On the Brexit Insanity: EMPIRE & LOCAL DEMOCRACY AREN’T ENEMIES, They MAKE EACH OTHER POSSIBLE.
Space Exploration Technologies, SpaceX, a California Corporation, just launched a rocket, and the habitable spaceship at its tip, with a capacity for seven astronauts, the “Crew Dragon” docked with the ISS, the International Space Station. “Crew Dragon” has its own engines, which it can use to escape the main vehicle, if the latter gets in trouble, or to maneuver in space. “Crew Dragon” was launched from the space pad at Kennedy Space Center as the Apollo missions to the Moon. Crew Dragon is much more advanced than Apollo in all ways.
Now think what it means, economically and politically speaking: California has a GDP larger than Great Britain, and a population equal to England. California rockets get launched at the Vandenberg Air Force base in California, but also from Florida at the Kennedy Space Center. Trucks and barges leaving California can go straight across the continent to Florida to carry rockets for launches. No customs. Same regulations. Same empire, continent sized.
Who founded SpaceX? A middle class South African immigrant. Whose family first migrated to Canada. Then he went south to San Francisco and co-founded PayPal… Then used all his money to launch SpaceX, Tesla, etc… Now he wants to make a giant sweating rocket. Yes, sweating, to cool it down the way evolution cooled down the genus Homo.
More than 27% of the population of California is not US born. That is, 11 million people. Most are not even European: there is an enormous flow of highly skilled Asians, Chinese, Indians (37% of the immigrants).
Now compare this to nervous, prickly, “British” obsessed Great Britain: 3.5 million people living in the UK are Europeans, but not British born. To compare, France has six million foreign born. (40% of French newborn have at least one foreign born grandparent.)
British European CHEATING, not paying a fair share of the EU budget: For years the UK boasted that it had a much bigger GDP than the French Republic. So why was the UK paying only 50% to the EU of what France paid, and, while having a smaller population, had as many Members of the European Parliament? This sort of British cheating was all over the EU. Contemplate for example British tax havens
Of all the 27 European Union states, Germany has the second highest percentage of immigrants in its population after the United Kingdom. By UN estimates, as of 2017, 12,165,083 people living in Germany are immigrants, or about 14.8% of the German population. Germany also put into law, in 2005, that it was an “immigration country”. By the way, most immigrants in the UK are not EU. Thus one would assume that cutting off the EU would change nothing to what brexiters view a sorry state of affairs.
But let’s go back to SpaceX. SpaceX has all the enormous resources of the USA potentially at its disposal. Should SpaceX be based in a Brexited Britain, the resources at its disposal would be much smaller. To start with, Great Britain doesn’t have a spaceport (the European spaceports are in Kazakhstan and Guyana) . And barely more than 10%of US GDP.
In San Francisco alone, there are more than ten satellite companies startups. How many in the UK? Zero. That has something to do with launching from Vandenberg, 400 kilometers to the south. The first stage of the rocket then maneuvers and go back to land there. Rockets fly over the Golden Gate. And what for? The US government has authorized some companies to launch more than 10,000 satellites. For worldwide communications. So sure enough, Brits will phone in the future, on their foreign built phones. Through US satellites enabled by US regulations. What will happen to UK GDP after Brexit? Turn into a profitable semi-dictatorship a la Singapore? With hyper massive immigration of added value individuals? Or see its GDP collapse? Slaves don’t need GDP. They can just Brexit with their minds.
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Europe bending over backwards for Britain:
British media insists to call Europe a “club”. This is a deliberate infliction of mental disinformation. The EU is actually an Union, something more akin to the USA than to those places British gentlemen used to make plots to exploit the world.
There is a long tradition for other European states to bend over backwards to please the UK. For example, UK science is heavily subsidized by the EU, whereas France and Germany are net donors. British science magazine Nature itself analyzed this here (“Austria, Italy, France and Germany were net donors of funds, particularly Germany, whose scientists received only 18% of the funds for their country’s 30% contribution to the budget (Fig. 1). Most other countries were net recipients of funds, with excess funds received by the United Kingdom and Greece representing 30% and 140% of their contributions, respectively”).
