LIMIT WEALTH ABSOLUTELY

In the Roman Republic, for centuries, families’ wealth was absolutely limited. When that limit on wealth became hard to enforce from the type of globalization the imperial Roman Republic organized, the Republic fell to rampaging plutocrats.

How come? How come the absolute wealth limit, how come its disappearance led to that of the Republic? And why is this irrelevant today? The latter point should be emphasized right away, to incite readers to read further: the entire planet is now endowed, in this world empire, with the same exact sort of globalization which killed the Roman Republic… And the so-called “populist” movements erupting all over, are fighting against that particular type of globalization.

Why did the Romans limit wealth absolutely?

Wealth is power. Democracy means, literally, “People Power”. If only a few have most of the wealth, a few have most of the power, and the People are left with an insignificant amount of power. This is exactly what Rome’s fate demonstrated. That brings two questions: who is the “People”, what is “Power”?

The Roman Republic’s first answer was that, instead, a poorly defined the “Thing Public”, the “RES PVBLICA” would be the instrument of the “Senate And People of Rome”, the SENATUS POPULUS QUE ROMANUS (“SPQR”).

Tropaeum Alpium: Trophée des Alpes. People Power Built That

The Senate was reserved to Patricians (the Nobles). “Patricians” came from “father” (Pater), and Senatus from senex (old man; one had to be old enough to become a Senator). Rome started with seven kings, chosen by the Senate, elected by the People. In 509 BCE, after a revolution and war of liberation, the kings were replaced by two elected Consuls. Elected magistrates became automatically  senators.

The Senate gave “consulta” “counsels” (advices, French conseils) to magistrates, including the Consuls.

Around 400 BCE, Rome had increasing problems keeping the Celts in check. Rome ended occupied, and had to pay a ransom to get the Celts out, after being rescued, in the nick of time, by a flock of geese on the Capitol. After this humiliation, the Romans no doubt discovered that the cause came from too much power in too few hands.

In any case, laws were passed to prevent wealth to exponentiate, as wealth tends to do. The Romans had the intelligence to not be too subtle.

The main idea of the Roman (unwritten) constitution was that not one single individual ought to have power beyond some limits of duration and law. Consuls exerted power one month at a time; and the law was supposed to spare no one, as the empress (“Augusta”) Galla Placidia reminded all in the Fifth Century: this was the principle of the “State of Law”.

Limiting power implies the limitation of wealth. Because unlimited wealth is unlimited power.  

SPQR Inscribed At The Bottom; La Turbie, France

Accordingly, after the insolent Celts had been dispatched, the same authorities who had succeeded in this war, passed laws limiting wealth absolutely.

This worked fine, until the Roman Republic won, after decades of harrowing total war, the Second Punic war. It set on fire the entire Mediterranean world: Carthage, a hellish, imaginative, creative plutocracy naturally allied herself to all the other plutocracies she could find (such as the Hellenistic kingdoms). The Republic won, and won a world.

This New World gave a new opportunity for the plutocratic phenomenon to blossom. All the more as many of the best and brightest of Rome had perished on the battlefields. At the Battle of Cannae alone 60 officers of senatorial rank or higher were died in combat, along with 300 Nobles and 80,000 Roman soldiers and allies, when the Roman army got annihilated by Hannibal commanding his smaller Carthaginian  and Celtic army.

The landlords and greedsters had made a lot of money during the years Hannibal roam the countryside, renting to the peasants who had fled to the fortified cities (the walls of Rome were of cyclopean proportions). That profiteering fostered an increasing mood of profit and greed with the systems of thoughts and practices to go with it. Globalization allowed to hide capital, and escape the law.

Notice that the same phenomenon happened when Middle Age and Renaissance Europe globalized, and established colonies worldwide. Colonies tended to escape the law, blossom plutocracy, and all the evil to go with it, such as slavery.

Let’s not just whine: plutocracy can be efficient. Carthage demonstrated this by creating a gigantic empire and trade zone that brought a lot to everybody.

The USA, and Russia are living demonstration that a ferocious extermination of the natives, in conjunction with an apartheid mechanism can be most efficient to create wealth (the Russian Orthodox Church for Russia, racism and racial slavery for the USA, were the instruments of this apartheid).

Roman democrats and progressives noticed that the limit to wealth had been removed: plutocratic power was in their face. They fought to re-establish the law. The plutocrats reacted with their private armies.

Rome sank in civil wars that lasted a century. Plutocracy, that all devouring principle, won. Plutocracy stays in power best, by making the People unemployed, stupid, terrorized, and small minded. Rome slowly sank.

Far sighted Roman generals endowed the Franks with the power to constitute a second foundation. The rest is history.

Nowadays plutocracy is rising again. To block it, the best way is to use the Roman method: cap wealth. Some will sneer that the Franks did not need to cap wealth. However, that’s just because those who sneer don’t know history. The Franks not only capped wealth, but they even extinguished it periodically in nationalizations.

The first one occurred in the 720s. Invading Muslim armies attacked Francia. Charles Martel nationalized all the wealth he could find, and that was the church. With the wealth so acquired, he constituted the largest army since the Battle of Cannae.

But this time, civilization won.

Patrice Aymé

Earth Out Of Oxygen: GLOBAL HYPOXIA

Move over, “Global Warming” and “Climate Change”! You meek, obsolete euphemisms have been paid by your fossil fuel masters to occupy the front stage, in a masquerade of objectivity. These euphemisms pretend, in the very description they entail, that we are just going to change to a warmer state… No big deal then. Actually the real full consequences of the CO2 emission crisis, are much more catastrophic. We could run out of oxygen.

Indeed, let me introduce, instead of a “warm change”, the radical notion of “GLOBAL HYPOXIA“. Yes, no less. That, running out of oxygen is the real ultimate danger in the enfolding man-made CO2 crisis. There are basically three known threats converging on global hypoxia: killing the oxygen making plankton, killing the oxygen making forests… and, even more pernicious, the oxidation of 1,600 gigatons of permafrost (that’s twice the mass of CO2 in the atmosphere…) That will suck oxygen out of the atmosphere…

I have explained that I do not believe in the Impact theory of previous mass extinctions. Instead I believe in what I call (Earth) Core Volcanism. Core Volcanism would have erupted with huge quantities of CO2, hence would have devastated the seas. Hint: at the time when the dinosaurs died, mammals and birds (a type of dinosaur) survived handsomely. Yet the devastation in the ocean was total.

