Trump A Traitor?

This is what French billionaire (and newly found messianic Jew) pseudo-philosopher Bernard Henri Levy (BHL), wants you to think. BHL wants you to think Trump is a traitor and that BHL is just the opposite. Yet, BHL has been part of the powers that be, at the highest level, for his entire life, even more so than Donald Trump. After BHL made an editorial calling Trump a traitor, I was, naturally, titillated. A comment of mine was immediately blocked (censored). The following is a vast expansion of said comment. Basically BHL tries to drown Trump by inundating him with innuendos… Whereas, in truth, Trump’s major crime is that his dangerous rhetoric threatens the politico-financial milieu created by actors such as BHL. To enrich himself, BHL destroyed the African primary forest. Thus BHL has had much further consequences on world ethics, and lying as the new ethics, than Trump ever had. His hold on the media is frightening.

A foundational lie of modern plutocracy is that Obama and the Clintons are dedicated friends of the poor and downtrodden. Nothing of the sort. The government’s own statistics show it (look at the graph below).

If you don’t know what the Gini Coefficient is, that’s not alright.  It may mean you may have a life, but you cannot take an intelligent part in debating what ails the world. Thus, for the sake of general goodness and true progress, let me explain: when a dictator pushes the Gini up, he (and sometimes she) augments the plutocracy, the power of the few, the oligarchs, over the multitude. Here is the sad reality of Obama and Clinton from raw numbers of the Federal REserve Data (FRED): 

The Oligarchs Became Richest Ever Under Beloved Leader Obama I. Notice The Colossal Rise of the Gini Under The BelovedClintons & Their “Democratic” Congress. Contrary to repute, Gini stagnated under the evil G W Bush. So why are not Clinton and Bush viewed as even more evil? The ways of the simple are mysterious.

The Gini coefficient is a number between 0 and 1.  It is a number to evaluate how much the richest get (it could be income, wealth, education, health, etc.). A country with an income Gini coefficient of 0 means all income is distributed equally.  And a country with an income Gini coefficient of 1 means one person gets all the money.  This measure was created to show just how skewed goodies distribution was.

Sadly, yet eloquently, despite, or rather precisely because of Obama’s ideologue-strength desire to claim to want to redistribute income, he’s craftily managed to make the rich get richer while the poor got poorer. And this, at record levels. Thus, if you hated Bush that way, you should excoriate Obama.

By 2011, the USA had become one of the top (most unequal) countries in the world in wealth. Just surpassed by four dictatorships. This can be explained by the rise of financial manipulators and conspirators such as Bloomberg, a plutocrat many times the wealth of Trump, who supports Clinton (as his ilk always do).

Obama & Democratic Congress Cut Taxes On Richest Taxpayers At The Beginning Of Obama’s Reign. [They also transferred trillions to the richest under ‘Quantitative Easing’, but that’s not in the graph above!]

And this is exactly how many Trump supporters are feeling like: the victims of a giant conspiracy, complete with lying media, pseudo-liberal economists, and pseudo-philosophers railing against We The People. 

‘Something Is Going On, And You Don’t Know What It Is, Mr. Jones’ (Bob Dylan)

The last few times I saw Bernard Henri Levy (BHL) on TV, 2016, he talked to no end about “Jewishness”, and the “genius of Judaism”. He had even just written a book about it. The French audience stayed ominously scornful. When he rose to leave the stage of the famous debate show ONPC, nobody, not even one person in the audience of hundreds, applauded (although BHL was the major guest of the evening). Nobody was amused.

Why? When the ugly face of religious war is surfacing in France again, fanatics of this, that, or the other cult, are intuitively disliked: they don’t seem like offering anything but strife. Many, among We The People, rightly perceive racism, which consists in treating people differently because of their origins.

Indeed, BHL does not like Trump to “emphasize Jewishness“. “Emphasizing Jewishness” is a crime if Trump does it, says BHL, yet a blessing when BHL goes ballistic about it. BHL should read carefully “Night” of Elie Wiesel, where the latter (one of many Jews to do so, including philosopher Hannah Arendt) considers that exaggerated “Jewishness” was a factor in the satanic brew which brought the Shoah. Indeed. There are rarely single causes, most often, web of causes.

The critiques of BHL against Trump, much of them hearsay or wild deliberate misinterpretations, may, or may not be justified. They would be justified if the facts were really as depicted, not just well-founded as industrial strength hearsay. Even then, Trump is a blabber box, who sometimes warns his audience that he may not know what he is talking about, and that his opinion may change in the future. This is an unusual approach for a politician, it strikes many as sincere… And it is. Yes, it’s frightening, but it’s intrinsic to the present system of government we have: a few people, elected or not, fairly or not, have too much power.

The final complaint of BHL against Trump is infidelity. “Infidelity to America.” Whines he:

“The implications of Trump’s election would be truly terrifying. The problem would not only be his vulgarity, sexism, racism, and defiant ignorance. It would be his possible infidelity to America itself. The party of Eisenhower and Reagan has been commandeered by a corrupt demagogue who betrays not only his country’s ideals, but also its fundamental national interest.

American vertigo. Global disaster.”

That’s rich. Eisenhower passed a 93% tax on the wealthiest. BHL himself is the exact opposite: he is one of the wealthiest, stealing wealth from the poorest (Africans, poor French taxpayers). BHL co-opted the entire French state under both Mitterrand and his successor Chirac to extract his father’s company from bankruptcy, and make himself a billionaire. BHL got the help of billionaire Pinault, to intercede with president Chirac, and pass the appropriate law in the French National Assembly. BHL’s life is a testimony to the sort of entanglement of political power and the hyper wealthy, which disgusts so much so many of Trump (and Sanders!) supporters. Ironically, BHL has been in very close, loud and clear relationships with many of the world’s leading politicians, in a way he hints Trump also does with Putin.  

