Must A Reserve Currency Explode The Trade Balance? No! Just Look! Also: Avoiding Slavery Is No Socialism!

Established economists say that Trump doesn’t understand the nature of the dollar: its status as world reserve currency causes a trade deficit for the USA. Really? It takes one look at one graph, while knowing the USA conspired to make the dollar official world currency in 1944. (And when the French Dominique Strauss Kahn tried otherwise, as head of IMF, he soon fell to a huge sex prosecution, out of which nothing came, except the destruction of his career. That would teach all those who, like DSK, pretend to follow the exact same idea Lord Keynes had in 1944… when Keynes chaired the Bretton Woods conference!) WTF? 

I have a Facebook friend who is a fanatical anti-Trump, she retweets anti-Trump material frequently. 2 days ago she put out 2 posts (retweeting from overseas oversea junk) which were deeply offensive. One extolled a woman cop killer; the young mom he had killed was unarmed; the other compared Trump to Hitler, and emanated from Germany, supporting whom I call Merkler (for her economic war against the Greeks and others… which has killed many).

My friend didn’t know her (French) jailbreaker hero was an unarmed-woman-officer killer (because my friend doesn’t know much about Europe). Neither did my friend, who has socialist pretentions, know Merkel was a fascist exploiter hiding under a “left” immigration policy (importing slaves to better exploit the working class). My friend took down both posts (and my smart comments, unfortunately!). We are still friends. Some of the political hysteria is just misunderstanding. For example, do conventional economists misunderstand what causes the deficit? If we can’t learn to live with (some) intolerance, we aren’t tolerant.

Another friend, an economist objected to my playing dumb in economic matters. I had asserted there was no connection between reserve status and deficit (contrarily to what self-declared “liberal” economists say). To the price of starting a squirmish with dropping a thermonuclear warhead on the opposition, here is the proof:

Those Who Brought You Reagan, Brought You the Trade Deficit. Economists of the Clinton-Obama persuasion say the dollar as reserve caused the deficit. This is obviously false: the dollar has been a reserve currency for about a century, and officially since 1944. However, there was no sizable deficit before Reagan. Reagan was a tool of global plutocrats, so the deficit exploded under him, right away. He was succeeded by G. Bush, who knew all too well where real power was an re-established the balance. But then came the stooges of plutocracy, and they let the deficit fly, as their masters told them to. The idea was to weaken American US unions, workers, and citizenry.

Eugen Roden wrote:

“Even if it is hard to believe, that you Patrice don’t understand how reserve currency will necessarily create deficit, I will do my best to explain to you and to your followers in a very easy way, why [the status of the dollar as] reserve currency necessarily creates deficit in US.

Reserve currency means,  that the currency is saved in other countries, than [the] country of its origin. It can be done by private corporations or public entities,  or even private individuals, who prefer to hold the reserve currency, as media of savings, because of the trust [they have] in it, compared to the local currency.  By doing so, they create demand for the money itself, as if it would be commodity or item of value by itself. And the truth is the reserve currency is an item of value, because of the trust people all over the world put in it. This trust is result of long history of reserve currency origin country’s military dominance,  democratic political system, free competitive market economy and unchallenged right for private property and wealth. China, even with its size of economy, (a bigger economy than that of US, not in nominal but real terms) doesn’t have a reserve currency, because it couldn’t create the trust in its sincerity in most of the above mentioned issues.  Europe succeeded only partly in making the Euro a reserve currency, because of its history of because of the world wars it initiated, and their economic consequences on Europe. Even 70 years of peace was not enough to create enough trust in Europe, to make from its currency a reserve currency comparable to US dollar, which has a history of continuous respect for the values mentioned above, since its declaration of independence.

The need for reserve currency exists,  to create trust in local currencies, based on these reserves. Just as in the past precious metal reserves, like gold or silver, made the currencies trustworthy, today holding of US dollars makes local currencies trustworthy.

But then if there is demand for reserve currency,  not as media of exchange, but as value holding item, its price, or exchange value will be influenced by this demand, without the question if exists enough additional production capacity to satisfy the value of potential demand that reserve currency promises. But then the relative prices in the country of origin of reserve currency,  have to be higher than in countries who accumulate the reserve currency, that has to create surplus in trade with reserve currency origin country, to be capable to accumulate these reserves. Such a surplus can be created only if the local currency value is undervalued compared to the reserve currency. Then the other side of this surplus has to be the deficit of the reserve currency origin country.”