The anxiety at pleasing free wheeling Britain may have come, for many European states, as a desire to counterbalance France, which initially opposed UK membership, and tends to be psychorigid.
Why didn’t the UK want to fix Europe? Well, because it was initially pampered, as its economy was weak. That turned, under PM Thatcher into a spoiled brat behavior. Thatcher forced the EU to octroy privileges to the UK, and foremost the British rebate or staying with the pound. Looks like a good thing, staying with pound. Indeed, the pound enabled the UK to have more money for its economy. However, had the UK been part of the Euro, maybe all of Europe would have ended with more, enough money, under British pressure (and not just that, but Britain getting so much of the money creation, made the rest of Europe poorer). Hyper nationalistic Brits would say, who cares? Well, you get richer if your neighbors do. The uncontrolled accumulation of inequalitarian wealth is precisely what brought the rage which led to Brexit. And, as Brexit is a fake solution, the situation will get worse.
Broadly, the UK gets back 66% of the difference between its share of member states’ VAT contributions and its share of EU spending in return. France technically makes a net contribution to the EU budget about twice that of the UK,[20] and is the greatest contributor towards the UK rebate, which means it would benefit most from its abolition.
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Esteemed Contributor Hazxan: “Since the referendum, I must have read millions of words from all sides. Before the referendum, I was not convinced by UK membership of the EU. The issue is complex and there are many different sub-groups who support Brexit for different reasons. However, I am more convinced than ever that the political drive for Brexit is an extreme right wing project.”
This is the most significant part of Brexit: it’s extreme right wing, it’s perverse, a pack of lies, hatred of strangers, and evil, in all sorts of ways. Brexit is a plutocratic conspiracy, and a very well financed campaign of lies and fake news. Pseudo-left people focused on Trump, perhaps not knowing that Trump used to be a rare anti-Reagan democrat (most democrats collaborated with Reagan’s extreme right wing deconstruction of civilization). As the pseudo-left went Trump 24/7, with the most absurd accusations, they overlooked Brexit… the real racist right wing conspiracy (Trump is just a conspiracy of one, with the voices in his head).
Watch sleek videos such as: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Kub69c6Sr4
… a pile of subtle disinformation about what it calls the “Brussels EU”. The perfidious video erroneously implies that the first head of the European Union, Walter Hallstein, was a Nazi (something not technically true… to say the least; and remember I am the first to condemn Heidegger as a Nazi, and many Germans, admired to this day, as those who taught Nazism to Hitler).
Plus, that video and similar material Brexiters got drunk on, are a seriously misleading and obsolete description of how the European Union works. Also omitting significant details, such that De Gaulle got Hallstein out of the EC.
Nowadays, as per EU Constitution. power is in the hand of the European Council (heads of the 28 EU governments, also often called the Council of Ministers) and the European Parliament. “Directives” from Brussels have actually to be approved by the European Parliament, and are truly directed by the European Council (which is democratically elected). The EC in Brussels has only the power to exasperate common Europeans with grotesque little details. If a European country says seriously no, it gets its way (as the UK may find out very soon: it’s not to be taken for granted that other EU countries will agree to extend Article 50… Especially after European elections; France already growled).
And the truth?
As I have explained, the worldwide plutocratic conspiracy has been worried that the EU could become too powerful, too socialist, too egalitarian. If the US followed, there was nowhere to hide. Hence the idea of a potentially fatal wound: Brexit. Brexit has turned to a comic mania. However, as the EU has been consumed by it, significant anti-plutocratic endeavors, such as a financial transaction tax, have been completely forgotten.
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Hazxan: “You can’t get most Brexit supporters to see this [Brexit is an extreme right-wing project], because for many of them, Brexit isn’t about the complex trade or international relations, it is an emotional issue about their identity as British and separate from Europe.”
