INEQUALITY KILLS PROGRESS, The Force Which Gives Us Ever More Meaning

OUR ETHICAL CONTEXT:

The following sketch of the main forces of history is written with a maximally progressive motivation. That is only normal: humanity is progress personified. Still the “Democratic” Party, in power most of the time in the last few decades, has been, overall, very regressive… because it has been captured by plutocracy: top “Democrats” became filthy rich from their political careers. Corruption, in other words.

The problem has been that the Democratic Party pretends to be a left but actually implemented policies way right of Trump. The retort the “Democrats” give to this is that their policies were right wing because the “Republicans”, the GOP, forced them that way. This astounding reply is deeply disingenuous. In the beginning of the reign of Obama, there were at least 72 days when the Congress and Senate were in session and Obama enjoyed a “Supermajority”. To pass a drastic law in such a context, one needs minutes, not days. But the truth is, during the reign of Obama-Biden the single genuinely progressive law passed outlawed the exclusion of preexisting conditions in healthcare private insurance (a law that the GOP supports).

Doesn’t Biden support equality? Well he claims to, but his record is clear, loud and strong: Biden’s record is the exact opposite to an extent which is astounding. Biden is the first candidate to the US presidency known to have fostered, during his long career, the financial plutocracy and collaborated in a crime against humanity (the killing of millions in Iraq). 

What of Trump?

I can debate with my opponent, but not with a fake friend who backstabbed me. The enemy of my greatest enemy should be my ally.

The greatest enemy should be the Global Deep Plutocracy, which owns all the world media, thus our souls, besides an increasing majority of the world Gross Domestic Product (GDP owns the GDP). What we are witnessing is the rise of neo-feudalism.

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WHY DID PROGRESS STOP?

In 1874 Félix du Temple succeeded the first powered take-off with a man on board. 95 years later, humans landed on the Moon. In this short period air travel became routine, human life expectancy doubled and thermonuclear fireworks were lit. Poverty vanished, everybody willing got a job, or a top quality free education.

Her Serene Princess Corinna zu Sayn-Wittgenstein fresh from cavorting with kings of Arabia and Spain, (yes, Wittgenstein, like the philosopher, same family) with Clinton, Princess Charlene of Monaco in between. All tax avoidance Delaware financial engineering style aristocracy Neo-feudalism is already here…

So more than 50 years ago a life form reached another celestial body, deliberately, probably for the first time in galactic history. So much progress in a few decades… And then… Fifty years of stagnation, or even decay: quality jobs vanishing, education, health care and housing getting too expensive, mathematics and reading scores going down, world ecology collapsing, religious madness growing, people getting killed for making jokes, unending wars… Why? What happened?

One has to find the most significant indicators. What could those be? Let’s take a sweep at history, on the grandest scale, to guess what the important notions were.

For millions of years, human populations were tiny and very diverse. But then human ancestors learned to master fire, more than a million year ago, and that was a force and capability multiplier: entire forests could be burned, creating an environment more human friendly. However, communications stayed very difficult. 50,000 years ago, Eurasia still had at least four human species… They used crucially life saving technology (tools, weapons, clothing, cooking of otherwise unedible plants). But progress was slow. Present humans resulted from interbreeding those species. 

Aside from fire, for millions of years human ancestors had only as much energy as what their muscles could deliver… until humans helped wolves evolve into dogs: suddenly human capability was very significantly enhanced: two top predators collaborating, and soon guarding herds of domesticated ungulates. Then, 10,000 years ago, the first cities appeared and the impact of humanity started to grow exponentially. New methods of harnessing nature, and new species, were created. Great human concentrations brought debate fostering innovation.

It is revealing that the progress of humanity was concentrated in space and time. For example the alphabet, the sexagesimal system, many crops, many democratic structures, and the first cities all appeared in an area less than 1% of the world’s continental mass… But smack dab in the Middle Earth, at the junction of Africa and Eurasia, where the trading of people and ideas was maximal, from Ireland to India. 

The conclusion is that Middle Earth had learned to learn. Global trade helped. More granular study shows that particular civilizations were highly innovative for often very short time, and then knowledge disseminated: Sumerian cities, Egypt, Crete, Phoenicia, Greek cities… 

What distinguished these particularly innovative societies? They have all one thing in common: the most innovative societies were more egalitarian, and less ruled as military dictatorships. Sumerian two chamber parliament cities, Cretan girl toreadors, the first dams in Yemen, with the first known queen…  Compare Sparta, the most racist, exploitative and iniquitous Greek city, which invented nothing, and Athens, the direct democracy which created an enormous body of knowledge, in a few decades. Equality fosters progress and the reason is obvious, as it fosters debate, thus intelligence.  

So what happened to equality? It went up and down, mostly down, but when it was up, progress was fast.

Equality, as in ancient Greece and Rome already, was a virtuous consequence of war. In the ancient world, hoplites armies, made of middle class citizens, were found most efficient militarily. The consequence was that citizens were armed and dangerous, and could not be subjected to a military dictatorship… because they were themselves the military. So democracy was an immediate consequence of switching from a military based on an aristocracy, to a military centered on a hoplite army. King Sergius Tullius made Rome switch to a hoplite army. Rome then turned into a de facto republic, and defeated her neighbors which had not armed the middle class. 

