Strikes Against Civilization

Dramatis Personae: Obama, Tyranosopher, and assorted characters meet in hell to discuss Obama’s “Signature Strikes”, the bombing by killer robots, of crowds of unknown people, on the chance an enemy would die.

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 Obama, face contorted by contradictory emotions, affects not to understand the strikes in Boston: “Why did young men who grew up and studied here, as part of our communities and our country, resort to such violence?… We will determine what happened. We will investigate any associations that these terrorists may have had.”

 Tyranosopher: The deepest association is with the breakdown of the spirit of the State of Law. In the West, now, as it happened 2,000 years ago, the spirit of republican law, equality, has broken down. Galla Placidia, made the “association” that counts.

Galla & Socrates: Absolute Power To Law Only

 Galla reigned as a Roman empress, for more than three times as long as you will be president, and in much more trying times. She was acutely aware that the notion of State of Law was the fundamental bedrock of the State, and wrote eloquently about it.

 She explained that it is the Law, not individuals, who should reign. Equal law. Thus the law should apply absolutely, even to the absolute sovereign. The embodiment of the enforcement of this is the International Criminal Court.

 Treat people unequal, they will treat you unequal.

 Brainy Salafist: Obama, you have shown us the way. Killing civilians, you know nothing about, calling assassination of the innocent fighting terrorism. Hiding perfidiously, but ineffectually, behind the CIA to commit acts of wars against Pakistan, as the sedate New York Times’ editorial board pointed out in April 2013. 

 While you, in your unfathomable stupidly, advertized worldwide that you approved every single strike, as if you were anxious to be the first ever Nobel Peace laureate prosecuted for war crimes.

 Obama: I am the leader of the Greatest Nation on Earth, under God. That makes me infallible. Plus we the leaders of the USA have been careful to refuse to recognize the International Criminal Court.

 Brainy Salafist: Thus you, Obama, are just a mafioso leveraging “A Secret Deal on Drones, Sealed in Blood“ (New York Times, April 2013 again). These “Signature Strikes” and “Crowd Killing” your National Security adviser and now CIA head, Brennan, obliquely confirmed their existence in front of the Senate. Many of your associates, Obama’s associates, have confirmed the existence of an association, the Assassination Panel at the White House. So we, the Salafists, imitate you, and kill people we know nothing about. Thanks for teaching us. We call it fighting terrorism too.

 Tyranosopher: Yes, an official assassination panel is something unparalleled in the history of all and any known states. Yet, after the Boston bombing you, Obama, declared that any bombing of civilians was an act of terror. But that’s what your “Signature Strikes” and “Crowd Killing” are all about. 

 Obama: I was shocked  when I became president, and I found out about “Signature Strikes” and “Crowd Killing”. But that’s the only game in town, and I am a team player. It works. We killed thousands of terrorists, using them.

 Tyranosopher: Try to pay attention to your own sick sport semantics. It’s not a game. Killing people does not make you player in a team. You were right to be shocked. Now you are shocking.

 Napoleon, Corsican dictator: “Even in war, moral power is to physical as three parts in one.” “Signature Strikes” bomb the USA’s moral power. The more you use them, the weaker you get. Your “Signature Strikes” are an anti-American strategy.

  Brainy Salafist: Obama you told us terror is the way. We want to be like you when we grow up. We want to do hundreds of “Signature Strikes“, on your territory, as you did, on ours, the House of Peace.

 Tyranosopher: Mr. President, I am afraid Salafists have been associating with the own past behavior of the USA, “Signature Strikes” its latest symbol. This is what a full enquiry would reveal.

 The notion of military-industrial complex was introduced by Eisenhower, as the greatest danger for the USA. At the height of the Cold War! Now we have something worse, the notion of enemy-industrial complex. It looks as if some in the government of the USA consider that to make sure of having enemies is the best way to have an industry.

 Obama: I did not start the violence in the Middle East.

 Tyranosopher: You sure did not. Arguably, from his own declarations, Muhammad started it, for the present period, in the sense that he revealed to his followers that the Persian-Babylonian-Zoroasthrian and Greco-Roman empires were exhausted, and could collapse if struck vigorously, hence allowing the Arabs to re-instigate the raiding they had been deprived of for more than a millennium.

 Young Salafist: Watch it, Tyranosopher, don’t you insult the Prophet! The Prophet is all I dream about, all the time, wet or not.

 Tyranosopher: You know very well, Young Salafist brimming with uncontrolled hormones, that this is what the fundamental Muslim texts say. Muhammad’s analysis was astute. The Greco-Roman and Persian empires were culprit each in their own way, of the tremendous war they made to each other, and they were on their knees. Muhammad’s hatred of the Jews grew from the Christians’ hatred of the Jews.

 By the way, if I want to insult long dead characters, I have the right to do so, according to my own religion.

 Young Salafist: You don’t have a religion, you believe in nothing, you insult everybody, even your friend Obama.

 Tyranosopher: Quite the opposite, I am helping everybody, by telling the truth. I believe in truth, and I believe in desperately searching for truth. That makes me a follower of the second most fundamental religion of man. And I subscribe to the first one, too, love.

 The truth is that Muhammad came from a prominent family in Mecca, but differently from the rest of them, was an analphabet. Somebody less charitable than me may think that had to do with his tough youth, and attending neurological problems he may have suffered from, PBUH! 

 Young Salafist: Spare me the sarcasm. Peace Be Upon Him, that man I dream about all the time.

 Tyranosopher: Are you gay? I find you rather sad. In any case, Muhammad gave too much of a military mien to Islam. But then, he had to, or Islam would not be on the map. After all, it’s the Roman military dictatorship, that decided to put Christianity, or, more exactly “Orthodox Catholicism”, on the map, and in command. They did so in a disastrous way. Later, the Franks found the right way: use the Church, to impose… progressive secularism.

 Obama: Can you guys come back to the subject at hand? Why such violence? Why couldn’t they all just play basket ball? That’s what I did, look where I am!

 Tyranosopher: Don’t worry the reservoir of potential Salafists inside the USA is a small fraction of that it is in a country such as France. One will hold them back with the idea of the republic, not by taking their rights away, even before judging them.

 You, Obama, could afford to not take your studies seriously. You were the missing link. Your life experience was, from the start, out of the ordinary. You lived in a mansion in Indonesia, with servants’ quarters. You went to the top private school in Hawai’i, Punahou. You also went to Harvard, same as your father, and, because your father had been there (“legacy admission“). Harvard is where the leaders are selected, and the spider web of worldwide leaders is set-up. Most recent USA presidents came from the Ivy League. Aka the Evil League.

 Even the guy who organized Pearl Harbor, the head of the imperial navy, admiral Yamamoto, went to Harvard. Speak of a guy who “studied here”! And let me exceptionally not mention the Nazis.

 It’s not about smarts, but about connections with wealth, as an owner, look at the Bushes, Kennedys, or… as a servant. For compliance, look at Bill Clinton, who did exactly what Goldman-Sachs told him to do, in a Faustian contract. Clinton went to Yale, still Ivy League.

 The contract made him swear. But he did what he was told to do, namely to deregulate finance in a way never seen before in the history of civilization. The total devolution of the public to the private. OK, something like that happened to the republic in Florence, when it turned into “The Prince”, plutocracy, basically a few private banks. (But then notice that Italy fell off civilization for several centuries.) So now here we are, neo-feudalism coalescing.

 Harvard plays into a form of violence. Its connection with various bloody dictators were left unpunished, even unpublished. In economics, many of its professors have published academic papers claiming that transferring more assets to rich people was what the Harvard doctors recommended (allusion to austerity propaganda from famous Harvard professors: Reinhart. Rogoff, Alesina, Ardagna).

 Under the guise of fair, balanced, learned, equal opportunity, extremely stealthy methods of vicious exploitation have been invented. They are different from those denounced in the past, in the period from 1648 (year of parliamentary revolutions in England and Paris, La Fondre) until Proudhon, Marx, etc.

 Obama: Once again Tyranosopher you are drifting through an immense historical landscape that seems to have nothing to do with the Jihadists in our midst.

 Tyranosopher: The most important connections are the ones that have not been made explicit yet, because they are deeper.

 As I was saying, the USA outsmarted the Western European powers, partly deliberately, partly by serendipity, in a sort of selection of the most effective behaviors, however devious. Devious support, by the USA, for the worst of Islam was crucial, in the rise of the present day Jihadism.

 Young Jihadist: See, Obama, you are devious, even though you don’t know about it.

 Tyranosopher: A preferred devious method, has been the traditional one of dividing to conquer. To enact these divisions, support was given to extremely violent enemies of “American” values. Including various fascists, in particular the Soviets, the Nazis, and violently regressive Islamists. Those enemies of the USA turned out to be its best tools. 

 Such fascist embodiments are unsustainable, making them valuable. The mess they create leads to divisions, hence easy pickings. Since 1945, contrarily to the cautious policies of Britain and France, Roosevelt’s USA threw its mighty support to Salafists, starting with the Saudis. (For comparison, the Brits annihilated the fiercest Wahhabist army, not even two decades prior; most of the 9/11 highjackers were Saudis.)

 CIA support was given to Khomeini’s followers, in 1953, and still later to Pakistani Fundamentalists, then to bin Laden (and the SIA), etc.. Thus we see it was more than a plot. It was a plotted strategy, that unfolded over 60 years (the support of Bush II for various Muslim extremists in Iraq was a continuation of that strategy: let the museums and archeological sites be looted, help the fanatics, bury the secularists).

 This strategy is coming to an end for diverse reasons. Terror by drones the way practiced presently by the Obama administration tries to extend it, but it is not sustainable. However, it’s causing, long term, tremendous civilizational damage. The West is losing credibility.

 Obama: “Civilizational damage”? What kind of weird notion is this?

 Tyranosopher: Civilizational standards are not just what make a civilization worth defending. They constitute a fundamental military asset, as Nap said. Civilizational standards are how the Athenians won at Marathon, or Salamis against the immense might of the giant Persian empire. On the verso, uncowed Sparta vanished from history, because its civilization was racist and plutocratic, something that leads to unrecoverable stupidity, among other problems.

 The drone program may have killed only a few thousand people, but the bombing of civilization itself it wrought is unequalled. (Although it may still be reverted at this point, should one be contrite enough about it.)

 Faisal Shahzad, USA citizen of Pakistani origin: “I entered a 2010 guilty plea, to try to set off a car bomb in Times Square, and I justify targeting civilians by telling the judge, ‘When the drones hit, they don’t see children’.

 Obama: I am the leader of the Greatest Nation on Earth, under God. I say this all the time. Pay attention. I am not your average terrorist.

 Tyranosopher: You call the ones you killed, terrorists. Just like in Vietnam. However, the law says that people are innocent, until proven to be terrorists. So you do not respect the most fundamental pre-condition to law, namely that punishment never precedes conviction.

 We know for example that a 16 year old USA born citizen was killed on a beach in a USA drone attack (apparently with a number of other teens), in one of the “Signature Strikes”.  Such an assassination, in the name of civilization, is the signature of a failed civilization. For such a crime, in old republican Rome, you would have been executed the “old fashion way“. (The one Roman president Nero was condemned to by the Senate.)