Yes, they talk that way. But what is Britishness exactly? Being cool about the cult of plutocracy, the Lords, the Queen and Her Son, while pretending to be living in democracy? Brexiters believe Great Britain is not in Europe, just as flat-earther believe the Earth is not round. Maybe they looked at a map, but they have not understood it. Believing Great Britain is not in Europe can’t be explained, except as an insanity, and a will to war. Like all insanities, Brexit has its reasons that the sane can’t emotionally share.
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Hazxan: “When asked why, Brexiters will say things like “Sovereignty” , “control of our Laws”, the EU is undemocratic”, and “we’re British, not Europeans”. None of which means anything to me, I have to admit! This “Sovereignty”, for example, when we “take back control”, how does it benefit us? Do we all get wage rises? Lower cost of living? A more efficient health service? Well, no, none of those. In fact, all of them will deteriorate because apparently “Sovereignty” has a cost and it “is a cost worth paying”. I still do not know what we are getting for our money.”
Brexit slogans are meaningless, one may as well listen to Nazis talking about their great white race, and how it would reconquer sovereignty by alienating its neighbors. What the Nazis were saying was indeed not grounded in the very values they extolled, including nationalism (the most telling example: all Germans had to prove they were not Jewish, according to the (insane) definition of Judaism of the Nazis… They was one blatant exception: HITLER HIMSELF! When Brits say the EU is undemocratic, they literally are insane: they have an unelected chamber of Lords.
The EU government is very complex, and the EU is over-legalistic, the French way. However the European Commission just executes the big notions from the council of the democratically elected governments. Nothing really prevents European governments to refuse to obey edicts from Brussels, or even European laws (France deliberately violates some of them, for more than half a century).
But the EU doesn’t have a unelected chamber of Lords and an unelected head of state, as Great Britain the Greatly Democratically Broken: the decision making of the EU is collegial among democratically elected governments, and laws have to be approved by the democratically elected European Parliament. One EU democracy can block everything as last week, when France vetoed calling Gibraltar a “colony”.
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Hazxan: “Then they [Brexiters] talk about hearing people “talk foreign” in the street, how this “isn’t right”. Again, I do not see the problem, I feel no fear, or anything at all if I hear someone speak another language. The media have used this a lot, so clearly, it is important to some Brexiters (including my family, who says it), but means nothing to me. It’s like their words sail 6 feet over my head.”
That brings considerations back to what I view as the essence of the problem, at the level of the Brexiters (not at the level of the plutocrats who pull their strings): racism.
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The Open Society is superior, as Pericles said, before doing the exact opposite, losing the war in the process:
In California, election ballots are in dozens of the world’s languages: California is not afraid of foreigners, because California is persuaded it has the best political system in the world, so it can afford to be an OPEN SOCIETY…. California is Brexit in reverse. Tellingly, that was Pericles’ great theme and semantics. Ironically, and tragically, Pericles himself made an exit on the OPEN SOCIETY, as he passed laws saying that only children from parents BOTH Athenians, were Athenian. Pericles was married to an Ionian philosopher who did much of his thinking for him, and because of the laws passed by his idiotic father, said son found himself non-Athenian, just when Athens needed maximal manpower….
So California doesn’t make the terrible mistake Pericles did, contradicting the very values Athens was based on… Just as the Nazis brought the weakening of the German race (scrapping all the recent immigration in Germany, Germans of German descent are only 65 millions… less than the French… France having always been an open society (but for the occasional loud expulsion of Jews… who were either right back, or never left).
California doesn’t make the alienation mistake of Pericles, rejecting strangers, but the UK does. Or more exactly, Brexiters want Britain to. go the way of Athens, and commit suicide…
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No empire, no law, no freedom:
None of this is funny. Lack of union in Europe is weakening Europe, hence civilization. Take for example North Africa, which is the geographical support of Europe. It’s in a mess, greatly because Europe rejected all of Africa after so-called independence (= let Africa be devoured by home-grown and international) plutocrats. Instead, more distant Turkey was developed (although it had fewer human and ideological, and cultural and economic ties). Result: Turkey is turning into a wealthy dictatorship, whereas places like Algeria, which voted for the Republic in referendum, were left to dictators to thrive in exchange for oil, gas and votes at the UN.
