Plutocratic Planet

Plutocrats control the thinking, thus the law. In the USA, it is unlawful for Medicare, the public health insurance for seniors, to discuss the price of drugs with (private) providers. If a drug company asks for an outrageous price for a drug, Medicare has to say yes.

However, private insurers can negotiate all they want. I asked a health care executive if this was fair. He smiled sardonically: “It’s the law.”

Krugman is increasingly discovering that plutocracy is a problem (although he is careful to not use the word too much, as it smells, literally, of sulfur). He wrote an excellent editorial in the New York Times, January 2, 2015 (time flies, happy New Year!)

Income to 2008. Return of Feudalism: It Has Got Worse Since.

Says Krugman: “What you see is the surge by the global elite (the top 0.1, 0.01, etc. would be doing even better than his top 1%), plus the dramatic rise of many but not all people in emerging markets. In between is what … I’d say corresponds to advanced-country working classes in general, at least if you add post-2008 data with the effects of austerity. I’d call it the valley of despond…”

I sent a comment putting things in historical perspective. The New York Times censored it (I am on the NYT’s official watch and censor list). Here is my comment below. I will comment more on what Krugman said, after it.

Patrice Ayme (censored by NYT): “Agreed to all. Let me add more perspective. Plutocrats rose after World War One, especially in the USA, by acquiring effective control of Germany, through the good offices of Dr. Schacht (Germany’s top banker, a pawn of JP Morgan), Henri Ford (financing Hitler massively), IBM (monopoly of computing in Germany).

This allowed to turn around the anti-monopoly laws of Teddy Roosevelt. One could argue that Hitler’s Reich was an American plutocrats’ puppet. By 1945, the USA was master of the world.

However, the US army (16 million young soldiers trained to kill), had to be pacified, so GIs were treated like kings (thanks to a 93% tax on the wealthy). The economy boomed.

However, what plutocrats want is to rule: that means they want the Commons despondent. Their world domination could be accentuated by repeating, worldwide, what they had done with Germany, Italy and even the USSR between the wars. They invested far away from Western workers.

The same situation exactly led to the implosion of the Roman economy. But, first, by voiding the core of the empire of work and power, Roman plutocracy insured for itself several centuries of rule.

The same psychology is at work today: plutocrats want to deprive of power who could take it away: the Western Middle Class. “Austerity” is a just a ruse that way. Its true validity is that it diverts money and power from We The People to the richest people in the world, by fiscally means.

Wealth organize its subjects’ minds all over. No hope?”

No hope to see such ideas in the New York Times: the preceding was censored, as deserved for doubting the goodness of the institutions and history our masters have set-up. By censoring such facts, and ideas, the plutocrats insure that their satanic conspiracy can blossom ever more. The facts above are correct, and there are much more, thousand more, like them (I have detailed them in preceding essays).

One can literally said that American plutocrats used Nazism as a tool.

I talk all the time to very educated Americans and Europeans who are persuaded that the USA did all it could against Hitler: the cover-up has splendidly held. So they have no idea of what we see today is a continuation of a process started a century ago. And that it can lead to the worst, because it already did.

Some American friends I had for years called me an uneducated Satan for evoking such facts, and have not talked to me once ever since. It is the world upside down, the inversion of all values.

The collaboration between American plutocrats, and the government they control went on, during and after the World War. Both institutionally, and individually: IBM made itself busy helping the Allies after the Nazis capitulated (they had the monopoly of organizing in Hitler’s Reich). Tens of thousands of Nazis escaped under USA supervision.

The other day, I saw a documentary on TV explaining to me how great the Nazi engineers who built rockets were, and how they got to the moon. Yes, they got to the moon (Saturn V employed more than 100 Nazi engineers). The documentary forgot to mention the tens of thousands of slaves who died in underground rocket factories managed by the same characters.

Klaus Barbie, well known to have tortured to death around 5,000 people in Lyon, personally, and having boasted about it lyrically, was in CIA employ for decades afterwards; the French arrested him in Bolivia and brought him to trial later. Barbie had tortured to death tens of British agents, of both genders, not just the French. Maybe he killed some Americans from the OSS too, I don’t remember. The CIA knew this very well, but it was headed by lawyer Dulles, who represented 1,000 Nazi companies before WWII.

In TWIN PEAKS PLANET, Krugman opines that:

“In 2014, soaring inequality in advanced nations finally received the attention it deserved, as Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” became a surprise (and deserving) best seller. The usual suspects are still in well-paid denial, but, to everyone else, it is now obvious that income and wealth are more concentrated at the very top than they have been since the Gilded Age — and the trend shows no sign of letting up.

But that’s a story about developments within nations, and, therefore, incomplete. You really want to supplement Piketty-style analysis with a global view, and when you do, I’d argue, you get a better sense of the good, the bad and the potentially very ugly of the world we live in.”

The potentially very ugly has been seen many times in the past, all over the world, from Japan to Central America: feudalism, and, or, giant war(s), sometimes for millennia.

Even the Roman Republic, which was extremely aware of the plutocratic problem, and had been built around the idea to not fall into it again, fell into it, after a long degeneracy,  with “Senatus Princeps” Augustus. (Princeps evolved in the word “Prince”).

The rest of Krugman’s essay is a rewording of what I have been saying for more than a decade in writing. A delight to read, and I will comment on it in another essay, because I do not have the time now, and readers tend not to have time for long essays, either.

Krugman finally pays attention to the thought control the greedy oligarchies have achieved. The power is in the discourse. (As Foucault, and others, noticed.)

So see you soon, and, again, Happy New Year!

Patrice Ayme’

Tags: Capital, Censorship, Dulles, Germany, Income, Inequality, Krugman, Nazism, Nazism As Tool, plutocracy, Plutocrats, Teddy Roosevelt, Twin Peak Planet, world domination