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Too Much Reserve Makes You Deficient?

The argument seems partially to be that, to create a store of dollars overseas, one needs to send said dollars there, to start with: a deficit. The graph of the deficit from the Federal Reserve which I put on top shows this is not correct: a continual flow of dollars is not needed to entertain a stash. A stash is a stash, it’s not a current.

OK, so we need X amount of dollars to create an overseas dollars stash. Say that stash is $10 trillion (a large overestimate). That’s 25 years at the present rate of deficit with China alone. And the stash existed before, it started before 1945. And also 4 trillion dollars of the stash is unpaid taxes by US corporations…

Moreover, consider, say, Argentina. It has a dollar stash. However the US has long exported cars to Argentina, so how did the stash develop? Through plutocratic mechanisms involving either tax cheating (laundered Argentine currency) or US plutocrats buying vast tracts of the country (also done in Chili).

In any case, the fact that the US dollar is considered reserve doesn’t mean one needs to have a deficit! And the fact is the US has been reserve since 1944 (after cheating Lord Keynes who didn’t want the $ as reserve, and headed Bretton Woods, but documents were switched!) There was no deficit for decades! And the fact is the massive deficit with China and Germany, or Ireland are recent. And the fact is, Germany has used its bankrupt small banks to self-finance its massive export machine, even within Europe…

And the fact is, the industrial core of the USA in the Middle West, got gutted, although it had a large educated population, and lots of fossil fuel energy. I say it got gutted precisely because it was educated (and thus a risk). Unions used to be hyper powerful in the USA, now they are near nothing…

Trade is good, exporting work, exporting ALL work, is bad… Yes, Merkler, 44% unemployment in Greece thanks to YOUR policies, was a terrible thing. Yes, the Greek government was an accomplice, an accomplice of you and your ilk. But We The People of Greece was innocent.

There are legal incentives to exporting job overseas, because corporate plutocrats told politicians to pass such friendly laws: watch how wealthy the Clintons are. And now the Bamas. Bahamas Bamas: a jungle rhythm. Main offenders in trade should be punished, until they cease and desist:

• China/Hong Kong exported to the US 3 times as much as it imported from the US.
• Japan exported to the US 2.2 times as much as it imported.
• Germany exported to the US 2.2 times as much as it imported.
• Ireland “exported” to the US 32 times as much as France, per capita, all of it being tax evasion by US corporations.

Notice that the French Republic should not save Merkler’s skin: whereas Europe didn’t have the muster to correct the exporting and exploiting ways of Merkler’s Germany, Trump does, and Southern Europe (that includes France, which is both northern and southern…) should enjoy the shooting down of the Merkler vulture by Trump, hopefully ending the austerity which has, and is destroying Europe (see Brexit).

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Krugman, Smelling Blood In Global Plutocratic Waters, Turning “Socialist”?

Krugman blocked and banned my comments for years, presumably because they were “socialist” (what else? I supported Sanders, Krugman dined with the devils, including Obama and Clinton, and took systematically anti-“socialist” position). But now he is changing. Suddenly, “Radical Democrats Are Pretty Reasonable“, opines Paul.

A “Socialist” newcomer young woman defeated the fourth ranking democrat in Congress in New York.

“Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s upset primary victory has produced a huge amount of punditry about the supposed radicalization of the Democratic party, how it’s going to hurt the party because her positions won’t sell in the Midwest… But I haven’t seen much about the substance of the policies she advocates, which on economics are mainly Medicare for All and a federal job guarantee.

So here’s what you should know: the policy ideas are definitely bold, and you can make some substantive arguments against them. But they aren’t crazy. By contrast, the ideas of Tea Party Republicans are crazy…

Ocasio-Cortez’s positions: Medicare for all is a deliberately ambiguous phrase, but in practice probably wouldn’t mean pushing everyone into a single-payer system. Instead, it would mean allowing individuals and employers to buy into Medicare – basically a big public option. That’s really not radical at all.”

