used two year old logic for all to see. (To paraphrase: “We have nukes, so we know India will not attack us, whatever we do, so we may as well do whatever we want.”; this plutocratic logic will be unbounded, until the day comes when India prefers to risk nuclear war).

Another class of demented logic is the pseudo expertise, from complicated argument resting on imaginary data. We see a lot of this with today’s economic experts (“austerity was a panacea,” they said, until it bled the economy to death…)

In “Django Unchained”, Di Caprio makes a beautiful demonstration of demented pseudo-expertise, as he gives a lesson of phrenology. Phrenology was a 19 C pseudo science that explained the mind by looking at the geometry of skulls. There is nothing to it, it’s nearly completely false (I say nearly, because the Incas had found out that, by compressing foreheads tremendously they could create humanoid killing robots).

What DiCaprio wants to demonstrate, is that Africans are submissive and non creative. The rest of the movie is about demonstrating, with facts, the exact opposite. Django becomes immensely creative, and totally rebellious, as he proceeds to annihilate the entire estate of Mr. Candie.

It did not start this way. Initially Django is playing an Obama like character, silent, guarded, keeping to himself, somewhat motivated first by not making waves. Then he reveals himself to put justice above anything else, even his own safety (or that of his family, that is, his wife).

So is Mr. Tarantino saying that Obama could turn into somebody re-establishing justice? Is Tarantino hoping that Obama is going to turn into a real life Django? I sure hope so.

Fat chance? Obama seems still affected by playing the part of the Stephen character in “Django Unchained”. If I were president, at this point, I would drive the plutocrats crazy (French cooperation would be automatic, and other important European leaders would follow; the rest of the world could be forced into squeezing out plutocrats, or join Depardieu in Siberia, to be used as Mr. Putin’s carpet).

Yet, forcing the Plutos into submission is not what Obama is doing. He speaks as if he were, but… Obama solved the fiscal cliff by rising the taxes of people making less than 100,000 when he repelled the repel of the payroll tax. Also those with income of a few hundred thousand dollars (barely enough, say, in the Silicon Valley to buy a two bedroom house) saw their taxes augmenting by 10%.
But what of the true rich, the real plutocrats? Those who are not on salary, and can claim, through tricks, that they have no taxable income? Nada. They go on as before, using all the tricks that allow them to pay very little tax, or not at all.

I worked massively for the first Obama campaign for two years. I spent a huge amount of time and money (compensated by smiley photos with dear friend Obama).

Yet, by the time of Obama’s victory, in 2008, a pattern came in full evidence, and I wrote about it on my site, even then. The pattern was to talk one way, and act the opposite, at least in finance and economics. Thus, strangely, I have felt terrible for more than four years, as I contemplate the duplicity of the leaders, and the naivety of the masses bleating their approval of the shepherd.

So there was the fiscal cliff. It was proclaimed to be a victory of the People because taxes were raised on salaried income, and the payroll tax was cranked back up. Guess what? Plutocrats don’t have salaries and they are not on someone’s payroll.
And guess a bit more: all the tax evasion mechanisms of plutocrats and corporations were left intact.
Obama foams at the mouth about China manipulating its currency. But that’s not the problem with “China”.
“China” is just a Trojan Horse used by (mostly USA based) plutocracy.

On a $600 iphone, only ten (10) dollars go to China. But then Apple washes, cleans and rinses its giant profits through various tax havens (such as the British Virgin Islands), and the plutocrats, with various other tricks, such as borrowing instead of earning, escape taxation further. In the end, said plutocrats, now mimicking wise men, advise Obama to go on with his boy, Lew, and the USA becomes a generalized heaven for plutocrats. Thanks to havens the USA is becoming a heaven for plantation owners, satanic style.
Do you think the big donors who sat with Michelle Obama last year for the State Of The Union pay tax? No they don’t. Yet, every year they become richer, and thus more influential.

When he announced the “fiscal cliff” “compromise”, President Obama claimed that upper-income Americans would be paying their fair share. But he failed to fulfill a campaign promise to change part of the tax code that benefits some of the richest people in the country.

