Responsibility, Greeks, Jews, Nazis, Decision Making, Trans Pacific Partnership, Big Pharmaceuticals… Or All the Evil The Lack of Direct Democracy Fostered:
“Eugen Lowy”: Dear Patrice… The Greek economic problem is more a moral problem than an economic problem. The moral question is what responsibilities has an individual to take regarding the decisions of leading elites of community they belong to.”
I have thought of this problem deeply and forever, in light of the Nazi problem. When I was around the age of 6 (!), a cousin told me that Nazism was not the fault of the Germans, but of the crooks who had led the Germans. I did not believe it at the time, and I spent a lot of time demonstrating to my satisfaction that this was not true.
I do believe in collective responsibility. We are collectively culprit to let ourselves being abused by plutocrats and their giant corporations:
Banks: Mandated to Create Money. Money Farmers. Pharmaceuticals: Mandated to Create Health. Health Farmers. Media: Mandated to Create Minds. Mind Farmers.
The State and the Government is not just who We the People elect to be represented by. De facto.
I believe in the collective responsibility of those who accept wholeheartedly criminal systems of thoughts and moods.
To say: ”My leader was a liar and a crook, I disavow him (her)” is acceptable, and honorable. However, it loses all credibility if one still espouses the moods and ideas that made the leader what he (she) became.
There is plenty of evidence that, after the Nazis had been militarily extinguished, Nazi moods and thoughts survived in Germany for decades. In particular, Germans who had resisted, or fought the Nazis were viewed, then, as traitors. It took decades to honor those who had attempted to kill Hitler.
Young officers of the best lineage (Prussian aristocrats) who planned to kill Hitler, and survived the post-coup bloodbath of Hitler against his own officer corps (around 5,000 assassinated), were then blocked by top Nazis such as the famous Von Manstein, to have any influence on the Bundeswehr.
This only happened because tens of millions of Germans were still Nazis, for want of a better word. When the Nazi ringleaders (for example Von Manstein) died, moods and ideas changed: today’s Germany is much closer, in moods and ideas, to present day France than to the Germany of 1945.
Today Richard Von Weisacker died. He had been German president. His father, one of the top Nazis, got seven years imprisonment at Nuremberg. The president himself had served in Hitler’s army. Such people recognized their crimes, all the way to Jerusalem. However, only their deaths turn the page.
Here is another example: I was in the USA during the ramp-up and unleashing of the Iraq war. I saw “friends” and “family” lay on sofas, watching hours of American “Football” and basketball. They could not care less. They had no inclination to find what was going-on. It was all the way like that, throughout the media. The slightest murmur or comment against plutocrat Bush was viewed as an unpatriotic act.
That made them all, as individuals, accomplices of the killing of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis.
As far as the Greeks are concerned, it is obvious that the average Greek did not partake in the erroneous and criminal decisions taken by the Greek and European elites.
Eugen: “So the moral question is, who has to take responsibilities for promiscuous behavior? Should it be the Greek leading elites? The Greek people? Maybe the German and French banksters and their servants? Or maybe the moral responsibility lays on the shoulders of the descendants of the German Nazis? And then if the one responsible to be blamed will be finally found, what will be the right punishment for them?”
To determine responsibilities, one has FIRST to determine causalities. Most people do not have the faintest idea about how money is created. Bankers create money (through credit). Thus bankers have extraordinary, unworldly, undemocratic powers.
This fact, in turn, is carefully hidden by systems of moods and thoughts whose main role is to hide what bankers really do.
Eugen: “Then the other moral-political question is, what responsibilities shout carry the leading elites, who implemented, short sighted policy of greed, personal enrichment and deception and if they are punishable for their crimes.”
Before they can be punished, the crimes they committed have to be understood, and viewed as crimes.
An example is the Jewish problem.
Eugen: “For 2000 years the Jews were an easy target for persecution. They were pushed to the edge of the societies, dehumanized, marginalized, humiliated, closed to their ghettoes. Too many times the Catholic Church initiated their annihilation.”
This is case where the crimes committed have not been understood. Not only that, but the very semantics used is criminal. Anti-Judaism is described as “anti-Semitism”. That confusion, per se, is a crime. A crime against reason.
Judaism is the mother religion of Christianism, and, thus Islam (although there is also a direct filiation, dues to the Yattrib/Medina stay of Muhammad). Judaism became, at some point, more than 2,000 years ago, a religion, not just an ethnic group (one can argue this happened more than 25 centuries ago, because of the Babylonian captivity of some Israelis). Thus “anti-Semitism” is not an appropriate term.