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A hefty minimum wage is not a question of having it more social, it’s a question of avoiding a slave society:

Medicare for all was proposed by yours truly, more than a decade ago: the idea is to open Medicare to all… As long as they pay the cost of insuring themselves. As Medicare is not for profit and is huge (economies of scale), it would be cheaper than ANY private health plan. So Medicare for All would quickly devour for profit healthcare gouging. My friend Obama meekly proposed it to his cabinet, which unanimously rejected it in favor of giving subsidies to healthcare billionaires, their sponsors (“Romneycare aka, Obamacare”).

Employment for all, as presently done in the USA is a good thing… Except if people work for free, in which case that’s called slavery. Thus, to avoid slavery, a hefty minimum wage insuring minimum living standards, in particular the capability of affording a home. In places like Oakland, California, or cities around, with all those jobs, a minimum one bedroom is $3,000 a month. That’s 36K a year. Cities around Oakland are instituting a minimum wage of $15. That boils down to 30K a year, working full-time, 2,000 hours a year: not enough to afford a roof! Thus college professors in San Jose have been observed, sleeping in cars….

$15 an hour is not socialism, it’s not even, a realistic minimum wage in the most booming part of the US. It is just an effort to avoid a slave society.

We are all socialist, just as we are all progressive. Just as we have to be somewhat conservative (to save the planet). The only question is how much. Not whether. 
Patrice Ayme

EURO CHEAT: German Hidden Banks Subsidies Destroy Europe!

More generally, the collapse of the European economy is caused by too much economic “liberalism”, while the rest of the world does the opposite, by providing strategic state help. This dichotomy happens within the Euro zone itself, where Germany found a trick to provide stealthy government help.

Abstract: The collapse of industrial production in France, Italy and Spain, while it soared in Germany, under the Euro regime, has a simple technical explanation. Using bankrupt banks, Germany subsidizes massively its industry. However, under vicious European Union rules, Germany insists that countries other than Germany do not get any STATE subsidies… while Germany enjoys them quietly. This cannot be allowed to go on.

The existence of a, de facto, common currency is nothing new in Europe: it was practiced during most of the last 2,000 years. It is a drastic economic advantage. Thus, so it should be with the Euro. However the present unfair and imbalanced German practice is unsustainable. The solution is for the rest of Europe to get state help, just as Germany, Japan, China, the USA and the UK (massive quantitative easing and other interventions), and also India, do: extend state subsidies to non-German Euro nations. (Either by creating banks similar to the bankrupt state supported German banks, as used to exist in France, or by some other subsidies…)

Several facts can be observed: first that the fossil fuel countries, Canada, US, Australia, did pretty well, thanks to their smothering of the planet in compensation for them making lots of money (figuratively or not). Second, that the Euro has become a Germany-first, a über alles Germany device. As I explained, that’s caused by bankrupt banks, which can lend to small, crucial industries, while being fed by state subsidies…

***

French presidential elections are 3 weeks away. Marine Le Pen wants to leave the Euro, and the European Union (however, she also intent to change to a Swiss-like system of plebiscites, so she would submit any big change to these). Marine Le Pen was received both by Putin and the presidents of Chad and Lebanon.

Many opinion leaders have clamored for years to destroy the Euro, such as the well-known establishment propagandist Paul Krugman. Except for howling together, the reasoning is not obvious. The anti-Europeans’ basic argument is that various economies need to devalue their currencies at different rates, because otherwise they won’t change.

On this site Picard 578 and Lovell said:”The problem of the Euro is its existence”. I disagree: common currencies are very advantageous, but this one has a poisonous hook inside.

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Past Currency Problems: Rome, China, Europe:

It is true that the gigantic Roman empire ran into a currency problem, characterized superficially both by dearth of fiduciary currency and inflation. One reason was the weakening of the application of Roman Civil law by centuries of fascism. Another is that, like China, the Romans did not have enough precious metals (anymore: they had exhausted the mines).

The Franks solved both problems: they yanked law enforcement from the Roman Catholic bishops, re-establishing good old fashion cruel punishments for malefactors: currency counterfeiters were slowly boiled to death, alive, in special long cages where they slowly cooking twitching bodies could contribute to leaving a lasting impression to the obtuse masses.