 Where are the excuses for that, killing boys having fun on a beach? Where is the enquiry? Or do you, Obama, president of the USA, consider, justify and order, killing teens on beaches on the other side of the planet? Explain to me why this is not much worse than the worse pedophilia?

 Obama: As I always say, I am the leader of the Greatest Nation on Earth, under God. I am not a terrorist, by definition, but the very definition of respectability. Fear me.

 Young Salafist: If we killed you, Obama, you, and your followers would not be as respected. However we will not kill you, because you are our best agent. We kill for the Greatest Religion on Earth, in the name of the one and only God. We are not stuck in one nation, our house is the House of the rising Sun, the House Of Peace, the Ummah. My universal God is better than your national god. Watch me and other martyrs die for it.

  Obama: You can’t kill me, I am invincible. Wherever I go, there is an army protecting me. Same for my family. Taxpayers will support me and my family forever, making me forever invincible. As they did with other great USA leaders.

 Tyranosopher: Our Salafist friend here is correct, Greatest Religion beats “Greatest Nation”.  Mr. President, you are too fond of calling the USA “the greatest notion of Earth”. This does not serve the country well. Not at all.

 Obama, laughing: Nation, not notion. Keep your words cogent.

 Tyranosopher: Calling the USA “the greatest nation on Earth” is not just a ridiculous notion. It is also extremely dangerous. There is a plethora of examples in history about the extreme lethality of nationalistic hubris. Athens went down that road to hell.

 Obama: I will remember you for the next drone kill list. See who is lethal.

 Tyranosopher: You feel lethal, as a child, but supreme thoughts kill better. All you are doing, is messing up civilization. Killing crowds, just because some enemies may be there, is the end of any pretense to civilized behavior. Flaunting it, is an attitude that aggravates the practice. 

 The USA is not the first democracy proclaiming, urbi et orbi, that it had a right to kill innocent civilians. It never ended well. it’s a philosophical red line. When a civilization crosses it, it dies. Such a murderous hubris was the proximal cause of Athens’ downfall.

 “Signature strikes” the killing of civilians associated by mere physical proximity, is as low a notion as humanity ever got. You do not even pretend to hate them, or that you want to eat them.

 In the hierarchy of anti-civilizational values, “Signature Strikes” are lower than torture, because torture comes from giving some value to the person one tortures. One values the knowledge that person may have, or one appreciates the pain one inflicts to them, or one values theirmind enough to break it.

 Signature strikes are lower than hate crimes. Signature strikes are lower than even cannibalism. Signature strikes are all about smitting people utterly, as if they were insects.

 Signature strikes makes the president of the USA in a devil Picasso, signing horror with pride of office. It’s beyond terrorism. It enrages people worldwide so much, it does not even bring terror. It only brings horror for the absence of values you embody. It deserves a new name, horrorism. 

 American historian of the racist type: Tyranosopher, I would hate to call you naïve. Yet, face the facts: in WWII, we imprisoned citizens of the USA of second and third generation, if they had some Japanese ancestors. It was brutal. But the reputation of the USA as a brutal power serves the USA well. If, centuries ago, the European colons in North America had not killed nearly all the Natives, the USA would be like Bolivia or Peru. Look even at Mexico: by 1600CE, there were basically only a million natives left. Too many. Now Mexico is like half Indian.

 Tyranosopher: I am not naïve, just the opposite, you are. What worked before, to establish an empire, against naïve Neolithic Natives, can have the exact opposite effect, trying to grab resources from the rest of the world. each “Signature Strike” may kill one hater of the West, and create ten thousands. Better get your anti-missiles working well against Pakistani ICBMs…

 Herodotus, Greek historian: A more general problem is that, by deciding who, among citizens of the USA, would live or die, at your own whim, Obama, you have made yourself, symbollically and practically, into what the Greeks called a tyrannos, a tyrant. As I said of the Athenians under tyranny: …”they let themselves be beaten, since they worked for a master…” To establish new wisdom as Tyranosopher does, one has to be unique. But when a politician reigns as one, that’s a tyrant.

  Obama: Signatures strikes are effective. They show the power of the USA. Not only we can do it physically, but we have the moral strength to do it.

  Tyranosopher: Tyrannies are always short term effective. You do not know what “moral” means. It means: “sustainable”. A traditional war, although with supersonic bombers, drones and smart bombs, as the French republic does in Mali, is indefinitively sustainable, fair and square. But the French fight warriors, on the battlefield. They are not killing crowds of unknown people, not fighting anybody. That earns them respect, even from their enemies.

  Whereas Carthage, long a top civilization, was undone by its immoral morality, killing innocent children. You are making the USA into a modern Carthage.

  Obama: Carthage was defeated by Roman armies, not morals.

  Tyranosopher: Conventional wisdom, the seduction of the superficial, that’s what you want to overcome. Instruct yourself, young man, lest you came to be known as Obabad. The Greeks called barbararians ba-ba, because they thought like children. You add badness to the mix. Obabad.

 The planned annihilation of Carthage in a Third Punic war, was hotly debated in the Roman Senate. Many, including the imperator put in command of the destroying army, were fully aware that Rome was crossing a philosophical red line. That transgression could, and even would, bring Rome’s destruction. This was said explicitly at the time (source: Polybius). The tough-as-diamond Roman imperator cried, as he saw the great metropolis burn under the extermination assault of his crack legions. he knew Rome was sealing her fate.

  Yet, it was foreordained. The fact that Carthage had sacrificed children to the fire made the difference, in the minds of the Roman senators and the military. It was the excuse that allowed to forget the real reason for wanting the annihilation of Carthage.

  You, Obama, sacrifice children to the fire, including the occasional, highly symbolic American child. Killing other people’s children, on the other side of the earth, does not make it any less so.

  Don’t deny.

  If you insist to deny that you are flaunting child killing as a new bedrock for civilization, then make full light about who, among your drone people, decided to kill that 16 year old American born boy, and how. And if it was a honest mistake, so to speak, let’s confront it. Only then can you talk to history with an honest face.

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Patrice Ayme

Indebted To Lies Plutocracy Is

A vast scandal is unfolding in economics. Its repercussions are horrendous: in conjunction with what i already denounced in “Indebted To Lies” (February 12, 2013), all you read about debt is false. As Paul Krugman puts it cogently in “The Excel Depression“: “Did an Excel coding error destroy the economies of the Western world?”

Krugman is way too nice. There was not just a coding “error”. The deliberate malfeasance I expose below is no error.

(Notice that Krugman seems to be oozing towards admitting that we have (an excel…lent?) depression not just a lesser one; soon he will have to call the unfolding disaster a Greater Depression, just as I do!)

Harvard: We Lie, Therefore We Thrive

Notice the understatement of the Wall Street Journal (“are not as clearly linked“), in their own caption above: there is little relation between growth and debt load. And this, even in the malevolently selected countries of the extremely influential R-R paper (to be trashed below).

Also notice the biased title of the WSJ, which contradicts the essence of what follows it: the WSJ staff knows readers have little time, and, at a glance, will extract from the graph (that they will most probably not carefully examine), that “debt is a burden“. Whereas the graph says the exact opposite: debt is little burden. But the WSJ staff knows what their masters want them to say: in with the austerity, out with the economy, and the People it supports. The WSj staff has to eat and pay rent. Of these little manipulations, little minds are made.

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HARVARD CROOKS LONG GUIDED THE WORLD INTO THE ABYSS:

To destroy plutocracy, one needs to destroy first the Evil League that provides it with respectability.

A famously very connected Harvard graduate and plutocrat, Ernst Sedgwick Hanfstaengl, was one of the early supporters of Hitler. His grandfather had carried Lincoln’s coffin. The Sedgwick family is part of plutocratic central in the USA. To this day (naturally in various forms of acting).

A composer and pianist, “Putzi” Sedgwick-Hanfstaengl wrote the songs the Nazis used, modifying his own Harvard songs. The scared and wounded Nazi leader took refuge at the home of this very wealthy American, after the failed putsch of Fall 1923. Hitler was in love with Hanfstaengl’s American wife. She prevented Hitler’s suicide, when Bavarian police came to arrest the Nazi “Guide“.

Hanfstaengl was connected by friendship to the Roosevelts, and many other influential plutocrats, themselves connected to everybody who mattered in the USA. Top Nazis came to believe, correctly, that the plutocratically controlled USA would never attack them (and so the Nazis had to declare war to the USA themselves when they found in Moscow that they would lose the war, anyway! When you have got to go, you may as well do so in a blaze of glory!)

This Harvard connection explains why the USA considered the French republic, rather than the Nazi dictatorship, its enemy after 1933. The result was World War Two, Auschwitz, Yalta, the pact with the Wahhabists, etc. As many gifts to those worthies supporting Harvard. Evil: the gift that keeps on giving to plutocrats.

Is the Ivy League resembling the Evil League, more than anything else?

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HARVARD CROOKS STILL GUIDE THE WORLD TO OBLIVION:

I have long insisted that “plutocratic universities” are propaganda outfits for their masters. Harvard University is blatant that way, a cesspool of theoretical justifications for civilizational abuse. For all to see: one of its professors came with the ridiculous “Clash of Civilizations“, an astoundingly uninformed, but highly influential work, a sort of modern justification for “Mein Kampf“. It goes a long way to explain the support of American “neoconservatives” for Fundamentalist Wahhabism.

Larry Summers (Harvard’s president), insisted, as Clinton’s Treasury Sec., that the most valuable investment known to man would be the financial derivative. And the full power of the state was harnessed to make it so. Ever since the economy has become derivative, indeed (size real world economy: 50 trillions, not even a tenth of financial derivatives alone, 80% of it through fiscal havens).

Thanks to the Clintonians (or should I call them Goldmanians?), financiers have been taxed a maximum of 15% ever since.

I am happy to report another deleterious piece of mass mind control from Harvard, with huge consequences. In 2010, Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff (R-R) released a paper, “Growth in a Time of Debt.” Their “main result is that… for countries with public debt over 90 percent of GDP … average (mean) growth rates are several percent lower.” The Harvard guys professed that countries with debt-to-GDP ratios above 90 percent have a slightly negative average growth rate.

The work of the Harvard worthies was used, worldwide, as the main argument to engage austerity programs all over. Just when People had to be put to work, they were told they were furloughed. Never minds if people died from all the austerity (say by arriving at hospitals that had stopped providing care, from lack of funds, as happened in Portugal).

Never mind that the austerity was not applied to the hyper rich and banksters (now both richer than ever).

What else? The Harvard economists cheated. And it was deliberate, because they did so several times, and in different ways.

Indeed, it’s hard to believe that their programming “mistake” was really a mistake, because, independently of that, they also massaged the data in what is obvious academic malfeasance (for example equating 19 years of solid British growth, in spite of debt above 90%, with one year of New Zealand growth, and similar biased monstrosities).

Another tactic: they deliberately misinterpreted facts (when GIs were demobilized, an economic disruption due to this was misinterpreted, by the Harvard profs, as a problem caused by debt; showing they are ignorant, or vicious, or both). 

Second problem? It should have been obvious that the Harvard professors’ work was completely wrong (Paul Krugman wants to “Blame the Pundits Too“; I concur).

