Europe’s Best Friend: Donald Trump

Donald Trump is trying to wake up European democracies about defending themselves, thus The Donald is viewed as extremely bad: ‘how do you dare waking me up, you really evil aren’t you? whines sleepy, prissy and fussy princess Europe. And she adds: ‘Aren’t you in charge, you dirty US capitalist? Can’t a girl get her beauty sleep?’‘

Things were the other way around during most of the 20th century, in spite of the dreary fact that most of the Plebs and the intellectuals who instructed it, believe the opposite:

The USA “Protected” Europe Too Late in the 20th Century, twice, and it was by well crafted plutocratic and imperial design: ‘Oh, oops, princess Europe, you all broken up, didn’t see that coming, let Uncle Sam and Uncle Joe help you by taking care of your properties, and placing you under tutelage.’

In 1937, the University of Chicago historian Dodd, US ambassador in Berlin, who saw the Nazis for what they were, had to talk at the zoo (“Tiergarten“), far from Nazi mikes, and spies, with the French ambassador, on how to fight Nazism (see the excellent book, “The Garden of the Beasts”). 

German generals and admirals informed the US ambassador, in 1937, that they were ready to make a coup and kill Hitler. All the USA had to do, was to warn the Nazi government that the USA would stand with the French Republic in its opposition to Nazism. (The British were similarly informed.) Knowing that the USA stood with France against Hitler, would enable the German High Command to justify their coup to the German Volk: because there would be no way that Germany could win another war, if the USA were allied to France (and a fortiori if the UK joined!)

Instead the USA and the UK governments, at the highest level, informed Hitler that his own High Command was plotting against him. The US president fired his anti-Nazis ambassadors in Berlin and London, and replaced them by pro-Nazi ambassadors.

Most people know the rest of the story: by chance (mostly), 157 German divisions defeated the 110 divisions, six million soldiers French army in May-June 1940. (Germany had mobilised 4,200,000 men of the Heer, 1,000,000 of the Luftwaffe, 180,000 of the Kriegsmarine, and 100,000 of the Waffen-SS.) Encouraged, Japan and Italy, the allies of the Nazis, also attacked the world, Nearly 5% of the world population died from the war. Entire communities, like European Jews got mostly wiped out.  At the time, the British army was 200,000 men, and the US army, even smaller.

All this because US leaders in the 1930s and early 1940s, from the presidency to Congress, to intellectuals, to even US Jews, felt, deep down inside, that a big mess in Europe would improve the status of the USA, as it did, indeed: the European empires collapsed, and the USA smoothly replaced Europe all over. Now, when there is corruption in Malaysia (say) it is US actors (in two senses of the word) who profit… Not British ones… (The election in Malaysia, where the 92-year-old PM of way back got re-elected is a healthy reaction to this world corrupt plutocracy, this corruptocracy, of US origin…)

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Deliberately Clueless Germany Confuses the Issues:

So it is rather hilarious that Angela Merkel, Thursday May 10 2018, enunciated that:

“It’s no longer the case that the United States will simply just protect us,” Merkel said to applause in a speech honoring French President Emmanuel Macron, who sat behind her at a prize ceremony in Aachen, Germany. “Rather, Europe needs to take its fate into its own hands. That’s the task for the future”.

Emmanuel’s Workers-Unite Fist? Or Roman-Imperial Fist? Both are needed, anyway. And here she is, ready for her punishment, a chastised Angela herself!

Well, Angela Merkel, typically clueless German politician, in the old style who brought us the Kaiser and the Hitler, in their cluelessness, let me teach you: the USA simply didn’t protect Europe, in the greater scheme of things, far from it. The US nasty plutocracy is in command for more than a century, and it’s no friend of Europe. The US rescued Europe from wars it enabled discreetly!

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A Little Bit Of True History Not Found In Pluto Textbooks and Pluto Universities:

The USA leadership has long just played friend of Europe, the Europe of the 1%, in the media (which it owns). The USA encouraged the Kaiser Wilhelm II to go berserk in 1914. Some will say it’s my opinion, a matter of taking at his own word what happened when Colonel House, right arm of US president Wilson, a racist “Democrat” visited with the Kaiser in Berlin, June 1, 1914. (I documented this in other essays.). However, it is plainly visible that the USA, with the complicity of the Netherlands and its corrupt (yet much admired) queen, broke the Anglo-French blockade of the Kaiser, and thus extended the First World War by several years... until Wilson saw fit to finish the Kaiser… (a blockaded Germany would have had to capitulate quickly).

Emmanuel Macron, the 40-year-old president of France: “Nous ne pouvons plus laisser d’autres décider pour nous.” (We can’t let others decide for us.)

The French Republic, led by Socialist PM Leon Blum (a Jew) wanted to go to war in Spain in 1936, to oppose the Nazis there. Instead France let the opposition of Britain and the USA to anything French, or anything to break their Anglo-Saxon idyl with Nazism, decide for France. Conclusion, when war with the Nazis started for real, the French airforce and army were untrained, uncoordinated, and incapable of communicating with itself. The French and the British learned fast, in a week or two: by the time of Dunkirk. But then the Battle of france had been lost. If France had not let US plutocrats decide the Republic should not attack the Nazis in 1936, it would have been ready in 1940… Probably the world war would not even have happened… German generals would have killed the Nazis…

US unemployment at 3.9%, North Korea making peace, after 67 years… Yes, well, how does Trump do it? Trump, as many presidents before him, decides to spend, as needed, and the hell with it. In March 1933 plutocrat-president Franklin Roosevelt (FDR) came to power, closed all banks, devalued the dollar, defaulted on US debt… And FDR decided to build a giant 24 “FLEET” Aircraft Carriers fleet. For comparison, Nazi Germany planned to launch two “Fleet” aircraft carrier by 1945. Yes, just two. Japan scrambled to build eleven, but their carriers were less advanced, and often just rededicated heavy cruisers: they didn’t have armored decks and steam catapults.

So Trump does it as FDR did it, or Darius, or Caesar, or Diocletian, or Peter the Great, did it: a sovereign, truly sovereign state, spends, orders and organizes, as vitally needed. This is how Stalin and its USSR could defeat the Nazis (with major help from US materiel, UK intelligence, and Hitler’s personal incompetence).

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Rebellious Macron? Correct Trump? Yes!

I have described Macron (and all other politicians) severely in the past. But the aim is to think and encourage correct drifts, not to rage, just because rage feels good… Emmanuel Macron is aware of the damage that Germany’s obsession with what is advertised as “budget discipline” is doing to the European Union. It is advertised as “budget discipline” but it is actually cheating: all too many local German banks are bankrupt, thus subsidizing German industry; what’s the motivation? I know personally, they are friends, some small German plutocrats, I see how they profit from the present Teutonic “budget discipline”… They are familiar with various tax havens, and things are swell for them, they even bought massive land in… Hawai’i… 

“Germany can’t have a perpetual fetish about budget and trade surpluses, because they come at the expense of others,” Macron said as he received the annual “Charlemagne Prize” from the city of Aachen (Aix La Chapelle, Charlemagne’s capital, in front of a public including the German chancellor.

As the French leader was celebrated for his contribution to European unity, he, thankfully, dared to make it official that German policy is selfish. Macron called for a Eurozone budget to stabilize the bloc’s economy and bring its members closer together, a key plank of his vision which Germany has so far refused to support. In particular, one can’t expect the French Republic’s war against Islamist terrorists in more than half a dozen African countries, to be financially supported by… Saudi Arabia as much as it is by much more wealthy and concerned, Europe…

(As it is Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates gave $150 millions for the African force organized by the French military operations, whereas Europe gave only 116 million Euros!) Meanwhile German plutocrats and industry get financed, while the French army goes starving…

So yes, Trump is angry at Germany, and right to be so: the defense of the West shouldn’t be just a Franco-American affair, especially when Germany prevents France to have the force democracy and civilization really needs. If Germany wants to extract a full

It is known that much more than 350,000 illegal immigrants going to Europe went through the country of Niger alone, in 2017. They were all ready to get to Europe… or die. Think about this: Europe, or death! It is that bad, that post-colonial order (no individual from subsaharan West African country fought for independence in any sense: independence was thrown at them, to get rid of them, so here we are…)

Post-colonial, plutocratic order, ladies and gentlemen…

The USA has roughly the same number of troops in Africa as France does (the numbers don’t look large, but these are modern elite troops, with lots of expensive equipment, and much of the aerial part of the forces operates out of France or the USA directly).

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Nasty Neutral Enabled The Nazi Holocaust:

Another lesson from the past is that small “neutral” countries, such as Sweden, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Ireland, Belgium, even Denmark, even Portugal (!), crucially handicapped the French Republic in its 1914-1945 war against fascist Germany. The actions of these countries were varied: some supplied weapons and top grade iron (as Sweden did, giving Germany its most useful weapon the 88 gun… and the iron for building all Nazi weapons), others enabled testing and smuggling of illegal weapons and materiel (Portugal).

A country, even if small and neutral is not really neutral. There should be, there is, no neutrality, when democracy and civilization are threatened. If present-day Germany, a Republic, wants to play Belgium, 1940 style, let it be reminded that Belgium is a monarchy, and that Nazi armor went, mostly undetected and unopposed, through Belgium and Luxembourg in May 1940: the result was that millions of French elite soldiers, and the enormous French armor (3,000 tanks, three times the number of vastly inferior German-made tanks), found itself, stabbed in the back (with the tiny but very well-trained British army).