The other way the Franks solved the problem of precious metals was by conquering Eastern Europe, something the Romans (except for imperators Caesar and Trajan) had not even envisioned. There were abundant silver mines in Eastern Europe. (The Chinese solved, sort of, their currency problem with paper currency. That lasted seven centuries, until collapse of the Yuans under hyperinflation. The Ming and Manchus got Bolivian silver from Bolivia, through the Philippines held Spain.

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Common European Currencies Never A Problem:

When there is no common currency, there is no common trade..Clearly common currency collapse contributed to the fall of the Rome of the Third and Fifth centuries, and the Roman Catholic bishop government of around 400 CE. The same holds for the Yuan. The Chinese used cumbersome copper as precious metal, or potentially worthless paper. When people cheated with currency in 400 CE Rome, the local bishop from the local plutocratic family, would admonish them. Six centuries later, the Franks had them bathe in boiling water, wine or oil.

Charlemagne was actually Roman EMPEROR. The currency system he refurbished had existed for 8 centuries and would exist for centuries more. Although various mints did various things, there was interoperability of the coins.

The Franks did re-establish the Roman currency, both by ferocious enforcement of the law, and by making the coins themselves more valuable (by augmenting their precious metal content).

From 650 CE to 1000 CE, temperature increases of the Middle Age Warming and the re-establishment of a stronger state (very strong in 800 CE, when the Roman empire was officially “renovated”, much more fragmented later in West Francia) brought more than a doubling of the population of Europe (from 18.5 million to 39 million). In spite of all the disturbances and massacres caused by invasions of rabid, voracious, pitiless Saracens, Vikings and Magyars.

Although West Francia (present day occidental two-thirds of France) was cut up in 60 local states (some duchies, some counties, some free cities, some church states), after the death of emperor Charles the Bald, counterfeiters were boiled all over, and thus (roughly) the same currency worked in northern Germany, Rome, or Austria.

I insist on this for good reason: the government of Roman bishops of 400 CE had decided, as the good Christians they were, not to apply the death penalty anymore for highwaymen. Result: the currency became extremely fake, and the road extremely unsafe. Too much goodness leads to too much crime for civilization to keep on operating. This is what the government of bishops of 400 CE proved (at the same time, realism forced the bishops to agree to let the Franks receive military control of three Roman provinces, including Gallia and Germania).

Charlemagne was Imperator Romanorum (Emperor of the Romans, approved by Constantinople, Oriental Rome). The Franks viewed Rome as “renovated”, but the fact is Roman civil law, Roman roads, and Roman currency had survived the collapse of the Roman state in the Fifth century (when it was progressively replaced by the imperators/elected kings of the Franks). The Belgian historian Pirenne suggested that it is the rise of the Muslim Caliphate which really caused a problem. That’s pretty much obvious as Islam was explicitly contrived to destroy the Greco-Roman state, promptly conquered more than half of it, by the sword, in 80 years, and then embargoed the rest!

In any case, the pure gold Roman Solidus was still used in 1000 CE, and the basic coin was still the Denarius (pfennig, penny, French “denier”). England, not yet part of the empire in 800 CE was still part of the currency system. Although England had 70 mints then, the English penny paid two-third of one basic worker’s day, same as on the other side of the Channel. As it took months to travel across Europe, the fact that there were many local mints does not mean that the (“Renovated”) Roman currency could not be viewed as global.

Charlemagne was the first Roman emperor who was officially sacred by the Pope. Hence the notion of “Holy” Roman empire, which surface several centuries later. By 1500, a common central European (Holy Roman-German currency) appeared: the Thaler (hence the word “Dollar”). The Thaler was used for nearly four centuries… until 1873, when Bismarck’s imperial maneuvering eradicated it…)

Europe had common currency before: the Thaler, covering Mittel Europa, lasted four centuries.

The Euro and EU intervention in economy is well beyond just having a common currency. For example it prevents to re-establish order in Africa, because France does that, France then gets punished for it in diverse ways, including by having not enough money for the rest of her economy. The proper usage would be to subtract France/Europe defense from deficit computations and, more generally, spending.

In particular money and plotting should have been spent as needed to establish a proper democracy and state backing it up, in Libya. Same for all subsahelian countries (Mali, Chad, etc.)

