Trade Wars, Divisions, War War: It Happened Before, In The 1930s

Stupid Is Depressing:

Trump plans to institute tariffs which have made the European Union angry. Jean-Claude Juncker is the head of the European Commission, the part of the European executive which heads the European administration, 32,000 strong, of 500 million souls. Juncker retorted to Trump: ”This is stupid. We can do stupid too.” Juncker has been around: he is quadrilingual French, English, German, and Luxembourgeois. Also, as PM of Luxembourg for two decades, he masterminded the transformation from its bovine economy to onshore tax haven. In any case, Europe is drawing a list of symbolic US products to be struck with tariffs too, from motorcycles to liquor. Let’s backtrack a moment here. This sort of madness is how the crash of Wall Street in 1929 and the Great Depression were engineered.

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Crash of Wall Street & Great Depression:

A massive, and deliberate overheating of the economy happened in 1920s. The Anglo-Saxon elite had decided to inflate out of the British World War One debt. US car production reached level in 1928 it won’t see again until 1948. When overheating became blatant, the US central bank decided to raise interest rates, the economy started to falter, and the US Congress decide to get real smart, the way idiots do it. Simply, Washington reasoned, why don’t we reduce imports? When investors with a modicum of real economics heard this, they understood an economic war was pointing its ugly snout, and they pulled out.  

After the markets crashed, they recovered, as the US Senate hesitated. However, the situation became catastrophic in 1930. Then the Smoot-Hawley tariffs were finally imposed, and Europe retaliated in kind. It would have been better to keep European production in Europe, buying the cars from government money , and selling them at a loss. That would have been socialist, and only the USA would have suffered. European tariffs made US exports collapse, companies went bankrupt, banks followed, and people lost all they had, as bank deposits were not insured either privately, collectively, or by the government itself. The economy greatly depressed.    

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The questions are: what is China doing right, and what are we doing wrong? Of these sorts of graphs, world wars are made. Notice that, in a few years, China got the world top GDP. Our crafty leaders say China has built too much! It’s going to crash! I say: go look at the homeless in US streets, it’s sickening. I say: contemplate that Paris didn’t build one skyscraper in… forty-four (44) years. They say: it’s to keep Paris pretty! I say: they deliberately don’t build, and it’s like that all over the West, more or less… Why? Keep it expensive, elitist. That “austerity” extends to activities such as scientific research (where China spends enormously). Actually Trump just wants to eliminate the world’s main existing thermonuclear research facility, and even European scientists are screaming that’s an outrage. 

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The Great Depression Brought The Mood Of War:

In Germany, the Great Depression brought Hitler to power. In the USA, Roosevelt. Both decided to reflate their economies at all costs, using similar methods (following Keynes all too much; Keynes had advocated make-belief work, if need be). The much richer USA for example decided to build 24 “Fleet Aircraft Carriers”. For comparison, and giving an idea how expensive fleet carriers were, Germany planned to have two such carriers by 1945. The US carriers, were helped by an enormous fleet of more than 200 “fleet submarines” (each nearly 100 meters long). The US subs sank 60% of the Japanese merchant navy, and eight “Jap” aircraft carriers.

Roosevelt put also millions to work, employed by the government. Hitler tried similar tricks, forgetting small details, like that Germany had no oil, and that much of its miracle economy was actually the province of US plutocracy. All the more self-contradictory as the Nazis officially hated so much those plutocrats they were the humble pigeons of.

Meanwhile the French Republic didn’t like the Hitler circus, seeing world war painted all over it, and went to Washington to protest the collusion of US plutocrats and Nazi demoncrats.That didn’t sit very well with old family plutocrat Roosevelt, who hated France anyway, as he saw in France both a juicy prey, and a threat to the plutocratic order, especially of the US sort. In any case, the relationship between France and the USA became execrable in 1934, and would stay that way for the duration, until 1945, and much beyond.

From the French point of view, the easy money, frantic spending on the military of the Anglo-Saxons and the Nazis was wrong in all ways. So the French economy relatively shrank, as France grimly prepared for world war. Sure enough, by 1937, the German economy was in deep trouble, and Hitler had no choice but rob Jews and others to create an appearance of wealth to his millions of increasingly rabid supporters.

Thus we see that the Great Depression did more than depress economies and psychologies: it put the French Republic on a collision course with the USA and the UK. The UK realized its mistake by 1936, and threw out its young Nazi king. By 1939, the UK, having seen Spain fall to Hitler, aligned itself with France, but the USA kept aligning itself, de facto, through its plutocrats and a diplomatic service helping them, with Hitler. (By 1944, though, the top US generals, whom Roosevelt couldn’t control, allied themselves with the French military, because they saw the valor, and had the need. Besides they were in palatial arrangements at the Versailles castle…The relationship stayed tumultuous, though…)

So question: does Trump want to renew with the mistakes of the past? Germany is now solidly allied to France and is a republic too. The only “oiseau de mauvaise augure”, actually a well-defined vulture, is Putin… However recently US forces in Syria eliminated 50% of a force of Russian “volunteers”…

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Divided We Can’t Stand:

The trade wars of the 1930s brought division to Europe. Nazism and the “Axis” would never have happened as they did, complete with holocausts and world wars, had the three big representative democracies of the West stayed united. (But of course, Roosevelt, like Hitler, wanted to grab the world; he was just much more crafty about it! Thus much more successful.)

For example Belgium would have built the segment of the Maginot line it was supposed to build, and that would have blocked, or slowed down the Panzers long enough for the superior French forces to regroup where needed (US influence pushed Belgium to suddenly become “neutral”, thus betray France, following that way the pernicious queen of the Netherlands, who digged the grave of her own country, with her love for Kaiser and Germany…)

More prosaically, German generals wanted a pretext to kill the Nazis. Instead Hitler showed them an isolated France… The US attitude was to play all sides, until the American Century got firmly established.

Nowadays, France and the USA are solidly allied. They are fighting side by side in Africa, something which started long ago, in 1978, when the French paras dropped on Kolwezi (the US provided some airlift, and the go-ahead). The war against the Islamists in Africa is long, intense, unforgiving. The Trump administration rightly denounced China’s maneuvers in Africa (suck all the juice, and ever more encroach…)

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And the Truth Is That The US and EU Elites Are Lying:

The US deficit is fundamentally caused by the exportations to China, Mexico, etc, of US production. So the slaves overseas are doing the work, while the higher class in the USA does not have to deal with pesky, expensive US unionized workers. Increase profit, decrease labor, grow plutocracy. What isn’t there for plutocrats, our lords and masters, to like?

Otherwise Trump is bluffing. Trump is trying to cut a deal about NAFTA/ALENA. To threaten tariffs is Trump’s dangerous and silly negotiation mode. Europe should ignore his craziness, but Europe, like Trump, is trying to make the peons believe it is doing something, when actually it’s doing even less.

So both the EU and the US elites are having a disingenuous argument. They play for the gallery of the naive out there, while the play is getting a life of its own. The right way out is to implement, throughout the West, a version of what Roosevelt did in the 1930s which was right: not the fight with France, that was wrong, not the support of overseas US plutocrats machinations, that was even worse. What was right was the rearmament program (developing and deploying more advanced weapons), and putting people to work, while cleaning up finance. And going to school, more than ever (as French president Macron just promoted in India). But schools all over, and everybody going to them is not enough: we need to put intelligence to work. And work, in the incoming age of robots, especially talking robots, of the sleek type I had on the phone today, means research. Nowadays scientific research should be promoted to the max. If not for us, and our children, for the planet… Can we please, believe in something, for a change?

Patrice Aymé

Plutocracy: I Lie, Therefore I Am

Submission To High Finance From Propaganda To Corruption, USA To EU:

IN EUROPE, OR ELSEWHERE. WHAT IS IT TO BE PROGRESSIVE, OR ON THE LEFT?

The debate about what is progress has been going since before Marx was a toddler. Actually, one can go back to Voltaire, and even all the way back to philosopher Abelard fighting Saint Bernard (Twelfth Century).

Abelard believed in debate (“Sic et Non”). Whereas Saint Bernard was all about having explained the world, all by himself, by following the herd, just as the average Christian gnu. Bernard, one of history’s greatest criminals, and thus, a “Saint, said, with revealing madness: ”I believe though I do not comprehend, and I hold by faith what I cannot grasp with the mind.”

Nowadays, many emulate Bernard, holding by faith that what they call the “free market” is the way to whatever they believe we are going to. In the “Free Market”, which is neither free, nor a market, banksters are free to enslave Peoples with as much interest as catches their fancy:

Unemployment Reached Nearly 30% in Greece, To Serve Better Banksters & Their Obsequious Servants

[Well above 50% of the total Greek debt is interest. The graph shall be produced another day! Greece has been ravaged by plutocracy, but is starting to resist.]

My answer is the simplest, to guide those who want a better, or just survivable world: You want progress, go with the truth. And truth is always from debate. That is what should guide the “left”, or whatever they want to call themselves.

Want some simple truths?

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WHY CLIMATE CRIMINALS ARE RICH:

Vanuatu was just lashed by a grade 5, maximum force hurricane. Those used to be very rare. But heat is energy, so more heat, more energy.

A truth that is simple: California is experiencing the greatest drought in millennia. This is directly related, in my learned opinion, to the general accelerated upwelling observed along such coasts, at such latitudes, worldwide.

Thus the unfolding California disaster (expect striking restrictions within weeks), is part of a much more general catastrophe.

Ironically, California, as the epicenter of USA propaganda, is punished by its own instruments.