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PHILOSOPHICAL METHOD SAYS: OBVIOUSLY WRONG IN ONE CASE IS ENOUGH

To prove a theory is wrong, it’s enough to have ONE spectacular counter-example. Obviously a lot of economies grew tremendously in spite of high debt loads in the past. It happened to the USA after World War Two. Same for most European economies.

This happened in particular during the “thirty glorious years” of unabated economic expansion. Then the ruling theory, all over the West, was that growth in infrastructure, knowledge (CERN, going to the Moon, etc.), social progress (retirement, mandatory vacations), education (GI Bill, free education, all the way to universities, even in California) had primacy over all other economic aims. Inflation and debt were put in the service of these goals.

Thus it was clear that the RR fact finding was actually fact denying.

A further step in proving an old system of thought is wrong is when a simpler, more plausible theory offers itself. It does not matter the details are not in. Not only do we have counter-examples to the debt-is-bad theory, but it’s easy to build a theory of why and when debt is good.

Debt, per se, is not a problem. As long as one can reimburse it. Thus the problem is what the debt is used for. Any debt that comes due, after a very profitable investment it enabled, allows to reimburse it, is obviously an economic positive.

So why the debt phobia? Why is Obama using debt phobia to throw Social Security below the exponential train?

Right now the debt phobia is just a Trojan Horse to divert the debate way from what the plutocrats do not want to talk about. Rising the taxes on those who have most of the money and power.

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STOP FINANCING THE RICH, INVEST IN A SUSTAINABLE ECONOMY FOR THE PEOPLE:

As debt became enormous in World War II, taxes on the wealthy, in the USA, were brought up to 94%. Truman lowered them down a bit, but then president Eisenhower, a republican, brought the top tax margin rate back up to 92.5%. Ike explained he did this to reimburse the debt. Meanwhile Ike launched and financed the Interstate Freeway System. The idea: to build all over the USA a system of autobahn (just like in Germany), free to the public, would improve the economy. That was proved correct a hundred times over.

Raising the tax on the most wealthy to 92.5% would have done wonder. Obama could have financed the construction of highly profitable 250 mph (400 km/h) high speed trains in several place where it would have been profitable to do so (for example the North East and California). Or simply to build power lines out of a few places where cheap sustainable is produced or producible. (In Spring, the North West USA produces potentially more electricity from hydro that it can use and export.)

The case of Europe is similar. Taxes there are higher than in the USA, but the land is poorer and smaller (the population density is  about four times that of the USA, with fewer resources). Thus public spending in Europe ought to be even higher. For example in the matter of energy. The switch to sustainable energy, as it is done today, is proving too costly under existing technology (this is very clear in Britain, where energy costs have doubled since 2006, and in Germany where they threaten to do the same soon).

So considerably more research on new energy should be made by Europe. Instead research and education budgets are coming short of what’s needed.

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GREAT DEPRESSION? PLEASE DEFAULT OUT OF THE OLD STUFF, & BORROW FOR THE FUTURE:

European “conservative” leaders will whine they don’t have the money to sustain their socio-economy. Of course, those neofascists and their plutocratic employers have the money, for themselves. And as far as the states are concerned, to get money, it could not be simpler: borrow. Interest rates are at record lows.

Borrow until what? Until so much economic activity explodes that money is very much in demand, and interest rates perk up. The interest rates will follow the economy. It’s mechanical.

The Netherlands just recognized this, three days ago. Not a coincidence that the great debt paper of the Harvard crooks had just crashed and burned. The Netherlands changed policy on austerity, this week, breaking spectacularly with Germany.

The Low Countries decided to forgo the austerity drive. The center-right government decided to deliberately AUGMENT its deficit by 10%, above what the EMU bylaws require. Instead of bringing their deficit below 3% of GDP (as mandated by European Monetary Union rules), they will keep it at 3.3% by refusing to make some cuts.

On April 5, Portugal’s Constitutional Court said that plans to trim public employee wages and retiree pensions—while not touching the income of other groups—violated the constitutional principle of equality. It also overturned a planned tax on unemployment benefits.

Do you really want to make Europe richer, you the “conservatives” admirers of Wall Street, infeodated to international plutocracy? Crack down on the wealthy. Not just wealthy individuals, but wealthy corporations. In particular, Europe should stop financing the corporations of the USA, the core of the plutocratic system. I am not just talking about having them pay tax (this they don’t do, allowing them to kill and devour small businesses, throughout the West… Although the BRICS do not allow them to play this game!).

On the his last day as president, Hoover signed the “Buy American Act of 1933“. That said that the government of the USA would buy only American. In the service of free trade, it was mandatory that the European governments will keep on buying American. All is fair in exploitation and spoliation. (In case the Europeans could still sell something to the USA, president Reagan (Ray-Gun?) had a reinforcement passed in 1983, the imaginatively, and revealingly named “Buy America Act“.)

That “Buy American Act” outrage to free trade was instituted 80 years ago. Meanwhile American plutocracy has kept on preaching the opposite. The European leaders do not seem to have noticed. Why? Are they paid not to notice, just like Harvard economists Carmen were paid, to bear power into the further destruction of the democracies? Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff were paid, through monies, career, honors, and reputation to claim that one cures depression by starving the economy of money.

Same for their European colleagues: paid through monies, career, honors, and reputation to claim that one cures depression by starving the economy of money, and… not to notice the “Buy America(n)” Acts.

***

Patrice Ayme

***

Notes: The University of Massachusetts found a more honest version of the Rogoff-Reinhart’s paper would revise the average growth estimate for the highest-debt countries to 2.2%—or a percentage point lower than for countries with a debt-to-GDP ratio of between 60% and 90%.

The head of the German Central Bank used the Rogoff-Reinhart’s claim that countries with more than 90% debt/GDP had negative growth, this pack of lies, as recently as February 2013, to justify curing depression with the hunger strike of austerity.

P/S: A faithful commenter on this site, Dominique Deux, reminded me of  “the “internal error” at the IMF which completely underestimated the negative effects of austerity measures. The IMF has recognized the mistake but its recommendations, and more importantly the policies they supposedly inspire, never wavered. I safely predict this new instance of cooked up “data” will have the same lack of consequences. Dogma trumps reality.”

It’s not just dogma, it’s first impression authored with great authority that imprints the weak minded. weak minded by purpose, of course.

Banksters Saved, Jobs Lost

[Considering my preceding essay on bombing semantics, I was happy to hear Obama pontificating that: “Any time bombs are used to target innocent civilians, it is an act of terror!” Wow, what a change! Does that mean no more drone bombings on civilians? Apparently the White House mood of “targeted killings“, “untargeted killings” or “signature strikes” is getting discombobulated by what happened in Boston. More on this White House mystified soul searching, in the future.]

***

THEY SAVED THE BANKSTERS, NOT THE JOBS:

Readers who are not fascinated by economists’ debate about the Great Depression of the 1930s (GD30), and  lessons therein, can jump directly to the paragraph: “Banksterism Should Have Been Liquidated”. The plutocrats got their attack dogs, the professional economists and politicians, to blissfully conflate providing a financial system for the People, with sending to the richest of the rich ever more money. Here is the result, a collapse of jobs:

Epic Fail: Banksters Saved, Jobs Lost

Basically, the real economy got starved of money. Notice the tremendous drop under great democrat Obama. All the great economists advising great democrats have to greatly explain this. Obama and his great adviser Larry Summers thoroughly approved the great Goldman Sachs plan to save the Goldman Sachs (and tax free big corporate USA) that had brought the crisis.

Then the banksters’ plan was pursued inexorably. After some hesitation, European parrots duplicated the plan. So here we are.

The red line in the graph above, the EMPLOYMENT RATE, the “Labor Force Participation Rate“, to give it its official title, is now as low as it was at the bottom of the deepest Volcker recession (the worst between GD30 and the present Greater Depression 2008). And we are plunging deeper. Much deeper, trust me.

Why much deeper? Because all those Very Serious People above trust in the great free market god, called Supply-Demand, to pull the economy through. But Supply-Demand is itself an artefact from mind control. So what needs to be controlled is mind control, and only regulations, and debate, democratically imposed, can do this.

Thus the employment situation, disastrous in Europe, is also disastrous in the USA (even though the USA is in full fracking boom, with its resulting, probably ephemeral, abundant oil and gas, that brings back to the USA lots of hydrocarbons dependent industries).

Thatcher and Reagan lowered the taxes of the rich. Now we have gone much further: the rich are outright financed by the poor. (To confuse the victims, that outrageous financing of the rich by the poor is nebulously called “Quantitative easing”, or “The Twist“, or simply “providing liquidity“.)

Far from allowing an exit of the system that caused the 2008 financial crisis, the present strategy, this Transfer of Assets to Rich People (TARP), has only made matters worse for the common economy, and for common people.

The latest twist being “austerity” programs, in Europe or the USA, supposedly to solve an alleged debt problem. But truly austerity makes it easier not to raise taxes on the hyper rich, be it only by changing the debate from the hyper-rich-are-not-taxed-enough to the poor-abuse-the-rich-with-their poverty (the latter was Thatcher’s line of personal business). 

***

FOUR MAIN CAUSES FOR THE GREAT DEPRESSION OF THE 1930S:

A superficially seductive, but greatly erroneous, prescription to avoid another Great Depression was publicized by Milton Friedman, and officially embraced by many, including the present Fed Chairman, and its central bank.  Contrarily to what those worthies affect to believe, throwing money at the problem, or, more exactly, at the same exact banking system that caused the problem, is no panacea. Quite the opposite. A misreading of what happened in the 1930s presides to the present disaster. Basically, Friedman said one could run on one leg. He forgot about the other leg, the one that was on the ground before.

Friedman’s “explanation” of the Great Depression of the 1930s (GD30) is that the Central Bank of the USA (“Fed”) did not provide banks with enough “liquidity” (cash). So the banks went bankrupt by the thousands, people lost their savings, business lost access to money, and the economy of the USA faltered. That’s all entirely correct, as part of the picture. Yet:

One can tell lies, just by focusing exclusively on part of the truth.

Lying by ommission is what Milton Friedman did about GD30. His bit of truth is not an “explanation” but a sample of  observed facts. Clearly bankruptcies of the banks was a disaster. All he said above is true, but does not provide enough of a context for revealing the real truth in its full splendor.

In mathematics local minima do not have to be global minima. Same in the theory of theories: local maximal truth does not a global reality make.

Friedman’s quarter truth has come to be viewed by the economic theory in power in the USA as the be all, cure all (panacea).

A few years back, the head of the “Fed” turned to Friedman sitting in the first row and told him, flippantly, for the ages:”You are right, we did it!“. Bernanke meant that the Fed caused the Great Depression, by being too austere.  (Bernanke did his PhD on GD30, showing that some PhD are provided to reinforce the bankster managed banks.)

Let me quote from Friedman (since I quote Hitler occasionally, I may as well quote Friedman):

 “at the London School of Economics… the dominant view was that the depression was an inevitable result of the prior boom, that it was deepened by the attempts to prevent prices and wages from falling and firms from going bankrupt, that the monetary authorities had brought on the depression by inflationary policies before the crash and had prolonged it by “easy money” policies thereafter; that the only sound policy was to let the depression run its course, bring down money costs, and eliminate weak and unsound firms.”