How did that happen? Because rejecting Africa was never debated. Africaexit and Frexit was imposed upon (France and) Algeria, for example (although Algerians had voted just for the opposite, twice!) Instead a religion was created around obsessive sex abusers degenerates such as the revered Sartre, and his sex offender “Beaver”, who posed as great humanists, when they were just greedy opportunists, ready to kiss any “communist” dictator’s butt to look interesting. Europe was weak militarily, and even intellectually.
Brexit is more mental weakness. Some, even on this site (Benign) have wondered: why can’t Great Britain trade with the European Union and leave it at that? For the same reason that California doesn’t just trade with the Union. Or that Sichuan does not just trade with Guangdong. There are plenty of obstacles to trade which need to be overcome by laws and regulation. That’s what empires are for. And no, empire doesn’t contradict democracy. Just the opposite. Athenian democracy built an empire to protect itself. When the Athenian empire failed, so did Athenian democracy.
The next thing which happened is that Rome, which was the next most democratic polity after Athens, also created an empire, for the same exact reason as Athens created an empire: for the protection of its democracy. Hence, the Roman empire was mostly created under the Republic. Or from the momentum given by the progressively degenerating republic (there were plenty of democratic and republican elements, say under emperor Trajan (~ 100 CE), when the empire was at maximum extent, such as scholarships for meritorious youth; it was not just about free bread and circuses).
Thus empire and local democracy are not incompatible, just the opposite. California is clearly potentially more democratic than any European country, Switzerland excepted. Because of those referendums (there are plenty locally, for example to decide upon financing school operations and construction, buy parks, etc.).
Brexit tries to break soft matter which smells particularly bad, full as it is of the most proliferating nightmares from the past. This gleeful manipulation of mental excrements pollutes everything, not just the Irish border, with its devolution of desires down to the most beastly kind.
The pseudo-left, just like the Brexiters, reject a European empire (Federal Europe). However, all the leading countries worldwide are empires: USA, China, India, Brazil, Russia, Canada, even Australia (which controls an entire continent, and its surroundings). What Brexiters say, is that they prefer to be controlled by Washington, than having a say,and being able to debate, in Brussels, Strasbourg, Berlin, Paris, Rome, and all around Europe. They want enslavement: their choice. The US food plutocracy, angry at the EU for imposing food sanity, has already announced that the Brits will have to accept hormonal, antibiotic laced US chicken, if they want to trade with the USA. Bon appetit.
Brexit wants to break, what should be flushed down the toilet. It’s intrinsically disgusting.
Down with the Brexit circus.
Patrice Ayme
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P/S: An indirect proof of concept above is Great Britain itself… in the past. While Britannia ruled the waves, and quite a few places (like most of North America until US president Polk grabbed everything below latitude 49 degree; and also the Raj… namely the Indian subcontinent), Great Britain was the most democratic place in the world… with the exception of France and the USA… both of which, no coincidence, were huge empires.
Why the connection? As I said above!
Democracy is expensive, and has to be stronger than autocrats, tyrants, and various plutocracies, and evil empires. That’s why it needs to be itself imperial (and no, Switzerland is no counterexample; other independent Alpine states were reabsorbed, by Rome or France, or Austria… The Swiss got lucky, and knew how to please… All the way down to Hitler, and now the EU, and the US).
Patrice Ayme's Thoughts 
March 4, 2019 at 4:09 am |
Here is my effort at a general theory in propositional form:
1. Plutocracy, aka extreme wealth and income inequality are evil (because maladaptive; they cause a plethora of social and health pathologies, see Wilkinson’s TED talk on inequality);
2. Empires built on republics always fail through divergence of the interests of the elected representatives and the people; the reps get bought off and make infeasible promises to the people to buy them off in elections;
3. Because government has the power to do so, it over taxes the people and manipulates the currency and uses brute force, etc., to preserve its position when the State becomes overextended; the banks aligned with the state do not charge off their bad debts but expropriate whatever assets the financially repressed people have left;
4. Plutocracy loves a divided populace unable to organize labor to demand a greater share of output and will mobilize any base emotion in the populace they can inflame; open borders, which are very beneficial in the early fiscally sound era of empire become yet another way to divide the people in the late stages and to keep wages low;
5. In the end the government fails to forgive unpayable debts, defaults on its own obligations, fails to admit mistakes, and running it all, the Plutos fail to voluntarily return the society to an equitable “circular flow” of income that will generate healthy levels of real capital formation and consumption. The people revolt.