Some of the wealthiest Americans – such as private equity managers, hedge fund managers and venture capitalists – will continue to enjoy the tax code that allows them to avoid paying billions in taxes.
As the San Francisco Chronicle puts it:”In the Bay Area alone, employees of top money firms donated $6.7 million to federal candidates and political committees during the 2012 election cycle.
An analysis was performed for The Chronicle by MapLight, a nonprofit that analyzes the effects of money and politics… said Daniel G. Newman, president and co-founder of MapLight. “Millions in political contributions brought billions of tax breaks for some of the wealthiest people in America.”

More than four years ago, Obama promised that he would end the practice of taxing carried interest as capital gains instead of as regular income. Such a change could raise an estimated $13 billion to $20 billion over the next decade, and impact 36,000 to 65,000 people.
But Obama failed to live up to his 2008 promise, according to the nonpartisan fact-checkers at Politifact.com who recently rated it a “broken promise” of his first term.

What is even more worrisome is the would be nomination of Jack Lew as Sec. of the Treasury. Lew has an atrocious track record, as he was one of the instigators, under Clinton, of the deregulation of the financial derivatives. That diverted money creation to the exclusive profit of the bankers themselves, violating their fiduciary mission (which is to create money FOR the real economy, instead or for just themselves).
Lew is connected in a major way to worldwide plutocracy, that he served as director of wealth management at Citi. No less.

Lew got enormous bonuses, even after his bank had (just) been bailed out by the public.
Those are the people blocking the taxes (on them, plutocrats) which would alleviate the deficit. Remember that president Eisenhower, a republican, brought up the tax on millionaires to 92%. He did this, Ike said at the time, extinguish the World War Two debt. Why can’t Obama ask the hyper rich to pay 50% tax? I understand he cannot be as much of a leftist as Ike, but why not go half way?

Obama not only does not propose to do this. Not only did he augment taxes for the working stiff. But he left all the tax avoiding tricks of the plutocrats intact, those tricks that guarantee the blossoming of plutocracy at an exponential rate.
What’s the computation here?

Well, most often, plutocracy grows so fast that it overwhelms the resistance of the majority of the People, and it then rules without sharing much. This is what happened to Rome, what happened in all of Europe during the Middle Ages, etc.

In 2008, the USA voted for Obama, because it thought he would turn into Django Unchained. Instead Obama became all too friendly to the likes of Mr. Candie (Di Caprio).

Mr. Candie’s faithful servant, Stephen, is played, with great subtlety, by Samuel Johnson. Stephen has completely turned to the Dark Side, although he believes he serves good (“Candie never killed a nigger” he says, when enjoying knees shattered by Django’s bullets). Although black like charcoal, Stephen is whiter than the whites about white supremacy. Obama’s soothing words about having achieved tax fairness, just because he is taxing more salaried people reminds us of the sort of hypocrisy and non factuality with a straight face those who collaborate with the Dark Side are expert in.
One of the main property of Hades-Pluto is invisibility. A tradition pursued throughout the Middle Ages, when Satan was called “Le Malin”, “The Crafty One”. This means that the disguise of reality is fundamental to the Dark Side. Not only does it allow to mislead the innocent, but also to excuse, and enable the guilty.

We The People of the USA needed a Django in 2008. Some say we got a Stephen. Somebody who can sit in the rich back room, talking peer to peer with the plutocrat, thinking he does good by changing things as little as possible, as plutocrats get to know and appreciate him.
The Civil War started a couple of years after “Django”. The immediate reason is that the South seceded and fired on Federal forces, as any history book will say.

However why that happened has to do with a collective psychology in the South, that embraced Armageddon in an orgasm of hubris. That, in turn happened for reasons that have to do with plutocracy growing exponentially. An exponential growth of plutocracy is not just a blossom of riches and power, in ever fewer hands, but also, consequently, a blossom of madness. Plutocracy refuses their humanity to most, hence puts into question the human nature of those who undergo it.