Democracy has a serious problem in Africa: it is high time to re-establish civilization there! As it is, Africans prefer to risk dying, rather than risking not trying to make it to Europe (and especially, France). To solve this extensive collapse of democracy, or even collapse of basic well-being, requires to defeat the European, but also global plutocratic system which has taken advantage of Africa, and to impose the rule of law… and that means force, military force. And putting billionaire plutocrats in prison, as France just did with Vincent Bolloré (for added fun, the Wall Street Journal certifies no such thing ever happened under US law… an unwitting double entendre in the land of LLC, Foundations, and other plots and conspiracies…)

And yes, Merkel, to enforce democracy means deficit spending, just ask The Donald, how it’s done, or then read about another dozen or two successful US presidents who did it, and now an empire you contemplate (but an US empire, as Macron pointed out implicitly). And yes, plutocrats, even German plutocrats my friends, may have to pay a little bit more taxes, or see their treasury bonds lose value: I don’t give a damn, actually, I rather relish the perspective…

The USA, or, rather a leading, manipulative class in US leadership, leveraged a sort of German fascist madness during 1914-1945, that Nietzsche, and others, had fully diagnosed. Of this the USA is not responsible, except as a racist and imperialist invasive metastasis of greed, all too highly successful as a bad example. The Prussian leadership and its love-hate imitators (Hitler and fellow Nazis) didn’t understand that the glorious American holocaust would not be repeatable: they had been led astray by the British support for Prussia in the Seven Years World War (1756-1763), when, against all odds, Prussia stuck it out, and won against Russia, Austria, France… (Hitler, to the bitter end, imagined himself as a new Frederik II…)

It is a refreshing change that Donald Trump is not playing that game, where the US leadership supports ideas, ways and means highly detrimental to its mother civilization, Europe… A nasty game Obama was playing, when he claimed in Cairo (!) that Islam was the best thing for civilization, or so (Obama has never heard of Pirenne’s thesis).

Trump is telling the Europeans: time to defend your values, if you really care about them. Forced we are to see that Germany still doesn’t completely get it! Angela Merkel is in her last bout as Kanzler: she should use the occasion to get herself more civilized, and not just play one on TV!

… I don’t want to have to call Angela “Merkler” again… Following in the footsteps of Emmanuel Macron de Rothschild should the sort of revolutionary act that even a Conservative could agree to…

Patrice Ayme

“Right” and “Left” Both Agents Of Plutocracy

The “left” and “right” labels don’t mean much these days. The next French president, Macron, is going to be a 39-year-old Rothschild “banker”, who earned millions a year (being a future president, thus a Rothschild agent, in all appearance). Astoundingly, the 32 year old, unqualified in economics and finance, was making 60,000 dollars a week, from the world most notorious bank, which US President Jackson hated already, two centuries ago. Even more revealingly, Macron is the official “socialist” candidate, with the full might of french state propaganda behind him (my rather placid comments to French state media on how the Euro works, are censored)

Macron was economic and finance adviser, on the right side of French president Hollande always, apparently representing the powers that be, and then he was economy and finance minister, front and center.

In a presidential debate against his opponent, a lawyer, Macron exhibited blatant, baffling, mesmerizing ignorance in what he is supposed to be expert in, economics and finance. (However, because he speaks with total verve and self-assurance, exhibiting “finesse” as he mostly intimated, Macron was believed by all too much of the rabble Macron who watched him on TV.)

“Representative Democracy” is neither representative, nor a democracy.

In the presidential debate, golden banker boy Macron got the history of French unemployment, in the last few decades wrong (it’s the highest now, something he did not know, and which has everything to do with the fact the Euro is the direct tool of German plutocracy, with the complicity of the French plutos, who profit handsomely of the present ECB system!)

More surprisingly, Macron did not hide his initially baffled surprise when confronted by Le Pen about the history of the ECU (European Currency Unit), the predecessor of the Euro. Macron behaved as if he had never heard of the ECU, and as if Le Pen were out of her mind when she talked about an imaginary ECU (however, Macron just flaunted astounding ignorance with such aplomb that he convinced the watching rabble, all over France that he could only be right and Le Pen could only be wrong). Finally Macron, as part of his deep, yet subterranean, systematic French bashing, claimed that France was uniquely doing bad economically in Europe (so, by using uberization, and making France into a start-up, Macron will whip the French into shape…)

Whereas everybody is doing badly in the Eurozone is, except for Germany, the former explaining the latter. Why is Germany doing so great? Because of its hidden banking subsidies, of a sort which are outlawed in the rest of the Eurozone. (Great Britain is out of that exploitation scheme, because the UK has its own currency.) France used to have large banks fiancing small industry such as the now defunct Dexia and the Credit Agricole fulfilling that role. But no more since 2008. Whereas Germany has thousands of small, bankrupt banks financing its crucial “middle industry”.

Macron, the Rothschild roquet is the SOCIALIST candidate… Don’t laugh, this is serious: hordes of “socialist” sheep are voting for him, so that they can be be fleeced. Sled driving cars soon, self fleecing sheep, now! Macron, in his early thirties, without having ever studied economics or finance, earned money at the rate of millions a year. But now all his money is gone, or maybe not, and nobody serious asks where it could have gone (except for yours truly). In any case, he did not pay the ISF (welath tax) which is curious for someone so suddenly rich.

Macron is supported, loudly,  by Obama, the “left” president who presided over the greatest rise, and furthest height of inequality in the USA ever, after sending trillions of dollars of government money to the world’s richest men, to make their main assets, government bonds, more valuable..

Marine Le Pen, has plenty of really socialist propositions, but all the French establishment calls her “extreme right”, and the “end of the republic” to defeat her… and, more importantly making sure that the inequality machine which feeds them, with the European Central Bank buying bonds at the rate of three billion dollars a day, keeps on churning.

The crushing of those who have had enough, be they Melanchon (Unsubmitted France) and Le Pen (National France), and quite a few other rebels adding to another 10% of the electorate is working splendidly… this time. Yet this is probably for the last time. The Macron elite will probably not change what needs to be changed, because it needs to be changed at a European level. As those who strongly disagree with the present system total around 50% of the population (or more), after another 5 years led down the abyss by the same crowd, things will blow up (or well before then, thanks to Merkel obdurate financial behavior)..

Meanwhile in the USA, a (Republican, somewhat “Libertarian”) Senator such as Rand Paul, a Medical Doctor by training, is unhappy. with the modification of Obamacare passed by the Republican Congress. Rand Paul is viewed as extreme right by the established pseudo-left. But what Paul resents, I listened to him, is actually that Obamacare sends public money to private companies to make plutocrats wealthier… That sounds rather more Marxist, pro-equality, than “right”. So is Rand Paul extreme right, or extreme left?

Meanwhile “left” worshipped ex-president Obama gets 400,000 dollars to talk 50 minutes to Cantor-Fitzgerald, the sort of establishment outfit he helped trillions of dollars towards (Cantor-Fitzgerald mostly sells US government bonds to the wealthiest)… No problem says the “left” he is our guy (our “son of a bitch” as president Truman put it, speaking of a Central American president). And indeed, Obama sent a detailed support message to Macron. Obama is widely and wildly popular in France. (For reason having to do with generalized naivety, and lack of knowledge, French Political Correctness, the same reason which made the French vote for Macron, and being so complacent with the system they have… Until it becomes fully dysfunctional!)    .

Right versus left is so yesterday. What matters is truth versus fake. Schools such as Oxford PPE (Philosophy, Politics, Economics), French Science Po and ENA (Ecole Nationale d’Administration: National School of Overlording), and the US plutocratic universities (with their tuition equivalent to median family income) are just into faking democracy, while, and thus, ensuring the rule of the establishment.

Patrice Ayme

How Tribal Evolution Brought Present Masochism

Ancient Mental Structures From Tribalism Foster Present Day Masochism Imposed By The Wealthy:

Humanity is fundamentally tribal. A tribe is a number of humans, say fifty. Enough to scare off, and kill, a sufficient numbers of predators. Not enough to tax the land so much, one could live off it.

Predation is something hard to imagine nowadays (and yet, ironically enough we are becoming victims of it again!) For tenths of millions of years of human evolution, before an alliance could be made with wolves, human beings were in a constant war with super predators. The notion of super predator is the stuff of legend. Why? Because humans eliminated most of therm in the last 50,000 years (around the date when Neanderthals exterminated the giant European Cave Bear).

California Scene, 15,000 Years Ago: Smilodon Not Smiling For 4 meter Tall, One Ton Arctodus

Eurasia and the Americas enjoyed their respective lions, at least 25% larger than today’s largest African lions. Homotherium (Eurasia), and Smilodon (America) were saber tooth cats, the latter was huge. The path into America was probably barred by the extremely carnivorous, lion faced Short Faced Bear, Arctodus Simus, represented above, who probably ran down bisons and horses (it was made for running). Standing, Arctodus reached four meters tall. Smilodons hunted in packs, and where altruistic (they fed their crippled brethren). California also enjoyed the American Lion, and its own heavy, non-hibernating version of the grizzly bear.

Giant hyenas and giant baboons prowled in Africa. A super giant, three meter tall sort of gorilla in Asia. And so on. The jungle, forest, taiga and tundra was incomparably more dangerous than now. For millions of years.

Human beings evolved in fear, finding safety only in numbers and military discipline. Fascist obedience behind rulers was a life-saver during millions of years. Those life-saving psychological charascteristics probably evolved into an instinct (a natural neurological pattern for human beings).

I call this the fascist instinct. Religions, superstitious or not, the madness of crowds, hyper nationalism, blind obedience to orders, lynching, all come from this natural human tendency to mob the enemy.

In particular, there is in human being a natural tendency to be subjugated, scared, so as to all unite in the terror of the moment.  Politicians exploit it. This tendency is no doubt at work in the rise of the present plutocracy, and the revered myth that we don’t have the means to serve our Lords, except if we engage in more austerity, and subjugation to the laws of the market (that is, the laws of those who had the capital to start with, often obtained by hook and by crook).