Something similar happened in Europe and America in the first half of the Twentieth Century. To defeat racist German fascism between 1914 and1945, the democracies, led by the French Republic, had to go all out and muster enormous armies. In the period 1939-1945, 16.5 million men served in the US Army, 6.5 million in the French army, 3 million in the British army. Those men had been trained to kill in the name of democracy, equality, liberty … It would have been ill advised to deprive them of these afterwards (such a deprivation is actually how the Franco-Algerian civil war started…in 1945…). 

Thus the GI Bill, which provided America’s young, dangerous and idealistic men with all they could possibly want. Thus massive socialist programs in Europe, such as universal free health care, universal free education, up to the university. Massive construction programs rebuilt destroyed cities, factories or railroads… or established freeway systems (US). The rivalry with the socialist paradise next door in the USSR helped along. This all led to an explosion of knowledge and capability… for thirty glorious years concluding with the visits to the Moon… 

However, even then, young people in the most advanced countries realized they were submitted to exploitative oligarchies. In 1968, revolt spread, from San Francisco to Prague. The war in Vietnam showed that a small elite in the USA had conspired to make a war which killed three millions for no good reason. That became a teaching moment, worldwide. Twelve years after the invasion of Hungary, the invasion of Czechoslovakia confirmed that the USSR, far from being a paradise, was a malevolent back-stabbing empire even worse than the USA. France also revolted, as young people there realized in May 68 that too many structures had more to do with encrusted privilege of an elite than anything else.

As a consequence of 1968 a defiance of the governments installed itself. But it is important to realize that May 68 happened because the great egalitarian movement which had accompanied the Second World War was fully receding. 

May 68 was just a flash in the pan. Obvious irritants were removed. The elite pursued its ascending trajectory in a more stealthy manner. In the USA, plutocrat Kaiser persuaded his friend President Nixon to use the government to help establish the private Health Maintenance Organization (HMO) system. (Just one man revered by the Democratic Party, Warren Buffet, made more than ten billion dollars from HMOs; his friends and collaborators made much more.)

The lesson the elite got from Vietnam is that war was good, be it only for its distracting element, as long as one could hide who started it. Under “Democratic” president Carter a deliberate ultra secret plot launched a war in Afghanistan, to destroy the USSR by forcing it to intervene. It used proxies. The Machiavellian idea was to use Muslim Fundamentalism from Saudi Arabia and the ISI of the Republic of Pakistan to wage holy war against the secular republic of Afghanistan. It could be done cheaply by attacking little girls’ schools (the Prophet, who improved the condition of little girls, would not have been amused). The war in Afghanistan killed millions, and is still on, four decades later. But the USSR, which had been trying to reform itself, indeed collapsed.

The elite harnessed craftily the idea of freedom. Freedom would be found in private enterprises, a move led by Thatcher and Reagan. TINA, There Is No Alternative, they claimed. There was a lot of merit to the idea. 

But profiteering could not be applied to unprofitable infrastructure. So infrastructure went the way of the dodo when privatization was imposed. The psychiatric patients were released to the streets. Violent crime exploded. In reaction, 97 to 3, US Senators passed Biden’s Crime Bill, which was pitiless on people of color, sending millions to prison for nearly nothing (Biden recognizes it was a mistake). My spouse fought a year to get a father of four out of life in prison. He had got life, because of a little pipe in his pocket. Just a pipe. No drug. It required Obama’s presidential pardon, which was obtained (with thanks from the president and the AG!)

China, though, was not that stupid. China has invested in massive public infrastructure for 4,000 years, and China knew the importance of governmentalism, when the government actively steers the economy in the direction of maximal progress. China went on a rampage of industrialization, using lots of Intellectual Property gleaned from the West. Quickly, the wealthiest persons in the West, especially in the USA, realized they could make a business deal with China, similar to the deals they had made with fascists regimes after World War One. (Such deals are not in official versions of history; however, just on the question of oil procurement, Hirohito’s Japan, Stalin’s USSR, and all European fascist regimes, depended crucially on US oil men, their capital, companies or know-how.)

Top decision makers in the USA became mesmerized by a philosopher who told them that the secret of a successful society is the roaring individualist:

“[Dean] “My dear fellow, who will let you?”

[Roark] “That’s not the point. The point is, who will stop me?”

― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead 

Anything was permitted, then. Nobody could stop them. Constraints on finance installed under Roosevelt in 1933, were removed by Clinton. The 1920s were back, complete with a crash (2008). The situation was worse, though, as Western bankers in the increasingly infernal trio of UK, US and France, mostly invested in bets with each other called derivatives. 

Chinese bankers investing in derivatives, instead of material infrastructure, were encouraged not to pursue this, with a bullet in the back of the head.  

Thus May 68 only made the elite smarter. By then the elite had become fully hereditary protected by an arsenal of iniquitous laws (and not just in the US, led by Delaware: in France the hyper wealthy’s property is protected from otherwise punitive inheritance death taxes). 