This ecological disaster wisdom is percolating down. “70% of the unfolding catastrophes experienced today are caused by the climate change.” Just said in Japan, Laurent Fabius, the extremely experienced French Foreign Minister (an ex-Prime Minister).

His USA homologue, John Kerry warned: “future generations will not and should not forgive those who ignore this moment, no matter their reasoning… It is time, my friends, for people to do real cost accounting,” Kerry said. “The bottom line is that we can’t only factor in the price of immediate energy needs. We have to include the long-term cost of carbon pollution. We have to factor in the cost of survival. And if we do, we will find that pursuing clean energy now is far more affordable than paying for the consequences of climate change later.”

Survival is the concept I have been using for years.

When the greenhouse crisis will strike in full, BILLIONS will die. It’s not just a question of acidic seas rising. One thing will lead to another. Giant wars will erupt as ecological systems collapse.

The attack on Crimea by Putin was fully part of it: Crimea controls half of the Black Sea potential oil fields (and exploration was set to start; now it has been blocked by Western law; companies such as Chevron are blocked; corrupt and backward Russia does not have the tech). Ukraine also has potential vast reserve of Shale Oil and Gas.

One should speak of climate derangement caused by the CO2 CRISIS…

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PAY SCIENTISTS WELL, THEY WILL SAY AS PLUTO WANTS:

It turns out that some “Climate Skeptics” were paid by the fossil fuel industries. All the way to the usual suspect, Harvard University. Cash for claims, that is the faith of academics who grew up in plutocratic universities (I have spent two decades in them, I should have seen many things; I did).

Says the New York Times: “For years, politicians wanting to block legislation on climate change have bolstered their arguments by pointing to the work of a handful of scientists who claim that greenhouse gases pose little risk to humanity.”

The New York Times then details the case of a Harvard-Heritage Foundation, Asian looking (that seems more serious), prostitute, who got at least 1.2 million dollars below the table to say absurdities about CO2.

“Historians and sociologists of science say that since the tobacco wars of the 1960s, corporations trying to block legislation that hurts their interests have employed a strategy of creating the appearance of scientific doubt, usually with the help of ostensibly independent researchers who accept industry funding.

Fossil-fuel interests have followed this approach for years, but the mechanics of their activities remained largely hidden.

[By the way, the recent revelation are coming, through Greenpeace, thanks to Freedom of Information Act, which acts only on government agencies, in this case the Smithsonian Institution; lying, private, plutocratic universities are not forced to reveal the corruption; and also: why did the Obama administration revealed it by itself?]

“The whole doubt-mongering strategy relies on creating the impression of scientific debate,” said Naomi Oreskes, a historian of science at Harvard University…”

The god debate in the USA is the mother of all plutocratically founded brain washing: thousands of extremely rich people in the USA work for god, and are paid by taxpayers.

Plutocrats love god, because god works for them.

As Jesus will save all Americans, Americans should just lay nailed to the cross, as plutocrats walk all over them, and just thank them for giving us a hard time, easing our way closer to you, my lord (of Wall Street).

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SWEDISH CIA WHORES CHANGING SONGS:

So Sweden, who told us that it was “illegal” to go interview Julian Assange for hard-to-believe sex charges, is changing its mind. Now that plutocrats have spent already 20 million dollars keeping him caged because he looked at a Swedish CIA woman funny.

After 1,000 days of detention in the Ecuadoran embassy, Julian Assange will be interviewed by Swedish prosecutors inside the embassy (for having sex in a non-Swedish way).

British plutocracy has spent more than 10 million pounds watching Assange. Yes, more than 18 million dollars.

Money in the pursuit of plutocracy has no limits. This, from a government which introduced PAY TO PLAY, all over Britain, including education.

It is widely expected that, as Sweden is a stooge for the USA, Assange would be deported to the Guantanamo Archipelago, to see his human rights trampled into nothingness. Nothing personal, it’s all about terrorizing Americans.

Sweden’s Minister of Justice, Bodström

Two women admitted to consensual sexual relations with Assange, but then asked him, they said, to stop what they had agreed to, and that he did not. After this sort of interrupted coitus interruptus, one woman lauded Assange on the Internet, and to the next future victim, who proceed immediately to be equally victimized, upon apparent recommendation of the first.

It turned out that one of the accusers of Assange provided the CIA torture program called “rendition” with victims. So Sweden’s Minister of Justice, Bodström tortures, and that is OK. (That was obvious all along, as he tortured Assange for all to see.)

Assange’s biggest crime? Publishing a video showing Americans pilots gunning down journalists, and then those who tried to rescue them. The Pentagon immediately claimed that WikiLeaks was a “security threat”.

It obviously said something about the USA, namely that the behavior of police in Ferguson is something that the USA finds so natural (shoot first, check later) that it is anti-American to reveal it.

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HAVE THE COURAGE TO CALL POLITICIANS CORRUPT CRIMINALS:

Matthew Yglesias repeated like a parrot what I have said for many years: small-country, and even medium-countries (Sarkozy, Brown, Blair, Monti, Schroeder), or large-countries (Clinton) politicians generally have personal incentives to go along with troika, or plutocratic demands even if they are against their nation’s interests:

“Normally you would think that a national prime minister’s best option is to try to do the stuff that’s likely to get him re-elected. No matter how bleak the outlook, this is your dominant strategy. But in the era of globalization and EU-ification, I think the leaders of small countries are actually in a somewhat different situation. If you leave office held in high esteem by the Davos set, there are any number of European Commission or IMF or whatnot gigs that you might be eligible for even if you’re absolutely despised by your fellow countrymen. Indeed, in some ways being absolutely despised would be a plus. The ultimate demonstration of solidarity to the “international community” would be to do what the international community wants even in the face of massive resistance from your domestic political constituency.”

But a genuine government of the left would be very different. And this is what we have got in Greece right now with Syriza. — not because its policy ideas are wild and crazy, which they aren’t, but because its officials are never going to be held in high esteem, and great gratitude by the Davos, private jet set. Alexis Tsipras is not going to be on bank boards of directors, president of the BIS, or, probably, an EU commissioner. Neither he, nor Finance Minister Varoufakis even like to wear ties, and they have announced they won’t wear any as long as the Greek debt crisis goes on.

Yglesias’ cogent remarks are nothing new, I have been writing about them for more than a decade. OK, Yglesias is part of the establishment of sorts, he has high visibility, he went the plutocratic university par excellence, Harvard, studying philosophy, so he is supposed to be taken seriously (Krugman refers to him continuously, while censoring my declarations saying the same for years).

All right, so that leaders of small countries betray their countries to foster their careers, is not new, indeed. Draghi, for example is a pure product of AMERICAN plutocracy (PhD MIT, jobs at prestigious American Think (Sink?) Tanks, Goldman Sachs, etc.). So how come this pure pluto made in USA is one of the leaders of Europe? Because European plutocracy is the poodle of American plutocracy.

Not that I do not like Draghi. He is better than his Prussian alternatives. That was just an example.

The situation with Luxembourg and Juncker has been even worse: we are talking about 200 billions of tax evasion a year, there.

When there is no economy but corruption, Pluto is its prophet.

We need a name for all this activity. We have it: corruption.

OK, let’s take a rest. Next I will explain why, as in Greece, Nationalism may help. Syriza governs with a right wing party. In Israel, the corrupt Netanyahu may lose power to a left wing opposition which proclaims its nationalism (“Zionism”).

But it will not end before the fat lady sings, and it’s in France that she playing Valkyrie. Fear, little Plutos, the pain you visited on the world!

Patrice Ayme’

Europe’s Greek Tragedy

Finance Without Morality, Is Only Ruin Of The People:

People like a good cliffhanger. It beats difficult analysis, any day. Will Greece be pushed out of the Euro? Everybody wants to know.

The answer is simple: no. Before I explain why, let me point out that Paul Krugman, over the years, said many silly things about the Euro. However, he is learning, and his last effort, “Europe’s Greek Test”, is pretty good.

“In the five years (!) that have passed since the euro crisis began, clear thinking has been in notably short supply. But that fuzziness must now end. Recent events in Greece pose a fundamental challenge for Europe: Can it get past the myths and the moralizing, and deal with reality in a way that respects the Continent’s core values? If not, the whole European project — the attempt to build peace and democracy through shared prosperity — will suffer a terrible, perhaps mortal blow.”

OK, Krugman should not call it the “euro crisis”. It’s not anymore a “euro crisis” than the related 2008 crash was a “dollar crisis”. And the point is not to get “past moralizing”, but to get, precisely, in the thick of true moralizing.

Krugman: “But doesn’t Greece have an obligation to pay the debts its own government chose to run up? That’s where the moralizing comes in.” And the moralizing is not just the way plutocrats and their parrots claim it to be. Krugman has finally discovered that only one side is submitted to beating until the masters’ mood improves:

“It’s true that Greece (or more precisely the center-right government that ruled the nation from 2004-9) voluntarily borrowed vast sums. It’s also true, however, that banks in Germany and elsewhere voluntarily lent Greece all that money. We would ordinarily expect both sides of that misjudgment to pay a price. But the private lenders have been largely bailed out (despite a “haircut” on their claims in 2012). Meanwhile, Greece is expected to keep on paying.”

Paying for what? Banksters! Krugman has finally come across the great truth of the so-called rescue of Greece:

“…to oversimplify things a bit, you can think of European policy as involving a bailout, not of Greece, but of creditor-country banks, with the Greek government simply acting as the middleman — and with the Greek public, which has seen a catastrophic fall in living standards, required to make further sacrifices so that it, too, can contribute funds to that bailout.