Paul Krugman says that Friedman viewed starving the banks as evident nonsense, and advocated instead the (THEN) Chicago view that banks should have been rescued, government should have acted to reflate the economy, and moreover, that there was a strong case, as Friedman wrote: “for the use of large and continuous deficit budgets to combat the mass unemployment and deflation of the times.” I agree with all this… However…

However as many have noticed, the doctrine Friedman considered self-evident nonsense is now more or less the official doctrine of the Republican party, just as it was under republican president Hoover, and of the European Union, as it was under the French governments of the 1930s. Meanwhile the views Friedman advocated from Chicago are now, according to American conservatives, tyrannical socialism, and according to European leaders, not an option.

The wheel of opinion has turned completely… Why? How? Krugman says it’s because they are all idiots, they just don’t know the basics of macroeconomics. Yet, reality is more instructive.

The passage of Friedman above quoted was a quarter of the truth, the fourth quarter of the truth, what became the truth after Roosevelt closed all the banks. That there was excess, and it had to be wrung out of the system, prior to that, that was another quarter of the truth, the third quarter of the truth. Now conservatives are focusing on that third quarter of the truth, in the USA, and in the EU. 

What was the second quarter of the truth? International trade fighting with tariffs (started in September 1929-July1930, by the USA). The modern equivalent of this deleterious international fighting is competitive devaluations, what the honorable dear professor Paul Krugman always advocates. (And which Japan has recently borrowed from the USA, making Washington all yellow in the face.)

Oh, and what got everything launched? A drastic boom in the 1920s, engineered to drown British WWI debt. That led to inflation (real estate, Florida, say) and overproduction (cars). That was the first component of the Great Depression quartet. 

Before I explain the obvious, let me veer towards what’s wrong in the presently attempted method to get out of this unfolding Greater Depression.

***

BANKSTERISM SHOULD HAVE BEEN LIQUIDATED, IT WAS NOT:

Saving a bank and saving a bankster are two different things. Two completely opposed things. It’s like confusing saving a victim and saving who murdered the victim. The banksters leveraged the banks they headed, to the max, because the larger the profit, the more money they got. Some built international airports in the middle of nowhere in Spain.

Some made bets with each other, using the fake currency of financial derivatives.

The more they bet with tremendous leverage, the more leveraged the system got, ready to collapse at the smallest loss.

Meanwhile banksters had bought jets, yachts, mansions, islands (Example: Paulson, Bush’s Treasury Secretary, bought himself an island large enough for several villages).

When the banks collapsed the banksters’ properties were outside of the disaster zone. Politicians left them there. Taking care of their own providers.

Example: Lehman Brothers, a bank, an investment bank, was not saved, but its head banksters saved for themselves the billions they made, driving it into the ground. The three top guys, including CEO Fuld, retired with five billions among them.

Starting in 2008, the structures, ways and means of banks, including the derivatives and banksters leading them were saved (see Citigroup, JP Morgan, Goldman). Everything that had caused the disease was saved, thanks to the public (taxpayers, low lives, etc.)

Whereas in truth and full morality, all that should have been saved were the small deposits (as was done in Cyprus below $130K accounts). The entire businesses, the entire bank holding companies, which had failed, should have been left to fail (free market theory).

From the ruins, banks serving the real economy ought to have been founded. Instead,  the exact same holding companies that had failed were refounded, again, same as they were before, and generally around the same imaginary activities, with the same managers. Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, were saved modulo gifts exceeding 50 billion dollars;  JP Morgan got a giant gift (Bear Stern) and got in trouble because of its “London Whale” (highly leveraged government bond derivatives).

Providing liquidity, that is aid and comfort, to a thief, or a system that steals the real economy, does not provide with an optimal outcome, especially if one is poor, because one has already been robbed by the same thief or oppressive system. But such is the business model since 2008.

A financial system that caused such a crisis, should not just be provided with liquidity, but should have been liquidated as a self serving financial entity.

***

GREAT DEPRESSION OF 1930S: LIQUIDATION, THEN LIQUIDITY:

So what happened during the Great depression of the 1930s? Was the view that all the excess should have been liquidated, that the depression should have done its job, correct? (The view held first.) Or is the view that the banks should have been saved correct?

Well, both views were correct. What Friedman and Bernanke do not realize is that there was serious liquidation, for four years, before Roosevelt launched his recovery program. And Roosevelt launched recovery by closing all the banks, first, just as was done in Cyprus recently. Banks were then reopened, provided with liquidity, according to their viability.

So Roosevelt’s New Deal provided liquidity… after a tremendous liquidation. (In the preceding 4 years.)

Right now, there is obvious excess, that should be liquidated. All over the West. It spans the whole landscape of spending. From the picturesque but highly symbolic, to the vast and deep.

I will give examples of what needs to be liquidated in another essay. There is just plain too many dimensions of excess, from “poor” Greeks or Italians with secondary residences, driving expensive Porsches although they have no income, to our self glorifying leaders spending on themselves public money like crazy, while sleeping in plutocrats’ beds. and of course transnational corporations paying no taxes so that they can swallow all and any creature or business in their way. Yes, there is much to liquidate.

***

Patrice Ayme

Times Praises Mind Control

RULE THE MINDS, & YOU SHALL RULE THE WORLD.

Abstract: The New York Times deliberately avoids to call a duck a duck if it quacks inside the government. This strategy is revealed, explicitly, by the New York Times itself. The New York Times, by its own admission,  deliberately misinforms the public, as it judges what semantics to use, in the service of what it perceives as being the White House’s best legal strategy.

***

How can large modern societies veer towards mass murder? Why did 80 million Germans goose-step behind the Kaiser, and then Hitler, to fight the world and achieve barbarian domination? I have the simplest explanation: mind control of the masses by cruel masters through carefully contrived emotional, semantic, logical and data input.

Germany 1938. Seeing What You See: Bad For Worship

[“Bird Hell” detail; by German Max Beckman, 1938. Obviously A Parody Of Hitlerland.]

Hannah Arendt, a suspect thinker, came instead with a convoluted theory (in the second edition of her “Totalitarianism”  book, in 1958). She suggested that “individual isolation and loneliness” are preconditions for totalitarian domination. Speak about pop psychology.

Was Hannah saying that the several hundred million people who embraced totalitarianism, in Europe alone, were isolated and lonely? Is that why they gathered in vast herds? When 50,000 Brownshirts paraded together, were they isolated and lonely? Were the comrades of the Politburo standing with Stalin isolated and lonely? An obviously stupid theory. It’s the exact opposite that is true.

Arendt’s fancy was actually contradicted by an explicit study of Columbia University’s Theodore Abel, published in 1938. The study “Why Hitler Came In Power” showed that the characteristic 1931-1932 Nazi supporter was employed, but not educated. The supporter’s mentality, far from being isolated and lonely, was shared by the Nazi herd. Nazi supporters were enraged by the World War One defeat, the Versailles Treaty, and all and any revolutionary movements contesting the old plutocracy.

In other words, Nazi supporters had their minds programmed expertly by the very class that caused World War One, and their own suffering.

Arendt’s weird considerations sound like excuses (for herself, for her lover Heidegger?).

To find the truth, it’s better to read Nietzsche’s broadsides against the German herd, or Hitler’s detailed explanation on how to make the multitudes goosestep, spiritually speaking. Hitler explains that the way to lead the folk (“Volk”) where it does not want to go is by using “big lies“. Nietzsche explains that Germans were in love with the instincts of the herd, and cultivated them by choice first, a will to baseness, and then because they did not know any better, that’s what they became. That’s why Nietzsche broke with his (ex) friend and fellow musician, Richard Wagner.

Now fast forward to Twentieth First Century USA. The New York Times, the ‘newspaper of record’ practices, of its own gloating admission, semantic mind control.

***

LET’S CALL EVERYTHING EMBARASSING DIFFERENTLY:

Wonders Margaret Sullivan, the New York Times “Public Editor“, about her own paper: “If it’s torture, why call it a “harsh interrogation technique”? If it’s premeditated assassination, why call it a “targeted killing”? And if a suspected terrorist has been locked up at Guantánamo Bay for more than a decade, why call him a “detainee”?”

Funny she has to ask that. Recent leaks from inside the CIA showed that CIA officials therein were afraid of International Warrants of Arrest against them in the future. So they did what bandits have always done, when they don’t fear summary execution. They switched from torture to assassination (assassinated people don’t tell tales to the International Criminal Court).

Ms. Sullivan went to ask Mr. Shane, a national security reporter in the Washington NYT bureau, and Philip B. Corbett, the associate managing editor for standards of the New York Times, to respond to some of these issues.

Mr. Shane addressed the question on “targeted killings,” noting that editors and reporters have discussed it repeatedly. He wrote:

“Assassination” is banned by executive order, but for decades that has been interpreted by successive administrations as prohibiting the killing of political figures, not suspected terrorists. Certainly most of those killed are not political figures, though arguably some might be. Were we to use “assassination” routinely about drone shots, it would suggest that the administration is deliberately violating the executive order, which is not the case. This administration, like others, just doesn’t think the executive order applies…“Murder,” of course, is a specific crime described in United States law with a bunch of elements, including illegality, so it would certainly not be straight news reporting to say President Obama was “murdering” people.

So, basically “assassination” is banned by decree, so “is not the case” and murder is illegal, so it’s not “straight news“. Thus Mr. Shane opines that: 

“This leaves “targeted killing,” which I think is far from a euphemism. It denotes exactly what’s happening: American drone operators aim at people on the ground and fire missiles at them. I think it’s a pretty good term for what’s happening, if a bit clinical.”

Clinical? The CIA is a hospital, and drones, presumably, scalpels? By that token whenever somebody shoots at children, it’s “targeted killing”, not murder! Indeed, an “operator” aims at children on the ground, and fires. Mr. Shane added that he had only one serious qualm about the term: it’s not “what’s happening”.  

Indeed, that, he said, was expressed by an administration official: “It’s not the targeted killings I object to — it’s the untargeted killings.” The official “was talking about so-called ‘signature strikes’ that target suspected militants based on their appearance, location, weapons and so on, not their identities, which are unknown; and also about mistaken strikes that kill civilians.”

“Mistaken strikes”? What’s mistaken about exploding a home one knows harbor women and children, in the alleged hope to get some potential terrorist, potentially inside?

In any case, Mr. Shane calls, from his own admission, “untargeted killings” and “signature strikes” by their opposites, “targeted killings”. In other words, black will be white, as long as it would be illegal, were it black.

Such are the standards at the New York Times. One can be barbarian because one is cruel. One can also be a barbarian, because one does not know how to use words. This is where the word barbarian comes from. The Greeks viewed those who could not talk well as saying: ba ba ba ba… (Notice I avoids any mention of the babama who wants to exponentiate Social Security out of existence, in an effort of remarkable restraint.)

Finally one can be a barbarian, because one views as valid a proposition and its negation. Mr. Shane seems affected by these three versions of barbarity: cruelty, at a loss for words, and self contradiction.

***

TORTURE HAS LEGAL RAMIFICATIONS, WE CAN’T TALK ABOUT IT:

On the matter of “detainee,” Mr. Corbett called it “a legitimate concern” and agreed that the term might not be ideal. He said that it, not prisoner, was used because those being held “are in such an unusual situation – they are not serving a prison term, they are in an unusual status of limbo.”