We live in strange times, when the real issues are blocked by a mess of red herrings and other irrelevant stuff. Contemplate the so-called “gluten allergy” (disclaimer: I have myself celiac disease). Gluten, a catch-all word for a number of proteins, is the major constituent of wheat, barley, and rye.  It is formed by the interaction of gliadin and glutenin proteins. Corn also contains related proteins called “corn gluten”. These proteins enabled civilizations, starting in the Middle East where they evolved by natural and artificial selection, and in Mesoamerica, where corn was literally created by human genetic engineering.

Now we are told those proteins, at the root of civilization, well tolerated for 500 generations, are poisonous. And people worry about this, frantically… Instead of the poisons and general denutrition agro-alimentary plutocracy has found convenient to stuff food with. People need enemies to feel united, but they are careful to not take plutocracy itself head-on. Just as prehistoric man could not take Arctodus head on, in the beginning.

Ultimately, Arctodus, having blocked the Americas for three million years, was defeated.

We don’t have that kind of time.

Patrice Ayme’

Hope At Last?

The 99% were told that they were culprit of the ways of high finance. The 99% were told that, they profited from the financial crisis, and had to be restrained with “austerity” (now that all the money had to go to the bankers and other richest people in the world, to save those towering pillars of society from ruin under which we would otherwise be crushed).

That the 99% were culprit of the high leverage of the financial system, thanks to heavy “investing” in financial derivatives such as Credit Default Swaps, was an absurdity: most people had no idea, and still have no idea, that much money creation by bankers, head that way, towards planet finance, instead of planet Earth.

Men Of Wealth, Taste, Power & “Three Minutes” Women

Austerity, the claim that the 99% were too rich, and that this caused the crisis, after thirty years of “Trickle Down”, was, of course, insane. And therefore well received. The appropriate punishment was to insure that the richest would have the means to stay rich, and massive transfers of wealth to the richest people were implemented (even in Greece, where, last I checked, ship magnates were still not taxed!)

With the bleakest sense of humor, this Transfer of Assets to the Richest People TARP), was called… “TARP”, because it was the ultimate cover-up.

However, the economy has not recovered. So insane the gap between sacrifice and result, propaganda and observation, that even average voters are becoming suspicious.

In Spite Of Gigantic Sacrifices & Unemployment, “Austerity”, Spain GDP Not Recovering

[I exhibited Spain’s GDP, but it’s typical. Lest some hysterical Germanophile comes up screaming that Germany is doing well, let me point out that Germany grew not at all in the last decade, averaging… one third of one percent yearly, which is only compatible with a population decrease, as observed… Thus Europe is literally dying from austerity.]

To accuse the 99% of the violations plutocrats engaged in, and only them can, is becoming so egregious, that even political leaders on the pseudo-left, like the followers of Blair in British Labor, find difficult to hold that discourse nowadays, with a straight face.

So here we are. The pyramid of lies on how the economy works, by self serving politicians in bed with the richest people in the world, is starting to collapse. Worldwide, voters are starting to have their own opinions, and feel that they were lied to, at a nearly inconceivable scale. Voters don’t just repeat anymore what the media owned by the richest people in the world have told them to think. Maybe there is hope after all.

Jeremy Corbyn, a long-time leftist dissident, just won a stunning victory for leadership of Britain’s Labour Party. In an excellent editorial, Paul Krugman  Labour’s Dead Center observes that:

…”one crucial piece of background to the Corbyn surge: the implosion of Labour’s moderates. On economic policy, in particular, the striking thing about the leadership contest was that every candidate other than Mr. Corbyn essentially supported the Conservative government’s austerity policies.

Worse, they all implicitly accepted the bogus justification for those policies, in effect pleading guilty to policy crimes that Labour did not, in fact, commit. If you want a U.S. analogy, it’s as if all the leading candidates for the Democratic nomination in 2004 had gone around declaring, “We were weak on national security, and 9/11 was our fault.” Would we have been surprised if Democratic primary voters had turned to a candidate who rejected that canard, whatever other views he or she held?

In the British case, the false accusations against Labour involve fiscal policy, specifically claims that the Labour governments that ruled Britain from 1997 to 2010 spent far beyond their means, creating a deficit and debt crisis that caused the broader economic crisis. The fiscal crisis, in turn, supposedly left no alternative to severe cuts in spending, especially spending that helps the poor.

These claims have, one must admit, been picked up and echoed by almost all British news media. It’s not just that the media have failed to subject Conservative claims to hard scrutiny, they have reported them as facts. It has been an amazing thing to watch — because every piece of this conventional narrative is completely false.

Was the last Labour government fiscally irresponsible? Britain had a modest budget deficit on the eve of the economic crisis of 2008, but as a share of G.D.P. it wasn’t very high – about the same, as it turns out, as the U.S. budget deficit at the same time. British government debt was lower, as a share of G.D.P., than it had been when Labour took office a decade earlier, and was lower than in any other major advanced economy except Canada.”

The question boils down on why do people think what they do. Well, they think what they have been told to think. Krugman:

“…the supposed fiscal crisis never created any actual economic problem… there was never any need for a sharp turn to austerity.

In short, the whole narrative about Labour’s culpability for the economic crisis and the urgency of austerity is nonsense. But it is nonsense that was consistently reported by British media as fact. And all of Mr. Corbyn’s rivals for Labour leadership bought fully into that conventional nonsense, in effect accepting the Conservative case that their party did a terrible job of managing the economy, which simply isn’t true.”

Why do people do what they do? Well, most people basically try to survive honorably. However those with political aspirations are different. After all, they want to make a job of ruling us. Thirst for power is therefore, one may suspect, a prime motivation of theirs. And then the question is what do they believe they can get away with, on their royal road to domination? And what will be their justification for domination, which they will cover-up their thirst for power with?

Enter plutocratization, the general mood that the few, urged by the most basic instincts of domination, doing better than the many, is the best social organization for everybody. This “trickle down” theory has led the middle class down the road of increasing pauperization, even while global GDP was rising. Plutocratic media monopoly has insured that this mood became a modern religion.

Thatcher and Reagan were the modern instigators of plutocratization. Ex-British PM Tony Blair is a spectacular success of official corruption. Corruption by officials, of officials.  Blair helped to demolish Iraq to please oil barons (and American plutocrats). Blair sells his services to whoever it is most advantageous to sell them to. Piling up income from the likes of the dictator of Kazakhstan, he gathered in excess of 100 million dollars.

By now the middle class is starting to feel they were had by plutocratization. Methods of massive exploitation had to be changed. Enter the 2008 financial crisis. The “rescue” consisted in sending giant amount of money to banks and their managers. “Trickle Down” theory changed its face to “austerity”. The 99% were told that they were culprit of the 2008 crisis, they had to be punished. Completely brainwashed as they were, they welcomed their punishment.

Krugman: “Beyond that, however, Labour’s political establishment seems to lack all conviction, for reasons I don’t fully understand. And this means that the Corbyn upset isn’t about a sudden left turn on the part of Labour supporters. It’s mainly about the strange, sad moral and intellectual collapse of Labour moderates.”

In much of Western  society, in the last 35 years, political leaders got to power by undermining civilization, and Western democracy. They have been well paid for that: watch the fortunes past leaders have made, such as Major, Blair, Clinton, Gore, Chirac, and, of course, their families: Chelsea Clinton is very rich, but so are the brothers of past French presidents, although Chirac is worth only $10 million, roughly a tenth (Blair, Clintons) or a hundredth (Feinstein, Pelosi, Gore) of Anglo-Saxon politicians worth. Still remarkable, for someone such as Chirac, who was only an elected official all his life (in the USA, Reid of Nevada, head of democrats in the Senate, has a similar fortune and history; that brought charges of corruption, quickly silenced).

The British press is held by plutocrats, some Australian heirs (Murdoch, son and father of Murdochs), some even Russian “oligarchs”. This is where thinking has been coming from. And the charade will go on, until We The People think on their own. How soon? Can one think freely in a Mafia State? Certainly not in Russia. What about Britain? George Monbiot argues that Britain is also a Mafia State. Considering my personal experiences, I can only agree. Dawn is the coldest hour.

Patrice Ayme’

Wisdom Is Not An Itch, But Economy Hitching The Dark Side, Is A Gangrene

Is Philosophy Just An “Itch”? Far from it. Even if it were, as Wittgenstein had it:

“Philosophy hasn’t made any progress? – If somebody scratches the spot where he has an itch, do we have to see some progress? Isn’t genuine scratching otherwise, or genuine itching? And can’t this reaction to an irritation continue in the same way for a long time before a cure for the itching is discovered?”

It is not true that philosophy asks always only the same questions, and it is not true that philosophy has not progressed in 3,000 years. Philosophy has progressed enormously in 3,000 years. But short term, there is a lot of noise, and often, what passes for “progress” is truly regression (looking at Hellenistic regimes show much of thinking in regression, and that degeneracy accelerated after the fascist Roman empire and its corrupt officials (such as Cassius and Brutus) took control of Greece during the last century of the Republic… Let alone when Justinian closed the schools, five centuries later, in 529 CE, and this time, for good.

Instead the opposite is true. contemporary with Socrates was Xenophon, who named and defined “Economics”. Xenophon was student and friend to Socrates, a writer, historian, soldier, general, and retired as a horse breeder. Differently from Plato and Aristotle, Xenophon was not on the take.

Paul Krugman, appropriately surrounded by the Dark Sides. Krugman Is A Philosopher, He Rules The World Socioeconomy With His Insane Globalism. And Who Pulls His Strings?