One way to think about the demands of the newly elected Greek government is that it wants a reduction in the size of that contribution.”

Krugman concludes:

“Objectively, resolving this situation shouldn’t be hard. Although nobody knows it, Greece has actually made great progress in regaining competitiveness; wages and costs have fallen dramatically, so that, at this point, austerity is the main thing holding the economy back. So what’s needed is simple: Let Greece run smaller but still positive surpluses, which would relieve Greek suffering, and let the new government claim success, defusing the anti-democratic forces waiting in the wings. Meanwhile, the cost to creditor-nation taxpayers — who were never going to get the full value of the debt — would be minimal. 

Doing the right thing would, however, require that other Europeans, Germans in particular, abandon self-serving myths and stop substituting moralizing for analysis. 

Can they do it? We’ll soon see.”

The usual moralizing analysis that is done is not just completely wrong, but thoroughly superficial: the average Greek has been punished for a crime she and he did not commit. They are been punished with their lives. Meanwhile, the culprit bankers are not giving back their mansions.

So Germany is going to become reasonable about Greece. Why? Because it is co-responsible: the Drachma was converted into Euro at twice its real value. Germany agreed to this. That instant wealth for Greece was going to bring a lot of purchase of German luxury cars by wealthy Greeks, and it did. So the average Greek was set-up by wealthy and controlling Germans, whose influence made German economists consent to malversation.

Another point: Germany saw its debt cut down four times during the Twentieth Century, and the last time was in 1953. Basically Germany did not have to pay for Nazism and reconstruction.

If Germany did not have to pay for Nazism, why should Greece have to pay for German bankers? (Hmm… Wait. It actually makes sense…)

In particular Germany did not pay in any commensurate fashion for the Greeks it killed in World War Two. How many Greeks did Germany kill when it attacked Greece in Spring 1941, and for the next four years of brutal occupation, complete with sending tens of thousands of Greek civilians to extermination camps? Or killing them on the way?

So many Greeks were assassinated by the Nazis that one does not know how many died. Up to more than eleven percent of the population. Scaled up to the present population of the USA, that would be around 33 million dead.

33 million dead, and now you ask for more?

The sort of governments which has been in power throughout the West, has been serving the wealthy capital class, from the USA to Greece. It’s not just the Eurozone.

The British Royal Mail was evaluated by some financiers at 12 billion Euros. But the “Conservative” government sold it 4 billion. In a few hours of trading, the privatized company gained 60%, making a lots of instant wealth for investors.

Plots everywhere by the plutocrats, what could go wrong? A Great Bitter Ocean to drown in.

Some ponder the nature of man, the Dark Side French ex-justice minister Badinter spoke about.

Yet, that’s another mistake. One does not avoid cruelty by just becoming a vegetarian, or a vegan. Actually, it’s easy to argue that this is an immoral mood.

Instead, blame General Economics.

It has been thoroughly documented that, in national parks such as Amboceli, elephants kill goats and cattle, just because they don’t like them crowding around water holes.

MORALITY HAS TO REACH ACROSS CENTURIES:

Spain, now followed by Portugal, has decided to allow Sephardic Jews to return. Five centuries after throwing them out. This is worth pondering as a morality play. After 381, the Catholic Church became not just a terrorist organization burning libraries, but an officially sanctified one lethal one killing all groups it did not like, and, first of all “philosophers”. The Church came close to annihilating the Jews, but then the Franks took power and re-established the civil rights of non-Catholics. In the following centuries, many Catholics converted to Judaism: whereas the Pope and his goons always threatened to burn alive miscreants, Judaism was more relaxed.

However, for a number of reason, such as Saint Bernard, Saint Louis and the like, and the death struggle against the Islamists who occupied most of the Mediterranean, the Catholic Church and its Inquisition came back in force.

Millions of Jews were thrown out, or forced to convert to Catholicism, or terrified, tortured to death, burned alive. Even towards the end of the Eighteenth Century, Voltaire condemned the execution of a young Jewish girl, burned alive in Portugal, just because she was a Jew.

Well, last week, a ten year old Nigerian girl was covered with explosives, and detonated in a market place, by Boko Haram, an Islamophile terrorist organization.

That would have been unimaginable in Nigeria, sixty years ago (you know, under the dirty colonialists). But now, it’s happening, and it’s the leaders of the world who are culprit. Because that’s the world they organized. With their lies.

So let’s talk truly now, and start with Greece. When one of the world’s most despicable men, Jean-Claude Juncker, a tax evasion specialist serving plutocrats for decades, enabling trillions of dollars to be stolen from the people, say that Greece, the Greek people, should pay, we should retort.

Retort that it is his kind that should pay, so we can start to put an end to the systems of moods and lies they set in place.

Plutocrats and those who enable them, have been full of audacity, for decades. But, without audacity, you cannot save the Republic. Because the world, or at least the ecology, always moves on.

Ah, and of Greece and the Euro?

The Greek Central Bank can actually print all the Euros it needs. So the charade in Greece was made possible by the complicity of the ruling elite. Syriza can put an end to that.

And what of Germany forcing Greece? How? By bringing back the Schliefen plan, and swinging millions of robotic soldiers, through France, as in 1914? Hahaha. Sorry, I am obnoxious. Not likely, anyway, as 98% of the military muscle in Europe is held by France and Britain.

The Euro is the Greek currency. Germans can’t change that. It would be easier for them to adopt the rubble of the Rouble as new German currency instead.

Not that force should not be used. Banksters and their accomplices should be made to regurgitate the ill profits they made from Greece and other places they victimized.

Patrice Ayme’

European Politics: Wall Street Servant

European Politicians Did What Washington & Wall Street Said, As the Obsequious Butlers They Are:  

Europe is made of small nations which feel independent of each other, an entertaining madness. But its corrupt elite has only one master, body and soul, and it’s on the other side of the Atlantic, where the strongest nation rules (the world, mostly through the meek minds of their butlers anxious to please).

EUROPE WILL GIVE BANKERS MORE MONEY, JUST AS IN THE USA:

The European Central Bank will enable member central banks to buy a trillion euros/dollars of assets owned by banks (sovereign, that is, government bonds, mostly). This is called “Quantitative Easing” (QE).

QE buys assets held by banks, to make banks richer. Supposedly credit will then be easier to have for the little guys. The idea is that then everybody will feel richer, when bankers feel better and wealthier. A happy banker is the greatest gift.

We are fully in the logic, and mood, that bankers, and their delicate psyche, make the world turn around.

Make no mistake, as Obama would say: we are still in democracy. Proof? Common citizens are not asked to kneel when bankers pass by on their way to private jets. At least, not yet. What the Commons are asked to believe is that bankers will become interested by their miserable, unworthy, low class plight. Instead of having the bankers send all the money they manage and command, most of the money in the world, to fiscal heavens, financial derivatives, dark pools, and giant above the ground plots, like the Davos World Economic Forum. It is entirely their right, for bankers to provide money wherever they want, to whoever they want, as bankers created the world, and thousands of pet politicians, besides.

This is so true that French president Hollande went to Davos to beg the high financiers to stop financing terrorist networks. It is like asking crocodiles to stop taking care of their young. The financial saurians neither understand what the French are talking about, nor care to, as all they know is biting and gulping furiously.

What QE does, is to remove from bankers the excuse that they do not have enough money. Don’t laugh: bankers own everything, including the notion of seriousness. That’s why satire is not welcome in the USA.

Europe is following the USA, which started an enormous QE as Obama got to power… While preaching austerity, and accusing Europeans to be big spenders addicted to state insured health care (instead of the wonderfully profitable Obamacare).

The same as in the USA, giving bankers money, was done in Great Britain (and that’s why interest on UK’ long bonds are thrice those of France).

By comparison to what the European Central Bank (ECB) is going to do, the TARP inspector in the USA claimed that the Fed provided eight trillions of QE (the Fed says it owns 4 trillion dollars of USA government bonds from the Treasury of the USA… to which it returns billions of interest).

Krugman criticizes Europe to have been “Too Responsible”: “The United States and Europe have a lot in common. Both are multicultural and democratic; both are immensely wealthy; both possess currencies with global reach. Both, unfortunately, experienced giant housing and credit bubbles between 2000 and 2007, and suffered painful slumps when the bubbles burst.

Since then, however, policy on the two sides of the Atlantic has diverged. In one great economy, officials have shown a stern commitment to fiscal and monetary virtue, making strenuous efforts to balance budgets while remaining vigilant against inflation. In the other, not so much.

And the difference in attitudes is the main reason the two economies are now on such different paths. Spendthrift, loose-money America is experiencing a solid recovery … Meanwhile, virtuous Europe is sinking ever deeper into deflationary quicksand; everyone hopes that the new monetary measures announced Thursday will break the downward spiral, but nobody I know really expects them to be enough.”

Neither did the ECB chief, who said exactly that. Clearly, Europe did not create enough money.

Krugman did not explain why, and how, the difference arose, and he is silly to believe that the economy of the USA is now growing at a 5% just because its bankers are bathing in money. Economist are often one trick donkeys, but here Krugman overlooks the obvious: look at the price of energy, look at the tax heaven status of the USA, look at USA monopolies.

EUROPEAN LEADERS ARE SERVANTS OF THE GREAT WALL STREET SPIRIT:

The question is why did American politicians and European politicians behave so differently from each other?

The reason is simple: American politicians are masters, European politicians are servants, or, at best butlers, of the former (Jean-Claude Juncker being an example of the latter sort).