Alexander (so called The Great) was very bold in battle. No wonder: he had adopted Oriental metaphysics. once he got hurt and blood flowed from his body. “Is that the blood of a god?” he wondered. his Greek companions laughed. No wonder Alexander became ever closer to the Persian (ex-)Royal family.
It is not just because excess makes mad, that plutocracy makes people mad. But the crazier the plutocracy, the crazier the justifications for it to keep on rolling up. If one is Stalin, and one kills millions of peasants, a lot of comrades and generals, one may as well keep on going, lest a new opposition gets empower, and that’s also why Mao got ever crazier. The “100 Flowers” were followed by the even nuttier “Cultural Revolution” the latter allowed to get rid of the opposition the former had created.

As readers can see I take seriously my general definition of “plutocracy”: a leader fond of the Dark Side is a plutocrat, and that goes all the way down to Mr. Candie and all his attendants and family. That’s why Django shoots Candie’s sister, in spite, but rather, because of her impeccable education and sensitivity (it’s a low dimensional sensitivity: it does not extent to “colored people”). So Django insists that proper goodbyes be given, before he cold bloodedly gives he r the hot lead she deserves in her midriff, as it is clear to him that polite formalism is all the depth these people have, and thus that superficial formalism is an enabler that should also be executed.

The hubris is explained by the necessity to be ever more cruel, brutal and arrogant as plutocracy augments, and singularizes itself. It becomes the pleasure of getting away with those sins, and even inverting all values, and exhibiting them as virtues. This mechanism shows that hubris is intimately related to the Dark Side.
The American South lived a collective madness. A madness so great, it could not have been conceived before; the Romans had slaves, but Roman slavery, although just as bad as American slavery, was not founded on the (crazy) concept of race.

Rome’s Severian dynasty was founded by Septimus Severus, a Libyan of Libyan descent from a Libyan senatorial family, who rose to supreme military command in Illyricum, before he re-established order to Rome with his legions (by stopping the chronic coup and circus of the Praetorian Guard).
The paradoxical result of the South’s hubris crisis was that, at the very end of the Civil War, slavery got outlawed.

So will Obama become Django, and unchains himself? Executive orders about the gun insanity in the present day USA is a good start. OK, the weapons of war madness is not as bad as the plutocratic insanity, but, as I explained in a previous essay, they are related.
And overall, they are supremely related by the metaprinciple of insanity being honored, unchallenged by reason, as if it is the supreme politeness to learn to respect it, no questions asked 9this politeness to insanity is one thing Tarantino targeted in his movie, as I explained).

Obama should go Django and start shooting liberally executive orders to explode the existing order. What does he have to fear? Nothing.

In the alternative, if Obama does nothing, and just sells himself like Clinton, let me tell him what’s going to happen. Plutocracy will not blossom for long. It will lead soon to disasters so great that today’s leaders will end worse than Dante ever imagined.
Ultimate wisdom for the human species is ultimate fighting, because only ultimate morality gives ultimate reason, thus terminal domination.

Such is the paradox of humanity. Love blossoms out of blood, when peace comes too short to allow a decent, comfortable enough existence.
***
Patrice Ayme

***

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21 Responses to “Obama Unchained?”

  1. EugenR Says:

    Dear Patrice, I am sorry, haven’t seen the film, yet i fully understand your argumentation. As to Obama, yes he has done to little in his first 4 years. He didn’t even approach the three major economic issues, and two major moral issue of US today.
    The first economic issues is, diffusion of the banking system (to big to be touched).
    The second economic issue is the corporate system of public companies, in which the executors work for themselves and not for the public owners, and even less for the general public.
    Finally the third economic issue is the enormous ever growing US trade deficit with Asian countries, that in its roots lays the need to satisfy the US public lust for more and more consumption. This lust is fully supported by all the political spectrum and the business community, even if it is created and financed by the provider of the cheap consuming products, the poor Asian workers, who earns max. 100 dollars a month.
    Non of these issues were addressed by the previous Obama administration. Yet as an economist i have to admit, when Obama did come to the office, the world economy was in a very big danger of total collapse. Any mistake could over flop the delicate economic balance. And then when the great danger seemed slowly to retreat, he had to come in terms with a hostile senate, whose only interest was to show to the US public, that none of “these kind of chaps” can run a country, and let the price and the price payer be whatever and whoever. If taken all this to consideration, he has done quite a good job after all.
    Yet, as to the moral questions, the first is the environmental un-sustainability problem of the today’s trends and the second problem is the unjustified uneven distribution of the wealth and standard of living, in USA itself and in between the US-Europe and the rest of the world. As to my opinion these two issues are interconnected, and deeply connected to the third economic issue i mentioned above, the unlimited lust for over consumption in the US (by the way also in Europe), subsidized by the poorest people on the earth. Obama has done nothing about it, (no end to subsidized fuel consumption, no WAT tax, to reduce over-consumption). As it seems, Obama has no intention to do anything about these issues in its next presidential term. The result will be, the worlds long term problems can will be kicked uphill for another four years.
    As to my opinion, the Banking system is already in process of change, just because the bank system as it is, is self destructive, and will be changed with or without government intervention. The corporate system can wait until one or two new Enrons will appear “out of the blue”, and it too will be at the end reformed.
    But the two moral problems and the trade deficit problem can be solved either by a independent revolutionary US president, with guts to do something about it, or by a world crisis, that only God knows, if or in what form the human civilization will come out of it.