In the case of capitalist empires, Marx got the prognosis right (extreme inequality and the immiseration of the working people, because r > g as Picketty says, the rate of return on capital Is greater than the rate of real income growth) but the solution wrong.
IMHO the solution is to put collars on personal compensation across the economy, regulating the dominant corporate form, to constrain top to bottom multiples to some reasonable number (US had its greatest growth when this was about 30). This is different from progressive taxation as it simply requires distribution of a corporatation’s profit within the collar to fulfill the constraint regardless of “ownership”; in the case of a bonanza of value creation such as a tech company this would mean everyone could still get filthy rich. Alternatively you could have set real boundaries on personal compensation and give the excess profit to the government as taxes, if in a direct democracy where they might be productively deployed.
One corollary is that Left and Right are most useful to the Plutocrats when they can be used to divide the people; the relevant dimensions are Up and Down.
The golden age of California was before it became pathologically overextended, as with Illinois, and as with the USA and the EU. But US states can’t print money. Sooner or later the US and EU will try to inflate out their debt by devaluing their currencies, and after that the currency will become worthless. Then one would hope for currency reset, an electoral reset with limitations on campaign spending, term limits, direct voting on important propositions. But no empire that reaches the critical state of overextension ever self corrects without a crash and burn.
Unfortunately in historical periods like this productive collective action becomes virtually impossible, which is just fine with the Plutocrats, who, as I have said, nowadays have even greater tools at their disposal to administer Plantation Earth. More and more, elements of personal trust become critical in making important decisions.
My references here are Peter Turchin’s excellent “Age of Discord” and Martin Armstrong’s blog.
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March 4, 2019 at 6:26 am |
Thanks Benign! Partial answer, core of an essay to come:
Plutocracy is evil by definition: Pluto-Cracy means DEVIL POWER.
Devil Power can be useful. When the conspirators grabbed Julius Caesar, and started to stab him, he fought, although unarmed, like a “wild beast”. Caesar gave up when his son Brutus himself, who had been one of his subordinate generals during the war of Gauls, also stabbed him. Then he “composed himself for death”.
In World War Two, the Nazis, who were devils, were crushed by Devil Power. The Pacific War was stopped by the Devil Power of two nuclear bombs, and the threat of more (the next one was going to Sapporo).
Harnessing Devil Power for no good reason is itself ultimately evil (because no goodness can be found in it, in any larger neighborhood).
Devil Power as the organizational principle of society, for no good reason (Stalin had a good reason after June 23, 1941) is ultimately evil. This is what plutocracy in the political sense is.
Plutocracy is not just evil because it creates all sorts of inequalities. That the face value of plutocracy. The situation is meta worse: inequality is deeply inhuman. Thus, when humans are exposed to crazy inequality, they feel exposed to inhumanity… supreme evil, the devil.
Supreme evil calls for ultimate means to fight it. That would be Devil Power, ultimate fighting. Knowing this, or rather feeling this, the plutocrats anticipate it, and make sure that those they have made unequal, inferior, and whom they rule over, are in no situation to realize their full fighting potential. However the full fighting potential is not any different from full human capability. So the plutocrats make sure to render human beings into subhumans.