Nowadays, a politician is a professional employed by wealth. She, or he, is like a bookmaker, somebody who takes bets. In this case, the bets are on those policies who will benefit most those who have the money, that is, the power. It’s a delicate thing, made of polls, lies, and taking orders from wealth.

That was completely obvious in France: the ex-fascist, Mitterrand, ran for president on a socialist-communist platform. Once that did not work too well, the Vichysto-resistant president went on a Wall Street compatible program, and France has never looked back since (with disastrous consequences).

Now they teach five year old French children how to do banking (at least my daughter explained that last week). Hey, I guess, she can become a banker too, and get money for nothing. If not that, she can turn to Islamophilia, and make a career talking about big, bad French imperialism, until Wall Street proposes her a job. But I digress…

If France fell in that high finance trap, money for nothing thanks to friendly bankers, you can be sure the rest of Europe did even worse. (Don’t roll out Germany as an example of probity: the success of its expensive cars, I drive one, and its machine tools export was greatly obtained by paying workers salaries as low as one euro an hour… This has just been corrected.)

WE PLUTOCRATS RULE HELL:

The most powerful nation, the USA, is ruthlessly led by its plutocracy. The bubble of 2008 transferred massive winnings from bets by some plutocrats against their peers and against giant money center banks which were public in two ways: on the stock exchanges, and, more importantly, as the organizations in charge of creating most of the money (through the extension of credit).

The bubbles popped. The financial system, throughout the world, was bankrupt. To fix it, the Central Banks enabled the creation of massive new credit (=money), by lowering interest rates to zero. The money center banks were then free to re-enact their previous act, and re-invest massively in financial derivatives, same as before, but now even more.

True, Obama dispersed a few hundred billions of “stimulus”. Much more money went from the Fed to the money center banks, trillions of dollars of it. One started, just as before.

A lot of the wealth of the USA comes from fracking (a gift from god), Wall Street conspiracies, and worldwide tax dodging by giant USA monopolies, all of this with the complicity of the world’s most powerful capitals, Washington and New York.

By pretending otherwise, attributing all the economic splendor of the USA to the wisdom of QE, Krugman is promoting the myth, and the banker.

THE EUROPEAN ELITE IS CORRUPT:

If not corrupt as far as getting money directly (but it does: watch the number of EC commissioners who ended in fancy Wall Street employ), its mind is sure corrupt (they all want to be employed by Wall Street; by the way, lots of French president got lots of money, and not just directly from Wall Street, or the like; an example was torrents of money from Hariri, a Lebanese-Saudi businessman, later exploded by Hezbollah).

Is the European elite culprit? Sure. It was bought into the mood, and money, coming from the USA. So it saw nothing, it wanted to see nothing.

So the European elite saw nothing that what was going on. It did not see the more than 100 billion of tax dodging by USA corporations, through Luxembourg alone. It did not want to see it, so it did not see it. The European elite did not see the Euro which was too high, way too high, maybe twice the vale it deserved against the dollar.

The European elite did not see the cutting of the science budget in Greece by 75%, and the like. The European elite did not see the young people deprived of education, of jobs, of future, of money… The European elite did not want to see European discoveries exploited in Silicon Valley and coming back as tax dodging monopolies. The European elite did not want to see that European energy became twice more expensive than it is in China, or the USA.

All what the European elite has been doing, for 35 years, is to please plutocracy (also known as “liberalism”). Plutocracy central is based in the USA, in the most powerful nation. Thus, in a way, Europe is paying the price of not being master of its own destiny, because, naturally, its elite politicians go to serve the richest masters, with the biggest army, and those are based in the USA.

(The USA’s wealth has much to do with being the owner of a giant expanse of temperate real estate, immensely rich in all ways; it’s not all about today’s conspiracies.)

So the USA got the best policy, not because the Americans are the smartest, but because they are the masters.

The Europeans are “much too responsible”, because they are, fundamentally, servants, and servants have to be responsible. Servants of their masters in the USA, one rung below the servants there.

Will Europe revolt?

Maybe it will. Maybe it will wake up from its Wall Streetophilia, Washingtonophilia, Islamophilia, and Europhobia, which has masochistically affected it al too long.

The satirical, thus critical, core of Europe is France, and France got a number of jolts. The last of which left not just the president of the USA pretty cool, but even officially disingenuously spiteful of Europe’s alleged lack of inclusivity.

The French Republic is under attack, and maybe it is what it will take. France, with her welfare state, under attack, may remember who created Al Qaeda. France may remember that Wall Street and other vast chunks of USA plutocracy are not her friends… Ever since they financed Hitler in the 1920s and 1930s. Or even before that.

The adviser of president Wilson proposed an alliance to the Kaiser on June 1, 1914; said alliance was crucial to said Kaiser, in the first three year of the war. That such facts are not in Franco-British (or German!) history books is very telling. It means official history has a Washington bias. (Sponsored by the same people who brought you Islamophilia, and decry European colonialism! Never mind that Europe’s largest colony is the USA itself!)

France told the European Commission (EC) that she will disregard the deficit limits (as the UK, did, long ago, by the way). Now the EC says it’s a great idea.

Bring the Euro down to 80 cents on the dollar, or lower. Institute deficit spending… until interest rates climb back up (they are down to nearly one half of one percent in France, negative in Switzerland). Rearm. Yes, rearm. That’s where hope lays. Following the poisonous, Trojan Horse advice from Washington, for Europe to lay on her back and present her soft belly, is only the path to gloom and doom.

And please do not restrict the financing of Europe to QE, Wall Street style. American corporations ought to pay tax, effective immediately. Just sequester 10% of their revenues, and, if they don’t like it, they can go back where they come from. Arresting all the high financiers who finance terrorists would be also helpful. One should put them in the same quarters as the Salafists: they could preach to each other their versions of hell on Earth.

Patrice Ayme’

Live Within Our Means, Say Mean Plutocrats

Austerity Is A Conspiracy By Those Who, Having All The Money, Want Us To Have None:

What do plutocrats want? In the common, all too restrictive sense of plutocracy as the “rule of money”, “plutocracy” is supposed to mean that plutocrats want their money to rule.

Yet, plutocracy is not just about money. Even if one starts with “money”, one ends up with much more. Indeed, money is power onto others. By establishing charities, foundations, political financing, and other networks of influence, plutocrats extent invisibly their power beyond the horizon, and below the ground.

However Homo Sapiens Sapiens not being made to be submitted to others “power”, we have there, in this will to quasi-infinite plutocratic power, a form of cruelty, not to say, mayhem. Power struggles kill, among chimpanzees.

Britain Won Its Place In The World Through Ultra Massive Borrowing & Money Creation

Notice that, with chimpanzees, even the alpha male has very little power: as soon as three of his subordinates gang up against him, he is toast. The same holds with wolves, or lions.

But civilization is all about power. When only a few have its reins, they become like gods. At least in their minds, habits, ways, and means. That’s why plutocrats, their obsequious servants, and those they have hypnotized, worry so much about “us living within our means”.

 

A Few Guys Have ALL The Power, What Could Go Wrong?

Whereas a modern bureaucrat, like Eichmann, can send millions to death. Some will say the analogy is in poor taste. But not so. People such as Obama, Hollande, Putin, can literally launch actions that, in the worst possible case, could lead quickly to the death of billions (it takes just one 300 kiloton thermonuclear bomb to destroy most of any city on Earth).

I do believe that so much power, in so few hands, in so few brains, is not just immoral, but unwise. This makes civilization highly unstable.

However, a meta-discourse has been held, not just logically, but emotionally: it is OK to have so much power in so few hands.

Let’s put aside the main problem aside. The main problem being that absolute power corrupts absolutely, and that Czar Putin, for example, has more power than all the Czars who existed before him, put together: it’s not just that Stalin, had no H bombs. Both him, and Brezhnev, were worried by the Politburo (their top communist colleagues). Putin, by comparison reigns on a coterie of obsequious plutocrats, anxious about Polonium in their tea, or homicide by heart attack.

Not that Putin needs to give a direct order. For someone who can roughly kill half of Chechnya, and then get away with offering luxury homes there to his gregarious friend the “star”, not to say czar, Depardieu (not prosecuted for war profiteering, whereas the French government prosecutes commoners for basically nothing, commonly), letting it known to its secret services subordinates that he would love it if contradictors could just vanish, is elementary.

An aside here: when top official of the Nazi administration asked Adolf Hitler directly whether there was a systematic policy in place for killing Jews, Adolf Hitler firmly denied there was. At the Wannsee Holocaust conference, top Nazis confronted SS General Heydrich, and told him that Hitler had personally told them that it was not the policy of the Reich to kill the Jews. And they felt sure that, should they ask Hitler that same question again Hitler would give the same answer.

To that Heydrich icily replied, with a thin smile: ”Of course, he will!”

The fundamental problem with the top Nazis was not that they had some very bad ideas, it was that they had too much power. That enormous power (greatly enabled by the dog-like submissivity of the average German at the time), led them in a quick succession of choices, ever more abysmal, starting in January 1933. (To this, as soon as 1933, the French and American Republics reacted by engaging in giant military spending to equip themselves for a world war; Poland and Britain, instead, reacted by becoming Hitler’s best friends… They would realize their mistake in 1939)

 

If A Few Guys Can Fry Us All, Why Can’t They Own Us?

If it’s OK to risk thermonuclear Armageddon with a few morons in control (for vicious moron, consider Putin), why is it not OK to risk an economic apocalypse, let alone a climate apocalypse, with even more morons in control?