Kill Seas With Acid, Kill Oxygen Production

Krugman wrote an editorial “Cutting Back On Carbon“, that explained the obvious, namely that switching to a non carbon economy would not cost much, if at all:

“Next week the Environmental Protection Agency is expected to announce new rules designed to limit global warming. Although we don’t know the details yet, anti-environmental groups are already predicting vast costs and economic doom. Don’t believe them. Everything we know suggests that we can achieve large reductions in greenhouse gas emissions at little cost to the economy…

You might ask why the Chamber of Commerce is so fiercely opposed to action against global warming, if the cost of action is so small. The answer, of course, is that the chamber is serving special interests, notably the coal industry — what’s good for America isn’t good for the Koch brothers, and vice versa — and also catering to the ever more powerful anti-science sentiments of the Republican Party.”

I sent an approving comment. However, it was censored. With my approach on this particular subject, it’s systematic. It seems that the censors at the New York Times are either very well paid by very clever supervisors, or so stupid that they believe that those who believe in GLOBAL HYPOXIA are genuinely mad.

Out of charity, I decided to operate under the later hypothesis, and to make even more efforts to educate those ignorant little Wall Street sycophantic tyrants.

Oceans Warming Globally, But Acidity Concentrating Locally

This is a (boosted) version of what the New York Times censored:

Agreed to all, well analyzed. Now to add a few points
Cutting carbon burning to zero is not just a question of cost, but a matter of survival. The present Green House Gases concentrations already guarantee that the planet’s climate will be brought back to the Jurassic. That guarantees flooding where billions of people are presently living: the Jurassic was characterized by shallow seas.

But that’s not all. Because this is the most violent eruption of CO2 in at least 65 million years, at least a third of the CO2 created by man’s folly goes straight in the ocean. It does so at a rate at least one hundred times faster than at any times in the last tens of millions of years (as ice core studies for the last 650,000 years have confirmed).

Once in the ocean, the carbon dioxide chemically reacts with water to create carbonic acid. The acidity has already climbed by 30%, globally. However, it concentrates mostly in some surface layers… Where sea life is also the most concentrated.

Thus the CO2 crisis is not just about Global Heating: It is also causing another crisis, a GLOBAL ACID environment too.

If the acidity rises too much, the phytoplankton will die and half of the oxygen supply will be lost.

Now add to this that the forests will burn, and that the permafrost will met and oxidize… and so will many mineral in the ground exposed to higher temperatures. So the Green House Gases pollution is not just a question of changing climate, like one changes clothes. What we have now is a programmed destruction of the biosphere…. and even of the oxygen it breathes!

The fact the US Congress wants to prevent the Pentagon to be well armed for climate change (in particular having as much carbon free fuel as needed), shows indeed that all what the Congress of the USA cares about is preserving the existing power structure. Well, it may be paid for that, but that’s a fatal disposition.

Patrice Aymé

Notes:

Hypoxia Censored: The preceding comment I made of the Krugman editorial was censored by the New York Times, as all previous comments of mine alluding to running out of oxygen, Global Hypoxia, have also been. This shows the hypocrisy of the Times: it pretends to be worried about the climate, but it does not want its readership to be aware of the ultimate danger we are facing: not just sea level rise, and crocodiles in the Arctic, but a lowering of global oxygen levels. It’s simple, yet radical science.

Scientific Background, From Anthropogenic Decline in High-Latitude Ocean Carbonate by 2100 : “The surface ocean is everywhere saturated with respect to calcium carbonate (CaCO3). Yet increasing atmospheric CO2 reduces ocean pH and carbonate ion concentrations, and thus the level of saturation. Reduced saturation states are expected to affect marine calcifiers even though it has been estimated that all
surface waters will remain saturated for centuries.

Here we show, however, that some surface waters will become undersaturated within decades. When atmospheric CO2 reaches 550 ppmv, in year 2050 under the business-as-
usual scenario, Southern Ocean surface waters begin to become undersaturated
with respect to aragonite, a metastable form of CaCO3.

By 2100… undersaturation extends throughout the entire Southern Ocean and… Pacific. These changes will threaten high-latitude aragonite secreting organisms including cold-water corals, which provide essential fish habitat, and shelled pteropods, an abundant food source for marine predators.”

That was published ten years ago, in 2004. Ever since the CO2 injections from human industry have accelerated considerably.

Joan Of Arc: Pet & Pest

National myths are the paradigms of the plebs. When all they do is exalt nationalism, for nationalism’s sake, they foster fascism. And only atavism, not justice, then justifies this sorry rage.

Joan of Arc incarnated Nazism without any Social pretense (the “z” in Nazism is for “socialism”). It’s even worse: D’Arc effectively turned a three way civil war in France into a religious war.

The French Front National uses Jeanne D’Arc as a front. That’s an affront, but not the way common wisdom would have it. Indeed, even under the worst scenarios, Marine Le Pen could never turn into as much a historical monster, as Joan of Arc was. D’Arc relaunched a civil war, that, thanks to her demonic efforts, lasted another four centuries.

Separatist Sister Souls In Fanatical Bigotry

Once Yolande’s pet, now recycled by Marine.

[By the way, in case Le Pen did not notice, Brussels used to be in Gallia and Francia, for more than 2,500 years. So Marine Le Pen, rendered mad by greed, wants to cut France in two.]

The president-elect in Ukraine just identified the separatists there to “Somali Pirates“. That’s exactly what Johanne was: a separatist, an outlaw.

Indeed what was the alleged work of Joan of Arc? A secession. Far from being a French heroine, Joan of Arc split France in two. Far from being a liberator, Johanne enslaved Western Europe to centuries of war. Her call to ethnic hatred against the “Anglois”does not help her modern philosophical depiction.

Indeed an accord had been found between the two feuding French governments, one in Paris, and illegitimate, the other in London, and legitimate. That was after nearly 90 years of (un)civil war. An accord reunited the government. After his death, the king in Paris, was to be succeeded by the king in London, Henry V of England, who was much younger.

Henry V appears in three Shakespeare plays, and is called the “Star of England”. grandson of Edward III of England. The latter being the one and only grandson of Philippe Iv Le Bel, of France. Edward III was the true king of France, being the son of Isabelle of France, queen of England, and legitimate (according to the Salic Law), queen of France (as the only child left of Philippe Le Bel).

So this 485 year war was all a Franco-French affair. To present it, as too much nationalist histories do,  as a national conflict, with the redeeming figure of 19 year old Johanne on top, is to put nationalism and a monster war on an altar, and worship them.

From the heights of wisdom, it is more judicious to put view them as garbage, and stomp on them.

The settlement with Henry V as king of the reunited kingdom, was infinitely better than the ferocious three way civil war between Anglois, Armagnac and Bourguignons. (At the time, all sorts of languages were spoken in “France”; even by 1900, only half of the population spoke “French” as a native language!)