They are not serving a prison term, but they are in prison. This is the New York Times, thinking.

The debate over the word “torture,” he said, has similar implications to the one Mr. Shane described with assassination. “The word torture, aside from its common sense meaning, has specific legal meaning and ramifications,” Mr. Corbett said. “Part of the debate is on that very point.”

Which point? What Mr. Corbett is saying is that the debate is about not torture per se, but about the “legal meaning and ramifications” of torture. Does that mean that the New York Times cannot talk about “torture“, because it has “legal ramifications” for its client?

The New York Times wants to “avoid making a legal judgment in the middle of a debate,” he added. The New York Times shall not judge before its time. We are not talking about “news” anymore, here. We are talking about judgment, once the debate, thus the news, are over.

***

NEW YORK TIMES AS A PROPAGANDA OUTFIT:

The most notorious failure of the media of the USA was when Nazi’s barbarity was not revealed to the public to the extent it deserved, in a timely manner. That’s how Hitler got on a joy ride for as long as he did.

The New York Times re-tweeted all the talking points of the Bush administration in the march to the Iraq war in 2002-2003. For years, if I sent a comment mentioning Mr. Bin Laden had been recruited and trained by the CIA and the SIA, my comment was immediately censored (I did this deliberately, just to experiment with the lemmings at the Times).  

What the authorities in Washington wanted, and it was amplified by the Main Stream media, is to make the folks believe that the Involvement of the USA in the Middle East started with a treacherous, mass murdering attack on 9/11. (My spouse worked for a firm that had offices in one of the collapsed towers, by the way, but moved just weeks before, so I’m not belittling 9/11, even on the personal level!)

In truth, 9/11 was a consequence of Washington’s policies more than that of some god crazed maniacs. And the consequences were highly predictable: after all the same trick of crashing a jumbo jet had been tried on Paris a few years earlier. Does that mean Washington never heard of Paris?

The first way to fight criminals, is to reveal, and then denounce their apparent, or suspected crimes. If there is a murder in the street, one does not call it a “targeted killing” especially if one knows that it is actually “untargeted” or a “signature strike”.

Also torture is the deliberate infliction of pain. It’s simple. Torture was stopped by European powers in the Middle Ages, because police techniques of interrogation had become more effective (and could be used legally, whereas torture could not… by law).

To stop barbarians in the modern world, the first thing to do is to uncover and denounce them. This is the job of journalism. The New York Times refuses to do this job. Instead it imagines it has another job, that of a legal authority. It also has the jobs of judge, and White House advocate. Not only it does all these things, which contradicts journalism, but it does it consciously, and deliberately.

Nazism was made possible because enough journalists and editors in the Anglo-Saxon world refused to report what the Nazis were doing. If they had, public opinion in the Anglo-Saxon world would have turned, and the collaboration with Hitler would have been declared unlawful, and then German general would have made an anti-Nazi coup.

So this is serious stuff.

And it’s still serious today. Obama basically proposed to do away with Social Security, by exponentiating out of it (more on that in another essay). What does the New York Times really know, and think about this? How come the reactions in the media have been so mild? How come not seeing what’s plain to see?

***

CIVILIZATION WITHOUT BRAINS CAN’T BE CONCEIVED, LET ALONE DEFENDED:

And so it goes. People are programmed by their (mental) environment. A devious mental environment makes for devious people. A base mental environment makes for base people. A false mental environment makes for small people. A mental environment where people learn to be only excited by trivialities makes for trivial minds.

Nietzsche condemned Christianity as a slave religion, while pointing out that the European aristocracy, while outwardly breathing Christianism, actually practiced the opposite. Nietzsche also noted that the strength of Greece came from keeping a balance between two completely opposed mentalities, the Dionysian and the Apollonian.  

Vast minds with vast personalities are more powerful than those who know only a few. When man domesticated an animal, the animals’ behavior registry got sharply reduced. A wolf is capable of much more behaviors than a dog. Domesticated animals are tools.

Tyrants rule over people because they have turned those people into low dimension minds with fewer emotions, and fewer thoughts, and less ability to form them, just like dogs relative to wolves. Ruling over weak minds is not just easier, it’s the only way. It’s also why democracy, which is more clever, keeps on defeating fascism.

Indeed a mental universe where people demand that ducks be called ducks is more powerful than one where they are not named. Intelligence is about discernment. Thus, the proper labels.

Mental freedom without mental power is only illusion.

The New York Times grandly proclaims the slogan “All News That Are fit To Print” on its front page. As pointed out above, the New York Times does not like to talk about it “while a debate is going on“.

New York Times, tell me: if “torture”, “murder”, “assassination” are not fit to print, what is fit to print?

***

Patrice Ayme

No Euro Crisis, No Debt Crisis.

No French Currency Crisis, Either. JUST PLUTOCRATIC DERANGEMENT SYNDROME.

American economists just discovered what the Euro is all about. Namely the Euro is the French currency. (Please applaud how much more clever they just got!). Professional economists could have known this long ago, if they did more than read each other. See my: Why Europe, Why The Euro.

French yields have improved dramatically. Why? It’s not just what American economists just learned that (Euro = France), because that was true ever since the European Currency Unit (more than 20 years ago).

What has really occurred is that the cause of the present Greater Depression has been stumbled upon, for all to see. Moreover real remedies have started to be applied. (For the first time in this crisis that exploded in 2008.)

The French finance ministry took the lead in making plutocrats pay for their mess (at least in Cyprus; one has to start somewhere!). Good. But that was just a warm-up. Real reforms are now happening everyday.

And a miracle happened. Thanks to Jérôme Cahuzac, a bandit of plutocratic type who happened to be French budget minister, French and Swiss Justice are presently demonstrating how pervasive the plutocratic phenomenon and its entanglement with politicians and tax havens are. In the USA, of course, Jérôme would be just another wealthy politician, legal thoroughly, and cabinet minister. (See, Rice, Susan, for further edification; plutocracy is legal in the USA).

But France and Switzerland are supposed to be democracies, not plutocracies. The incoming consequences of discovering how huge tax evasion by the plutocracy is, are going to be huge. And are already showing up.

Indeed a corollary is that bond market participants know now that Europeans are going to realize that austerity is not just a sham, and a crime, but also a Transfer of Assets To Rich People (TARP!). The bond market understands that the collective consciousness is changing, and that real change on the way. For the better. Hence the collapse in yields.

In a society which does not revere plutocrats as “philanthropists” (as the USA pathetically does), austerity does not have a reason to be. Thus austerity ought to be discontinued, in Europe, the world’s largest economy. But austerity made the deficits worse. So, if tax evasion is mitigated, the economy can restart, and debt loads ought to stay manageable. Hence the bond rally in France. Now for some more details and perspectives.

***

EURO = FRENCH INVENTION:

The Euro is, first of all, a French invention. President Mitterrand proposed to his good freund Kanzler Helmut Kohl to create the Euro, in a deal to support, in all ways, the reunification of Germany (including with French direct investment in East Germany).

Since the grotesque Second World War, all those who half think in Franco-Germania, decided that the one and only way to terminate the interminable, perfectly ridiculous Franco-German wars, was to reset the macropolitical clock back to 800 CE, when the Renovatio Imperium Romanorum extended from Catalonia to Poland. For about a millennium, there was just one currency in Europe. After that, there was war.
Paul Krugman in “France Has Its Own Currency Again” discovers the notion:

“Joe Weisenthal draws our attention to a development that may surprise many people: French borrowing costs are plunging. (Don’t tell George Osborne — he thinks that low British rates are a unique personal achievement)…

But wait– wasn’t France supposed to be the next Italy, if not the next Greece?

Well, Joe has what I agree is the right explanation: markets have concluded that the ECB will not, cannot, let France run out of money; without France there is no euro left. So for France the ECB is unambiguously willing to play a proper lender of last resort function, providing liquidity.

And this means that in financial terms France has joined the club of advanced countries that have their own currencies and therefore can’t run out of money — a club all of whose members have very low borrowing costs, more or less independent of their debts and deficits.

Welcome to the club, France. Now, why are you doing all this austerity?”

[France is not doing that much austerity: she went into a full war in Mali, and the deficit is still going to be closer to 5% rather than 3%; that’s less austere than the USA. Still, there is enormous waste in, and from, the French bureaucracy; a referendum to diminish the bureaucracy just failed in Alsace].

***

WHY THE EURO IN A NUTSHELL:

So American economists, traders and speculators are suddenly realizing what was true all along, that the Euro is very much the French currency. Always has been.

Many Anglo-Saxon leaders are so much into the business of deriding anything French that they believe reality has an anti-French bias, in all things, except wine and cheese. Now that dear Paul Krugman and company self congratulate each other for having come across the obvious, so true for 30 years, let me point out that their slaps in the back do not explain the sudden drop in yields in April 2013.

Before I proceed to do that, let me re-iterate what I have long said.

The Euro is more than the French currency. The Euro is the Franco-German currency. Just like the French, the Germans, after May 1945, and even many of the Nazis themselves (for example Albert Speer) several years before that, came to understand that the only way to win a war against the other  was by total unification.

This is what makes the Euro not just unavoidable, but necessary. Once Franco-Germania (re-)unifies, a superpower is immediately created. Indeed, France and Germany, plus the crumbs in between (Benelux), represent more than 180 million people. To this one has to add other satellites: Northern Italy, Austria, Catalonia… Even Switzerland (Swiss Franc is, had to be, pegged to Euro). At this point, one talks about 250 million people, a power roughly comparable to the USA in most of the most significant long term characteristics, most of them living an average distance of 500 kilometers from Bale/Basel.

The fact the distances are so small is of the essence: one can drive through pieces of the largest of these countries with one car, in one day. The Euro is a driving necessity. Before I used to dread to travel from my Alpine home without the proper papers, currencies, etc. It’s as if I were in enemy territory within twenty minutes of setting behind the wheel. Now I am still at home around home, I am not fighting WWII all over again.

***

SO WHY DID FRENCH YIELDS JUST COLLAPSE?

The yields were high because of two reasons:

1) speculators prefer high yields, so they made it so (remember that, thanks to unregulated and mostly secretive derivatives, they have tremendous leverage at their disposal).

2) some bond investors were genuinely afraid they would not get reimbursed by the governments they lent to. (Indeed, watch Stockton, California, file for bankruptcy; ah, not in Europe? Just a detail. Still a government of sorts.) High interest is a way to make sure they get their money back.

An indication of future inability of government to pay back is if said government has high debt and is running a primary deficit (mostly borrowing more to pay past debt). Most Western government ran high primary deficits after 2008, because they had to pay jobless people, and re-capitalize banks.

At least, that’s the conventional explanation. The truth is more subtle. in truth, banks were recapitalized with public money, instead of being recapitalized by finding the money that had apparently disappeared.

Take Cyprus: extravagantly high interest rates (5% to 9% were paid, for years, as world finance collapse). So a Russian Afghan drug runner having dropped his ill acquired wealth in the “Popular bank of Cyprus”, could have made 50% on his money in 5 years.

The way the crisis of 2008 was solved, French and German taxpayers should have saved his 50%. But this time the French and German finance ministers said NEIN. Instead the drug runner plutocrat was told to kiss “his” money bye bye. Next time he can go leave his money in Dubai. This was giant conceptual progress.