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Germany Banking Subsidy Trick:

Thousands of medium German banks are crucial to finance the “middleling” German companies (of the “Mittelstand”) which produce crucial equipment for larger companies (say specialized brakes for fancy cars, or specialized LED lights used in characteristic German cars like my own). Such companies can then evolve and produce in a very protected, stable environment, favorable to apprenticeship.

It is a good system.

Too bad other countries are not allowed to have one too. To have one, other countries would have to massively invest, in full, enormous catastrophic deficit mode, before then going-on in a chronic deficit mode (as Germany presently does).

Weirdly, I am the only one to talk about this.

By the way, China’s local communities (sometimes cities with 25 million people…) do the same as Germany: massive deficit spending to sustain massive local industrialization. Right, the Chinese system is suffering from terminal debt. However, the fact is Chinese industry is thriving and expanding worldwide (Example: a Chinese drone company has a contract for taxi drones in Dubai, to operate in a few months…).

Meanwhile, French industry has collapsed, most governmental help being outlawed by European institutions (which did not discover the German trick therein described…) 

Thus General Electric, saved by 60 billion dollars from Obama, was able to swallow its French competitor, with Brussels’ benediction… That was helped by US “Justice” condemning said French competitor to a billion dollar fine, for… alleged corruption in Indonesia… The European Union has prevented its actors to act dirty. Except for those, like Germany, which play dirty.  

Goodness is always last to play dirty, by definition. However, if goodness never plays dirty in the end, goodness will be devoured by badness, malefaction. Voltaire recommended that we “ought to crush infamy”. That means not turning a blind eye towards those who exploit the rest of the world, just because we are good, and aspire to goodness. Now more than ever.

Patrice Ayme’

Brexit Idiocy In One Picture

Hard core Brexit idiots pontificate that they will renew their ties with the British Commonwealth and the USA. As if the quaint British monarchy imported from the Netherlands had anything in common with the hyper violent, domineering American republic, a country of immigrants, a world country, the world’s hyper power, which can purchase anything… but a soul, and a past it is ready to admit it had. The proud British are, relatively speaking, Europeans, and they don’t even know it.

Here is the European situation, the web of relationships, with the spider in the center, depicted with the most basic mathematics, set theory. I present to you the spider and the fly:

The Situation Is Even More Complicated Than That: Switzerland, For Example, Has More Than 600 “Bilateral” Treaties With The European Union, And Has To Respect Free Circulation Of European Citizens.

[Nota Bene: the GDP numbers above, due to the tremendous immigration of people and capital into the United Kingdom, the UK, due to the laxity of France and Germany, brought an extreme overvaluation of the British Pound, and a swelling of all things British. This house of cards is collapsing: British GDP has now shrunk below French GDP, in barely more than two weeks…]

Switzerland voted against the Free Circulation Of European Citizens, including Croatians, in winter 2014. Some sanctions were applied by the EU on an aghast Switzerland, the next day. However, Switzerland still has to accept everybody. Should it change that requirement, Italy, France and Germany would block the borders, and let Switzerland die. Really, not kidding: Switzerland has only one refinery, producing 25% of Swiss fossil fuels, and it gets all its raw petroleum through a pipeline, from Marseilles, France… Thus, Switzerland will have to vote again. Or learn to ride horses again.

Why is such ferocity welcome in enforcing European unity and free circulation? Simple: Enforcing cogent, fully informed reason upon, and by, We The People, is the best way to avoid war. Thus war tends to happen when unexpected.

Europeans have bent over backwards frantically for twenty years to accommodate increasingly crazed, selfish, grotesque, hypernationalist British demands.  The British thanked the rest of Europe by an insulting vote. (Remark: the Swiss referendum was just about refusing the diktat of free circulation of any EU citizen; it was NOT about rejecting the 666 treaties with Europe… Although of course, it could have this consequence… Nor, a fortiori, the European Union )

Right now Europe is suffering from three mentalities:

1. The first problematic mentality was English sabotage. The English entered the “ever closer Union” and decided it was just a free trade “club”. Basically NAFTA. That was a lie, a breach of trust, and a betrayal. No wonder so many European leaders are keen to get Brexit done. For twenty years, English governments have prevented the built-up, in-depth of European laws and institutions. Instead of electing the head of the European Administration (“Commission”)  directly, by the People’s vote, one still uses the ancient system of nomination by the heads of governments. That sort of undemocratic blockage was the work of English Europhobes, mostly.