After months of negotiation with Charles VI of France, the Treaty of Troyes (1420), agreed to by the queen of France Isabeau de Baviere, recognized the 34 year old Henry V as regent and heir-apparent to the French throne. This treaty deprived Isabeau’s own five sons of the throne. Henry was not just an invincible conqueror, he was the legitimate king.

Henry V, the victor of Agincourt, was subsequently married to Charles’s daughter, Catherine of Valois (1401 – 1437). However, following Henry V’s sudden and unexpected death in France two years later, two months before the sickly Charles VI did, Henry was succeeded by his infant son, who reigned as Henry VI (1421 – 1471). It was a case when lethal dysentery changed history.

When Jeanne said:”King of England, and you, duke of Bedford, who call yourself regent of the kingdom of France… settle your debt to the king of Heaven; return to the Maiden, who is envoy of the king of Heaven, the keys to all the good towns you took and violated in France,” she is actually a child addressing an even smaller child, the king, and the legitimate head of the state of France.

All this mythology was prompted by Yolande of Aragon, queen of four kingdoms, who did not want to be vassal to a super power in the north. Or just loved power, whatever (she was in power, and a power, for 43 years).

The bottom line is that the events that Joan of Arc came to symbolize are all wrong (and it’s no wonder the so called Front National embraced her). Prior to this triumph of bigotry, what’s now called France and England, had been part of the same polity of more than a millennium. To celebrate Joan of Arc is to celebrate religious fanaticism of Osama bin Laden’s intensity, and the 400 years of further strife the victory of Yollande and Charles VII brought.

More details can be found in:

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2013/05/18/joan-of-arc-roasted-too-late/

Nowadays, common commentators remember only this of the period: the Agincourt victory by the “English”, and the martyrdom of Jehanne. In Anglo-Saxon countries, the first is often used to prove the French are worthless, cowardly, inferior militarily idiots. The second is evoked to prove the viciousness of the English. Never mind that the victors of Agincourt were annihilated in a battle later, and that the southern French army developed a new weapon, field artillery, that allowed to kick the “English” out.

“English” that were French truly. Never mind too, that the main accuser of Jehanne was bishop Cauchon, who was French, whichever way one wanted to look at him (his aggressive philosophy led him later to accusations of heresy).

Joan of Arc, national hero, was nothing but: ultimately the war between Paris and London was rather lost by Paris. Certainly, that spirit of division and conflict weakened France: remember Louis XIV, chasing millions of Protestants out of France (maybe because he had been rendered mad by a festering hole in his nether region, which lasted decades).

Thus, in a way, Joan of Arc is the perfect festering, fanatical symbol for would be simple minded fascists.

Writing a new, and more correct, history, means throwing a lot of old myths, and their accompanying deleterious illusions, into the fire.

Patrice Ayme

 

 

 

Joan of Arc

Those Who Know History Don’t Need To Repeat It

CHANGE OF MOOD: WHY HAS THE USA’S WHITE HOUSE BECOME PRO-EUROPEAN?

Moods are everything. They are the epigenetics of ideas. They don’t just color them all sorts of ways, they originate them. Homo is not just about mental capabilities, but also the hormonal system motivating to develop them

Putin was stopped in the Ukraine, because he was handled by the USA in a completely different mood than the mood the USA applied to previous European tyrants, such as the Kaiser and Hitler.

In the Twentieth Century, formidable European tyrants, such as the Kaiser, Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler and Franco were approached as business, and even imperial opportunities, by the USA. Those tyrants became the tools the USA needed to break the European hegemony on the planet.

There is an exhibit number one here: the abominable attitude of the USA in September 1939. Instead of flying to the rescue of the French Republic, which had declared war to the mass homicidal dictator Hitler, who had already killed hundreds of thousands of Germans, the USA applied sanctions to France and Britain (which, with the Commonwealth had joined France in declaring war to Hitler, to its honor, overruling the despicable bleating of Gandhi, Hitler’s self-declared”friend“).

Not only that, but the industry of the USA allowed Hitler’s Luftwaffe to keep on flying while it crushed Poland, and kept France at bay.

I said: exhibit number one in 1939. The paradigm of the USA’s bait and switch was the USA’s conspiracy with the Kaiser, from June 1, 1914 (bait and trade), to sometimes in 1917 (switch!)

Forget about the genius of free enterprise. This bait and switch of the USA was about raw empire, comprised of countless conspiracies of major plutocrats, and details nobody even knows about.

Details of enormous consequence, though, such as the decision by Roosevelt, in 1933, to build 24 fleet aircraft carriers. That was not just as an enormous economic stimulus… And puts a lie to the commonly entertained fantasy that the USA was not ready to fight a world war in 1939.

The day fascist Japan attacked treacherously, the USA had seven carriers, and five were in advanced construction. Only one survived the war, the Enterprise (and it was holed by Jap bombs more than once, including off Okinawa).

Embracing European dictators, while getting ready to stab them in the back, worked beyond the wildest dreams of the American nationalists.

The way the strategy worked was always the same: under the guise of “isolationism”, and loving to know nothing about everything, the USA would let its top business men established profitable trade with the worst.

A massive war would ensue, and the USA would fly noisily to the rescue of victory, preventing the victors to enjoy victory without Uncle Sam splurging, and dictating.

A recent example of this has been the Coltan war in Congo. The USA long supported Kagame and company (the “liberators” in the Rwandan holocaust… Or maybe perpetrators and instigators, too).  Electronic businesses wanted the Coltan without paying taxes. Result: Rwandan supported warriors caused a mess in Congo, bringing five million dead, and lots of tax free Coltan. (Susan Rice was involved in this circus.)

Yet, in Europe, the USA has changed strategy.

How come?

Simple: the European Union. The EU’s democratization paradigm changed everything. The European Union forced the de-fascization of Portugal, Greece, and Spain. These dictatorships had been established with the help of the USA, direct or not. The EU’s might deconstructed the American empire.

Direct French (and then British) intervention in Bosnia (under UN mandate) forced back pseudo-nationalist Serbian racial fascism.

Confronted to all this, Bill Clinton joined the Franco-British effort (well after the French had used lethal artillery and air force violence in Bosnia). At this point the USA changed paradigm: instead of doing its usual switch and bait, it just collaborated with the EU, or France and Britain, right from the start.

Why?

Simple. The switch and bait tactic used with the Kaiser, Hitler and Stalin, while still unobserved so far,  has come very close to being revealed to all. One more blatant case, and even well paid pseudo-intellectuals from the pseudo-left, would be forced to admit that they noticed it.

When the European Union enforced the de-fascization of much of southern Europe, the USA could not really oppose that frontally.