By the way, 96% of depositors in Cyprus’ banks recovered 100% of their saving (plus extravagant interests paid!). It’s only the fat cats who are being punished (and even then, mostly in 2 banks).

The old way to solve the financial corruption crisis was plutocratic, unfair, and just a way to extend the crisis, by going on with the transfer of capital from taxpayers (the poor) to the hyper wealthy (the plutocrats whining that their banks had gone bankrupt, because they just finished stealing them down to the last Dollar or Euro).

This is what I have been saying for years.

The old way just made the public deficits worse. “Austerity” was then introduced as a further boost for cutting money to the poor some more.

The “new” way adopted to solve the Cyprus crisis, make the plutocrats pay for the crisis they fabricated, instead of just augmenting the deficits some more (still the Europe gave 9 billion euros to Cyprus, augmenting public deficits by that much, and the IMF, one billion. So even USA taxpayer and beggars pitched in!)

There is nothing really “new” about this “new” way. Debtors going bankrupt were severely punished in the past. Now we are just going to forse them to regurgitate what they stole. Hopefully.

If plutocrats are going to regurgitate a bit, why not go the whole way? Then, it turns out, the deficits would completely disappear. Tax evasion to tax havens in the European Union is evaluated at more than a trillion euros. About half of the yearly budget of the USA.

Hence the following evidence, pointed out today by L’Humanite’, the Communist newspaper: austerity does not have to be. It would be enough to strike the tax evading plutocrats with austerity, as I have been claiming all along.

***

THANK YOU Jérôme:

That’s why we all have to say thanks to Jérôme the bandit. You see Jérôme, was not just a successful plastic surgeon. Part of his business development involved not just having, with his wife, also a surgeon, a private clinic. No. Jérôme became a “socialist”, just like many wealthy people become “democrats” in the USA. You know, the sort of people the president sleeps in with, in the Silicon Valley (Silly Cone?).

As an MD, Jérôme was a natural big negotiator of health stuff with rich health care providers such as Novartis. Thus the bright, towering, energetic and good looking Jérôme was naturally part of the “socialist’ government in the 1980s. he negotiated many things with the likes of Novartis.

Under the table. Under Swiss tables, more exactly. That’s why, as baking secrecy was threatened in Switzerland in 2009, Jérôme tried to get a number of Swiss banks to transfer 15 million euros from Suisse towards the safer tax haven of Singapore. That was not easy, because the banks noticed he was a Member of the French Parliament. Jérôme had to falsify a finance ministry document.

Under Hollande, Jérôme became budget minister, making a giant noise on how he was going to find and punish those who engaged in fiscal evasion. Ironically, the full and enthusiastic cooperation of prosecutors in Geneva brought his case to light, with the amplification of the French Internet magazine “Mediapart“.

Now French Justice has charged Jérôme with “blanchiment de fraude fiscale” (laundering of fiscal fraud”).

***

So let me repeat slowly: the reason for austerity is out. It turns out that French finances are actually excellent. And the finances of many other European countries are also excellent. This is why the yields are collapsing in France.

What has just been revealed to the masses is that the debt crisis was mostly about the hyper rich splurging with other people’s austerity. Make the hyper wealthy fraudsters regurgitate their stolen goods, and deficits disappear.

***

Patrice Ayme

Pacifism Is Easy, Peace Harder

I knew I was going to get flak for advocating no more concession to the 29 year old hereditary king of North Korea, while making clear that crushing his tyranny was worth a war.

In the last few years, outrages of North Korea have included sinking a South Korean ship and submitting South Koreans to an artillery barrage, killing dozens. The worst offense: violating UN Security Council orders about NOT becoming a nuclear ICBM armed state. This is the densest problem. Contemplate the Plutonium ring below:

Eleven centimeters (4″) across. Explosive power: more than 100,000 tons TNT.

Yes, if it could be made magically into a ball, around five centimeters in diameter, this innocent looking ring, with neutron reflectors all around, would explode with the power of 100,000 tons of TNT. It baffles the mind. (In a so called thermonuclear bomb, much of the power can come from fission efficiently boosted by thermonuclear tricks.) 

Plutonium is the densest naturally occurring element. Plutonium is pyrophoric: it spontaneously ignites when exposed to moist air. Mr Kim Jong Un has just officially restarted one of his Plutonium making machines.

Using a Plutonium bomb as match, one can release enormous amounts of power rather easily from a mix of other elements such as deuterium, tritium, lithium deuteride and Uranium 238. (The tricks are pretty much known by all: fill the void at the center with deuterium-tritium gas,  compress lithium deuteride  around a fissionable core, within a Uranium temper, with extremely hard radiation, etc.)

Some commenters suggested I was a war monger, “over the top“. My answer:

Sorry if I left the impression that I believed Kim Jong Un was a “new Hitler”. That is not what I tried to say. My main point was otherwise subtle. It was about worldwide moods. I could have been more direct.

Kim will have 300 nuclear tipped ICBMs in ten years or so. Then what? Democracies will want to keep the overwhelming military advantage over North Korea they have now, to make sure they will not be attacked. So Japan may have 6,000 nuclear tipped rockets, South Korea, 3,000. The Nuclear Proliferation Treaty will be out of the window. China will try to have even more nukes than Korea and Japan put together.

And if you think that 100 million Vietnamese will not get nuclear armed if China is crawling with nukes, you don’t know military history. And part of India is presently occupied by China, the South China Sea is claimed by many powers, etc. Fortress USA will be projecting forward its defense lines, as it is, correctly, already doing, making China uncomfortable.

In other words, considering all the local animosities about who owns what islet in the region, nuclear war of all against all will pretty much be insured, should North Korea become a bit more of a nuclear armed power (say when it can annihilate Tokyo, as it is basically capable of doing already).

What will one say then? Those who talked about it should not have been “over the top“? (A precedent exists: Nietzsche, for condemning loud and clear what came to be known as “Nazism”, 50 years later, was himself called a Nazi, when he was in truth the enemy of the herd instinct especially around what would become the main themes of Nazism.)

Around 300 nukes in ten years for Kim Jung Un, I say. Some will sneer that I am exaggerating. Well, they need a course in (recent) physics. OK, let’s go.

***

NUCLEAR ENERGY GENESIS:

In January 1938, when, and because, war with Adolf Hitler seemed unavoidable, young Nobel Laureate Irene Curie explained to the French Ministre de la Guerre that immensely powerful nuclear bombs could be made. France hid immediately all patents related to nuclear energy.

Irene Curie had found that neutrons made Uranium 235 nuclei fission in a nuclear chain reaction. When slowed by heavy water. In June 1940, the French heavy water was loaded on a cargo ship, with some prominent nuclear physicists involved in the bomb program. The French army sank the ship during a Nazi air attack. The Nazis were satisfied.

Little did they know that everything and everybody had  been transferred secretly to another cargo ship.  The program was transferred soon to the USA. It was discovered that, one could slow down the neurons using only Boron and graphite. By nuclear transmutation (Irene’s Nobel discovery), an element could be created in nuclear reactors, Plutonium.

If one gathers enough Plutonium (isotopes 239, 240, 241) or Uranium 235 in one place, the fissioning of nuclei will create more than one neutron in the average, and thus generate ever more neurons: that’s the chain reaction, Irene’s discovery (deliberately falsely attributed to Otto Hahn by the enemies of France, and friends of sexism).

Assemble lots of this material together quickly, and a giant explosion will result. How quickly to assemble Pu239 or U235 was the trick question.

It was quickly discovered that Plutonium (especially Pu240) creates so many neutrons that the nuclear chain reaction starts too fast, before the entire material can be exposed to a full chain reaction, resulting in a fizzle.

***

NEW NUKE ARM RACE, THANKS TO CHEAP HEU:

Because Plutonium so readily explodes, a Plutonium bomb requires the implosion of a sphere of Plutonium. To realize that, in turn, requires very complicated math, and specialized very fast electronics, to fabricate lenses of high explosives and slow explosives shock waves to concentrate the Plutonium in a tight ball so suddenly that the entire material can bathe in the neutrons it generates all over before it predetonates in a sub-volume.

Uranium 235 is less reactive, so one has much more time to assemble a super critical mass. A simple gun, where a mass of U235 is fired deep into another U235 mass will do. This is EXTREMELY EASY to do.

However, producing enough U235 by separating it from naturally occurring U238/233 mix was an extremely time, space, energy, capital, and effort consuming process.

One made a gas, Uranium hexafluoride, and then passed it through thousands of filters, progressively leaving the U238 behind. The plants were gigantic, as big as a kilometer across, and used giant amounts of electricity.

Fabricating Plutonium in nuclear reactors by transmutation was much easier. It was much simpler, and cheaper to extract Plutonium from nuclear reactors, where it is made from the sort of nuclear transmutation process demonstrated by Irene Curie.

This is why nuclear bombs were made with imploding Plutonium spheres since 1945. Yet, the engineering looked so far-fetched, that the U.S. military required a test of the design before using it (@ Alamagordo).

Indeed, the military wanted to make sure that the first bomb used against Japan worked. The military wanted shock and awe, not  apathetic fizzle. So the bomb dropped on Hiroshima was an Uranium gun device. Even the military was sure that it would certainly work: the Hiroshima bomb was a prototype.

Uranium 235 was too expensive to make to waste it in bombs. It was much more economical to enrich natural Uranium with the U235 isotope, by a few percent, then use that in nuclear reactors and make Plutonium there. 

Nowadays, though, things are changing. This process of ENRICHMENT has become much easier with ultracentrifuges. Ultracentrifuged gas containing more of the denser U238 tends to stick to the outside. Enrichment promises to get even easier with an even newer process, laser separation.

One knows laser enrichment works, because the USA loud and clear announced to the world it was building such a plant. Talk about talking too much.

If one can produce lots of Highly Enriched Uranium (HEU), cheaply, one does not need Plutonium to make bombs.

The next mystery is how rich needs to be the mix U238/U235 to make a bomb? 98% certainly works. But what about 50-50? Nobody knows. I fear that it works (using thermonuclear tricks one can fission usually placid U238; making thus not just a “H bomb” of a sort, up to megatons powerful, but also a very dirty one)…

We have therefore attained an extremely dangerous situation with the proliferation of nukes. Billions of pacifists praying the other way will not change that. The giant plants of old fashion enrichment were easy to spot. Small underground chambers with lasers will be nearly impossible to spot and destroy.

***

ANTI-WAR JIHAD REQUIRED:

One thing the Qur’an got right is that the concept of Jihad is part of core humanism. Jihad means “struggle, contest, effort,” from the infinitive of jahada “he waged war, he applied himself to.”

Kim Jong Un commands the fourth largest army in the world. However its power is quickly waning. But for the nukes.

Kim’s differences with Hitler are many: Kim was always pampered, a man of wealth, taste and vast appetite, an hereditary plutocrat, Hitler was dirt poor, and shot at by the French for four years. Kim is an overweight smoker, Hitler was a lean vegetarian, who neither drank, nor smoked. Kim has a charming wife, whereas Hitler got married at the last hour (OK, last 5 hours). Hitler was also in his forties when he got to responsibilities. Whereas Kim Jong Un is only 29 year old. Kim Jong Un also does not have a racist agenda, to my knowledge.