Paul Krugman is one of the world’s most respected – and most feared – economists of our time. The illustration above is by David Simmonds.” – from Handelsblatt which adds: “Many think the U.S. Nobel Prize winner is the most influential economist of our time and a leading voice on the left. But many of his major ideas are controversial. And rightly so.”

I don’t know what the “left” is (although I know what it should be). But I certainly know that “Liberalism”, in the US manner is not from the left… Although common opinion in the USA at this point is that “liberalism” is not far from “socialism” (a huge mistake, and why dozens of millions of US citizens have no health insurance, after decades of “liberalism”).

Those familiar with my disagreements with Krugman know that we differ philosophically. Our differences are mostly about finance, banking… And especially believing that, if only bankers had even more money, through Quantitative Easing, the world would become richer, fairer, and more comfortable. That is anathema to me, for many reasons, including the fact I do not trust too much power in too few hands, whatever the reasons evoked, or even if one calls these people bankers, and even if Obama admires them very much.

Philosophy named and defined much progress.

Behind all and any empire is an economic organization backed up by a philosophy. Darius, founder of the Achaemenid Persian empire, changed economic organizations very quickly, according to circumstances, , from military to command and control, to building the world’s first fast road system, to libertarian capitalism.

It is possible to argue that the Greco-Roman empire failed, because it failed PHILOSOPHICALLY. Namely, its philosophy failed. It failed because the (Macedonian) military leaders got imprinted on the erroneous, despicable, and lethal philosophy of their friend Aristotle, itself all too inspired by Plato, Socrates, and other golden youth, or their fellow travellers.

One can view the Middle Ages greatly as a struggle against much of Aristotelian philosophy: not just against Aristotle’s physics, which was egregiously wrong, but also against his Ethics and his, related, preferred theory of government. Aristotle embraced dictatorship, also known as monarchy, hence theocracy.

In Socrates’ times, democratic institutions were, in many ways, brutally primitive and inappropriate for sustaining the Athenian Republic. These brought not just the death of Socrates, but were decisive to bring the defeat of Athens in the Peloponnesian war (which nearly brought the annihilation of Athens, and certainly an eclipse of democracy for more than 2,000 years). The People’s Assembly had decided to massacre entire populations (Melos), and brought hatred against Athens.

Much of Socrates’ work was about improving the Athenian democracy, and many of the philosopher’s critiques were addressed during the Middle Ages, by inventing new institutions.

So there has been progress in philosophy, and also considerable social and political progress in implementing progress in wisdom.

We need more. Behind Krugman’s vision of the world, lays a benign, naive trust in human beings benevolence. At least, that’s the excuse.

Friends, Not To Say Lovers Of The Same Values. How Far Are We?

Instead, I go further than “French Theory“. French Theory, generalizing Nietzsche’s approach, is suspicious of all and any institutions. I propose to remember what the Marquis De Sade implicitly proposed: those who take, those who are entitled, those end up being able to take decisions on behalf of the many, are, intrinsically, moved by the Darkest Side. Even if they did not start this way, the stress they are subjected to, insures that they end up that way.

Yes, Krugman is a philosopher, in the sense that his work, and advice, and popularity among, thus, power on, the mighty, depends upon his philosophical positions. Yet philosophers to the Dark Side, by their very presence where they are, embrace it.

This is not all just words. I love and respect Paul Krugman. in some ways. However, contemplate this: “Enron, a notorious corporation which conspired in organizing energy shortages in California, later to collapse in scandal and bankruptcy, employed Krugman. Paul’s fee? $37,000 for three days work. It provoked outrage. Wasn’t this excessive?. Mr. Krugman used his column to respond: not at all, he wrote. At the time his fee for a one-hour talk was $20,000. Enron got a deal.”

And the worst? Paul Krugman is very small fry, in the plutocratic world, as far as income is concerned. Donald Trump recently pointed out he “knew hedge fund managers. They pay no tax.” And some of those earn billions. General Electric got (60) billion dollars from the Obama administration, paid no tax for years, and then proceed to buy its French competitor, Alstom. Even the European Commission found that not kosher (although the plausibly secretly compensated by huff and fluff ,French government had approved).

Krugman at some point proclaimed himself the “lonely voice of truth in a sea of corruption”. The worst? It’s true. Because Krugman had dared to say the Obama administration was soft on punishing Wall Street after the 2008 corruption affair (the so-called “crash”), he was not invited to participate in said administration of the useless and redundant (as plutocrats connected to the so-called “Deep State” take all the decisions).

Handelsblatt: “Somehow Mr. Krugman’s fury keeps on growing. The source of this anger may be the man’s greatest enigma, since in fact worldwide there has never been as much Keynesian intervention as there is today…”

The answer to this, Handelsblatt, is simple: the crisis is getting ever worse. To the point the spectrum of war is rising. Even the Pope, noticed this.

Handelsblatt: “Since the crisis began, the largest central banks have flooded the world economy with liquidity, and brought their base rates close to zero. The governments of the industrialized world, with the exception of Germany, are still running huge budget deficits. They have put together enormous rescue packages, partly to rescue the banks, partly to bail out bankrupt states, partly to invest in infrastructure.”

Well, and this is my main difference with Krugman, rescue packages were all about the (“PRIVATE”) banks, and they bankrupt(ed) the states. To correct this, the entire banking system needs to be completely overhauled. In first approximation, the spirit of the reforms of president Roosevelt, ought to be re-introduced.

In Great Britain Jeremy Corbin, an anti-dictatorial (anti-monarchist) was elected to head Labor. Tony Blair, one of the world’s most corrupt politicians, ever (Bliar gets money from various dictator, including that of Kazakhstan) suggested that: “those who say their hearts are with leftwinger Jeremy Corbyn should ‘get a transplant’.”

Darius, like the Incas, like Diocletian’s Rome, or the Tang in China, or the empire of the Franks (which mutated into the “West”), or Themistocles Athens, let alone Stalin’s USSR, or today’s China, let alone the mercantilist USA, show that the primary actor, and author, of the economy is not the little capitalist, but the massive state. Handelsblatt claims not to understand this, and calls Krugman a fool.

However, the USA’s government institution revealingly known as the “Fed”, created more than 13 trillions (yes, that’s a t: trillion) dollars of money to inject in the economy, and the European Union, less than two trillion. And yes, that’s a problem: too much money chasing too few investment possibilities. So what ought government to do? Create more investment possibilities. Titanic investment program. As Darius did with his Royal road network. Now the Royal Road ought to lead to Mars. And the Quantum Computer. And Thermonuclear Fusion. And the Space Elevator. And a research program to fight aging (a major economic, not just military problem). Those who don’t want progress get regress, not to say egress.

Imagination, ladies and gentlemen, is more important than austerity, and not just in economics.

Patrice Ayme’

Plutocracy’s Fascist, Europhobic Dream

“Europe’s Impossible Dream” proclaims the New York Times’ Paul Krugman. What dream is that? The dream that Europe needs another currency, besides the dollar. All right American supremacists do not say this in so many words… Instead they use convoluted, illogical reasoning, as I will presently demonstrate.

Good propaganda starts with correct facts. Krugman:

“Greece is experiencing a slump worse than the Great Depression, and nothing happening now offers hope of recovery. Spain has been hailed as a success story, because its economy is finally growing — but it still has 22 percent unemployment. And there is an arc of stagnation across the continent’s top: Finland is experiencing a depression comparable to that in southern Europe, and Denmark and the Netherlands are also doing very badly.

How did things go so wrong? The answer is that this is what happens when self-indulgent politicians ignore arithmetic and the lessons of history. And no, I’m not talking about leftists in Greece or elsewhere; I’m talking about ultra-respectable men in Berlin, Paris, and Brussels, who have spent a quarter-century trying to run Europe on the basis of fantasy economics.”

Commodities Crashing Worldwide: Not A Euro Problem, Mr. Krugman!

Then Krugman operates his bait and switch:

“To someone who didn’t know much economics, or chose to ignore awkward questions establishing a unified European currency sounded like a great idea. It would make doing business across national borders easier, while serving as a powerful symbol of unity. Who could have foreseen the huge problems the euro would eventually cause?”

Several remarks here: first, for people like Krugman, apparently society and economics is reduced to “doing business”. In truth, having multiple currencies was a major hindrance, I have said this many times. Try a currency in New Jersey, one in New York, one in Connecticut, one in Massachusetts. It’s not just business which will be inconvenienced. Europe has as many states as the USA. Krugman can’t understand this: not smart enough, or with an agenda? You judge.

Commodity Deflation, In Dollars. Not A Euro Crisis, Mr. Krugman!

Good propaganda accuses the scapegoat with wild abandon. According to Nazis, everything was the fault of the Jews, and the French. According to Krugman the ills of the economic world can all be traced to the Euro. Bankers who feed him, are beyond any suspicion. The bait is to enounce correct facts, the switch is to accuse the innocent, in this case “Europe’s Impossible Dream” and the common currency, thus causing unfathomable distraction, away from the real culprits. Krugman:

“Who could have foreseen the huge problems the euro would eventually cause?

Actually, lots of people.”

Who are Krugman’s heroes? Eurosceptics, naturally. Krugman:

“The only big mistake of the euroskeptics [sic] was underestimating just how much damage the single currency would do.

The point is that it wasn’t at all hard to see, right from the beginning, that currency union without political union was a very dubious project. So why did Europe go ahead with it?”

The problem with someone as Krugman, is that he has no idea about European history, whatsoever, except the pro-Nazi propaganda of Lord Keynes. Krugman affects to think Europeans are idiots anxious to please plutocrats, and their obsequious servants:

“Mainly, I’d say, because the idea of the euro sounded so good. That is, it sounded forward-looking, European-minded, exactly the kind of thing that appeals to the kind of people who give speeches at Davos.”