Then of course, there were the eight year of plutocrat Bush. Bush decided to better embrace Europe to lead it into military-imperial adventurism.  However France got in the way.

Obama had decided that the Iraq war was a stupid war, and, thus, proved himself an authentic ally of France. (He could not advertise that, as Wall Street induced Francophobia runs rampant in the USA; if anything, he did not want to antagonize his sponsors.)

Obama, Clinton, and, of course, Kerry-the-French, seem to have perfectly understood that the old bait and switch strategy is unbecoming the USA. And that’s right. The USA is now so mighty that it can get a better mileage from a higher morality.

This is why Obama has become the best friend the European Union ever had since president Kennedy.

Why Kennedy? Kennedy was no peasant. He was the scion of a top plutocrat. Yet he was also someone who had travelled in Europe, and, even more important, was an authentic war hero (so was his elder brother, who died piloting a sort of giant early version of a drone in a quasi-suicidal mission).

Obama has an extremely variegated experience as a child, not just in Hawai’i, but also in Indonesia, confronted with people  with very different attitude and religion, and even suffering the occasional brunt of their hostility, just because he was different.

Enough to appreciate the transnational splendor of the European project. And that is why Obama found the wisdom and power to stop Putin in a timely manner (instead of the bait and switch FDR played with Hitler; Obama could have very well done this; instead, sanctions that bit were applied, and even the Swiss got motivated enough to entertain Putin with the vision of the bank accounts he and his friends have in Western Europe).

Those who know history don’t need to repeat it.  

American plutocrats are too mighty to be opposed directly. After all, they made Clinton and Obama. The best those chaps could do was to short their main overseas strategy, planetary bait and switch. It’s much more than it looks.

Now what we need is a real left in the West. And it should, it has to start, with intellectuals (it’s no accident that Elizabeth Warren is an ex-Harvard professor).

As Obama has long said , he can’t do the entire job by himself.

Patrice Aymé

Full Frontal Naked Nationalism

Or When Nationalism Is Better Than The Alternative.

The Danes self define as the happiest people in the world: sometimes it seems the government chew their food for them (the Danish tax rate goes up to 80%). Danes are worried “Brussels” will put an end to that. Whatever that is. In truth, alien foreigners have exhausted their welcome. On May 25, 2014, 27% voted for the nationalist anti-European far right.

That’s the same score as Marine Le Pen got in France.

French President Soon? Careful, She Bites

What’s going on? Well, each time extremism rises, it’s because there are very good reasons for this to happen. Clearly the status quo ante is unacceptable in Europe. Something I have said myself for years. And not just in Europe. A revolution is needed, and fast. More and more of We The People are arriving at the same conclusion. That’s good and necessary.

I still am an extreme internationalist. For me, for decades, nationalism was the definition of hatred and war. I was also against imperialism. I was once personally attacked by hyper nationalistic fascists, with lethal force (an IED).

Apparently, they saw my broad minded considerations as an existential threat. Nationalists tend to be mentally fragile.

Meanwhile I discovered that being against blue sky meant preferring the blackness of space. To my dismay, having a high minded internationalist mien is an invitation to victimization. It’s quite a bit related to the attitude of the Jews vis a vis Hitler in the 1930s: it’s not because you turn the other cheek, each time it gets slapped, that morality, let alone survival, progresses. Instead, the pacifist sheep will get a concussion, and finish in the incinerator.

Ukraine, of course, is an example when nationalism is turning into a good force. Only nationalism is strong enough to resist the traditional dictatorial instincts of the Kremlin. Better plenty of nationalism, than morbidity below a crazed autocrat’s boot.

In France the national Front just won the European election, becoming, on this occasion, France’s first party. It’s a victory for Marine Le Pen’s strategy over her dad’s grumpy style.

One would guess that I am horrified, as I am as progressive as they come.

But not so. Instead I am amused: progress is not always where it’s supposed to be.

Sometimes, progress takes a circuitous route. It’s because plutocratic Rome collapsed that the Franks could take over, and legislate a much more advanced civilization: much fewer death penalties, no more slavery, total religious freedom (after more than a century of religious terror).

If plutocratic Rome had not collapsed,  the barbarity of Greco-Roman civilization would have persevered. Only a radical reboot, the one the Franks imposed, could relaunched Western civilization in a sustainable form.

Another example is the occupation of France by the Nazis: it actually civilized the Nazis to the point that collaboration with France was forced onto Hitler by his colleagues to the point the Nazi dictator had to agree to it, although he argued that would make France win the war (as France’s industry was supposed to fabricate daily necessities, while Germany concentrated on weapons).

The end result is that France and Germany started to unify in 1948, something that certainly would not have happened if France had not declared war to Germany in 1939. War is also a debate.

In 2012, I saw a debate between Marine Le Pen, and the top French economy pundit. Marine Le Pen described basically how the fractional reserve system worked, and intoned that this was completely wrong. However, the cocksure pundit     excoriated her, with conventional wisdom. He claimed she understood nothing, had no knowledge of finance whatsoever.

A week later, the same pundit debated economics with Melanchon, head of the leftist opposition to the Socialist Parti, the Front de Gauche. Melanchon told the pundit he had been wrong, and Marine Le Pen was right.

And so do I.

On a related subject, Marine Le Pen has been very loud and clear that the Euro was too high. That, too, is correct. The high Euro has been killing the part of French industry that makes mass items (whereas Italy, Switzerland and Germany long focused on higher end products).

It’s of course worse for many other Euro countries.

Many European countries have been de-industrializing. It’s not because people there are dumb and lazy. Far from it. In truth Europe invents much, and other exploits those inventions.

How?

Well, Europe is open to the world economically, a bit as Athens was. and Pericles beautifully boasted in his famous funeral oraison. However openness is not everything: Athens was defeated and democracy came back, under the attenuated form of representative democracy, only 23 centuries later.

European intellectuals themselves have excoriated Europe, as if it were the source of all evils. Confusing the Nazis and their enemies the French is a case in point, chronic in the enslaved USA.

And yet, what is the truth? The rest of the world has not played nice with Europe.

Take an outrageous example. European governments have been buying from the USA. The converse, though, is forbidden by American law (except under special circumstances).

The conspiracy against Europe is deep and wide. Corrupt American industrialists, working hand in hand with the government of the USA and corrupt leaders overseas (example of such corruptocrats would be Major, Schroeder, and Blair) conspired to impose a war plane, the F35.

The F35 is the world’s worst plane: it has no better performance than the F105 “Thunderchief”, a 50 year old plane that failed in the Vietnam war. The F35 can’t go fast, it can’t carry much, it can’t accelerate more than 4 gs (the Rafale does 10gs), and, although labelled a “stealth” plane, it is fully visible to Russian and Chinese VHF radar. It’s also the most expensive military program ever: half a trillion dollars, and counting.