Fanatic Brexiters insist they never voted for a European “Superstate”. That is not just a total lie, but it means they want Europeans, and their ex-colonies and present allies, to be ruled by Superstates (USA, Russia, India, China).

2. The second problematic mentality is the fact that the European defense system is mostly operated by the French Republic, which is supposed to pay for it, while leaving its deficit below 3%. Logically, French tanks should first roll through Brussels, Luxembourg, Belgium, Lichtenstein, while addressing an ultimatum to Eurozone member Ireland, and force all these miscreants to pay taxes. (Since Germany has the same problem as its sister republic, France, it would rather applaud the usage of force… which is exactly what both of them did, with the help of Italy, to pressure Switzerland that way… It helped that the latter was not a founding member of the EU, and a rather small fish.)

What about the refugee crisis? Well, go back 17 centuries: the Goths, fleeing the Huns, invaded the Roman empire. Initially, the Goths came as refugees, and were allowed in. Later, even more Goths, now fully armed, came in, and thew Roman Empire said no. The solution? Have an army strong enough to kill the Huns. This was finally done in France, 80 years alter. First the inhabitants of Orleans inflicted a defeat on the Huns, inside the city itself. Then the Franks shadowed and harassed the retreating giant host of the Huns. That gave enough time for the Roman Field army headed by Aetius and to the Visigothic army to join the fray. Then the Huns got crushed in the titanic battle of the Catalaunian Plain. Having suffered tens of thousands of dead, if not hundreds of thousands (the number 300,000 has been advanced by sources), the spirit of the Huns was broken. Just as that of the Nazis in May 1945.

That was how to handle Assad: destroy him and his family, occupy Syria, re-establish secular, republican order. And it was not to the Russians or the Americans to do that, but to the Europeans. But there is no European army, no European will. Just European wealth for the world to steal. And for this, the ectoplasmic Britons are much to blame.: did they not learn anything from the Kaiser and his spiritual son Hitler?

As a result of formidable austerity imposed on France, the French defense system is woefully insufficient, although not quite as moribund as the British one. This is a grave situation in several ways: first it weakens the West enormously. Secondly it makes the USA more dominant than ever in defense. And thus, it augments the aura and diplomatic might of the USA in all matters, including the economic one… which pays for defense.

3. The third problematic mentality is indeed austerity itself. It was imposed by a coalition of conservatives and the evil influence of the ruling plutocracy. Great Britain saw less of it, thanks to the plutocratically owned tabloids, and the fact that plutocracy has made the wealthiest in Britain so much wealthier. Austerity is no less than a complete plutocratic plot, and a direct consequence of not taxing the wealthiest enough to spare us being in their debt.

So deep has the propaganda been for the plutocrats whom have made us in their debt, that only now the German SPD seems to realize that austerity is a plot of the wealthy. The “S” in SPD is for “Social”: Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, SPD… The SPD is in coalition with the German Conservatives, who are white-hot, foaming at the mouth demanding ever more austerity (especially from other Europeans… It’s understandable as Germany is in a virtuous circle presently…)

Brexit can potentially break that logjam. First, British sabotage of the “Ever Closer Union” will stop. Appropriate superstate structures could now be erected, as needed… Secondly, the austerity party in the EU, right now led by Britain and Germany, is going to be halved. Thus one can hope that the French, these austerity specialists since 1932, will snap out of their madness, and lead a revolt against the austerity party. Simple: the European Union has just do what the USA has done under Obama. The Federal deficits amounts to something around 100% of US GDP (if one adds Quantitative Easing, an unusual addition, not usually made for obvious, vicious reasons, to the official deficits).

Will Europeans understand this?

Meanwhile, it’s fun to see the Brexiters struggle with the spider web above. Good luck coming out, to sink in the ocean…

Patrice Ayme’

 

Long Live The Euro: 3) Exiting By The Top

“SORTIR PAR LE HAUT”:

The Euro is one of the elements necessary to unify France and Germany. Fully constructing the supporting apparatus the Euro needs, entails, by itself, an entire hierarchy of unification projects subordinated to it.