I was not making an analogy between Kim and Hitler, but between the way this crisis ought to be treated and the way the Hitler problem was treated… All too late. Now, of course, to this day, some are whining about the cruelty of Britain and France, coming to the rescue of Poland. Such people fondly remember Nazism. They are frequently found in the USA, a country where, when the mother of Obama got married to a Kenyan, such a depravity was unlawful in many states.

If France and Britain had not intervened, not only would the Nazis have killed all the Jews, and many other minorities, but also they would have killed all the Poles, maybe all the Slaves, etc.  The Nazis did organized the holocaust of the Poles, even setting up Auschwitz for them. But the pressures of the world war distracted the Nazis from that task, and, in spite of a good start in 1939-1940, they killed only six millions Poles in the end.

The racist, fascist MOOD that arose in Europe, starting before 1914, was not barred until August 1939. Nietzsche pointed out that crazy militaristic racist fascism was well started in Germany by 1880. There was, especially in the 1930s, an infection of fascism, worldwide. Japan, Germany, Spain, among others, fell to fascism in the 1930s. In the USA, the country nearly did fall into fascism, and then its plutocrats took command in lots of countries, including Italy, Germany and Spain.

Ultimately, fascism had to blocked, with ultimate violence. This is what Poland, France and Britain did in August 1939. They refused to give another inch to Hitler.

Right now we are facing the potential rise of something similar. The rise of a MOOD OF NUCLEAR BLACKMAIL. Worldwide. That was my main point. To pretend that I said: Hitler = Kim, frankly is a smokescreen masking my main idea.

If Kim Jong Un is not struck down, nuclear blackmail will be rewarded. Other fascist regimes will be inspired. China, right now, is opposed to what North Korea is doing.

Said Xi, the new Chinese president, April 6 2013: “No one should be allowed to throw a region and even the whole world into chaos for selfish gains. While pursuing its own interests, a country should accommodate the legitimate interests of others.”

Yet, if leaders see that nuclear blackmail is rewarded, some are bound to feel that it works.

Kim Jung Un is a typical plutocrat: he speaks several languages, and has two billion dollars stashed in Swiss banks alone.

He thinks he knows his fellow plutocrats well, just as Hitler did. Hitler had been told by his hyper wealthy advisers that democracies would never find the will to block him. He came to believe that deeply. There is little doubt that Kim Jung Un believes something similar.

The worldwide plutocracy has actually NO interest to a full blown war with North Korea. Be it only because, when the mood of blowing up a few plutocrats has been adopted, it may prove persistent, and they may be the next ones to be blown. Something like that happened after WWII in Europe, and the USA.

Indeed, a full blown (world, or not) war would probably lead to a great equalitarian wave, as happened, in Europe or the USA, after WWII.

The question of tax avoiding hyper rich corporations and individuals is indeed related. it can only come from those to whom jihad is natural. 

After World War Two eleven million GIs required to be served. The government could not argue with the 7% of the population, the war ready young men, who had just been trained to kill, in the name of civilization. So taxes on the hyper rich were brought up to 92.5% in the following decade. In the USA.

This why, when Roman plutocracy grew, it tended to employ foreign troops. They were unlikely to require a revolution at home, and if they did, it did not matter, as their home was out there. 

The Romans used to say that, if you want peace, prepare for war (Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum). But the truth is even worse. When maximizing peace, do not prioritize the minimization of war.

Nobody said life was not tough. But there is nothing like it.

***

Patrice Ayme

North Korea: CRUSH INFAMY!

In a few words: Killing lethal moods swiftly is the only way to survival for a civilization increasingly surrounded by ever more deadly dangers. One way, or another, the North Korean regime has to be disposed off. Quick. No half measures will do. Against a power crazy, cornered nuclear beast, any moderation will contend in vain. All the democracies have to understand this, and act accordingly.

*** 

Abstract. War is Homo’s most fateful behavior. Goodness often cannot do without it. Man has evolved partly intrinsically bad, because not only is the planet finite, implying war, but forceful progress, ferociously defended, has always been the only way out of wanton fangs and claws. The law was invented to sheperd new technology away from new bestiality. Better beasts against lower beasties, that is the dirty work enlightenment has to go through, just as one washes clothes, from time to time. 

ICBM Trajectories To Hawai’i, West USA On Map

In war, leaders turn into gods, deciding who may, or will, die. Men become death. Yet, in the better cases, war can kill the worst moods, not just other men. With North Korea, such is the case.

With many times more population than the Earth can sustain, dawn may rise on an age of war as never seen before. Unless more advanced discipline, that is, more law, and much more futuristic technology, allow to master the demographic situation. Good discipline is when our better angels are enforcing it. Good technology is when anti-ballistic missiles missiles are reigning, rather than what they are supposed to intercept. 

In this context, if a pretext arises to annihilate North Korean fascism, by force, it should be jumped on. Sometimes blatant usage of force is good. Many are the very strong reasons for this. To start with, North Korean fascism has crossed all the philosophical red lines.

It’s the first time a regime begs for food, by threatening Armageddon. Your food, or your life.

It’s not a question of advocating the first good world war around the corner, but a case of precisely the opposite, of desperately clinging to a greater notion of planetary peace. And not just in the context of Korea, but of the entire planet. The age of war will certainly arise, should the mood of aggression be encouraged by brainless pacifists.

One wants to avoid the contagion of having countries around the world believe that nuclear fascism worked, because democracy left it not just unpunished, but rewarded.

That mood, that fascism had been left unpunished, or even rewarded, is precisely why allies of democracy in World War One, such as Russia, Japan or Italy turned to fascism after WWI. They observed that German war criminals, culprit of a deliberately planning a World War of wanton aggression for August 1914, had not been punished. And that some of them thrived (Schacht).

(In truth the Kaiser, and its top generals, should have tried for various outrageous war crimes, not by coincidence the same crimes that made the Nazis’ fame later. Correctly tried, he Kaisers and his co-conspirators would have been hanged. Not coincidentally that would also have had the positive side effect to remove criminals such as Luddendorff, Schacht or Hidenburg, who were top Nazis, one way or another: the former two chaperoned Hitler, the third nominated him.)

Repeating the performance with nuclear weapons ever more widely available, would have even more dreadful consequences.

It is timely for the USA to remember that it is the betrayal, by the USA, of its parents, France and Britain, and humanity in general, that enabled Hitler to score from 1936 until his armies froze in the suburbs of Moscow in December 1941. The pseudo-pacifists, intrinsic collaborators of evil as they are, should be especially reminded of this. And the following corollary:

Those who know history are condemned not to repeat it. 

(Fortunately Obama knows history better than the plutocratically tainted Franklin Roosevelt.)

In 2013, the USA can count on the formidable strategic deterrent of the European Union spearheaded by France and Britain. But the USA better be ready to go the whole way, right away with its East Asia allies. The question is whether democracies such as South Korea and Japan will win, rather than the fascist  regime principle, in a nuclear context. Should the USA be reluctant to smash North Korea, it would favor the latter rather than the former.

(This, unfortunately is a possibility: the Chinese plutocracy is little more, nowadays, than an antenna, a subsidiary, of the one centered around Harvard and Wall Street; major USA plutocrats would not want their main tool, the People’s Republic of China, broken, and that tool has been cooperating with North Korea since the “communist” era of the early 1950s.)

History, logic and wisdom show that the first line of defense is to inform North Korea that the only concession worth making, is to consent to engage it in total war. There again the situation faced with Hitler is enlightening. In some important ways the present situation is worse. Tolerating North Korea is not just tolerating fascism and plutocracy over democracy, it’s also tolerating nuclear blackmail for planetary guidance over the most basic common sense.

***

THE HEAVY RESPONSIBILITY OF THE USA IN THE 1930s:

The situation with North Korea is clearer than it has ever been with any extremely lethal fascist regime in the past. The regime has to be changed, using force, one way or another. In the soft version, North Koreans, faced with annihilation, do it themselves. So the world democratic leadership should make clear to the NORTH KOREAN MILITARY THAT THEY WILL BE TERMINATED, should they not get rid of the terrorizing dictatorship that they let themselves be guided by.

That solution, execution, and a coup, did not happen with Hitler. But it could have. It nearly did. It certainly would have happened if the Anglo-Saxon part of the West (plus Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Sweden) had not been collaborating with Hitler (each in its own way).

More specifically, German marshalls and generals could not figure out, all too long, on which side Great Britain, and especially the USA, were. Each time Great Britain or the USA made a new deal or concession with Hitler, Hitler’s top generals, who were GRIMLY DETERMINED TO GET RID OF HITLER, were undercut. The German generals wanted to appear as the saviors of Germany, not the ones undermining the great National-Socialist German Workers’ revolution (to give the Nazi party its full name).

One should avoid that same slippery slope with North Korea (Clinton, Bill, the guy who brought us the reign of financial derivatives, and too big to jail bankers, cut deals with North Korea; so here we are, facing nuclear strikes!). It should be made clear to the world’s united fascists, that, threatened with (nuclear!) terror, the democracies will ALWAYS ANNIHILATE regimes playing that sort of “games”

“Nuclear threats are not a game,” Ban, the UN secretary general, a Korean,  in connection with N.Korea’s nuclear blackmail  said at a news conference in Andorra on April 2, 2013. “Aggressive rhetoric and military posturing… could lead down a path that nobody should want to follow.” My main argument is that rewarding this, is an even worse path.

Although the primary culprits of Nazism were the crazy Germans of the 1930s, themselves, of course, enormous manipulations of public opinion by Anglo-Saxon plutocrats caused the apparition, in Great Britain and the USA, of a mindset collaborating with Nazism. That mindeset was re-amplified back in Germany as Germans, and especially the Nazis, could appreciate all the help from the USA the Nazi party, and then regime, was getting.

Anti-French feeling, prominent with the London financier and economist Keynes, rose in that context; the French republic became the explanation of all that was bad in Germany, as far as much of the Americans elite was concerned (it goes on to this day, in a remarkable case of mental inertia).

World War Two killed 75 millions, 3% of the world population. Could it have been (mostly) avoided? Yes. Is there an application to the situation with North Korea? Yes.

In 1939, the USA, entangled with Nazi Germany through its plutocrats, passed a law calling its parents, France and Britain, “belligerent countries” (because France, followed by its reluctant poodle Britain, had attacked Hitler).

As it turned out, France and Britain were right to attack Hitler. However, in the first ten months of the war, more than 95% of the fighting against the Nazis was made exclusively by the Poles and the French. On May 10 1940, France had 110 divisions engaged against Hitler’s 160 divisions. Britain had only ten divisions (plus one tank brigade). (Various traitors such as Belgium and the Netherlands found themselves arttacked by Hitler, mostly put off balance the French military, so, instead of helping France, helped efficiently in her demise.)

Carefully forgotten by official history, the most significant contributions of the USA to the war effort in 1939, helped Adolf Hitler. OK, not a thesis to make friends with! Friends trespass, truth stays.

***  

NUCLEAR BLACKMAIL OUGHT NOT TO BECOME THE NEW PARADIGM:

President Obama, contrarily to Franklin Roosevelt, was not born and raised in the plutocracy, and knows history much better (Roosevelt’s unexplained, long term anger against France, and his urge to cut Europe into small pieces, is a testimony to his lack of a sense of history; in the fullness of time, for the USA to undercut the beautiful civilization out of which it sprang, is self destroying).