After the demented theocracy that smothered the Roman empire, Franks re-established Pagans, Atheists and Jews to their rights. Charlemagne took himself for Israel’s King David (somebody famous for disobeying god’s criminally insane orders).
Christianism (= Catholicism for 15 centuries) eradicated, or try to eradicate, using methods that made the Nazis look like choir boys, all religions for 15 centuries. Then those rabid dogs had a go at each other, logically enough.
In particular, in the case of France, seven religious wars occurred, in short order at the end of the Sixteenth Century (meanwhile the Church was busy burning alive philosophers). Then, in the following century the Sun-Tyrant, Louis XIV, threw the Protestants out of France (as a result France started to lose wars and territory, surprise, surprise).
Jews had been living in France for 16 centuries, and Protestantism was around five centuries old (I consider the Cathars to be the most radical Protestants, ever).
Eugen: “In your essay you attack the multinational corporations and their unscrupulous tendency not to pay taxes. The problem of paying or not paying taxes is not a question of morality… but a question, who is better to allocate resources to create maximal well-being for the people of the states. I personally have difficulty to believe, that the government is the best tool to do it. I rather believe, that decentralization of resource allocation decision process, could be more effective than its monopolization in hands of the government. “No taxation without representation”, is a very relevant slogan in these days, when the political elites can do any kind of unscrupulous decisions without a need to pay for its to many times disastrous consequences. ( viz Greece above ).”
Part of this argument has been made by Bill Gates. And it’s as old as plutocracy.
“No taxation without representation” is itself a slogan that creates its own poisonous context. The context being “representation”. In the USA, as it is, around 600,000 people are “represented” by one person. The Greeks would have called that tyranny.
I propose instead: “No personal taxation without personal decision”.
In the 1790s, De Sade, eminent deputy of the far-left at the Constitutional Assembly, proposed not just that women vote, but that direct democracy be established. That was very sadistic of him.
Our leaders are ignorant little twerps. What they know best, is how to lie. Beyond that, they are at a loss. This is not surprising: the People is ignorant, ill-informed, and infantilized. An elite, mostly made of people with the worst motivations, takes all the decisions, and claims to have all the knowledge, and the wisdom.
In truth, they know naught.
The way to expose that is to establish a debate, that is, direct democracy. Out of the debate will come the intelligence.
Imagine the Nazis debating in public, with input from everybody, their “Final Solution” for the “Jewish Problem”. Imagine Putin having to explain in detail, in a debate, how the “volunteers” who stream into Ukraine are paid and equipped. Imagine having General Powel having to explain what exactly he meant with, and how he obtained, his little drawings of trucks converted into biological weapons labs. Powell, representing the USA, used these lies at the UN, but nobody was empowered to contradict him.
Entire nations ought not to be represented by real, or even potential, liars. It is high time for people to be fully informed, and fully enabled to take the fundamental decisions.
Are we getting more direct democratic? The decision of displacing a TGV (High Speed Train) in Eastern France’s Loraine is submitted to direct vote: very good. Meanwhile the TPP, the Trans Pacific Partnership negotiations are pursued secretly among plutocrats.
“Don’t Trade Away Our Health” whines the New York Times (where were you during the negotiations of “Obamacare”?)
Actually, I should not make fun of the author, Joseph Stiglitz, a good guy:
“A secretive group met behind closed doors in New York this week. What they decided may lead to higher drug prices for you and hundreds of millions around the world.
Representatives from the United States and 11 other Pacific Rim countries convened to decide the future of their trade relations in the so-called Trans-Pacific Partnership (T.P.P.). Powerful companies appear to have been given influence over the proceedings, even as full access is withheld from many government officials from the partnership countries.”
Compare with the Wansee conference, where the Final Solution for the Jews was elaborated: ”a secretive group…” Abomination and infamy always entail secretive groups, as De Sade pointed out.
Stiglitz points out that the bad guy there is the USA Trade Representative, who wants to increase Big Pharma’s” profits.
If Big Pharma spent its money on research, that would be OK, but it’s not the case, most of the money goes to corruption: advertising, so-called marketing, and extravagant salaries for the Plutos and CEO class at the top.