So the problems the Euro creates are supposed to appear, and being solved, thereafter. How? By “coming out on top”. Division and bitterness, is coming on the bottom. Coming out on top means higher ideas, unification, harmony.

To reconstruct a European state is as if one were constructing a cathedral: one has to do the following. One decides to build it, and then make it so. Cathedral construction was modified, as needed. Arches were progressively added, and, when problems were found, they were fixed. When it was discovered that the gigantic Amiens cathedral was bulging out, and was going to collapse, and enormous iron belt was added to its waist. It survived the world wars.

Paris had an enormous Roman cathedral for nearly a millennium. However, in the Twelfth Century, Parisians decided that, instead of refurbishing it once again, and expanding it, it would be better to build an entire new cathedral in what was known then as the “Frankish style”. The church leaders explicitly stated this as a technological project to awe the masses, and instruct the plutocrats as to the new possibilities technology offered. So the old cathedral was demolished, and the present one built. (There are no picture of the previous building, it stood fifty meters west of the present one.)

What present day, patritotic Europeans do not want to see again:

By 1200 CE, The Renovated Roman Empire of the Franks Had Become A Big Disunited Mess. Wars Blossomed All Over

One thing can be picked up from the map: it is the French themselves, the Western Franks, those based around Paris, who created the mess, by insisting on going their own way, and that everybody had the right to go their own way.

Charlemagne himself had launched the way towards that mess: he let Venice stay sort-of independent (although the Frankish empire needed Venice’s fleet), and then Charlemagne outright created the Papal States (by giving territories to the Pope upon which he could exert material power).

It is finally Francois I who understood that France and Germany had to be unified again. But, although he had been elected king of France (by the kingdom’s council), he failed in the 1519 CE election as Roman-German emperor.

Instead, Spain, Germany and Italy (plus the Americas) got united. The result was nearly 200 years of war between France and Spain, which created the independent, tolerant, somewhat republican Netherlands, while finishing with still another world war, the War of the Spanish Succession, which France barely won (losing territory in the process, and fostering British and Dutch power).

By then the Netherlands, Britain and France, the former two created by the latter, and long the same polity, were at each other’s throats. To win, Britain heavily financed Prussia, while France enjoyed a succession of ill advised dictators (Louis XIV, Louis XV, Napoleon).

Clearly one should go back to basic principles:

Europe Was A Creation Of The Franks, Not Just As A State, But As A Concept:

The power, and vision, of the Franks created Europe. It was originally mostly motivated by survival, and the will to set right was Late Romans had set wrong.

We actually know enough about the rise of Frankish power to discern the philosophies at work. Aetius, a Roman commander-in-chief who had been brought up (from an exchange/hostage program) among the Huns all too long, naturally used the Huns all too much. After Aetius was assassinated in one of these conspiracies Late Rome was rife with, his closest collaborators took over. They switched back to the 150 year old alliance with the Federated Franks, the fiercest enemy of the Huns (who thereafter disappear from history).

Europe is a modern concept created by the Franks anew in the Eighth Century; the original Europe, in the Eighth Century BCE, 16 centuries earlier, designated continental Greece. But that name, itself, the name of a Princess, was an older myth which acknowledged the debt Greece had to Phoenicia (nowadays Lebanon, and, more generally, the Middle East).

If one wants to build something great, one has to start somewhere. A European currency exists, and France and Germany constitute an “optimal currency area”, all by themselves. They have very similar republics. Both have a very high minimum wage, German police can pursue thugs inside France at will (and reciprocally). Both consult continually, Germany has agreed to help France’s wars in a supportive role.

In truth, Germany has become France, after around two centuries of error under Prussian misguidance.

So what are the problems with the common currency? Well, all these problems it was supposed to bring. A first one, of course, is the problem of making a Banking Union. The situation there is quite complex, yet unification is under way: the 200 largest banks are supposed to be inspected (smaller banks are crucial to the German economy, but they tend to be bankrupt, so they have been spared the present inspection regime).

What is there not to like? Well, don’t ask American plutocrats and their obsequious servants; they will stat to recite again Friedman’s hare-brained, shallow and disingenuous arguments.