    Like

    • Patrice Ayme Says:

      Dear Eugen: So your argument, as an economist, is that Obama could not throw down the entire structure. However bankers and other financial rats were treated much better than General Motors (also a financial company!) was. GM (de facto nationalized), and Chrysler (sold!) were treaten rough, whereas Obama kept on singing the praises of his friend, the crook Jamie Dimon (who just saw his “bonus” halfed, probably because he is still viewed as in bed with the president!, a non linear loop).

      when I see how wrong top economists can be , even those on the “liberal” side, Krugie Boy and Stiglitz, it’s hard to condemn Obama, as i know he came in, knowing nothing much, except that it looked good to celebrate the black mass in the Financial Times.

      Obama wanted, first, to be re-elected. He just crushed Romney partly, because of superstorm Sandy, which showed, for all to see, that many of the main arguments of the republicans were a recipe for (economic!) disaster (such as discontinuing FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management agency). Some of the most criticial republican governors (NJ’s Christie) were singing the praises of Obama in the last few days before the elections (because Obama threw immediately the full power of the Fed in the rescue operations).

      As far as the deficit is concerned, it’s artificial, in the sense that the deficit is mostly a plutocratic effect. Just as in Ancient Rome, the plutocrats have delocalized production overseas, and for the same basic reason, which is to make their bases SAFE FOR THEMSELVES: Chinese slaves to turn the screws, white populations doing nothing, knowing nought, and thoroughly impotent, just as the plebs in Rome.

      A few well placed taxes such as a (worldwide) carbon-arsenic-mercury tax (found OK by WTO) and social taxes (for compensating non respect of workers’ rights) would solve the crisis.

      But, there again, even the likes of Krugman and Christie understand rather the opposite of the truth. Globalization is no solution if all it means is termination of industrialization.

      If globalization was to be a plus, it HAD TO BE COMPENSATED BY NEO-INDUSTRIAL, NON EXPORTABLE PROGRAMS. Solar pannels is easy tech: proof; they are all built in China. Aircraft manufacturing (see 787) and nuclear energy generation are NO easy techs, and they are NOT exportable easily (the failing batteries of the 787 are made in Japan; the electrical system is French: Thales).

      So I have no problem with Obama.
      As long as he UNCHAINS himself. Now.
      PA

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    • Patrice Ayme Says:

      “But the two moral problems and the trade deficit problem can be solved either by a independent revolutionary US president, with guts to do something about it, or by a world crisis, that only God knows, if or in what form the human civilization will come out of it.”

      What I am proposing in “Obama Unchained”is that Obama become that leader, freeing himself from the chains of mediocrity and resiting the songs of plutocracy.
      I don’t think the planet can wait: the mispositioning of the USA drags the whole planet down the wrong road.
      PA

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      • EugenR Says:

        Obama Unchained? Sorry, a wishful thinking.
        What worries me most is that you don’t think the planet can wait another 4 years, Who if not you should know, how the things in reality are.
        As to trade deficit, viz. my article;

        How bad is the accumulated US debt to the world economy?-

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        • Patrice Ayme Says:

          Dear Eugen: I left a comment on debt on your site (it’s TOO little, BTW… ;-)!) Debt is a Trojan Horse.
          OK, Obama Unchained maybe wishful thinking. But: NO HOPE, NO LIFE!