Is it not more… democratic? If Obama has too much power, does not giving ever more power to the Koch Brother, Bill Gates, and the Z guy from Facebook counterbalance that?

In any case, bleat the sheep, if plutocrats have all the power, they take all the decisions, and we can rest.

So, indeed, we have to ask again, what do plutocrats want? What train of evolutionary thought do they come from?

Well, simply the cruel streak which leads to extermination. The main problem of man has been man. For millions of years, being the top predator.

 

Insane Austerity Is Plutocracy Under Another Name:

One of the appreciated commenters on this site, Chris Snuggs, made the observation that:

It is not “austerity for austerity’s sake”, Patrice. It is simply the principle of “living within one’s means”. NO COUNTRY IN EUROPE IS DOING THIS. The idea that “ending austerity” is the solution is risible leftist claptrap. It is the failure to live within our means that has led to this as politicians at all levels either bribe voters with the latters’ own money, or in the case especially of Italy and Greece simply steal it.

If it were just Italy and Greece, we would be safe. Stealing from politicians is a worldwide phenomenon.

The son of the preceding (“socialist”) president of Senegal, found himself with a fortune of more than a billion dollars. After a change of president, judges put him in jail, in the hope of finding out where the money came from. Senegal is one of the world’s poorest countries (having no resources of any sort, but for fish devoured by Korean factory ships, which, I am sure, paid very well; the fish came back after the new president asked the Koreans to pay, and the French empire lent a military jet which takes pictures).

“Living within our means” sounds good, but a sovereign country is not a family (contrarily to what Obama said).

The money within a country is not a store of value (only gold reserves are; most countries got rid of them). Instead, money enables the population to do a number of things. If there is not enough of money around, these things cannot be done.

Moreover, money, like blood, has to circulate.

However, it’s not doing that anymore, as the wealthiest store it, and have less use for it than the lower classes.

 

How Not To Live Within The Means Of the Wealthiest:

Take the case of France.

Suppose France borrowed a trillion Euros on the free market, at the present rate of less than 1%. Investors, in their despair, are ready to lend to France at that rate, on the ten year bond.

Such a borrowing would allow the government to augment enormously its spending: it could pay for the best universities in the world (as China is presently trying to do), it could finance all sorts of fundamental research, it could even fabricate large Thorium reactors, with the whole economy to go with them (mines in Brittany, U 233 breeders, etc.). Presto, no more energy and CO2 crisis, and reactors which could be sold worldwide.

The pessimist would bemoan that we cannot afford it.

Of course we can: it would cost, nothing.

How so?

Hopefully, inflation, over the next ten years, will be 1% per year, entirely cancelling the interest payments. Higher inflation, though, would devour the principal.

Is this all fancy? Today the Chancellor of the Exchequer (Britain’s finance and economy minister), G. Osborne, announced that Great Britain will, finally, reimburse its First World War debt. How? By borrowing at 4%, the lowest interest in Britain for a very long time.

Says Osborne: “This is a moment for Britain to be proud of. We can, at last, pay off the debts Britain incurred to fight the first world war. It is a sign of our fiscal credibility and it’s a good deal for this generation of taxpayers. It’s also another fitting way to remember that extraordinary sacrifice of the past.”

Actually it’s even better than that: some of the debt to be repaid comes from the Crimean War, the wars against revolutionary France, and even the South Sea Bubble (three centuries ago).

 

Borrowing Can Buy You The World:

As Dominique Deux, another esteemed commenter on this site, reminded me: “Britain did not get to be the world’s first industrial power by “living within her means” but by extensive long-term borrowing.”

Right.

It is even better than that: The Bank of England, the world’s first central bank, was created to support the Royal Navy. Basically, if the Navy needed money, the Bank would print it.

That was put to good use a century later. France was much larger economically, economically, not to say intellectually, than Britain, so fighting the French superpower seemed ridiculous. However, as France was in the way, this is exactly what Britain did in 1756-1815. Paying Prussia as an attack dog, creating a huge Navy, etc.

How?

By borrowing extravagantly. So much borrowing that Britain won, but for the little problem of the French engineered creation of the American Republic (a foundation which proved the undoing of both France and Britain…)

 

To Make Money, Government Can Just Grab It From The Filthy Rich:

Famously, confronted to the invasion of Francia by the Arab, Syrian, Berber, and generally hysterically Muslim armies, and navies, in 721 CE, the Merovingian government of Prime Minister (and effective head of state) Charles Martel, just nationalized the Catholic Church, selling its precious metals, and stones.

That was a stroke of genius, as it defeated both Christianism and (what the Franks viewed as) its Islamist sect. (OK, it took a full generation of total war.)

That method is more available, the more plutocrats there are.

Osborne (out hero of the day, the conservative plutophile who heads things financial in the UK), spoke yesterday of introducing a “Google Tax” of 25%. Says the Guardian: “Responding to outrage about the minimal contributions big corporations make to European governments, the Treasury is targeting Silicon Valley companies such as Google, Amazon and Apple, but the measures will reach beyond technology to high street chains such as Starbucks.

“We will make sure that big multinational businesses pay their fair share,” assured Osborne. That will not be easy: one is talking here about what some view as the richest criminal enterprises in the world.

Facebook made something like 100 million dollars of profit in Britain, and paid not even five thousand dollars of tax. The Guardian: “Google paid just £20m tax in the UK last year. But its actual British revenues were £5.6bn. The group as a whole has a profit margin of 20%, suggesting the company’s real profits in the UK could have been as high as £1.2bn. Taxed at the proposed 25% rate, this would deliver £280m a year in revenues for the Treasury from just one company.”

Having plenty enough of money to accomplish important work, is pretty much how the West went through the 30 glorious years of strong economic expansion after World War Two.

In practice, though, debt can be reduced by taxing the wealthy. Why to borrow from the rich, when one can tax them? Well it all depends if one lives in plutocracy (borrow), or in democracy (tax).

Under general-president Eisenhower, the wealthiest were made to contribute (Ike used his 93% upper margin tax rate; it was of course the same in Europe).

That’s how to live within the better means we could create for ourselves.

This means, first, defanging what, and those who, have too much power, be it thermonuclear, political, economic, or even ideological.

Democracy is not just a way of life, but the way to survival… Just what the cruelest, and fiercest instincts do not want.

Patrice Ayme’

Bad Germany? Or Bad Advice From Pluto?

Germany decided to go greener than green. Weirdly, that meant increasing the production of the most polluting fossil fuel, lignite. Apparently scared by the tsunami in Japan, it also involved closing down nuclear power. Nuclear power makes zero emissions of greenhouse gases, and it’s nearly as cheap as wind power.

Thus, instead of a fast tsunami increasing sea level by fifteen meters in minutes, Germany has opted for a slow tsunami increasing sea level by seventy meters over, well, a much longer time.

OK, nuclear power has drawbacks: ever since civil nuclear power was used in the USA, nobody ever got killed or injured from it, there. (Whereas coal kills at least hundreds a month… some of it probably from radioactivity, but never mind…) So nuclear power is dreadfully boring. Hence the need to freak out about it.

Going green by going lignite, is a parable for all too many, slightly demented German policies.

All of the Eurozone is on the verge of recession, Germany has grown two percent, total, in six years. Main cause? Not enough money to make the economy turn properly. Also a despondent inner German economy. Hence the need to sell German luxury cars all over the world. OK, machine tools, too.

I used to disdain Paul Krugman’s opinions on Europe, as he was too unaware of the fundamentals, be they historical, political, or economic. However the situation has changed: he had much to learn, and he learned much. Also change did my opinion of German policy, as Merkel got ever more obstinate. In any case, I agree with all of Krugman’s well researched article, Being Bad European. Let me quote from it:

“Unemployment in the euro area is stalled at almost twice the U.S. level, while inflation is far below both the official target and outright deflation has become a looming risk.

Investors have taken notice: European interest rates have plunged, with German long-term bonds yielding just 0.7 percent. That’s the kind of yield we used to associate with Japanese deflation, and markets are indeed signaling that they expect Europe to experience its own lost decade.”

Paul has the courage to go in full PI mode. PI? Politically Incorrect, or Profoundly Investigative:

“Why is Europe in such dire straits? The conventional wisdom among European policy makers is that we’re looking at the price of irresponsibility: Some governments have failed to behave with the prudence a shared currency requires, choosing instead to pander to misguided voters and cling to failed economic doctrines. And if you ask me (and a number of other economists who have looked hard at the issue), this analysis is essentially right, except for one thing: They’ve got the identity of the bad actors wrong.

For the bad behavior at the core of Europe’s slow-motion disaster isn’t coming from Greece, or Italy, or France. It’s coming from Germany.”

Germany has a dreadful history to use its own population as cannon fodder for its plutocrats (see the 1914 German invasion and attack), and currency has a spoiler for reason (see the 1923 inflation, engineered by Schacht, an agent of JP Morgan, and later an instigator and puppet master of Hitler; don’t worry, Dr. Schacht came out of WWII, and a little Nuremberg Trial, just fine).

Here is Krugman again:

“If you try to identify countries whose policies were way out of line before the crisis and have hurt Europe since the crisis, and that refuse to learn from experience, everything points to Germany as the worst actor.

Consider, in particular, the comparison between Germany and France.

France gets a lot of bad press, with much talk in particular about its supposed loss in competitiveness. Such talk greatly exaggerates the reality; you’d never know from most media reports that France runs only a small trade deficit. Still, to the extent that there is an issue here, where does it come from? Has French competitiveness been eroded by excessive growth in costs and prices? 

No, not at all.”