***

Krugman, Or The Pseudo-Left: 

Who is Paul Krugman? Not only does he have a bully pulpit at the New York Times, and a Nobel, but he is, according to polls, the most trusted voice by the left… in Europe. Listening to him too uncritically can only lead to anti-Europeanism.

The domination of English is also the domination of the Financial Times, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, and the ever more sneaky New York Times. The Anglosphere’s tendrils are definitively plutocratic in their outreach.

In his very anti-European article, Krugman says that the case for devaluing the Greece currency is overwhelming: I agree with this, the Euro ought to be devalued.

If Greece had its own currency, and devalued massively, it would not profit much economically: Greece’s main import-export activity is to buy petrol and then sells it refined: all these transactions are priced in dollars. Leaving the Euro would make Greece ready to become a satellite of the USA again (complete with colonels).

***

Why are we submitted to so much anti-Europeanism?

Because the plutocrats and their obnoxious servants have interest to say that the problem is the Euro, not banksters, and banksterism, the situation where bankers create money (as credit) and give it to they friends.

Then said friends run away with the money, banks turn around, and ask treasuries and central banks to allow them to make money again. (One way to do this is Quantitative Easing, something Krugman love as it feeds the banksters, who feed him.)

None of this giant financialo-economic drama has to do with the Euro. To imply that Denmark, the Netherlands and Finland have problems because of the Euro is inaccurate (to put it mildly). Switzerland is also pegged to the Euro, and does great, because of its diversified knowledge economy (where pharmaceuticals dominate).

Krugman is aware, but disingenuously denies, that loving the dollar is hating the euro:

“if you were an American expressing doubts you were invariably accused of ulterior motives — of being hostile to Europe, or wanting to preserve the dollar’s “exorbitant privilege.”

And the euro came. For a decade after its introduction a huge financial bubble masked its underlying problems. But now, as I said, all of the skeptics’ fears have been vindicated.”

***

Why the Euro?

Because France and Germany have had enough to fight each other. The two countries are roughly comparable in all ways, economically and financially. They are converging demographically. They used to be the same country for five centuries, a time during which a unified Germany, and a German language was created.

The re-creation of a unified Germany, after 1,000 years, without, led to near continuous war between France and Germany, for, fundamentally, philosophical reasons.

France won, both sides are now sister republics, ready for total reunification. Thus they need a common currency. Then the in-betweens (truly pieces of France which were torn away from France, to make France weaker) cannot survive without using that same currency. Then one has to add contiguous areas with the same socioeconomic level (Austria, Northern Italy, Catalogne; the latter two long part of French territory, especially if one defines France as more than just the so-called “kingdom of France“, which was often a very small, relevant territory  inasmuch as it was supposed to be the imperial seat). At this point one is well above 200 million people with the same currency, and a GDP only second to the USA.

This territory is the old Francia which founded Western Civilization. Western Civilization is not just Jerusalem, Athens plus Rome, as many have it. It’s also the Franks and the tolerant melting pot they imposed on the Germano-Gallo-Romans, with their home made, advanced, pseudo-Christian philosophy.

How can the rest of Europe be excluded?

The USA acquired its common currency during the Secession War. So far, the attempt to secede in Europe are rather meek. Let’s keep them this way.

Naturally, the USA’s patriots can only hate to have a second world reserve currency. The dollar as world currency was imposed on Keynes through the substitution of the crucial document for another one.

Paul Krugman never mentions the felony that gave rise, over Keynes’ obstinate resistance, to the dollar as world currency.

Europe is not an impossible dream. Should it become so, so will human civilization. Because Europe is a toy model of the global problem of nationalities.

More fundamentally, today’s civilization, all the way to China, Japan and Patagonia or South Africa, was invented mostly in Europe. Admitting it is impossible, is admitting a nice future is impossible.

Is all lost? Did American europhobic university professors win? Not sure. Hollande and Merkel are working on a Eurozone government, democratically anchored through a subset of the European Parliament. It’s high time. “Le nationalisme, c’est la guerre!” (nationalism is war) said French president Mitterrand in one of his last discourses. Ironically, Chancellor Kohl had proposed further political union when he signed on the Euro project, and Mitterrand, then hindered by a divided government, turned him down.

I am sure Frau Doktor Merkel remembers this, and will seize the opportunity.

Patrice Ayme’

Piketty Pickets Titanic Teutonic Ignorance

Watching the entire German political establishment (so-called “Socialists” from the SPD Schultz, Gabriel, etc…) threaten Greece with punishments not in their powers to inflict… One is reminded that some countries have a habit of lying (this is, basically, what Nietzsche already accused Germany of doing… 130 years ago).

I said the entire German establishment… But for, paradoxically, Angela Merkel. Instead she, correctly, went to take her orders in Paris (a good instinct). After his victory the Greek Premier called Hollande first… And Hollande told him that Greek finance Minister Varoufakis had to go. Varoufakis had gone a truth too far, namely that plutocrats and their agents are terrorists.

You Two Better Solve This By Cutting Greek Debt 30%, Or History Will Punish You

In August 1914, the German Socialist Party, the SPD, supported the wild attack of Prussian and filthy rich plutocrats against the rest of the world, and in particular, the French Republic. A month later, the entire German army got nearly annihilated east of Paris (the First Battle of the Marne).

Why is it that the SPD cannot learn? (Germany is governed by a SPD-CDU coalition headed by CDU’s Merkel; Merkel, just like Hitler, needs the approval of her Parliament. Differently from Hitler, she can’t just send the SS to help approval.)

Countries are not just affected by their own cultures, ideologies, systems of thought. They are also influenced by something more pernicious, systems of mood. The mood that welcomed Auschwitz and another 5,000 extermination camps in Nazi Germany, was not made by Hitler, contrarily to despicable legend. Hitler just accompanied the exterminationist mood. That, in turn, was implied by a great admiration for Luther, one of the worst men. Ever.

Martin Luther was one of the great thought criminal, ever, because of his vicious anti-Judaism (many others, more courageous than Luther had criticized Catholicism before, without hating the Jews).

This is a serious PHILOSOPHICAL problem. Friedrich Nietzsche (who had fought against France in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71, before realizing his mistake), wrote hundreds of pages on the madness of the German herd, and its strident anti-Judaism.

Somehow the Nazis turned around Nietzsche’s philosophy against himself.

I thank John Rogers, a commenter on this site to attract my attention to (French) economist Thomas Piketty’s interview below.

Piketty wrote “Capital in the XXI Century”, a book where he presents (part of the) problems in economy and finance long exposed on this site (and its ancestor), and a few of the solutions (although I go much further, as I consider the public-private fractional reserve system a fundamentally fascist system, which has, ideally, to be outlaed in the long run)

This interview with Thomas Piketty puts it all in perspective:

DIE ZEIT: Should we Germans be happy that even the French government is aligned with the German dogma of austerity?

Thomas Piketty: Absolutely not. This is neither a reason for France, nor Germany, and especially not for Europe, to be happy. I am much more afraid that the conservatives, especially in Germany, are about to destroy Europe and the European idea, all because of their shocking ignorance of history.

ZEIT: But we Germans have already reckoned with our own history.

Piketty: But not when it comes to repaying debts! Germany’s past, in this respect, should be of great significance to today’s Germans. Look at the history of national debt: Great Britain, Germany, and France were all once in the situation of today’s Greece, and in fact had been far more indebted. The first lesson that we can take from the history of government debt is that we are not facing a brand new problem. There have been many ways to repay debts, and not just one, which is what Berlin and Paris would have the Greeks believe.

“Germany is the country that has never repaid its debts. It has no standing to lecture other nations.”
ZEIT: But shouldn’t they repay their debts?

Piketty: My book recounts the history of income and wealth, including that of nations. What struck me while I was writing is that Germany is really the single best example of a country that, throughout its history, has never repaid its external debt. Neither after the First nor the Second World War. However, it has frequently made other nations pay up, such as after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, when it demanded massive reparations from France and indeed received them. The French state suffered for decades under this debt. The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.

ZEIT: But surely we can’t draw the conclusion that we can do no better today?

Piketty: When I hear the Germans say that they maintain a very moral stance about debt and strongly believe that debts must be repaid, then I think: what a huge joke! Germany is the country that has never repaid its debts. It has no standing to lecture other nations.

ZEIT: Are you trying to depict states that don’t pay back their debts as winners?

Piketty: Germany is just such a state. But wait: history shows us two ways for an indebted state to leave delinquency. One was demonstrated by the British Empire in the 19th century after its expensive wars with Napoleon. It is the slow method that is now being recommended to Greece. The Empire repaid its debts through strict budgetary discipline. This worked, but it took an extremely long time. For over 100 years, the British gave up two to three percent of their economy to repay its debts, which was more than they spent on schools and education. That didn’t have to happen, and it shouldn’t happen today. The second method is much faster. Germany proved it in the 20th century. Essentially, it consists of three components: inflation, a special tax on private wealth, and debt relief.

ZEIT: So you’re telling us that the German Wirtschaftswunder [“economic miracle”] was based on the same kind of debt relief that we deny Greece today?

Piketty: Exactly. After the war ended in 1945, Germany’s debt amounted to over 200% of its GDP. Ten years later, little of that remained: public debt was less than 20% of GDP. Around the same time, France managed a similarly artful turnaround. We never would have managed this unbelievably fast reduction in debt through the fiscal discipline that we today recommend to Greece. Instead, both of our states employed the second method with the three components that I mentioned, including debt relief. Think about the London Debt Agreement of 1953, where 60% of German foreign debt was cancelled and its internal debts were restructured.