          Within 4 years, at the present rate, we will be past the tipping point of massive oceanic rise, and massive releases of CO2 and CH4 from the tundra (we should be around 470 ppm in CO2 equivalents!). Let alone the other problems.
          PA

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          • EugenR Says:

            Dear Patrice, thank you for the comment on my site. If any questions about the total US debt, you can find the answer in the Federal Reserve publication. Start to read from page 64.

            Click to access z1.pdf

            The federal government debt increased from about 5 trillion US$ at 2007 to more than 11 trillion US$ at III quarter of 2012. Additional 3 trillion US$ debt have the states.
            The rest of the world holds gross 9.4 trillion US$ debts and after reducing from it their debt it will be about 7 trillion US$. Of course not all the debts are federal government debts, but does it really matter? After all the US economy will have to repay it.
            For comfort you can say the US assets far exceed this amount. I read, it is estimated to be about 120 trillion US$. So it is still a very long way to go, until US will be entirely impoverished.
            You correctly said, China and the US are tightly interlocked, i am just not sure if it is a hug of love or hug of wrestlers.

            By the way, the total US GDP is about 15 trillion US$.

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          • Patrice Ayme Says:

            Dear Eugen: Total Fed debt is 16.5 trillion. Lower numbers are obtained by ignoring roughly half the debt. I had that debate with Krugman for years, but he published the following within twenty seconds today, so I think he now agrees:

            “””The primary deficit is 7%. That means the debt augments by 7% of GDP a year. What’s wrong, what’s right wing with doing what President Eisenhower did, and, yikes, rise the tax on the hyper rich to 92.5%?
            Instead of keeping on borrowing against Social Security and Medicare?”””

            I will look in the Fed link you gave, thanks.
            PA

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          • Patrice Ayme Says:

            Dear Eugen: From the Fed introduction:
            “State and local government debt, which had declined
            in 2011 and increased modestly in the second quarter,
            was nearly flat in the third quarter. Federal
            government debt rose at an annual rate of 6 ¼ percent
            in the third quarter, about half the average rate of
            change of the previous four quarters.
            At the end of the third quarter of 2012, the level of
            domestic nonfinancial debt outstanding was $39.3
            trillion, of which household debt was $12.9 trillion,
            nonfinancial business debt was $12.1 trillion, and
            total government debt was $14.3 trillion.”

            I don’t know how Fed gets to 14.3. Debt authorized was 16.4 Trillion dollars, and that was passed january 4, 2013.
            PA

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  2. Chris Snuggs Says:

    Elected too young, for the wrong reasons … a gutless windbag who has achieved NOTHING in Palestine, under whom debt continues to increase, society become ever more fractured, the American dream ever more illusory. Lincoln Mark II, he ain’t …

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    • Patrice Ayme Says:

      Chris: Elected too young, sure. He should have talked with me more, first. Instead he got seduced by the rich folks, down in the Silicon Valley, many of them planted by the powers that be. Yes, planted. When one sees that the girl who used to sleep with summer and made it big down there, in one of the “tech” companies, now a billionaire, is considered for secretary of something, it’s real slick, and real sick.

      And unfortunately, the peril nowadays is much greater than in Lincoln’s time. Lincoln had enormous courage about something less obvious. Obama risks very little by putting a worldwide carbon tax. Or rising taxes above Eisenhower.
      PA

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  3. pendantry Says:

    Hi Patrice. As usual, I’m sorry to admit to not having the stamina to read all of your long post. I will, however, say this: never forget that guns don’t kill people; people with guns kills people (far more effectively than people without them). It’s very important to fail big for the win.

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    • Patrice Ayme Says:

      Dear Pedantry: I do not do posts. Posts are about repeating the same old tired ideas, without much explanatory support. The addiction to “posts” makes thinking a dirty word, and conflates it with unsupported slogans. Anyway, thanks for telling the truth…

      I am a philosopher, I write essays. Each is like a little book. In older times, that’s exactly what they would have been called. literary works sometimes comprised 30 “books”.