One thing that was out of line with Germany, is that it mistreated its working class:

“Since the euro came into existence in 1999, France’s G.D.P. deflator (the average price of French-produced goods and services) has risen 1.7 percent per year, while its unit labor costs have risen 1.9 percent annually. Both numbers are right in line with the European Central Bank’s target of slightly under 2 percent inflation, and similar to what has happened in the United States. Germany, on the other hand, is way out of line, with price and labor-cost growth of 1 and 0.5 percent, respectively.”

Dis-information about France is great in the USA, because plutocratic propaganda knows France is the number one danger country, the place out of which the most dreadful anti-plutocratic, atheist policies emanate. But Krugman has now understood this, so he pounces some more:

“In other words, to the extent that there’s anything like a competitiveness problem in Europe, it’s overwhelmingly caused by Germany’s beggar-thy-neighbor policies, which are in effect exporting deflation to its neighbors.

But what about debt? Isn’t non-German Europe paying the price for past fiscal irresponsibility? Actually, that’s a story about Greece and nobody else. And it’s especially wrong in the case of France, which isn’t facing a fiscal crisis at all; France can currently borrow long-term at a record low interest rate of less than 1 percent, only slightly above the German rate.”

What Germany did was cutting salaries as low as one Euro per hour (completely illegal in France, where the minimum wage was at least ten times that; in 2014 Germany introduced a minimum wage comparable to France’s.)

And Krugman to conclude:

“What we’re seeing, then, is the immensely destructive power of bad ideas. It’s not entirely Germany’s fault — Germany is a big player in Europe, but it’s only able to impose deflationary policies because so much of the European elite has bought into the same false narrative. And you have to wonder what will cause reality to break in.”

It’s true that “German” policies have actually been plutocratic policies: France, Italy and Spain, together, form an economic behemoth much larger than Germany, so they could easily force “Germany” to do whatever they decided. They did not, because they are all serving Mammon.

German policy at this point is irresponsible. It is demonstrated with the numbers Paul rolls out. But there are others. Germany, weirdly, has resisted French efforts at a Banking Union (it agreed only to phase in slowly a reduced version).

The Banking Union would be similar to the FDIC in the USA: banks would be forced to pitch in what would be a mutual insurance fund. With some rules attached.

However Germany is scared that thousands of its banks are under water, so it has refused the oversight of Banking Union. This tends to show that Germany cares more about what Europe brings to it, rather than it can bring to Europe.

When Greece was in full corruption crisis, a small city in Greece was the greatest purchaser of Porsche in the world. This kind of details was viewed as good for German business, but it actually means that the Germans cooperated with the very corruption they later denounced.

So why is Germany behaving this way?

Tough German reforms were instituted by Schroeder, a “Socialist” who turned out basically into an employee of Putin. The West has known many of these pseudo-socialists, who are actually greedy agents of Plutocracy Supreme. (The latest case is the preceding “Socialist” PM of Portugal, who made millions under the table; he was just arrested.)

Schroeder squeezed German workers as much as possible. That depressed German demand, making Germany more dependent upon exportations. But it made the wealthiest, wealthier.

Same old same old: plutocrats reign.

Some will say: ”Oh, but then you agree with the Brits?” Not at all: London has arguably displaced New York as the world’s dirtiest plutocratic center. London is rich, for the worst reasons, to a great extent (not to a full extent: there are actually some good policies in England, if one searches carefully for them).

So what London does cannot be duplicated elsewhere: its unicity makes it wealthy, mostly by attracting plutocrats from all over, insuring they escape the taxman and the lawman, and any sort of decency.

Ultimately, although Krugman praises France, he did not say that France, herself probably the mightiest country in Europe, all around, could very well break out of the plutocratic mold.

What the government of the French Republic has to do is simple: just look at the European Commission in the eye, and say: ”We plan to run a 4.5% deficit for the next two years. Submit.”

Guess what?

In a break with the plutocratic tradition, this is finally just what France did. The preceding European Commissioner of Finance and Economy, a man completely sold to Pluto, bleated his approval. He was then replaced by a Frenchman, ex-finance minister Moscovici.

This whole situation is about a system of thought. It’s time to change it. Understandably, Germany does not trust its revolutionary instincts. That leaves us, once again, with France to lead the way.

Although it’s hard to imagine Hollande leading anything, his Prime Minister is more of a man. Thus, probably, the change.

Patrice Ayme’

Tax Theft: Luxembourg. Impotence: All Over. Culprit: GOP?

Great Evasions From Taxes And Responsibility. Krugman Accuses Republicans Of Everything

When cheating is legal, is it cheating? Many worthies in Europe are affecting surprise that Luxembourg allowed hundreds of the greatest plutocratic corporations to escape amounts in taxes similar to the “austerity” they try to impose. That means that tax evasion by the richest is paid by the poorest.

Tax avoidance, through Luxembourg alone, by the richest persons in the world, are of the order of 10% of the yearly Federal Budget of the USA (you will not see this in the newspapers, I computed it myself).

Burning Cars May Move Minds (Brussels, 11/6/14)

People are starting to see through this Kabuki theater. While Luxembourg flaunted its criminal nature, there was a bloody demonstration in Brussels against renewed “austerity” (from a new “conservative” government). No less than 20% of the capital’s population was in the streets, French and Flemish speakers united. Two police officers were grievously hurt.

Demonstrators burned cars, but did not set fire (yet!) to the European Commission and Parliament buildings. Let me be clear: the European Commission and the European Parliament have known, for years, of Luxembourg’s dirty nature. I have written of this institutionalized thievery, for years. It has been known, for years. All the politicians are accomplice… Indeed, none of them protested stridently against institutionalized tax stealing.

Jean-Claude Junker was the Prime Minister of Luxembourg, for 19 years, and, thus, Luxembourg’s thief in chief (plus 5 years, prior, as Luxembourg finance minister). Junker’s punishment? He is now head of the European Commission. It is eerie, surreally obscene, a tiny bit as if Himmler had been made president of Israel (in the last few days of WWII, Himmler cooperated with the Swedes to save thousands of Jews! Both were obviously trying to make amends, while Nazism was suffering its well deserved apocalypse. Some will say the comparison is exaggerated; however, EU austerity-tax cheating by fat cats has killed probably thousands of people already).

Satanic corporate officers would show up in Luxembourg, and, within the same business day, organize the tax evasion of their employer, with the full participation of the authorities of Luxembourg.

Luxembourg whined that an illegal act had been committed: state documents had been revealed (28,000 pages on 340 companies, obtained by a consortium of journalists, ICIG; they have a consortium… to escape national censorship; many firms paid less than 1% on profits, whereas the law is 12.5%; other countries are cheating, including, Eire, the Netherlands, and the UK). Infamy knows no shame.

But one does not need to rob the state thugs of Luxembourg to expose the truth about Luxembourg. The industry of Luxembourg is organized crime.

According to the most recent data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis about $95 billion of profits moved into Luxembourg from U.S. companies in 2012 alone. In Luxembourg, those $95 billion of profits were basically not taxed. Direct investment from the U.S. into Luxembourg in 2013 was $416 billion. More than 200 U.S. companies operate there.

Luxembourg’s GDP per capita in 1961 was $2,200 (yes, two thousand dollars). Now it is more than 120,000 dollars. Only the tax cheaters Liechtenstein (140 K) and Monaco (180 K) are richer. What to do, when a country thrives from thievery? Why don’t the French and Germans send a few special forces?

Here is a description from the prime financial channel of the USA, CNBC. Here is the start of the associated text: “Here’s an international money riddle for you: What country is smaller than Rhode Island yet is the most attractive place for companies and investors to park their money, behind the United States? Ireland? Cayman Islands? Try Luxembourg.”

Notice that CNBC admits implicitly that the world’s greatest tax cheat is the USA itself (banking secrecy is often total in the USA, with shell companies, “charities”, “trusts”, and “Dark Pools”). And so it is.

So don’t ask why Obama did nothing for the USA. Ask why he should have done something against his sponsors.

And then rolled another editorial of Paul Krugman, accusing the Republicans of the “Triumph Of Wrong”. Said he :

“From Day 1 of the Obama administration, [republicans] have done everything they could to undermine effective policy, in particular blocking every effort to do the obvious thing — boost infrastructure spending — in a time of low interest rates and high unemployment.

This was, it turned out, bad for America but good for Republicans. Most voters don’t know much about policy details, nor do they understand the legislative process. So all they saw was that the man in the White House wasn’t delivering prosperity — and they punished his party.”

The usual flood of comments approving that childish and irresponsible vision flooded in, as a self-congratulatory orgasm of surrealism. My own comment was completely lost in that self-loving flood.

The truth, though, is that the democrats were in total control of Congress, the White House, and had a super-majority in the Senate (allowing to override filibusters), in the beginning of Obama’s reign. That was highly problematic, as the Democratic Party is controlled by plutocrats.

What were they going to do? Legislate against themselves? Discover that Delaware enables even more tax evasion than Luxembourg, as long as one is really very rich? Not embarrassed, the plutocratic owners ad operators of the “Democratic” Party accused Republicans “of doing everything they could”, to have, presumably, psychologically forced Democrats to do nothing anti-plutocratic.

I pointed out that, on November 5, 2008, Obama went to work at a hedge fund, in Chicago. That should have alerted the so called “progressives”, that something was not quite right (I certainly noticed!). But it did not. Even six years later, the (pseudo-) progressives still do not get it.