The USA Trade Representative will soon be rewarded, as a good pet, with extraordinary salary and compensation (as Obama comes and goes). Stiglitz:
“Historically, though, the trade representative’s office has aligned itself with corporate interests. If big pharmaceutical companies hold sway — as the leaked documents indicate they do — the T.P.P. could block cheaper generic drugs from the market. Big Pharma’s profits would rise, at the expense of the health of patients and the budgets of consumers and governments… If the United States Trade Representative gets its way, the T.P.P. will limit the ability of partner countries to restrict prices. And the pharmaceutical companies surely hope the “standard” they help set in this agreement will become global — for example, by becoming the starting point for United States negotiations with the European Union over the same issues. ”
Let me have Stiglitz say what I did for years. But it’s good to have a Nobel in Economics saying it:
“Of course, pharmaceutical companies claim they need to charge high prices to fund their research and development. This just isn’t so. For one thing, drug companies spend more on marketing and advertising than on new ideas. Overly restrictive intellectual property rights actually slow new discoveries, by making it more difficult for scientists to build on the research of others and by choking off the exchange of ideas that is critical to innovation. As it is, most of the important innovations come out of our universities and research centers, like the National Institutes of Health, funded by government and foundations.
The efforts to raise drug prices in the T.P.P. take us in the wrong direction. The whole world may come to pay a price in the form of worse health and unnecessary deaths.”
In 2013, 100 leading oncologists from around the world wrote an open letter in the journal Blood calling for a reduction in the price of cancer drugs.
Dr. Brian Druker, director of the Knight Cancer Institute, one of the signatories, asked: “If you are making $3billion a year on [cancer drug] Gleevec, could you get by with $2billion? When do you cross the line from essential profits to profiteering?”
None of this would happen without secrecy, and the very respect which is extended to the creeps who lord over us. Time for some audacity from those who ought to govern, us: We The People, not them the bosses.
All this evil is made possible by the concentration of decision making in a few hands. That is intrinsically plutocratic.
Absolute power corrupts and pollutes absolutely: when watching our dear leaders, remember, you are watching people who are absolutely corrupt. If they were not so before they got power, they sure are it, now. The very notion that a few are only habilitated to know all, and decide all, is sick.
No taxation without decision.
Patrice Ayme’
| World’s largest pharmaceutical firms | |||||
| Company | Total revenue ($bn) | R&D spend ($bn) | Sales and marketing spend ($bn) | Profit ($bn) | Profit margin (%) |
| Johnson & Johnson (US) | 71.3 | 8.2 | 17.5 | 13.8 | 19 |
| Novartis (Swiss) | 58.8 | 9.9 | 14.6 | 9.2 | 16 |
| Pfizer (US) | 51.6 | 6.6 | 11.4 | 22.0 | 43 |
| Hoffmann-La Roche (Swiss) | 50.3 | 9.3 | 9.0 | 12.0 | 24 |
| Sanofi (France) | 44.4 | 6.3 | 9.1 | 8.5 | 11 |
| Merck (US) | 44.0 | 7.5 | 9.5 | 4.4 | 10 |
| GSK (UK) | 41.4 | 5.3 | 9.9 | 8.5 | 21 |
| Astra Zeneca (UK) | 25.7 | 4.3 | 7.3 | 2.6 | 10 |
| Eli Lilly (US) | 23.1 | 5.5 | 5.7 | 4.7 | 20 |
| AbbVie (US) | 18.8 | 2.9 | 4.3 | 4.1 | 22 |
| Source: GlobalData | |||||
Tags: Direct democracy, Health Farmers, Pharmaceuticals, Profits., Representation, Representative Dictatorship, Richard Von Weisacker, Stiglitz, Taxation, TPP, Trans Pacific Partnership, Von Manstein
Patrice Ayme's Thoughts 
February 1, 2015 at 8:30 am |
Dear Patrice, you are touching the main problems of the modern global macro Economy very precisely, but here is more of it. I am just starting (need to find time ) to think to write a new book, which will try to bring up the failure of the today’s dominant economic system called the ” Capitalistic system” or the ” Market economy”.
To my oppinion the major problem of this economic system is its enormous success within the aimes it has targeted. The very best prove for me of the great success was the last bust of the system at 2008. Here we are 7 years later, after the whole monetary system collapsed, that could easily wipe out the virtual value of money, ( and we would have go back to barter economy of antiquity ), and nothing of this kind happened. The trust in the system is back, and not even the imaginative Greeks can change it.
So whats so wrong about it? Wrong is that this economic system drives the world on a well paved way to catastrophe, that will destroy the human civilization if not even beyond that.
I shall not go into details of my thought about this, it is enough to mention, that the today’s system has no tools to cope with the environmental issues, that are nocking already in our entrance door. The other issue is the poverty. Yet the main problem is the self imposed ignorance of most of the people on earth to the major issues, that are endangering their own or their children’s existence. Your description of superball is exactly about this.