That is a higher level of evil which plutocrats need to exert, not just to access power, but to stay in power. So it may start with wealth, but it will end with the greatest cruelty. This is why the Saudi Crown Prince, who has everything, to stay in power, needed to have around him goons determined to silence even other members of the Saudi establishment. And to make sure they learn discipline, the punishment is exemplary. Yes, you shall be tortured to death, whoever you are. Stalin ruled that way, so did emperor Constantine. (When Nero tried the same for all to see, a not-impressed-enough Roman Senate condemned him to be flogged to death… the “Old Fashion Way”)
Plutocracy then, is a psychological mechanism of amplification of evil made possible by civilization. And the more civilization, potentially the more plutocracy. Direct democracy, hyper democracy, are the natural, and only antidotes. The idea is to prevent absolutely the apparition of great wealth, exactly as the Romans did, under their republic.
Thus, there should not be a situation where “elected representatives” can have so much power that they create an inequality situation.
Here is the explanation. Say we limit wealth absolutely to 100 million dollars. A 100 million dollars individuals can muster some political power… But not too much. Call such a power, or one hundred times that power (corresponding to ten billion), the maximum political power. Cap it just there, except in war, etc.
That was the system the Roman republic used: very severe cpas on the power of just one man. Two Consuls (very rarely just one) had power for just a month, alternatively (except when on the field, leading an army), for a total of a year. Marius (Caesar’s uncle was elected Consul seven times… something never seen before, or since… But that was when war in Africa and then Gallia, had taken dramatic turns for the worse engaging Rome’s survival…). The Roman political structure has sacro-saint “Tribunes” (who introduced laws; Consuls were executive rather than legislative), etc.
Elected representatives with severely curtailed powers, plus ferocious limits on how frequently they could be elected, cannot be easily bought off… Especially when there are no more billionaires! (Or then they can be billionaires SpaceX style, namely much money put together, from various sources, for the common good, and under some government control…)
A sovereign state is never over-extended. Philosopher Massimo Pigliucci, a Roman, told me that Marcus Aurelius would have been immediately killed, had he tried to re-instate the republic. But that was because Rome, by then, was a power struggle between the economic plutocracy, and the military plutocracy: that struggle was explicit when Octavianus sat by his army in the Po valley. One centurion under the nominal command of the great nephew of Caesar went to the Senate, unsheathed his sword, and ordered the Senators to give a rise to the army, or said he brandishing his glavius, this would do it for them. So, under Marcus Aurelius, one had a hybrid plutocracy, that was the state.
The sovereign state, under Marcus Aurelius, was not a democracy, and the old Roman republic was way too much of a democracy. The Roman army liked power, and didn’t want it to go back to the “Tribes” (which elected the Tribunes)…
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March 4, 2019 at 4:13 am |
Or excess profit could be retained for investment i.e. Capital formation by the company (better than giving to government).
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March 5, 2019 at 6:43 am |
Business tax should be abolished but personal tax should be quite high to prevent plutocracy and high income inequality which is bad for civilization. Any money invested in a business enriches all.
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March 5, 2019 at 8:42 am |
Yes, Partha, we would not want to discourage SpaceX, Blue Origins, Big Pharma done right, Microsoft investing in Quantum Computing, Huawei and Samsung making foldable screens, etc… Capital fully reinvested in R & D should be spared taxes. The archetype example is Tesla (I must admit…)
However, plutocracy borrowing against capital, and arguing that’s not income, should be discouraged too… So it’s not as simple as an absolute tax on wealth, or its functional equivalent… One should have “SUMPTUARY” LAWS… And the Roman Republic, and also some Greek cities, had them…
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March 4, 2019 at 5:17 pm |
Yes, evil is a potentiality of human nature, abetted by unconstrained capitalist dynamics that lead to oligarchy and plutocracy, sad to say. Absolute power corrupts absolutely (a “benign” dictator is a theoretical possibility, but not a likelihood! 😉 one can only hope the species learns to self-regulate at some point…
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March 8, 2019 at 7:08 pm |
Plutocrats of all sorts paid (illegally) to prop the Brexit campaign, using everything from private jets to hypnotists and paid Labour officials. And murder was no problem. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/mar/08/arron-banks-ignored-deal-to-stop-pro-brexit-ads-after-jo-cox-death
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