“We need a conference on all of Europe’s debts, just like after World War II. A restructuring of all debt, not just in Greece but in several European countries, is inevitable.”
ZEIT: That happened because people recognized that the high reparations demanded of Germany after World War I were one of the causes of the Second World War. People wanted to forgive Germany’s sins this time!

Piketty: Nonsense! This had nothing to do with moral clarity; it was a

rational political and economic decision. They correctly recognized that, after large crises that created huge debt loads, at some point people need to look toward the future. We cannot demand that new generations must pay for decades for the mistakes of their parents. The Greeks have, without a doubt, made big mistakes. Until 2009, the government in Athens forged its books. But despite this, the younger generation of Greeks carries no more responsibility for the mistakes of its elders than the younger generation of Germans did in the 1950s and 1960s. We need to look ahead. Europe was founded on debt forgiveness and investment in the future. Not on the idea of endless penance. We need to remember this.

ZEIT: The end of the Second World War was a breakdown of civilization. Europe was a killing field. Today is different.

Piketty: To deny the historical parallels to the postwar period would be wrong. Let’s think about the financial crisis of 2008/2009. This wasn’t just any crisis. It was the biggest financial crisis since 1929. So the comparison is quite valid. This is equally true for the Greek economy: between 2009 and 2015, its GDP has fallen by 25%. This is comparable to the recessions in Germany and France between 1929 and 1935.

ZEIT: Many Germans believe that the Greeks still have not recognized their mistakes and want to continue their free-spending ways.

Piketty: If we had told you Germans in the 1950s that you have not properly recognized your failures, you would still be repaying your debts. Luckily, we were more intelligent than that.

ZEIT: The German Minister of Finance, on the other hand, seems to believe that a Greek exit from the Eurozone could foster greater unity within Europe.

Piketty: If we start kicking states out, then the crisis of confidence in which the Eurozone finds itself today will only worsen. Financial markets will immediately turn on the next country. This would be the beginning of a long, drawn-out period of agony, in whose grasp we risk sacrificing Europe’s social model, its democracy, indeed its civilization on the altar of a conservative, irrational austerity policy.

ZEIT: Do you believe that we Germans aren’t generous enough?

Piketty: What are you talking about? Generous? Currently, Germany is profiting from Greece as it extends loans at comparatively high interest rates.

ZEIT: What solution would you suggest for this crisis?

Piketty: We need a conference on all of Europe’s debts, just like after World War II. A restructuring of all debt, not just in Greece but in several European countries, is inevitable. Just now, we’ve lost six months in the completely intransparent negotiations with Athens. The Eurogroup’s notion that Greece will reach a budgetary surplus of 4% of GDP and will pay back its debts within 30 to 40 years is still on the table. Allegedly, they will reach one percent surplus in 2015, then two percent in 2016, and three and a half percent in 2017. Completely ridiculous! This will never happen. Yet we keep postponing the necessary debate until the cows come home.

ZEIT: And what would happen after the major debt cuts?

Piketty: A new European institution would be required to determine the maximum allowable budget deficit in order to prevent the regrowth of debt. For example, this could be a commmittee in the European Parliament consisting of legislators from national parliaments. Budgetary decisions should not be off-limits to legislatures. To undermine European democracy, which is what Germany is doing today by insisting that states remain in penury under mechanisms that Berlin itself is muscling through, is a grievous mistake.

“If we had told you Germans in the 1950s that you have not properly recognized your failures, you would still be repaying your debts. Luckily, we were more intelligent than that.”
ZEIT: Your president, François Hollande, recently failed to criticize the fiscal pact.

Piketty: This does not improve anything. If, in past years, decisions in Europe had been reached in more democratic ways, the current austerity policy in Europe would be less strict.

ZEIT: But no political party in France is participating. National sovereignty is considered holy.

Piketty: Indeed, in Germany many more people are entertaining thoughts of reestablishing European democracy, in contrast to France with its countless believers in sovereignty. What’s more, our president still portrays himself as a prisoner of the failed 2005 referendum on a European Constitution, which failed in France. François Hollande does not understand that a lot has changed because of the financial crisis. We have to overcome our own national egoism.

ZEIT: What sort of national egoism do you see in Germany?

Piketty: I think that Germany was greatly shaped by its reunification. It was long feared that it would lead to economic stagnation. But then reunification turned out to be a great success thanks to a functioning social safety net and an intact industrial sector. Meanwhile, Germany has become so proud of its success that it dispenses lectures to all other countries. This is a little infantile. Of course, I understand how important the successful reunification was to the personal history of Chancellor Angela Merkel. But now Germany has to rethink things. Otherwise, its position on the debt crisis will be a grave danger to Europe.

ZEIT: What advice do you have for the Chancellor?

Piketty: Those who want to chase Greece out of the Eurozone today will end up on the trash heap of history. If the Chancellor wants to secure her place in the history books, just like [Helmut] Kohl did during reunification, then she must forge a solution to the Greek question, including a debt conference where we can start with a clean slate. But with renewed, much stronger fiscal discipline.

***

I read, and approved what Piketty said. I would add this: only two countries, Denmark and deluded Britain, have an opt-out of the Euro currency. All other European countries are supposed to adopt the Euro (and Denmark is already pegged to the Euro… As the Swiss Frank basically is… by spurts). Thus, to kick Greece out of the Eurozone is a bit like wanting to kick it out of the Union. Interestingly, too, Greece has not breached some democratic aspects that other countries (namely Austria and Hungary nearly did, exposing themselves to sanctions… The Austrian case was resolved, Hungary is still under close watch).

Thus Greece really is making plutocrats and their obsequious servants furious. Some think the banks of the USA got 13 trillion dollars of money from the government (namely, the Fed). Europe’s ECB gave only one trillion Euros. It’s high time to write some huge checks to relaunch the European economy. In the case of Greece we are talking about making a 100 billion gift. Scaled to the entire European economy, that is ONLY five trillion Euros. Notice it’s smaller than the case in the USA.

Last, but not least: California, with many times the economy of Greece, got broke a few years back. It paid employees with IOUs (I Owe You). Now California has fully recovered, thanks, in great part, to its knowledge economy. So, no panic. Just keep money flowing to Greece’s necessary functions, such as science and education…

Patrice Ayme’

Moods Rules, Countries Follow

MOODS AS HEGEMONS

Countries are ruled by people, or individuals, who are ruled by philosophies, which are ruled by moods. Some of these moods are superior, others, non-sustainable.

Hegemony Works Only If Its Values Are Right:

In the present Greek crisis, the Greek government just changed its mind again, and decided to roughly accept what it had refused the week before. France was happy, and wanted to jump on the occasion of making a new accord, and forget about the referendum (the subject of which is not clear).

However the German automatons and their Dutch robot, Mr. D, who has been appointed Eurogroup “president”  (I guess if Obama and Hollande can be “president”, anybody can! It’s the reign of machines,) mechanically announced that: ‘vee vill not negotiate’ (in an excellent, albeit unwitting, imitation of the Terminator). Heil, meinen Fuerers! It’s funny that the German leaders still don’t get, after all the horrors of the mass atrocities which their numerous, abominably monstrous predecessors, have visited on humanity, that being robotic is adverse to civilization.

The Mood Which Ought To Rule Civilization: Athena Guarding Austrian Parliament

“Germany is essentially the hegemon in Europe, but it does not like being seen as running the show,” said Charles Grant, director of the Center for European Reform, a research group in London. Is it “Germany”, the hegemon of Europe, or the USA, or more exactly, the NSA? As Merkel and her goons spy on France, who is the hegemon?

“Essentially”? Was Sparta “essentially” the hegemon of Greece? That was, essentially, an hallucination:

***

Failed Hegemon: Sparta. Our Ontological Hegemon, Athens:

“Hegemon” is an old Greek concept which, interpreted as it was at the time, caused catastrophic failure of Ancient Greece. “Hegemon” comes from hegeisthai “to lead”. By 500 BCE, the “hegemon” of Greece, after a showdown with Argos, which Sparta won, was viewed to be Sparta. Especially by the Spartans.

It was a question of honor, as far as Ancient Greeks were concerned. Then, honor was more important than life. Yet, when the Persian fascists landed at Marathon, in Attica, Athenian territory, the Spartans did not show up (they were busy with a “festival”, they lamely pretended).

However, thanks to her open society, direct democracy, better demographics, silver mines, higher philosophy and vast influence overseas, let alone her military aggressivity, by 450 BCE, Athens was the real hegemon of Greece. Athens had carried the war against Persia to Egypt, in an effort to free the oldest civilization from Iranian occupation.

Athens had direct democracy. Instead we have an NSAcracy. NSAcracy: the power of NSA. We have freedom, increasingly, albeit, without expression. When people who are not even USA citizens reveal USA war crimes, the full might of the government of the USA come after them (see the case of Assange, among others). Conversely, those who ordered war crimes are the object of no inquiry.

In truth, Sparta was a dying civilization. Yes, civilization. Sparta was so far out, in so many ways, it deserves the label “civilization”. Like all those who drown, Sparta’s actikons were erratic (allying itself with Persia against Athens, was the lowest of the low).

Make no mistake: in some ways, Sparta was more advanced than any other society, worldwide. For example for the status of women: girls, or women exercising in the nude with the boys, or men, was the norm. Athens, and other cities denigrated Sparta for giving so much power to women.

In other ways, Sparta was more than despicable: the Spartan, coming from the mainland to the north, invaded the Peloponnese, and enslaved the natives, the “Helots” reducing them to a very weird condition, both entrusting them, and treating them worse than even slaves were treated in the USA (Helot hunts, search and kill, were organized once a year for young Spartans to refine their skills).