So why does a plutocrat such as BHL dislikes Trump so much? Because Trump said many times that the plutocrats who do not presently pay taxes, for example hedge fund managers, will, should he become president. BHL is scared that this mood, this mood of taxing the wealthy, will propagate (even in France, the wealthiest legally escape tax in many ways made to strike the poor hard). 

Policies Engineered by US Leaders Since Reagan’s Reign Are Obviously Wrong. Time For A Vast Change We Can See. European Parrots May Follow.

In his editorial BHL claims Trump’s call to renegotiate some debt would reduce the US to Argentinian status. Yet, some debt could be renegotiated: after all, president Roosevelt devalued the dollar and cut US national debt by 33%, the day he got to power.

That a pillar, and prime recipient of the present established order, such as BHL, does not like Trump is hardly surprising.  Trump has stated, loud and clear that he would severely modify the established order, making lots of bad actors, and free riders, pay. Trump want bad actors and free riders, from Amazon Inc. to hedge fund managers, to sanctimonious members of NATO who don’t pay for their own defense, to pay for the advantages they enjoy.

That so many of the “vulgum” BHL despises so much, so explicitly, are ready to vote against the established order, is refreshing. I would have preferred Sanders. Individuals such as BHL, who found the money in the coffers of states, they needed to cut the entire forests of some African countries, to buy themselves palaces all over the world, and dominate the media relentlessly, should get their comeuppance.

Trump demolished Jeb Bush by calling him a “liar” about the invasion of Iraq. Bush could not find a way to reply to that. Not just once, or twice, did Trump call Bush a liar, but hundreds of times. And Trump insisted with outright blustering anger that the entire government of Jeb’s brother G W Bush had lied too. And it worked: average right-wing Republicans, by voting for Trump, agreed that the Bush family was a family of liars. It is telling of the sorry state of US  politics that no American politicians had ever made such a furious denunciation of the Iraq invasion prior to that. (Yes, Clinton, as a crucial Senator, voted for the Iraq invasion, to help her friend G. W. Bush; Trump will accuse her to be either a liar or an idiot, or both, on this subject.)

Of this, this alone, real progressives should be grateful. And what of the wall Trump wants to build? Some will whine. Well, the wall already exists. Just look at that Gini above. That’s just the one on income. The one on wealth is way worse. And the one on after tax income jumped after Obama became president, because democrats decided to help the economy by taxing the wealthiest less, and pumping into them trillions through the Federal Reserve (“Quantitative Easing”)

In Africa, huge crocodiles look like friendly trunks, placidly laying there in the water. Lying there or laying there? That is the question many animals are not able to solve. Trump may not be the friend of the common person. However BHL has spent his entire life trying to demonstrate, to himself, that he was a good person. When obviously, he knows perfectly well that he is exactly the sort of crook the world is sick with, doing the sort of things which should be rewarded in the future not with billions, as he was, but with long prison sentences.

I am not for Trump. I am not advocating to be trumped by Trump. The choice between the insufferable Trump and the corrupt Clinton illustrates perfectly well the abysmal nature of representative politics. But I am certainly against liars, and lying in general. Much of what was presented as “progress” in the West since the Fall of the Berlin Wall was actually addictive lying. Yes, GDP went up, in the UK, or the US. But mostly GDP of the rich: watch Irish GDP going up 26% a year, thank to tax evasion.

The lie? That this sort of industrial strength legal tax evasion has nothing to do with most people’s lives getting ever harder. Lying is addictive because, with humans, perception, even perception of happiness, is (nearly) everything. When We The People lives the lie that exploitation is redemption, they live happy.

Increasingly it feels as if lying were most of the industry of the West: contemplate the fact that Obama and Clinton, who brought up the US Gini (on both income and wealth) up to heights never seen before, are really viewed by the losers they stole as their best friends. At some point though, those who do not view We The People as vulgar, may win. A different regime of truth will apply.

So is Trump a traitor? Let’s hope so. He would betray his class, as he already betrayed the Neoconservatives (who were all about invading Iraq).  When one looks at history on the largest scale, one can see that revolutions are often led by plutocrats who betrayed their own class (the Gracchi, and Caesar were from the very top of Roman society; they were assassinated; had they lived, the Roman Republic may well have survived, and progress forged ahead without the Dark Ages; a queen of the Franks outlawed slavery in the Seventh Century; several otherwise vicious Russian leaders propped Russia forward; and so on).

Maybe Trump is a piece of trash. Yet, when he got people to vote for him by decrying the “wrong system” he admitted he was a product of, and he was “wrong” and “part of the establishment”, Trump says important things, and set-up a different mood. A better mood that the one of embracing lies, just because they feel good.

The future is here: it looks just like the past. Lying is its cement, generously provided by the ruling class. Decrying lying is nothing new: the Cathars insisted that most of Christianism was a gigantic lie. Maybe the part of the universe humans lived in was controlled by Evil. That would explain the “Catholic Orthodox” church’s nature. The Cathars were, obviously, and in retrospect right. They were most believed in the most democratic and republican part of Europe, the giant county of Toulouse and surrounding areas. The establishment was not amused, and kill both the Cathars and their books, to the last (millions died, one million in France alone).

At some point, history did not repeat and real progress was made. First by analyzing the past. The time has come to analyze with more subtlety than ever.

Patrice Ayme’

Tags: Bernard Henri Levy, BHL, Clinton, Gini, Lies, Mood, Obama, system of thought, Trump, US