How long will it take for We The People to realize the present governmental set-up, complete with its attending pundits, is a plutocratic mood organization? I guess, as long as the New York Times keeps on censoring me, there is little hope. But then, why do I send money there?

Habits are hard to break. Ultimately, ideas break down, when people start breaking things down. This is how it was always done. Ultimately, violence is not just a political activity, but a psychological one, because it requires a lot of energy to break out of old systems of thought, and even more, out of old systems of mood.

Let see what Europeans worthies do, having named a thief in chief as head of the European Commission, and now seeing the rabble raise in a fury. A hint: if next time demonstrators make it to the European Parliament, breaking and burning, said Parliament may reach a clearer, and more cautious mood.

Austerity? You want austerity? Then why not start with the plutocrats?

Patrice Ayme’

Krugman Rising From The Deep

Nowadays, I rarely bother to criticize, let alone advise, Obama (OK, I did it on Syria).

The One has become insignificant, it does not matter what he thinks, supposing he thinks at all. (Chuck Hagel, the Defense Secretary just called the policy of the USA in Syria strategically compromised, long term, as it profits the other enemy of civilization, Assad. Hagel is right. Attacking ISIL without taking out Assad is unbalanced. I am sure another Christain, or Druze strongman can be found.)

Soon the entire Congress will be Republican, and the Obama groupies will wonder what happened. Well, they have only themselves, and their reveling, to blame.

What happened is that, while Obama adulators were celebrating, when Obama became president he got surrounded by a thick cloud of plutocrats and their servants. Thus all Obama’s policies were all plutocratic, including (most of) Obamacare.

Unfortunately, the so called “Democrats” were not brainy enough to realize this. They believed that their beige hero would save them all. And, besides, superman like, find a solution to everything.

And, even if “Democrats” had brains, they had neither theory, nor a plan on how to handle the world.

The same problem has arisen with Clinton, Bill, earlier, and with the dimwits of the Socialist Party in power (supposedly) in France: no progress whatsoever.

I can’t reproach right wingers such as Cameron, or Merkel to be right wing. Even Abe in Japan does what he said he would do.

But the left, in Europe and the rest of the West has long been derelict.

Why? How? Lack of correct ideas. They did not think it through.

The best Krugman could suggest, for years, was more money for kleptocratic banks (“QE”), or devaluation (as Abe is doing in Japan). Fortunately, at last, Krugman is changing. As he is the most followed political economist in the world, it matters. Polls in Europe showed that the (Ex(?)-Europhobic Krugman) is the most trusted voice… On the left!

Then, of course, it all makes sense: if Krugman, the most trusted voice on the left, was actually on the right, or nowhere in particular, then no wonder the left was a right, and civilization got off the rails.

Krugman is realizing, slowly, that the debate has been framed by the plutocracy, especially about the lack of investments.

So now Krugman realizes that he and his kind (ex-Fed chief Bernanke) owe apologies to Japan. Says he:

“TOKYO — For almost two decades, Japan has been held up as a cautionary tale, an object lesson on how not to run an advanced economy. After all, the island nation is the rising superpower that stumbled. One day, it seemed, it was on the road to high-tech domination of the world economy; the next it was suffering from seemingly endless stagnation and deflation. And Western economists were scathing in their criticisms of Japanese policy.

I was one of those critics; Ben Bernanke, who went on to become chairman of the Federal Reserve, was another. And these days, I often find myself thinking that we ought to apologize.”

Well, indeed, you should: to keep its economy up, the Japanese government engaged in a gigantic effort (its debt is now 240% of GDP… Slightly more than the 90% of Britain or France).

And Krugman to diagnose: “… the West has, in fact, fallen into a slump similar to Japan’s — but worse. And that wasn’t supposed to happen. In the 1990s, we assumed that if the United States or Western Europe found themselves facing anything like Japan’s problems, we would respond much more effectively than the Japanese had. But we didn’t, even though we had Japan’s experience to guide us. On the contrary, Western policies since 2008 have been so inadequate if not actively counterproductive that Japan’s failings seem minor in comparison. And Western workers have experienced a level of suffering that Japan has managed to avoid.”

If it were only workers! Grandmothers and everybody not a banker or hedge fund managers also suffered from Quantitative Easing (which brought savings’ interest down to zero).

So what happened? Krugman again:

”What policy failures am I talking about? Start with government spending. Everyone knows that in the early 1990s Japan tried to boost its economy with a surge in public investment; it’s less well-known that public investment fell rapidly after 1996 even as the government raised taxes, undermining progress toward recovery. This was a big mistake, but it pales by comparison with Europe’s hugely destructive austerity policies, or the collapse in infrastructure spending in the United States after 2010. Japanese fiscal policy didn’t do enough to help growth; Western fiscal policy actively destroyed growth.”

And Krugman to evoke the austerity mistake even in Sweden, and to conclude:

“I’ll be writing more soon about what’s happening in Japan now, and the new lessons the West should be learning. For now, here’s what you should know: Japan used to be a cautionary tale, but the rest of us have messed up so badly that it almost looks like a role model instead.”

I added the following in a comment:

The case of Japan is special: it has collapsing demographics, not compensated, as it is in many Western countries, by a vigorous immigration. Japan also has no indigenous energy to speak of (even its nuclear waste recycling long depended upon France).

It was long obvious to yours truly, that the conditions we are in are worse than in 1930s. The Great Depression of the 1930s happened mostly accidentally; it was a succession of obvious mistakes: a boom, followed by a crash, made worse by a tariffs war, leading to industrial shrinkage, and a liquidation of banks.

Nowadays, it’s different: the planet is crashing, a more serious problem. This could be stopped, but for that the general mindset would have to be different. However, said mindset is constructed by an ever more powerful plutocracy, a few hundred individuals who order the world around.

In particular, the plutocratic mindset has seized the financial sector and the government. The former does not need the public to make money: the financial sector has tricks such as Quantitative Easing up its sleeve, boosted by the continual authorization for banks to cooperate with, or engage in financial piracy.

The latter, the government, refuses to engage in massive public investment, from top notch free public schools, to massive infrastructure to massive public healthcare (if you brandish Obamacare, contemplate its deductibles). Simply because, as a proximal reason, if government goons hold that line, cushy jobs are for them to take when they come out of government.

The way it connects with the financial pirates is simple: money creation is a zero sum game, when pushed to the max. If more money went to the real economy, it would be as much not going to the financial pirates.

Krugman, and his eminent colleagues have not understood this yet, that all the money created for financial thugs, is as much not going for vaccine research, schools, bridges, healthcare, etc. Hopefully, they will, some day. Before that day, do not expect progressive polices to bear fruit, or, even, to exist.

The media, everywhere, is little better than FOX News: it’s a giant propaganda machine which has interest to make the rich richer, and the poor, stupider.

Plutocracy is the metastatic cancer which has invaded, paralyzed all the minds. Before a stunted economy, and decaying society, we are confronted to decomposed minds. And mostly on the left. The right, at least, the plutocratic right, knows how to take care of its own.

Patrice Ayme’

The West: Hong Kong In Reverse?

In Hong Kong, students are demonstrating. Beijing plutocrats are throwing at them what they can: professional politicians, popular singers, and professional gangsters from the renowned triads.

This is what happens when you educate your youths too well: they get ideas, and contest the rule of the alpha male, in this case the omnipotent president Xi (who claims an official right to rig elections by choosing the three candidates to lead Hong Kong; in the West, the process is the same, but behind closed doors).

Cynics will sneer that this was the whole idea about degenerating the educational system in the West since the (world) disturbances of 1968 (which topped in the USA, France, and Prague). Precisely to avoid what is happening in Hong-Kong now.

How come the left in the West is a right? The answer is obvious: “democracy” is just a sham.

Let’s nevertheless waste a few minutes to describe the right that calls itself a left…. Now that France has a so called “socialist” government which governs on the right of the official French right, this burning question comes back to the fore, six years after Obama sold himself, body and soul, to the greediest financial sector in the history of civilization.

In the last 20 years, the self-described “left” came to power in the USA (twice: Clinton, Obama; moreover Reagan had to govern with a Congress controlled by democrats), in Germany (Schroeder, and now an union government of CDU and SPD), in Britain (a decade of Blair, Brown). France is the extreme of that: she enjoyed decades of “socialist” rule (Mitterrand, Jospin, Hollande).

The result is everywhere the same: plutocracy has kept encroaching (as depicted in Piketty’s “capital). There is even worse: the educational systems have collapsed, all over the West.

Indeed, in 1900, the West had, by far the best educational systems in the World. Now the results are eloquent. They are established by PISA, a subdivision of the OECD (the Organisation De Co-operation Economique et Development, in its original French; it was founded, and is based, in Paris).

France, Britain and the USA completely fail their new generations. Refined tests on problem solving show that the youngsters of these nations are three years late in their mental development on Asian students.

Apparently, the mental retardation has set quite a while ago, because present date politicians do not understand the problem. It’s simple, though: these countries made a huge effort in national education a century ago. Not so much anymore.

To get a good education in 1950, one went to public school. Now one goes to private school. The quality of education is just as abysmal, studies suggest. But the networking is everything

Valls is a theoretician of greed: he can’t imagine anything else as a human motivation. At least that’s what he said as much about GPA.

It’s a bit like Lenin’s apology of dictatorship. Lenin could not imagine a more effective government than dictatorship.

Valls is not pecuniary greedy, or let’s say he can wait, as the greed for power is even more direct than the one for money. My tolerance exhausted itself after he made Macron economy minister. Macron’s career is a short resume’ of the genetics of the cancer that infects the West most: a know-nothing, made into a top finance inspector who teaches the world’s most notorious bank how to evade taxes and financially conspire, thus putting himself into orbit for highest rule.