That turkey prevents the furthering of a European superiority fighter, although Airbus‘ Typhoon/Eurofighter  and Dassault fighters are known to be the world’s two best fighter bombers (they both take out the American superiority fighter, the F22 Raptor).

So hundreds of thousands high tech defense jobs are going to the USA, instead of Europe, on that project alone. Just because European politicians have been on the take. At least, nationalism would stop such an absurdity.

To stop all this non sense, some nationalism is needed. Some will say, as some French philosophers did, that Europe is dead, long live the world.

Yet, it’s not so simple: as I explained, both North America and Russia have been founded on maximally exploitative philosophies, which have triumphed.

Europe’s sustainable philosophy has taken a beating, and the weaker Europe gets, the more of beating sustainability gets.

So this is not just about Europe, it’s about sustainability and diversity.

Out of 750 European MPs, around 140 are Europhobes. The Danes and the British UKIP despise Marine Le Pen. Yet, if they want to have any influence in the European Parliament, the Europhobes will have to find common grounds, thus valuable complaints.

The force of democracy is the wealth of viewpoints it brings.

And never forget that democracy without force is nothing.  A six year old British      boy was found drowned and unconscious at the bottom of a pool of the giant “Royal Caribbean” ship “Independence of the Seas”.

Well, there is no independence, even on the high seas. Even for a British boy, whatever the UKIP feels like bellowing about. A French helicopter flew across the ocean, and picked up the unconscious boy to provide him with state of the art treatment (top French hospitals use methods akin to hibernation, as was done with Michael Schumacher).

It’s a small world, and in a small world there are no borders, only limits beyond which outrage turns to violence. And the worst is, that some of this violence is necessary, and the more necessary, the more violent it will become. Europe, and the world, has to march ahead, or die by the wayside.

Patrice Aymé

Hate Euro, Hate Union

Here we have Paul Krugman invited at a European Union conference, to inject his anti-European venom. Why don’t they invite Putin instead? I am sure Vladimir The Invader would be all for the Euro. After all, he is all for a greater union. Instead, Paul Krugman harbors unfathomable rage against that European currency he abhors.

Is it not nice? Instead of speaking of the banks that caused the crisis, and the bankers who made from it, like the bandits they are, we are going to talk about… A currency?

Whether he understands it, or not, Paul Krugman is paid to do that. To hate the Euro. That’s what his position in life is, to be employed by vast and influential plutocratic organizations (Princeton University and the New York Time). To hate the Euro also comes with his location (just south of Wall Street). Location, location, location.

American Economists Tell Europe: All You Need Is Dollars, Forget A Currency Of Your Own

A proof of Krugman’s lunatic hostility to Europe? He relates, and subsequently erupts uncontrollably: ”Barroso [EC chief] just declared that the euro had nothing to do with the crisis, that it was all failed policies at the national level; a few minutes ago he said that Europe’s real problem is a lack of political will.

This is quite amazing, in a really bad way.

Sorry, but depression-level slumps didn’t happen in Europe before the coming of the euro.”

What? I beg your pardon? Elitism is most useful to the global plutocracy. You bring a so called expert such as Krugman, and Big Lies become reality. What’s the difference between that and holocaust denial? I will argue, not much.

What is Krugman going to say next? Sorry, but holocausts “didn’t happen in Europe before the coming of the Euro”?

Reality check: here we have a self-declared, and unanimously applauded specialist of the Great Depression, Nobel Laureate in economics, who proclaims there was no Great Depression, just because it serves his apparently uncontrollable rage against Europe.

It will be interesting to see if he modifies his “European Green Lanterns” post after reading the complaint I sent him. Here it is:

Barroso is history. No doubt a bank or hedge fund is getting ready to employ him.

Curiously, you, Paul Krugman, forgot about the Great Depression of the 1930s. That was before the Euro. It led to a war that killed more than 70 million people (3% of the world population then).

Are you, Paul Krugman, aware that your position on the Euro is somewhat on the right of Marine Le Pen? In her saner moments, Marine just wants to devaluate the Euro itself. (The Euro’s value, built on the long range average of the French Franc is supposed to be one dollar, not 50% higher.)

It is the fact banks got bailed out, instead of bailed-in that caused the sovereign debt crisis. Spain had only 37% debt to GDP before it.

The correct way to do economics within the European house is to create a strong BANKING UNION, which will precisely prevent the bail-outs of wealthy financiers before we sell their private jets and castles.

(Right now only the weakest Banking Union is set-up, mostly because Germany has lots of small near bankrupt banks crucial to her economy. So the BU concentrates only on large banks, and, even then, meekly.)

The incorrect way to do economics within the European house, is to go back to competitive devaluations which, besides stealing the common people, are a way to make war. Economic war, perhaps, but war, nevertheless.

And war of a sort is obviously a preparation for the real thing. It is no accident that the USA marched into its lethal Secession War to the tune of many banks and currencies. (That war killed also 3% of the population.)

During the Secession War, one of the first action of Washington was, as a prelude to unification by force, to forcefully impose a currency for the Union. The present process in Europe is not any different. It’s just more pacific. Paul Krugman, by stridently howling against the Euro, is howling against the Union, and it’s amazing he is invited to do so. Why not visit the local hyena house instead?

Denying the Euro is denying the Union. It’s great for economists based next to Wall Street, and who depend upon Wall Street funding (Krugman, Stiglitz, and all others from Washington to Boston).

But denying the European Union is an invitation to war, some more war, on European soil. Happily many European leaders feel this in their guts.

Sadly, some Americans still believe that competitive devaluations are the way to go, and that it is moral to propose it, that is, to propose more holocausts on European soil.

Economically, it makes sense: the USA’s astounding wealth and power blossomed after the implosion of Europe that the desperate war against fascism from 1914 to 1945 brought. The USA made a huge amount of capital in the Twentieth Century by feeding food and ammunition materials  to the Kaiser in World War One.

World War Two was more of the same, hundreds of American corporations, such as, for example IBM, working for the Nazis right through the entire war (and providing services to the Nuremberg trials of some of their top collaborators!).

Let me ask this to Paul Krugman: after we have devaluated currencies, what do we devalue next? Do we devalue Peoples? Is it not, in a sense what Hitler did, after devaluating the German currency? Did he not devalue People? How could that not be the next step?

First put People’s worth in the incinerator, then, if that’s not enough, put the People themselves therein. Then what? Inherit the world. That’s Krugman’s program, pushed to its logical, final solution.