      In other news, according to some, nukes don’t kill people, people with nukes kill people. So, for example, after a Uranium 235 bullet smashed into a Uranium 235 hemisphere above Hiroshima, according to gun enthusiasts, people with guns (????) started to kill 200,000 people or so, over the next few years?
      Let’s defend the right to bear nukes.

      I thoroughly demolished the “war weapons” arguments in 2 long essays, leaving no objections unturned (around 8,000 words, one tenth of the Qur’an). I do not expect people who can’t follow brain activity beyond a few lines to understand anything I say (I am also used to that, having lived through it in science!). Like terrorists in Mali, they will have to be rolled over. I am happy to see Obama doing exactly what I suggested, about guns, though… I guess he has the stamina to read until the end of 5,000 words… I will read your article.
      PA

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      • pendantry Says:

        So sad. I can only repeat the old mantra: “I know that you believe you understand what you think I said, but I’m not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.”

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        • Patrice Ayme Says:

          Pedantry: So sad you can only repeat slogans, instead of telling me in a few words what I did not understand. I just pointed out that it is an atomic bomb that killed people at Hiroshima. And then you tell me that I did not understand that you meant that people kill people. Another post, another slogan.
          All I know is that Paul Handover censored me when I mentioned the “gun problem” and that is not admissible. (The New York Times has censored hundreds of my comments).

          Those who can reason only by slogans belong to the dogs, or rather the wolves, howling together. Let them howl, and be sad.
          They are not thinkers, just howlers.
          Howling we do not need anymore, there is plenty of it already.
          PA

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    • Patrice Ayme Says:

      dear Pedantry (second try, the first was crashed by WordPress). What you are saying in your poem/post is that the bigger the crime, the kinder the regards to it. Sure, but the story does not stop there, that would be too unfair, and primates don’t tolerate unfairness. The devil hides in the complexities of the logic involved. The vulnerabilities hide as flaws of the logical flow, and that is why neither posting nor posing can beat intelligence.
      PA

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  4. Dominique Deux Says:

    I’ll certainly go and see the movie in the light you suggest. It’s not everyday one can gulp down a bellyful of cathartic gore with a nice excuse.

    I’m afraid however that as far as Obama is concerned, the New Yorker cover is much closer to the point (Jan 21).

    Like

    • EugenR Says:

      From time to time i would like to be a cat !!!

      When pushed away,
      he moves to a new lap,
      without grudge, without enmity, without resentment,
      until he is expelled again.

      Then he sits to the former lap again,
      there he rubs, gurgles, pleases himself,
      until he is kicked again,
      this he ignores, as if it did not concern him at all.

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      • Patrice Ayme Says:

        Dear Eugen: Sorry that you know such a rough master! ;-)! But come to think of it, indeed, that’s what happens to most cats, and they react to it in the most appropriate way, with regal indifference…
        Speaking of cats, it will be amusing to see Krugman (a leading light in this obscure forest where fireflies shine bright!) change his music about debt… Now that he seems, finally, to have accepted that borrowing for the general fund MASSIVELY against medicare and Social Security is not very “liberal”.
        PA

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    • Patrice Ayme Says:

      Dear Dominique: I went to find the New Yorker cover, which represents Obama herding cats. Well, he carefully grew the feline spirit among the plutocratic sheep of Congress (most of them very very rich). It’s all a travesty. If Obama wants to lead, he has to lead by debate, and he can use executive orders, vetos and the like.
      For example when Congress presented him with a law outlawing the European carbon tax on planes, Obama could have vetoed that. But the bottom line is that he does not really believe the house he is renting in Kilua will go under water, because of what HE is doing. And if he did, he socializes with a crowd of semi-intelligent people who would just smirk, and say they will just move uphill… I know some of them, they could never have aligned two important thoughts in a row.
      PA

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    • Patrice Ayme Says:

      Dominique: Granted, that’s a supplementary reason to see gore. However, there is always an excuse to see gore, namely that’s how the drastic things tend to get done. Example: the Obama administration’s gory secret committee to execute USA citizens according to secret guidelines, is an example of gore (one of the USA citizens killed was 15, a child, or so, I read… well, he played on a beach). Moral gore is worse than gory gore…
      PA

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