The Romans had the Cursus Honorum, we now have the Cursus Damnarum. In the Cursus Honorum, would-be politicians, after a top education, became first top officers in the Roman army. And then, only then, would go back to politics.

Because Rome had strict term limits, politics was spread among the many. For example a Consul had full power for just a month, and then, after his one year term, could not be re-elected for another year.

Here, of course I am talking of the full Roman Republic, not the diseased system which agonized for centuries after Augustus came to power. Conventional historians prefer to talk about the latter, because they are the Gibbons of the plutocratic system we have the dubious honor to enjoy.

How could the so-called left not be a right?

It’s all about how politicians are selected. First, they are most greedy. They are all about the Will To Power.

Second, if not 100% greedy, they are somewhat deranged: they really believe that, with their puny minds, and extravagantly modest propositions, in these most alarming circumstances, they will really make a difference.

Third, they give themselves what scientific psychologists, the ethologists, call “moral license”. That’s the idea that, if one has made what one perceives as a good deal, or has the right to trample others, somewhat.

Indeed, the leaders of the West now, in their collective, have rights not really different from that of the omni-president Xi and his colleagues. It is for example against the law in France to insult one of the goons of the government. The powers that the top politicians in the USA have, are awesome.

And forget about checks and balances, as the presidency of W. Bush demonstrated! The entire USA was committed to a war crime course in 2003 with as much ease as Nazi Germany in 1933.

And please don’t tell me that’s ancient history. The present war against ISIS/ISIL/ “Caliphate”/Daech springs directly from this. The essence of the power of that organization is that the tribes that the USA struck against in 2003 are now sitting on their hands at best (when they are not outright helping the Islamist insurgents).

This entire political system of the West rests on greed and delusion. It’s a system of thoughts and moods, where greed, sugar-coated with the appearance of altruism, rules.

Blossoming plutocracy is a consequence. And the more it goes, the more education, reflection and civilization, degenerate.

The type of remedy needed can be observed in the streets of Hong-Kong.

It is easy for the Hong-Kong protesters: they want what the West already has. In the West what is needed has to be invented. Looking around (Switzerland), or learning history (fully Republican Rome, Athens), will help the imagination.

The real problem is that there is no progressive guidance. A proof is my struggle in philosophical circles right now to impose the correct view on Aristotle. Aristotle was first and foremost, the greatest architect of plutocracy ever. That’s how, and why, he got to be viewed as the greatest philosopher ever.

Everybody drank the poisonous cool-aid, ever since.

Something similar is happening now, live: Krugman’s position of Quantitative Easing (giving money to the largest, most powerful banks) is (still) viewed as highly progressive… And so apparently, is austerity.

And where is the money found to fund all this austerity? Some of it is found all the way into the bone. Fundamental education (That’s now called the “Common Core” in the USA), and fundamental research.

Obama is urging schools to teach the Common Core, and that’s good. (It’s even better that it costs him nothing, as the Federal Education budget is just 1%. Always this 1% thing.)

Maybe, if he had been taught the Common Core, Prime Minister Valls would be able to logically determine he stands on the right of the National Front’s Marine Le Pen, in several dimensions.

Maybe, if he had been taught the Common Core, Obama would fund fundamental research: unbelievably, he has been cutting into the bone there… Just when everything is becoming possible, the leadership of the West is trying to make the impossible possible, by closing the future to progress.

Patrice Ayme’

Macron, Bankster, Executioner

Humanity is facing its greatest crisis, ever. Clearly the situation of the biosphere is the most dangerous in 65 million years. And what do we do? We put in charge of everything individuals such as Mr. Hollande, an obvious half-wit with a vicious sense of contradiction (his ex-mistress revealed that “socialist” Hollande calls the poor “Sans-Dents”: “No-Teeth”).

Krugman wrote in the “Fall Of France”: “At this point, Europe is doing worse than it did at a comparable stage of the Great Depression. And even more bad news may lie ahead, as Europe shows every sign of sliding into a Japanese-style deflationary trap.” That has long been clear, as I pointed out in GREATER DEPRESSION, more than three years ago.

Hollande: Bankster To Lead France

Krugman: “[Hollande] was elected on a promise to turn away from the austerity policies… Since the intellectual justification for these policies was weak and would soon collapse, he could have led a bloc of nations demanding a change of course. But it was not to be. Once in office, Mr. Hollande promptly folded…

Let it not be said, however, that he is entirely spineless. Earlier this week, he took decisive action… Mr. Hollande’s force was focused on purging members of his government daring to question his subservience… you need to understand two things. First, Europe, as a whole, is in deep trouble. Second, however, within that overall pattern of disaster, France’s performance is much better than you would guess from news reports. France isn’t Greece; it isn’t even Italy. But it is letting itself be bullied as if it were a basket case…”

(Actually French employment rate in the prime slice from 25 to 55 years of age is better than the USA’s!)

Hollande nominated an entire team of half-wits to lead France; several of whom apparently hoped that, being at the top of the state would put them above any suspicion, and allow them to engage in massive tax evasion.

The latest of these low lives was Trade Secretary only nine days before it came to light he did not declare his income for years. Not to worry: he is back to Member of Parliament again, where he will be presumably able to make discourses attacking those in the Middle Class who complain about confiscatory taxes, as he used to.

Hollande’s fate is reminiscent of Obama’s. Here are two presidents elected to enact real change profiting We The People. Yet, they soon surrounded themselves with people from the other side, the side of very high finance. Then they surrender to the reality they had themselves created.

In both cases, it has been a triumph of the bankers. In both cases individuals who worked in, and for banks, became pillars of the administrations. And not just any banks. The major banks, those entrusted by society to create massive credit, that is money, to support the economy.

Instead those giant banks spend all their muscles engaging of a casino of their own making, in which they make money off each other and a secretive universe of hedge funds and so called “Dark Pools” (more than half the world’s money).

Hollande just nominated Mr. Macron, 36 year old, Economy Minister. Macron is a graduate of ENA who worked as a Finance Inspector, before being employed by the Rothschild Bank for four years. Presumably Macron was using his know-how of the Finance Inspectorate to tell Rothschild how to avoid taxes and prosper. Macron made a huge fortune.

Rothschild had already pulled this trick over a twenty year period in the 1960s and 1970s, when another of its equally ignorant creatures, Pompidou, came to lead France as PM and then President.

The Daily Beast, in a burp of propaganda: …”[Macron] got rich on his wits. He is, by all accounts, brilliant; a dashing, urbane go-getter who exudes charm. A sharp intellectual. A prodigy. He is even a prize-winning classical pianist. The guy’s a winner… Nicknamed “the Mozart of Finance,” Macron spent short but extremely lucrative years as an investment banker at Rothschild Group. His key role in shepherding Nestlé’s $12-billion purchase of Pfizer’s infant-nutrition unit is said to have set Macron up financially for years to come.… ”

Key role? Let me laugh. One of the main reason for acquisitions right and left is so-called inversion, in other words, tax evasion. Sharp wits? No doubt it’s smart to be a crook, when being a creep puts the world at one’s feet.

This all begs the question: how extensive is corruption in the democracies? When all the leaders are bankrolled so extensively by the most powerful, most perverse financial system ever created, is it surprising that the leaders’ decisions favor private banking?

And how come that banks, those daily beasts, have acquired that much power?

Lest Americans congratulate themselves about such things not happening in the USA, let them know that what is going on in the USA is even worse. In the USA many of the tax avoidance schemes which are unlawful in France, are perfectly legal.

In all and any cases, the conclusion is the same: the definition of plutocrats is that they do not pay taxes.

This is exactly what happened with the French Ancient Regime aristocracy. Now top public servants (that is top politicians) are on the take from said plutocrats.

Even the educational system has been thoroughly tweaked: no instruction is ever given revealing the role bankers and plutocrats (most of them US plutocrats) played in the rise, one should even say the creation of Nazism and even World War One.

What remedy is there now? Why not try democracy? Real democracy, not the representative oligarchy we have, which insults us by calling itself democracy.

Direct democracy works in Switzerland (where banks have been reined in better than anywhere else, contrarily to repute). It could be tried in other countries. It is too bad that a call to direct democracy has not been made the main axis of the Scottish Independence referendum.

But it is not too late for more local entities to shake the slavery to extreme finance.

A last hilarious note about Macron. When “Macron” was named finance dictator of France, I could not believe it. Macro, in French “Macron”, was one of Tiberius sidekicks. Macron, a Roman prodigy similar to the French Macron, organized emperor Tiberius’ passing, and nominated Caligula. According to Tacitus and Suetonius, Tiberius was in no hurry to depart this world, and Macron, in the end, smothered the old Princeps below blankets and pillows.

But do not expect any of the French intelligentsia to react to this amusing historical connection: France used to be a place of high esprit and culture, but now it’s fading fast (with the USA) in the PISA OCDE classification of 65 countries. (Latest results: PISA 2012.)

In both the case of France and the USA, it was found that the elites themselves (the top fifth) are sinking fast in their ability to hold a rational discourse in math, science and reading. The differences are not small: Chinese students were found to be three years ahead of their somewhat lamentable Franco-American colleagues.

Moral, and then mental degeneracy has proven a strong force, throughout history. The Greco-Roman empire went down that way. So did the Jin and Song dynasties, let alone the Baghdad Caliphate.

So long live the prodigiously immoral Macron, fit for a brainless age, Caligula should be around the corner.

Patrice Ayme’