Indeed, a devaluation devalues the People of that nation’s wealth. Krugman advocates doing this. In other words, not content with having taxpayers pay for the thievery of the wealthiest, Krugman wants to make all of We the Common People even poorer by devaluating whatever we have left.

Of course, during the devaluation process, hedge funds located next to Krugman’s home, would make a killing, shorting everything: shares, bonds, currency. What would be next in this Krugman scheme? Oh, we have seen it many times. It’s a sort of American made breathing.  The hedge fund would keep on shorting those nations, until everything is just cents to the Euro.

Then, having made a fortune, they will invite Krugman over, and serve him caviar and champagne, in a spirit of communion.

But it won’t be over, we have seen it many times. While those countries are broke, American investors, armed with their strong dollar, will swoop in, like the vultures they are.

Americans, armed with their strong dollar, the one and only reserve currency (once Krugman got his way, and destroy the Euro). Americans will buy the land, as they did in a similar situation in Patagonia, horizon to horizon, singing on all rooftops that they are doing good. Then those hyper wealthy individuals will employ the newly destitute People, and extent the empire of the USA. Then they can invite Krugman, to howl against the Natives some more.

It is just one huge system of thought. Krugman has proclaimed many times that the activity of hedge funds had strictly no impact on the real economy. That of course goes hand in hand with shorting countries as they pull out of the Euro.

Krugman has also claimed, many times, that the fact the Dollar was the world’s reserve currency was not advantageous to the USA (in spite of Keynes being stridently of the opposite opinion, and trying his best to prevent a king dollar). I can’t tell if it’s out of genuine stupidity, or deep disingenuity.

 

Big American money hates France, and the European Union. Should not it be time for some hate-back on the part of Europeans, after they turned the other cheek for decades, until they got dizzy?  Can we start by telling it as it is about Krugman and company? That, unbeknownst to themselves, perhaps, in the guise of comparative economics, by hating the Euro, they foster bloody separatism, and holocausts?

Patrice Aymé

Why Big Money Hates France

One trait that never ceases to amaze is the hatred for “France” in much of the political, financial, and economic related media in the Anglo-American world.

As I have explained at length, this rage against the country that views herself as the home of human rights, ever since the slave trade got outlawed there in 655 CE, is not surprising coming from plutocrats, and the media they control (which is pretty much all of it). If the Franks could impede business in the Seventh Century, what is there not to hate?

That anger is directly related to the failure of the left to address the 2008 crisis and the outrageous way it was “solved” by profiting some more those who had fabricated it, thuggish financiers.

Imaginative Satanic Thrust Through Ardennes Then France

[The Nazis got very lucky in mid may 1940, as they sneaked in their entire army, undetected by the French and British until it was too late to avoid a tremendous defeat.]

Recent examples of anti-French rage are articles against the business of the French military-industrial complex with Russia. While the much larger relation of the USA military-industrial complex with Russia is enjoying the charms of devoted silence.

The the sale of two ships by France is the occasion of a deluge of racist comments against France and the French. Why not try the same racist frenzy against Blacks, or Jews?

Paul Krugman wrote an ill-conceived editorial: Crisis of the Eurocrats. Semi-education is best to bolster the violently ignorant. Weirdly, Krugman, who is on the right of Marine Le Pen about Europe, is a self-declared “conscientious liberal”.  And naturally a hero of the left. The ignorant left. Even in Europe.

Krugman’s anti-Euro trash brought up racist anti-French comments.

“France’s Jews are leaving en-masse today, after waves of antisemitic activity, with violence attached“, opined in support of Krugman “New York Times trusted commenter” Rima Rigas. In truth, 90,000 French have migrated to Israel, between 1948 and 2014. Most of them came initially from North Africa. That’s much fewer Jews emigrating than from the USA to Israel.

It’s well known, in the Anglo-American world, that France exterminates Jews. As France has special laws against Nazism, as do Germany and Austria, to exert great vengeance and retribution against that hated current of thought, that’s viewed, by the millions of anti-French racists in Anglo-Americana, as a proof that the French, left to themselves, massacre Jews, and are ‘anti-Semitic”.

The truth? Scientific and other studies show that probably half the French population is somehow Jewish or Semitic related. Being Jewish was no problem in France, for more than seven centuries, or until the monsters Saint Bernard and Saint Louis agitated their fanatical Catholic snouts. (Monstrosity helps to become a saint.)

In truth, France was stuffed with hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees from Central Europe when she was invaded in May 1940. The USA had refused to admit any.

That only 75,000 of these Jews, most of them refugees, died from Nazi action, is testimony to the courage of millions of French civilians who sheltered the rest. My own family saved of the order of a 100 Jews. To their great discomfort (food was rationed), while living in terror for four years, in cramped quarters, at the risk of their lives, and then they were chased around by the Gestapo like vulgar rabbits through forest and mountain.

But back to the essence of the problem.

World War Two started when Britain joined France to declare war on Hitler. The Commonwealth followed. Still, the brunt of the fighting was suffered by France until a (provisional) cease-fire was called at the end of June 1940.

The USA helped Hitler in 1939. Stalin was allied to Hitler in 1939. The French military had bad luck in May 1940 against the USA-Nazi-USSR coalition. Yet the Battle of France of 1940 was the deadliest battle in the West during WWII: more than 200,000 killed in 5 weeks. Only in the USSR were there more terrible battles.

How does this relate to the crisis of 2008, that we still enjoy?

It is very simple: those helping Hitler the most were plutocrats from the USA. Hitler was pretty much their thing. Not only they financed it from scratch, but they even provided him with crucial ideas.

Henry Ford brought the malfeasance of the International Jew to the fore, while giving Hitler a fortune. JP Morgan brought Dr. Schacht. Lord Keynes forcefully explained why the Versailles Treaty was an economic disaster, and a fabulous injustice caused by the manipulative French. Even PM Lloyd George told Hitler, at length, in person, that the Kaiserreich (Germany) was on the verge of victory in 1918, when it was stabbed in the back.

Hitler was like a drone, a remotely operated device, with hundreds of American plutocrats pushing the buttons. Even Hitler understood this. Only in 1941 did he half understand that he had been played: some of his wealthy friends turned into fiends, as it suited their interest better.

This was all passed under silence, and ignored. Still is.

Nobody points out that the plutocrats were playing both sides, while gathering ever more power. Their influence was occulted, in appearance after 1945, when the more than 20 million trained soldiers of the West (16 million were actively serving in 1945) had to be reintegrated in civil life, with nice social programs. To prevent them to make a revolution.

However the Dulles brothers, who were as tight with the Nazis as imaginable, before the war, pretty much controlled the USA in the 1950s. One headed the State Department, the other, the CIA.