Inequality grew, helped by the partnership with the Chinese dictatorship. Inequality itself is a dictatorship, so its relationship with the Chinese dictatorship justified its own existence and reciprocally. This sort of growth of evil has happened many times in history, in all locales. Under its metastatic form, it is called as it should be, Evil-Power, Pluto-Kratia, where it penetrates all of society.

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WHY DO CIVILIZATIONS COLLAPSE? 

Because tiny elites, with their vicious, greedy minds, take them to the abyss. It is optimistic to hope that the Fourth World War will be fought with sticks and stones. The Coronavirus pandemic shows that the annihilation of humanity is possible. A lab in Wuhan made viral enhancement studies… next to the “Bat Lady”. 

Absent absolute wealth limit legislation, mathematics makes increasingly powerful elites dominate societies. Ruling the many by the few, is inhuman. Thus can only be enjoyed by ever more evil means. Rendering the population so stupid it can’t even take care of itself is a must. 

The Global Dark State of world inherited finance chose Biden, for decades a Senator of the world’s top tax haven, Delaware, the “den of thieves” (dixit the New York Times in 2008!) 

Free trade is neither free, nor a trade, for citizens living in the so-called democracies. Instead world globalization, as in the Roman globalization of 22 centuries ago, enables the wealthiest to escape democratic laws, taxation, minimum wage, laws against slavery. 

Collaboration with dictatorships such as China built networks of power around the world (the Epstein underage sex ring is a small example of this; Biden’s state of Delaware, another). So-called “Representative Democracy” rests on very few representatives, the families of whom can be bought. Global corruption in top politicians is generally legal and a world phenomenon. In the US, they don’t even hide. 

An example? Looking at costs, as percentage of GDP, and quality of care, comparing the US and the UK, one sees that at least half of US health care spending is sheer corruption. 

Trump ordered to crush down the price of medical drugs down to the lowest level of comparable countries. Congress found that U.S. drug prices were nearly four times higher than average prices compared to similar countries… Democrats did nothing about it, even when they had a supermajority House-Senate, or when Trump asked. So the question naturally arises: do most of the media hate Trump because he is too much on the left? That would make sense as all the media is owned by the world’s wealthiest families.    

Trump is hated for his climate positions. Yet the Paris Accord allows countries to pollute as much as they want. The scheme was just a way to extract money from the USA (as the WHO is). To prevent the catastrophic emissions of greenhouse gases (now above 500ppm of CO2, the highest level in 40 million years) will require new technology so good and efficient that all countries adopt it. Nothing less will do. This requires releasing the animal spirits, as Trump did. 

Under Obama, the Patent System was destroyed to insure the reign of the tech monopolies doubling as spy agencies and a new form of censoring plutocratically owned media. Obama committed the outrage of making it impossible for small inventors to make claims against monopolies stealing them.  

Contrarily to repute, Trump has signed on gigantic augmentations of the budgets in fundamental science and health research. But it does not matter: many (not all) of the world’s wealthiest people hate him because he threatens to break their power tool, world globalization. They also succeeded to make lots of the electorate hate him too, thanks to their ownership of the media.

The power grab of hyper wealth is frightening, but even more so the fact that the intellectual class has sided with the world plutocracy (which pays their salaries). A hope of this book is to expose enough deeply significant facts to make thinkers realize that the enemy, Trump, of their greatest enemy, world plutocracy, may not be their friend… But should be their ally. A good occasion to debate, therefore to learn better thinking.

Hatred is no way to progress. Nor can one progress if one cannot debate with someone in a basement. The connection between Biden and the hyper wealth secrecy of Delaware was never exposed for what it is. The Trump hating plutocratically owned media thrills its gullible public with tales such as Trump wanting to inject them with bleach. 

Here is an illustrative anecdote, mostly based away from the US. The ex-king of Spain has a wealth officially in the 50 million dollars range (not bad for somebody who started with nothing). However the ex-king made two billion illegally, from moving bribes around discreetly thanks to the world financial system… the nexus of which is Delaware… The present king of Spain renounced his inheritance… Or so he had to say. 
Once the ex-king of Spain got one hundred million dollars from Saudi Arabia, and passed 65 million Euros of it to one of his mistresses, the Danish Corinna Larsen (who since changed her name in another marriage, and became “Her Serene Highness Princess” Corinna zu Sayn-Wittgenstein). She explained that “it was not to hide the money”, but “to win me back”. The mistress is tight with the Clintons, Prince Charles, top journalists, the top UK aristocracy, and is a star of the Paradise and Panama papers, with dozens of illegal offshore accounts. Who is arresting her? Nobody. In the US the black man with an empty pipe gets arrested, imprisoned for life, while princesses who have money laundered hundreds of million dollars, and everybody knows it cavort with the US aristocracy, and its media, serenely.

Why so? Because, per the intrinsic nature of the world’s representative oligarchy we enjoy, the political system obeys, and law enforcement negotiates, with those who have the power. Because power buys everything. In the last few weeks, Wall Street unleashed more than a billion dollars to support Biden (more than 30 times what Trump got)… as it buys itself a president they already know all too well…

Patrice Ayme

Tags: Biden Trump, Inequality