Moreover, differently from 1939, when Hitler looked like a distant asset of the USA, this time the USA is on the frontline. A president of the USA will not be able to claim surprise as with Pearl Harbor, or 9/11. The North Korean military has just announced that it has been authorized by Mr. Fatso to conduct nuclear strikes on the USA.

North Korea’s 2013 nuclear threats were apparently to get “concessions”. Nuclear blackmail is a new mood on the world scene, a new mood in history. A CASUS BELLI, PER SE. No nation has ever engaged in idle nuclear threats before (nuclear dissuasion is an entirely different thing). On the face of it, nuclear blackmail is a new form of terrorism. Nuclear terrorism.

It’s not because a regime is led by obviously crazed maniacs, that it should not be taken seriously. In 1939, the USA did not take Hitler, seriously. The USA did not stand with its parents, France and Britain, or even democracy, civilization, or common sense, and basic humanity, against fascist thugs. Quite the opposite.

***

WHY THE NORTH KOREAN DICTATOR IS CRAZY, AND WHY HE WON’T STOP, UNTIL DESTROYED:

Hitler had good reasons to be angry and desperate in 1945. The Nazi dictator had actually the means to kill millions in 1945, using jet bombers (that flew too fast to be intercepted) and huge storage of nerve gas. Hitler did not even contemplate the possibility. Whereas the insane Mr. Kim poses in front of  map that says he plans to kill dozens of millions or so. Mr. Kim is not too worried; he is obviously not even on a diet. He is an old hand at terror as the way to the best life, the only life he knows.

The present North Korean dictator spent nearly ten years in rich boarding schools in Switzerland. Many say that would make him somebody one can trust. Quite the opposite. Mr. Kim knows that it is terror that brought him (and his father before him), the ultimate plutocratic lifestyle: buying anything, getting away with anything (not just mass murder).

Hoping that Mr. Kim is one of us, a frequent reaction with common people I interviewed, because he has always lived like the ultimate plutocrat shows how brainwashed We the People has become. Plutocrats are not like us!

To believe that just because plutocrats are spoiled they will always be keen to not make waves, is similar to the reasoning of the 1930s that Von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s foreign minister, had got to be reasonable in the end, because he was an extremely rich wine merchant, with a vast, luxurious apartment in central London, where he entertained the British oligarchy. Hitler himself, not just the British high society, believed this.

Von Ribbentrop was hanged at Nuremberg, for the part he played in setting up the conditions for World War Two, by misleading a lot of people. It’s clear that, should missiles start flying, the young Mr. Kim’s responsibility will be much greater than that of von Ribbentrop. In other words, Mr. Kim is a potential criminal of the highest order. Already making nuclear war threats put him off the scale. That he had a privileged youth, thanks to the murder of thousands, if not millions, makes him even more so.

Mr. Kim was born and raised in a world of terror, where terror is the friend that kept on giving to him. What he knows at this point is that many North Koreans want him dead, and all too many of his own generals are wondering why this brat, half their age, gives them dangerous orders. Apparently there was already at least one assassination attempt.

By the time France and Britain declared war to Hitler, there had been no less than 24 (two dozen) known assassinations attempts against  Adolf Hitler (including some by SA and SS, some all the way up in the army command, all the way to Generalfeldmarschall, and higher!). Those assassinations attempts motivated Hitler to further an ever more outrageous, ever more dangerous situation, in the hope of activating the fascist instinct that makes people group up brainlessly behind their leader in case of lethal threat.

The top Nazis were in the usual position that top plutocrats always find themselves in, when they have got too far. When their devotion to the Dark Side has brought them far enough, the safest course, the only course, is to get ever worse. 

Mr. Kim, the North Korean dictator, sees two alternatives: on one side being arrested, tortured, jailed, tried or assassinated, and, on the other side, playing nuclear war games. With the hopes that he can score big that way (say through concession by the West, as he used to get from Clinton, Bill, Lewinsky Maximus). As his father did before him.

Then, after his hoped-for abject concesssions from the West, Mr. Kim would appear to be Mr. Indispensable, saver, if not father, of his nation. That is why Mr. Kim will never stop, because the only hope he has, to survive, is to instill in us enough horror, that we submit abjectedly, ever more. At some point, that will mean actually launching a nuclear tipped missile, unless Mr. Kim is physically neutralized first.

***

KILL NUCLEAR BLACKMAIL NOW:

Looking forward, nuclear blackmail should be viewed as a war crime. If one makes a death threats against, say, the president of the USA, it’s legally punishable. The same should a fortiori be true when one makes threats against millions of people.

Any regime that engages in nuclear blackmail ought to be discontinued. Taking North Korea out, would incite leaders who do not think very well in Iran or Pakistan, let alone Beijing, or Moscow, and the individuals attending to them, to think more carefully in the future. It’s a question of annihilating a mood that feels nuclear blackmail works. That mood will grow, lest it’s killed in its North Korean egg.

If that mood grows, the situation will become very hard to control. One of the problems in 1939-1940, is that the French republic found itself at war with no less than five hostile countries or gangs rendered crazed by fascist thugs: the Nazis, the Italian fascists, the murderous Soviets, the Japanese imperial machine, and (most of) the American plutocracy (the latter pulling everybody’s strings directly, but for the Japanese, who, nevertheless, through the formal machinery of the Axis, were submitted to their influence; after all Yamaoto studied at… Harvard, just as one of Hitler’s earliest (1921) sponsors).

Although France could have handled just one of these enemies with 99% probability of winning, with so many enemies together collaborating suddenly, the Republic was at the mercy of a shove by a combination of high command incompetency, fate and betrayal. As happened. (One of the many nefarious consequences being the Holocaust of more than 50 millions.)

Right now, the West can smash the North Korean dictatorship completely, and easily. Others who want to help the infamy in North Korea are welcome to stand on the battle field, and be smashed too. We may as well have it now, on the time and place of our own choosing.

Tomorrow will be something else. There is no doubt that, if Mr. Putin sees that North Korea is getting concessions, he will become even more aggressive than he already is. On the other hand, if he contemplates every single palace of Mr. Kim reduced to ashes, he will reconsider his present drift towards ever more aggression and tyranny.

Indeed, after the Troika was very firm on Cyprus’ mobsters’ activities, the Kremlin backed off. If the Troika had been impressed by the threats of Medvedev and Putin, we would still be giving respect to gangsters (instead, Cyprus’ justice is now turning against the politicians and oligarchs it suspects got paid by the Russian mob).

***

TO ENCOURAGE A COUP, NO CONCESSION WHATSOEVER:

Democracies have to make junior, or more moral military in a fascist regime realize that they better not collaborate.

The first way to take a fascist regime out is to make very clear that anybody contributing to such a regime will be tried for war crimes, and that the regime, should it engage in outrageous threats, confirmed by aggression, will be taken out. To back up that threat, it has to be real.

One should not repeat what happened with Hitler. The top German brass had contacted the British government to ask it to declare that Britain would stand with France and declare war, should the Nazis engage in one more provocation. The idea was that then the German generals, headed by Beck, the head of the army, would make a coup, and justify it to the German Volk by observing that Hitler’s march to a war with France and Britain, would destroy Germany.

A similar situation happened a bit earlier in Japan: junior officers tried a coup against the top military-plutocratic brass. Strong support by the West against those officers may have been effective. In any case it may have make top officers such as USA educated Yamamoto (head of the Navy) think twice. 

Instead of making the declaration the German generals asked for, British traitors told everything to Hitler. That made all subsequent coup attempts much more difficult. It is certain that, should Britain have clearly declared in 1938 that it would go to war against Hitler with France, Beck would have got rid of the Nazis (they were easy to eliminate for the army in 1938).

In North Korea, as in Nazi Germany, millions of rather well meaning naïve idiots are the main support of the regime. One has to show them that their leaders bring them doom and gloom, and only doom and gloom. And never, ever, the smallest positive thing.

***

SHOULD ONE FAIL TO ACT…

A most significant difference, at this point, between the 30 year old fatso in Pyongyang and Hitler, is that Hitler never had a nuclear weapons program. The Nazis had been told by their ignorant scientists (Hahn, Heisenberg, etc.) that nuclear bombs were not possible. (France had started her bomb program in January 1938, Japan did have three nuclear programs, the main one in (occupied) North Korea.)

Another difference is that, six years into his reign, Hitler was at war with Poland, and the French and British empires. The North Korean dynasty is in its third generation, and it’s getting ever more absurd, crazy, and lethal

The scared and scary brat in North Korea may have 300 weaponized, miniaturized nukes, and perfectly working ICBMs, in ten years. Then what? Dozens of millions dead? 

In ten years, the nuclear brat in Korea will be more scared than ever, more crazy and lethal than ever, and would believe, should he succeed in his present maneuvers, that ever more blackmail will be ever more profitable. By then he may have more allies (contemplate Putin’s unstable, phantasmagoric and childish mind).

Moods are important. Mussolini was Hitler’s determined enemy, before he realized, that, after all, they were fellow fascists. Stalin, and his cabinet of Soviet comrades just as phantasmagorically, went the other way, from German generals, and Hitler’s best friend and fan (!), to their most determined enemies.

The German slip, from imperial fascism in July 1914, to racial mass murdering fascism by 1933, was greatly due to the mood that whoever the Nazis and their fellow travelers thought counted in the USA, and Britain, was with them, against France (and then against the Jews).

Once the fascist instinct has taken over an entire population, said population has to be defeated as the large single minded idiotic monster it has become. The Nazis were still fighting like mad men in April 1945, when most of Germany was covered by foreign armies. Units were formed of German kamikaze pilots to ram their planes against Allied bombers. The first suicide collision brought down two American superfortresses… So do not doubt an instant that many a North Korean officer is foaming at the mouth to visit nuclear fire on all the cities of the USA (among other places).

The West should not be afraid to impose a new mood now, because not only its survival, but the fate of the biosphere depends upon taking the toughest decisions, and very soon.  The new mood should be that the West will not hesitate, as Voltaire ordered, to crush infamy. Especially when it has to do with saving reason.

China and Russia have to face the fact that their own creature, North Korea, is threatening to engage in nuclear war. That is their responsibility. This is not something that happened in the 1950s. 

President Truman fired Mac Arthur, because he said that Mac Arthur “wouldn’t respect the authority of the President”. It had nothing to do with nuclear war. Had North Korea be endowed with the capability of waging nuclear war, and threatened the USA with nuclear strikes in the 1950s, Truman would certainly have unleashed Mac Arthur all the way to Stalin’s Moscow. 

Hitler had not even threatened France and Britain when the two democracies gave him an ultimatum on September 1, 1939. Why did France and Britain engaged in a world war? Crush infamy! At least, this time, and in a striking contrast with what happened in 1939, the USA can be sure that, should nuclear war be engaged in Asia, it can count on its parents to help keep Mr. Putin in check, manu militari.

Voltaire felt very strongly about his metaprinciple: Écrasons l’infâme (“Let’s crush infamy“). So strongly that he signed his letters with Ecr. L’inf. (Cru. inf.)

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Ecr. L’inf., Patrice Ayme