The uncooperative and disruptive Kennedy brats were promptly assassinated, and it has been a home run ever since.

The rage against the French Republic has gone on ever since, because plutocrats control it less well than the rest, ever since 1789. True, the Nazi spearheads cut the French best armies and the British army from behind in May 1940. However, that was incredible luck. The French high command made incredible mistakes (sending the mobile armor reserve to help the Netherlands), and a succession of lucky draws of the dice favored the Nazis. When a Spitfire pilot said he saw the entire Nazi army on a leafy road in the Ardennes, he was thought to be deranged, as this was too crazy an idea to conceive.

Most of the military re-runs of May 1940 show the French and British winning a crushing victory. The very nature of the Nazi Panzer thrust exposed it to be cut from behind. It was a close thing. Had the French command being less foolhardy, and the Nazis a bit less lucky, it would have happened.

The plutocrats vaguely perceive that: how dare the French have attacked Hitler in 1939, and, in the end, prevented them, and Hitler, to exploit Eastern Europe and Russia, as had been the plan? (This is what the British-Nazi treaty of 1935 had anticipated.)  And the French could have won, clean? And they had an atom bomb program? What would have happen to the “American Century”? Still born? Is the European Union an attempt to achieve the same result, through a more devious route?

How to fix the plutocratic madness that’s taking over is simple in theory: first, determine property worldwide with a cadastrum, as Thomas Pikketty suggests. Because most of it is hidden.

And then tax wealth at 95%. And go all the way: put a cap on wealth commensurate with the one the Roman Republic had. That’s what I say.

Yet we are still in the midst of a coup by the few against the many. How? The few control the media, including the universities, the politicians, and other celebrities. To the point that bleating is the sheeple’s highest calling.

And, in Anglo-Saxon countries, raging against “the French”. Those who attacked Hitler in 1939, while the USA’s big money leadership, to its eternal shame, but well in line with its racist, exploitative past, helped the Nazi dictator to the best of its ability.

When accused later to have plotted to launch the USA into World War Two, president Roosevelt said he did not do it. What proof did he roll out? Franklin Delano Roosevelt boasted that he had been instrumental in limiting the percentage of Jewish students who could attend Harvard University. In other words, he was so spiritually close to Nazism, that he could not be suspected to have plotted against it. I rest my case.

Patrice Aymé

Putin: Viciously Incoherent

Like Hitler, Putin is obsessed by invading countries for their oil. Says the New York Times:

“Putin acquired not just the Crimean landmass but also a maritime zone more than three times its size with the rights to underwater resources potentially worth trillions of dollars.

Russia portrayed the takeover as reclamation of its rightful territory, drawing no attention to the oil and gas rush that had recently been heating up in the Black Sea. But the move also extended Russia’s maritime boundaries, quietly giving Russia dominion over vast oil and gas reserves while dealing a crippling blow to Ukraine’s hopes for energy independence.”

Putin: Got black Mind, Wants Black Gold, Black Sea

During a royal tour of Canada Prince Charles expressed a commonplace opinion in private to  Marienne Ferguson, 78, Jewish daughter of Poles who fled the Nazis and lost relatives during the Holocaust of the Jews by the Nazis.

She had spoken to the prince about her family and how she ended up in Canada.

He responded “something to the effect of, ‘It is not unlike what is now happening in Russia, what Putin is doing,’ ” she said, although she could not “exactly remember” the phrase he had used in referring to the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin.

“The prince then said, ‘And now Putin is doing just about the same as Hitler.’ ” She then said, according to The Daily Mail.

The Russian embassy in London demanded an explanation.

Here it is:

There is plenty of evidence that the latest Russian elections where rigged. Even at least one of Putin’s closest advisers admitted the results made no sense in places where Putin got more votes than registered voters (don’t ask me for a link: I saw the adviser said this on TV in English).

The annexation of Crimea is unique in history. Never had an annexation proceeded so fast. Even if one admits its independence vote, Crimea was independent just a few hours.

Also that vote was rigged: the absolute numbers initially announced in favor of independence were several times those discreetly admitted later (the participation rate was halved, and it was admitted many voted against independence, not just 3%; none of the numbers of the moment are worth reporting, as they are whatever Putin decides at that particular moment).

The incoherent declarations of the Russian dictator, when he is not hunting down who he denounces as homosexuals, anti-Christians and other degenerates, keep on piling up.

Putin said to the British press that the comparison between him and Hitler was “unacceptable” and “not royal behavior. I think he understands that himself.”

For Royal, or Czarist behavior, consider Putin. “If the main bonus Russia gets is to sit in the room and listen to what other people are saying, then that is not a role Russia can agree to,” Putin said. “We always take into account the interests of our partners … but there are some lines that cannot be crossed, and Ukraine and Crimea were that line…”

By “partners“, Putin does not mean his  partners in crime (but he thinks of them). He means the leaders of the West, who, used to close their eyes with various plutocrats, extended this to the Kremlin’s own version of Satan.

“Where is the guarantee that, after the forceful change of power, Ukraine will not tomorrow end up in NATO?” Putin told senior representatives of major international news agencies, including The Associated Press. (All this, after the Russian Strong Man claimed he would respect the Ukrainian election!)

“We hear only one answer, as if on a record: Every nation has a right to determine on its own the security system in which it wants to live, and that doesn’t concern you.”

Well, indeed, that’s how the United Nations and International Law work. Time for you to learn something, dictator!

Either Putin is viciously incoherent, or he does not know what elections are about, or both.

Criminals find handy to be incoherent: that prevent those who oppose them to make sense.

Others compared Putin’s annexation of to Hitler’s annexation of Austria. Hillary Clinton said, in public: “If this sounds familiar, it’s what Hitler did in the ‘30s.”

I have detailed the scenario with Austria. Putin was forced to veer from it, by the ferocity and unanimity of reprobation of his actions. Whereas, in the 1930s, the French Republic, until 1939, was the only state opposing Hitler. Later on that year, the USA imposed sanctions on Britain and France for declaring war to Hitler.

Instead, these time, all the representative democracies, even Switzerland, have been united in telling Putin that he was a mad man (what else did Merkel mean when she declared, in public, that Putin was in another world?) In the United Nations, more than 100 countries condemned Putin’s invasion cum annexation.

Prince Charles is expected to meet Mr. Putin early next month at D-Day commemorations in France. Hopefully, he can teach him some history.

Patrice Aymé

European Union Elections

Many are deeply ignorant of how Europe “works”. Left to themselves, European countries go to war. That is the clear lesson of a millennium of having separated Western Francia from the rest of the Imperium Francorum.