***

Chose Which Moods Rule, Carefully, Lest You Destroy, And Be Destroyed:

Athens could deploy more than 15,000 hoplites in the field, about 50% more than Sparta at its peak. Athens also had a war fleet of 300 triremes (Sparta had none).

According to Thucydides, the rise of Athens made Sparta livid, and was the cause of the war.

In my opinion, although this opinion is correct, I would add to it the important dimension that Sparta, this racist, exclusive society, was fading quickly.

Sparta constituted a vast coalition, and attacked Athens.

The war lasted 30 years, and devastated Greece. Sparta won only thanks to the enormous support of the giant fascist Persian empire (which Athens had defeated at Marathon). Persia financing allowed Sparta to build a giant fleet, with which it defeated Athens.

Now, where is Sparta? Athens is a metropolis, and many of her ideals rule the planet. Emperor Julian, when already the potential one and only heir to the imperial throne, asked to drop everything, and went to become a student in Athens, 800 years (!) after Sparta’s attack on Athens (by then Sparta had ceased to exist, from its rabidly exclusionary mentality).

Like Sparta, Germany is not really the hegemon. Fading error would be more like it.

Demographics projection show that both the United Kingdom and France will pass Germany relatively soon. Those two countries have more young people than Germany (and more ideas).

Although Germany is not Sparta anymore (see Nazism), it is still, arguably more Sparta, and France more like Athens (the role Francia, then France, played arguably since 356 CE, when the Parisii elected Julian, the anti-Christian Caesar, Augustus.

Germany has been behaving strangely. Merkel apparently was spying on France for the NSA.

Thus the question: where does the cooperation between the Germans and the NSA stop? Is Germany trying, deliberately to sabotage the Euro? The Euro was a French idea, and the French government is, at this point alarmed by German behavior. Who is Merkel working for? The NSA, in more ways than one?

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2015/07/01/imf-nsa-trojan-horse/

Some say that the Greeks have twice the income and retirement, of say, the Slovaks. However, to halve suddenly Greek wealth and income would, and does lead to tragedies: for example Greeks have to pay 25% of their medical drugs, from their own pocket. If they have no pocket, no drugs, death.

Not to say that Greece is beyond any suspicion. Putting the Greek retirement age much later seems crucial. Early retirement age in Greece is…58. Whereas it’s 65 in Germany.

Now, of course, there are systems of mood. The mood in Europe has been that employment is not a human right, but a chore to be limited as much as possible. And that Greek plutocrats do not pay tax, is just a particular case of this general phenomenon, throughout the West. Factory, castle and artwork owners in the very egalitarian French Republic do not pay significant taxes.

***

Athens Failed Because Valuable Moods Are Not Enough, Luck Is Necessary:

The best examples of bad luck piling up high caused the catastrophic, but temporary, defeat of France and Britain in May 1940. Athens had even worse luck.

In retrospect, Athens ought to have bent over backwards, and humiliate itself, to wait out Sparta’s quick degeneracy (the number of Spartan hoplites was going down fast).

However, this wisdom was not obvious at the time. Athens lost of the Peloponnese war greatly because of bad luck (not just because of hubris, lack of wisdom, irritating Alcibiades, and bad admirals).  A “plague” killed a full third of Athenian military age men, weakening considerably the City-State. But Athenian civilization survived. Although in reduced form, in the most important dimension. To this day.

***

The Concept Of Hegemon Evolved According To Moods:

The Roman Republic had, essentially, a defensive concept of hegemony. When it became a plutocracy, it switched from defending the law to violating its spirit.

The Roman Republican spirit was symbolized by SPQR, the Senate, and The People of Rome. Namely wisdom of the Ancients, and democracy.

Then the mood changed to celebritism, being ruled, making rulers into gods, kleptocracy, plutocracy, and, finally, Catholicism and terror.

The Franks were not obsessed by the desire to establish hegemony. Officially kings (and queens) of the Franks were elected, and egalitarian inheritance laws made the legacy of power of an oligarchy uncertain, and, or, feeble. This mood penetrated the entire Frankish empire. So, when the “Renovated” Roman Empire was proclaimed at the Winter Solstice of 800, nobody tried to force the Republic of Venice to be part of the empire (although the Franks could have used Venice’s fleet).

Thus, counter-intuitively, the Frankish empire devolved politically afterwards, for centuries. Meanwhile, as we will see a new PHILOSOPHICAL hegemony was growing.

The first serious attempt at political hegemony was thanks to the Spanish-Roman empire Charles Quint (from Bourgogne) was (twice) elected and selected to lead. Then the war Isabella and Ferdinand had launched with France, blossomed in a monster that complicated the on-going hostility between France and her English erstwhile colony.

By 1600 CE, France was in the middle of an all-out war with Spain that would result in the independance of the Netherlands, and the independence of german states and Austria. By then the glories of hegemony were sung on all rooftops, as the concept, at least to the French, appeared to be a guarantor of security.

Unfortunately, in the next round, financially leveraged (ironically, thanks to the Dutch invasion of England) plutocracy defeated systematically France in two world wars (1756-1763 and 1792-1815). France won the middle war, which created the USA.

Meanwhile English plutocratic conspiring blew Prussia (and hence its evil mindset) out of all proportions. It looked as a good deal, for a long time. Prussia beat France twice in a row (1814-1815 and 1870-71), weakening the old European hegemon, France, considerably.

At Waterloo, the modest British force of 25,000 soldiers won, thanks to the much more numerous Prussian armies (which with other Germans brought the total to 118,000). That allowed to establish a worldwide British empire which lasted a century.

However, Britannia, France’s daughter, found itself confronted to a Prussian-German hegemon with a terribly evil mindset, which went berserk in 1914, after plotting its madness carefully.

***

So How Did Western Civilization Come To Be? Became An Hegemon?

The answer is simple: Europe became a philosophical hegemon, through tremendous mental diversity. As political hegemony weakened, philosophical hegemony grew. How does philosophy lead? Naturally, philosophy leads the more, the more it embraces reality, that is, the more multidimensional it gets. This is the big difference with China, which was pretty mono-philosophical.

Chinese philosophy rested mostly on Confucius (with a sprinkling of Lao Tze and Mencius). Its diversity fed European philosophical hegemony. And it’s not finished. Indeed, we are not even respecting Athens’ full inheritance. Be it only in politics. High time for Athena to trample underfoot the robots of high finance and their miserable conspiracies (one of them to admit the Drachma at twice its rate for conversion into Euro, and another conspiracy being to propose a “bailout” that was truly a bail-out of greedy banksters, and a killer of the socio-economy).

The diversity of philosophical moods presiding over human destinies has made Europe rich and powerful. By forcing Greece in a Wall Street straightjacket, a vast conspiracy of the mediocre wants to impoverish and weaken the cradle of civilization. In a mood of gathering plutocracy, it makes sense. The sense of going down the abyss of self-destruction of all civilization, starting with the annihilation of imagination.

Patrice Ayme’

Greek Crisis, Or Greed Crisis?

“The Awesome Gratuitousness of the Greek Crisis” bemoans Paul Krugman. Really? Is not that a bit naïve? How does that fit with converting the Drachma at twice the rate, or Lagarde changing her music, after the Greeks had accepted her conditions? Does not it all look at a different plan of the “Deep State”? Like having just one boss, supposedly located in a White House?

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/06/29/the-awesome-gratuitousness-of-the-greek-crisis/

Indeed, my dear Paul Krugman, the exact chronology of events makes one rather believe that [IMF Director Lagarde] is following her usual pattern: doing what she’s told to do, and taking the heat, as Dominique Deux, an esteemed commenter on this site, puts it. Dominique’s profession involves him with this sort of people, he is in a good position to know.

So is it a case that: “There are horrible people who, instead of solving a problem, tangle it up and make it harder to solve for anyone who wants to deal with it. Whoever does not know how to hit the nail on the head should be asked not to hit it at all.”

[Friedrich Nietzsche The Wanderer and His Shadow, aphorism 326, 1880.]

Well, I don’t think so. The Drachma was deliberately converted at twice its rate. Everybody knew it at the time. That was clearly a time bomb.

***

Paul Krugman’s Analysis Of The Raw Data, I Agree With:

“I’ve been looking back at the numbers, readily available from the IMF, and what strikes me is how relatively mild Greek fiscal problems looked on the eve of crisis.

In 2007, Greece had public debt of slightly more than 100 percent of GDP — high, but not out of line with levels that many countries including, for example, the UK have carried for decades and even generations at a stretch. It had a budget deficit of about 7 percent of GDP. If we think that normal times involve 2 percent growth and 2 percent inflation, a deficit of 4 percent of GDP would be consistent with a stable debt/GDP ratio; so the fiscal gap was around 3 points, not trivial but hardly something that should have been impossible to close.

Now, the IMF says that the structural deficit was much larger — but this reflects its estimate that the Greek economy was operating 10 percent above capacity, which I don’t believe for a minute.”

And Krugman concludes that:

“So yes, Greece was overspending, but not by all that much. It was over indebted, but again not by all that much. How did this turn into a catastrophe that among other things saw debt soar to 170 percent of GDP despite savage austerity?

The euro straitjacket, plus inadequately expansionary monetary policy within the eurozone, are the obvious culprits. But that, surely, is the deep question here. If Europe as currently organized can turn medium-sized fiscal failings into this kind of nightmare, the system is fundamentally unworkable.”

Well, the system was revealed to be unworkable, thanks to the 2008 financial crisis. States were asked to come in, and replenish banks stolen by plutocrats. Meanwhile, the taxing authority and capability of states had been stolen by the likes of Jean-Claude Junckers:

***

I Stole, Thus I lead:

The president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Junckers, speaks of “betrayal” (“trahison” in his native French). He should know about betrayal. Whereas the semi-mythical Corleone in the movie “The Godfather” stole millions, Junckers helped to steal directly hundreds of billions of Euros, and, indirectly, trillions.