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February 1, 2015 at 5:21 pm |
Dear Eugen: The production of goods is now global, yet governmental control of democratic type is only local. Number one problem.
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February 1, 2015 at 5:18 pm |
[Sent to Twitter]
By confiscating “the” Holocaust conducted by the Nazis, for the Jews (the Shoah), a great disservice is done to the Jews, long term.
The point being that most of the people killed in extermination camps were not Jewish. Those groups were next on the list for extermination.
Around 40 European nationalities & ethnicities were exterminated in Nazi extermination camps, just because who they were, not what they did.
There is no Christian civilization, inasmuch as there is a Frankish civilization, with its own version of Christianization.
It is the mass murdering, self aggrandizing tyrant Napoleon who put an end to the Frankish founded (Renovated) Roman empire, which lasted thus a bit more than 1,000 years.
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February 1, 2015 at 7:38 pm |
Hello Patrice,
No I’m not going to mention that mass murdering Napoleon was the first modern European monarch to grant full citizenship to the Jews. Europe would soon return to its ghetto-loving ways, as you often recall.
My point is about – Burundi, the early 2000’s. I went to the field and produced a report on HIV prevalence in the countryside. Very little was known of it, as opposed to the situation in cities, where it was well documented and thought to be under control. (There was that little issue of an ongoing, low-noise civil war between the countryside and urban centers, you see).
I reported that the situation was much worse than envisioned, and that it would go worse, as the current cost of available tritherapy drugs and testing ran in the hundreds of dollars a month, well beyond a farmer’s means. In fact, the paradigm amoung UN agencies, NGOs and Goverment alike was to be content to mitigate and alleviate, writing off infected individuals and concentrating on orphans and widows.
I also pointed out that generic drugs already manufactured in India or South Africa would put treatment costs within the reach of average farmers, and that agricultural development projects should be geared towards producing the necessary additional income, while ensuring access to these products
I was laughed off, because HIV generics were under huge worldwide attack from the pharmaceuticals, which would never allow this to happen. Research, they loftily explained, was expensive and generics killed research.
However, soon after I went on to other studies, as the debate went on and the pharmaceuticals held on their position, the (wicked) idea was floated of bringing some light on the cost issue by mandating an external audit at the highest level (UN), to find out exactly how much of a pharmaceutical’s income went into research.
That was enough. No need to go to the trouble, the pharmaceuticals said. Third world countries suddenly were welcome to produce generic HIV drugs and tests and sell them to third world countries at third world prices. What was supposed never to happen thus came to pass: hundreds of thousands of sentenced people now lead a normal, productive life.
Needless to say, the pharmaceuticals’ benevolence specifically did not extend to developed economies, where they reap most of their profits anyway. Bleeding dry civilized health systems is still the order of the day. And to this day, nobody can tell which part of the pharmaceuticals’ income goes to research. Don’t expect this to change anything soon. That was part of the deal…
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February 2, 2015 at 12:27 am |
The mass murdering, self-aggrandizing Napoleonic mongrel, had no choice, but to pretend that he was the defender of the Revolution, so he had to walk the talk with the Jews. But I did not see himself putting a crown on his head inside a synagogue…
The refugee Jews from Iberia and Southern Jews were given equality in 1790 (Mirabeau had to give up in 1789). The Ashkenazim (Alsace), who were the equivalent of hundreds of thousands relative to today’s population, were given equality on Sept 27, 1791 (one year before the proclamation of the Republic).
In 1792, French general Custine, having conquered German territory west of the Rhine, freed the Jews.
In 1796, the Netherlands having been liberated by a French army, also liberated Dutch Jews, and so on.
In 1796-98, French armies, in a two year campaign, headed by Consul Napoleon, conquered Italy, freed the Jews, destroyed the ghettoes. Who said freedom was not at the point of a gun?
PA
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February 2, 2015 at 2:33 am |
Dear Dominique: Enlightening story, indeed. I have seen corruption from as close by as one can get, in academia. But my knowledge of pharmaceuticals, Big Pharma, is just, well, academic. It’s very good to get the testimony of someone who was on the frontline.
One thing that intrigues me, is that, in the numbers I read in the financial press, percentages for research show up. Still, you say, they are not really known. I could see how this could happen, because I have seen universities apply research funds to absolutely-not research activities. Corporations and “foundations” are notorious for doing this.
PA
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February 1, 2015 at 10:47 pm |
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February 2, 2015 at 11:00 pm |
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