Western Francia, composed mostly of Neustria and Aquitaine, became the so called kingdom of “France” in the Thirteenth Century. It was an abuse of language, as said kingdom covered not even half of present day France, and a fraction of the “Francia” of 1000 CE.

Core Of Latin Roman Empire Successor State To Rome, 811 CE.

A bit more than 12 centuries ago, the Latin speaking core, direct institutional successor state of Rome, defined itself as the “Renovated Roman Empire“. It kept on expanding in the following centuries, back into Rome’s old borders.  Great Britain (1066 CE), Spain, Southern Italy all the way to Sicily were reconquered from the savage barbarians who had overrun them.

The apparition of narrow minded nations and intolerant religious factions in the late Middle Ages and so called “Renaissance” brought great mayhem, and vast regression. To prevent this devolution into barbarity, wisdom requires first to re-unify the empire that once was, where it makes sense to do so (clearly, culture ought to be excepted, as its variety enriches minds).

The European Union is actually an evolutionary mechanism to unify the continent, driven by Germany and France. It is a set of construction projects: parliament, executive, justice, currency, etc.

The EU is also governed by the existing democracies, independent nations legislated by their own parliaments.

Thus there are two intertwined systems: national democracies cooperating, entangled with more or less European institutions they more or less control, and increasingly weave together, while reinforcing them, or creating new ones, as the need arises.

For example, France is crumbling under an avalanche of European decrees from the European Commission (EC), applied throughout the EU. Yet, unbeknownst to many, especially in France, a plurality of these decrees is suggested by the government of France!

American progressives ought to relax: democracy is doing fine in Europe. The EU does not have millions of citizens incarcerated, as the USA does. The EU has no debt. The EU does not rule the planet with its Pentagon. The EU does not have a NSA. When European private banks need more money to leverage, they cannot go straight to the central bank and ask for more, as is the practice in the USA.

The incoherent discourses of a few extreme nationalists who dislike each other (and often are already elected European MP) are not a threat for the EU. Even those critters agree that the European Monetary Union has to be greatly improved (and a banking union is on the way). Even Marine Le Pen, an European MP, as her father is, can talk more cogently about the European currency than many an American economist.

The excellent Martin Schultz is the perfectly French speaking, and French like, German president of the European Parliament. He is a socialist (SPD). He is one of five candidates to head the EC. Chancellor Merkel supports the conservative, financier friendly Jean-Claude Juncker from Luxembourg, a native French speaker.

Natürlich, Martin Schultz is supported enthusiastically by the socialist French government.

For American plutocrats, the real threat is that Martin Schultz will become the first head of the European Commission next week to be elected by the European Parliament (instead of selected by the national governments).

That’s what this election is about.

Patrice Aymé

 

 

 

House Of Force, Not Health

Different countries manage their different houses in different ways. A century ago, the Prussian military, imbued by the philosophy of Bismarck, had a free rein over Germany, a fascist country, with a face saving, but impotent Reichstag.

Bismarck thought that force was… more economical. He has followers, to this day, worldwide.

USA: Into Force, Not Health. Health Spending Inflation, France Red, USA Blue.

This graph from the USA Federal Reserve, shows that, at least in health care, plutocracy has been doing increasingly better in the USA.

So Bismarck (author of universal health care in Germany in 1860!), from his very successes, instilled contempt for an economy not axed on force, in several generations of Germans.

However, a counterattack by the French army, east of Paris, the battle of the Marne, in early September 1914, should have put that theory to rest. But Putin did not get the news, or, maybe, finally, with his collapsing economy, it dawned on the Kremlin’s madman that now was not the time to wake up the animal spirits of an EU-USA contraption, with an economy worth around 33 times more than Russia’s.

Another one that did not get the news is American muscle. Being all muscle, and no brains, goes only that far.

As David Sanger says: “WASHINGTON — The National Security Agency has never said what it was seeking when it invaded the computers of Petrobras, Brazil’s huge national oil company, but angry Brazilians have guesses: the company’s troves of data on Brazil’s offshore oil reserves, or perhaps its plans for allocating licenses for exploration to foreign companies.

Nor has the N.S.A. said what it intended when it got deep into the computer systems of China Telecom, one of the largest providers of mobile phone and Internet services in Chinese cities…

Then there is Joaquín Almunia, the antitrust commissioner of the European Commission. He runs no company, but has punished many, including Microsoft and Intel, and just reached a tentative accord with Google that will greatly change how it operates in Europe.

American officials say, off the record, that while the N.S.A. does not spy on Airbus and give the results to Boeing, it is free to spy on European or Asian trade negotiators and use the results to help American trade officials — and, by extension, the American industries and workers they are trying to bolster.

Speaking of the spying China does in the USA, Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard law professor who served in the Justice Department under the George W. Bush administration, wrote on the Lawfare blog on Tuesday that it “sounds a lot like the kind of cybersnooping on firms that the United States does.”

All of this to say, the USA does not spend as much brainpower on health care. From the New York Times, May 19:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/05/19/health/rating-a-health-laws-success.html

“Charting the number of deaths from diseases that could have been prevented if the patient had access to appropriate health care, called the “amenable mortality” rate, shows that the United States is far behind European nations.”

Treating these diseases — like heart disease, diabetes, infections, pneumonia and treatable cancers — improves greatly the quality of life, and survival.

“Nearly 20 years ago, the United States was closer to the middle of the pack, but other countries, like Ireland and South Korea, sharply improved their rates by 2007, according to the most recent data available from the Organization for Economic Research and Development. The rate of improvement in the United States was 14 percent, the lowest of all countries surveyed.

… Seven countries improved their rates to pass the United States, which is now on par with countries like Chile and Portugal.

Deaths from heart disease and other circulatory diseases represent about half of all amenable mortality. The rate in the United States is similar to the rate in South Korea, and far higher than the rate in France.”

Actually the death rate from all amenable diseases in the USA is more than twice that of France. And the gap was growing until recently. It’s not just that the same health care, from birth (more than twice more deadly in the USA), to MRIs is many times more expensive in the USA.

In the USA, when one tends to get pneumonia (as I do), it’s hard to get antibiotics. But all and any American fowl, chicken, cattle and pigs get them everyday, as “growth factors”. In other words, in the past, there was slavery, but now even pigs are treated better.

Is plutocracy unchained amenable to progress? Sure: if we were slaves, we would get antibiotics as growth factors. Our own greed for freedom has lowered our health prospects.

In related news, the new and future Boeing 777X is getting nine billion dollars in government subsidies (mostly as tax breaks; see the link with the very American publication Aviation Week). By comparison, Airbus gets none. Yes, contrarily to legend, none.

Different ways, different houses…

Patrice Aymé