When the Euro was conceived by Jacques Delors and his colleagues, it was supposed to stand on two legs, one financial, one economic. However, jealous national governments decided to do away with the economic leg. Only after the 2008 financial crisis was reluctantly built a partial banking union (with mutual insurance and inspection of the biggest banks).

In Greece, as elsewhere, governments saved failing banks with public funds. However, in Greece, the real deficit was higher than the official one, and Greece needed a supplementary help from foreign institutions such as the ECB, EC, and IMF (the “Troika”).

The Troika provided enough rope with its help, to hang Greece with, thanks to “austerity” measures.

***

Let’s Vote NO To Plutocrats and Their Obsequious Servants:

Here is Paul Krugman again:

….”acceding to the troika’s ultimatum would represent the final abandonment of any pretense of Greek independence. Don’t be taken in by claims that troika officials are just technocrats explaining to the ignorant Greeks what must be done. These supposed technocrats are in fact fantasists who have disregarded everything we know about macroeconomics, and have been wrong every step of the way. This isn’t about analysis, it’s about power — the power of the creditors to pull the plug on the Greek economy, which persists as long as euro exit is considered unthinkable.”

Indeed.

The ECB, the IMF and European “leaders” are not incompetent. They are extremely powerful, and thus extremely corrupt. What use is their absolute power, if they do not show they can use it absolutely? Should not they engage in the hard work plutocrats and banksters have entrusted them with? Otherwise why should they, or their relations, get rewarded when they come out?

What they want to hide is the nature of the financial crisis, and thus the nature of finance.

“Austerity” is another word for the plutocratization banksters have increasingly brought, over the last few decades. They define the rules, they write the laws. They are indignant that the Greeks vote, because the Greek elite ought to be mature enough to feel that Democracy, Demos-Kratos, People Power, is just a mask for the power of the few and well connected.

There is no reason for austerity whatsoever, if one lived in democracy.

Verily, there is plenty of money out there, among the filthy rich, and plenty of capacity to make money, as needed for We The People. What is in short supply is the will to provide money for We The People.

Alain Bauer, a top, world class criminologist who does not teach only in France but also overseas, for example China, Singapore, estimates that the total money hidden in tiny tax havens amounts to 70 trillion dollars. Even more money is hidden in plain sight, thanks to Delaware and Great Britain (the famous “Non-Doms”), and shell companies.

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2014/07/06/usa-financial-extortion/

***

Money Creation Is Diverted To Plutocrats, By Plutocrats:

It’s not different from Stalinism, fundamentally!

Even more money is created by the banks for financial derivative trading. The size of that trade, somewhere out there on planet finance is more than ten times world GDP (so it’s around 800 trillion dollars). How come most of the money created is created for the richest, by the richest?

Don’t forget that banks are given a public mandate to create most of the money. So, in a sense, bankers ought to be just what they are: public employees, the modern equivalent of those who struck coins for the government in the three thousand years prior.

It frequently happens in history that minor events act like the proverbial snowball. This, clearly, maybe one such case. It is, in particular, the IMF, based in Washington, last I checked, which is pulling the plug.

What is Washington doing in what ought to be internal European affairs? Well, demolishing a financially independent Europe. Agents of the USA such as the head of the ECB, Draghi, will be happy to oblige. Draghi got his Phd at MIT, and was later  vice-chairman at Goldman-Sachs a Financial Uber Conspiracy Katastrophe (with a telling acronym).

What could go wrong? Last time there was a catastrophe of financial type, banksters lost the banks’ money to plutocrats, and We The People was asked to reimburse the banks. Thus, overall, the wealthiest people and organizations came out of it even richer.

Now the Greeks are refusing to obey, and get ever poorer with their own agreement. Time for another catastrophe? If well done, the rich ought to get even richer. With a little bit of help from their friends at the ECB, IMF, EU, EC, and all these strings pulled from Washington and New York, etc.

http://baselinescenario.com/2010/03/15/senator-kaufman-fraud-still-at-the-heart-of-wall-street/

We have different hearts than those of Wall Street, and it is exactly what the Greeks are now showing for all to see.

Patrice Ayme’

Selection Of The Dirtiest

Plutocratic Circus Blossoms As Greek Tragedy

It was not supposed to happen, but a woman in Washington, who used to head one of the world’s largest law firm in Chicago, closed all banks in Greece for a week, and made it so that Greek families now live on fifty Euros a day.

Is that democracy? Who elected that woman? Nobody. More exactly, a handful of guys, talking to each other behind closed doors. But not all is lost. Look at her superiorly tailored suit, her little diamonds, her pearl necklace. She belongs to the well dressed, Wall Street style elite.

A Face Of Evil: Wall Street Fascist Devices In Control Of Europe

[International Monetary Fund (IMF) executive director Christine Lagarde attends a news conference at the end of a Eurogroup meeting at the European Council building in Brussels, March 25, 2013. Elegant fox presides over the hens, to mandate their future.]

A gallery of abominable crooks who give themselves airs decides how to make an example of Greece. Hey, the Porto-Rico governor just announced Porto-Rico was not that rich, and its debt could not be repaid (proportionally, it’s higher than Greece’s). Quick, let’s starve to death a few Greeks! Kindly,  Paul Krugman in “Greece Over Brink” calls the monsters who preside over us “fantasists”.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/29/opinion/paul-krugman-greece-over-the-brink.html?

I will stick to the truth, as I have no reason to spare corrupt crooks who abuse their powers. Differently from Krugman, I don’t have to be polite with these sadistic monsters.

Some may raise an eyebrow: am I not overly critical against a particular individual? Yes, for cause: my scathing critique is directed to a particular criminal behavior. I have no problem hating particular individuals, such as Hitler and his ilk.

Condemning people for crimes they engaged in is the exact opposite from hating people for no good reason, such as where they come from.

Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely:

Why did the Eurozone bring the International Monetary Fund based in Washington, half a mile from the White House, into what ought to have been an internal European affair? Was it to make sure that Washington would rule the Eurozone?

Does that sound counter-intuitive? Not at all. It is something completely natural. The top European leaders are, or have been, all agents, top operators in, or completely obsessed by the American system.

It’s clear that Greece cannot pay the monumental debt it incurred when money was given to banks. And here the IMF has behaved atrociously: after the Greek government accepted all conditions last week, unbelievably the IMF came up with new orders, such as augmenting the Added Value Tax, higher up. Such an VAT strikes everybody, including the poorest of the poor. The standard rate of VAT in Greece is 23%. (Compare with California’s 10% sales tax!)

Christine Lagarde thinks the Greeks are children. But, when she was offering hundreds of millions Euros of public money to plutocrook Bernard Tapie, she did not mind to deal with a child. Why?

Probably because she is corrupt. Corrupt, some of the naive will say, smirking. Does not corruption imply giving money? Show me the money, and they cackle smugly. However, money is power, absolute money is absolute power, and it corrupts absolutely. Lagarde, an ex competitive swimmer, has enormous power, given to her by other politicians, themselves elected from, and by, money.

http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/jun/25/greek-crisis-20-key-moments-eurozone

Actually, it’s not a probability, but a certainty: absolute power corrupts absolutely. Lagarde, although the prime villain this week, is closely followed by the head of the EC, one of the world’s greatest engineers of corruption, ever, and the German finance minister (yes, someone already shot that one, that’s why he is in a wheelchair).

***

Financial Terror Feeds Terrorism In General:

Muslim terrorism is, first of all, an intellectual phenomenon: terrorists just read a book written by generals in a time so primitive, the Arabic language did not fully exists, in written form. However terrorism is (partly) motivated, not just by the manipulations of plutocrats, but also by a legitimate rage against plutocracy.

Plutocrats know no bounds, such is their cruel nature. They belong to the most horrendous aspects of mythology. Indeed, the victimization of Greece is a case in point. Some of the most horrendous creatures are on the front stage, pontificating, making up stories that will be remembered for centuries.

Plutocrats hated Alexis Tsipras, the new Greek PM. They had to make him fail. Just when he had agreed to violate a bit the mandate under which he had been elected (his party, Syriza, controls 156 seats in Parliament), Lagarde and her abominable muses, sprang the trap: they asked for more from the (basically) innocent people of Greece. Specifically, they wanted an even higher VAT, as if 23% were not enough.

This, from crooks who fly in private jets.

Somer people will say that someone like Lagarde went from swimmer to head of the IMF on merit. There is another possibility, though: look at Heinrich Himmler. Did he get up there, at the head of the SS, on merit? Not really. Even fellow Nazis admitted he was not that bright (and joked that his brains was Reinhart Heydrich).  Himmler got up there because he was willing to do the dirtiest work.

In the end, Himmler, to advance himself in the rather difficult circumstances of the collapse and invasion of the Third Reich, had to save thousands of Jews (in cooperation with the Swedes, who were also anxious to paint themselves as the opposite of what they had been). Himmler did what it took to advance himself. Whatever it was. If it meant kissing and making up with the Jews, so be it.

So did Stalin: he used to rob banks, with maximum violence, at the head of a gang. So does Lagarde and her ilk. Such individuals will do whatever it takes to advance themselves. That’s why so many “leaders” got where everybody could look up to them. That’s why, and how, they ended, ordering tens of millions. It is the SELECTION OF THE DIRTIEST. Oligarchies all need goons to do the dirty work, just as they need janitors. The dirtiest goons take the decisions, their masters, the plutocrats, smile. The world we have.

Patrice Ayme’