Finally all what the American plutocrats and their butlers have to stay is that, never, ever, could France and Germany get unified again, so they could not possibly share a common currency (aside from the dollar, which American plutocrats control, through their rogue financial system). What they should stay, if the truth was their goal, is that they dread an ever greater unification of France and Germany.

First, because they won’t control it as readily. Secondly, because of the tradition of revolution, for which France, in particular, is known.

Civilization means revolutions, plutocracy, its obsequious servants and greedy opportunists, hate both. Thus they hate European Unification.

Why is the USA different? Simple: countries such as the USA, Canada, Australia are gigantic, and full of recent immigrants. Recent immigrants in a giant country can always go somewhere else, where construction, expansion, conquest, fracking, tar sands, coal and iron ore, lithium, what-not, is going on. No such possibilities in Europe, or then tightly regulated.

Recent immigrants are also anxious not to be seen whining, complaining, talking back, agitating, rebelling, lest they be not trusted anymore. In countries such as France, or Greece, if you do NOT whine, complain, talk back, argue, rebel, it is the exact way around: it is a servile, anxious to please, fit and conform attitude, which is not trusted.

One could see this with Obama: for years, it was said by his opponents that he was not a genuine American. Actually, he was not even an American, they asserted. The American Constitution invites this: it distinguishes American-born Americans, and immigrants (the French and now German Constitutions do not). An immigrant American cannot be elected president.

Discrimination is more American than mother or apple pie. Anxious to conform, American Jews, such as Milton Friedman, who could not even bother to express concern on behalf of their brethren while they were in danger of being exterminated, now have the infuriating impudence to teach us about strife being hindered by division. Verily, some people learned nothing, and are the lowest of the low.

So should the French and the Germans have a common currency? Well, in a sense, they used to have one, what was called “Euro-dollars”. The dollar, was, de facto, Europe’s common currency.

France and Germany do not discriminate against their citizens on ground of their origins. This is one of many ways in which France and Germany are similar. Why so similar? Well, they spend a lot of thinking finding out which French, or German qualities, laws, regulations, habits, appreciations, they should adopt.

France and Germany are now closer in spirit with each other than they are with the USA. So they should have rejected the dollar as a common currency, and get their own, according to the very argument the Euro haters have been using. And that’s exactly what they did.

Patrice Ayme’

Long Live The Euro: 2) Friedman Ignorant Anti-Euro Rant

Is Europe an “optimum currency area”? Milton Friedman believed it was not, and he gave apparently cogent, and now much repeated reasons, why it was not. However one should remember that appearances are deceiving, the most venomous snakes look like pretty leaves. Some people do not know how to add, but they claim they can multiply.

American economist have been lying, they are paid to lie, because their lies in economy give justification to otherwise unjustifiable policies. The policies of the USA have been, overall comfortable: having eliminated the Natives, American and Canadians, like the Australians, enjoy entire continents for themselves, far removed from the rest of the world, and its often crowed, overwhelmed realities.

Whereas France is in a different situation. French major policies have not been comfortable, since 360 CE (when the elite Parisian legions revolted, refused to leave France, and proclaimed the Caesar Julian, Augustus; the central government in Constantinople was not happy, and those in-between, distinctly uncomfortable).

France did not just declare war to the Nazis in the 1930s, when the USA was busy doing profitable business with them. France has been fighting Islamists since 721 CE (before that the Franks’ James Bonds were spying on said Islamists in the Middle East).

The war with the Islamists requires much power and determination. Here is a picture from April 2015, taken at night, with a high resolution radar. The famous Second Foreign Parachute Regiment (2 REP) is dropping at night on the Salvador Pass, in the middle of the Sahara, at the Libya-Niger border. It then engaged Islamists in combat:

Reality Check: Economics Serves War. Combat In More Than Half A Dozen Countries Costs France Beaucoup Euros

[The dots are French soldiers, and equipment, not trees. The area is the most barren desert on Earth.]

Here is Milton Friedman, that supposedly great economist, as we will see a great liar, a little man, a European war lover, in the conclusion of his famous essay supposedly demolishing the Euro. That essay is oft-repeated with glee since, by pseudo-”liberal” luminaries such as Paul Krugman, and, in general, all faithful, one should even say, obsequious, servants of Uncle Sam:

“The European Commission based in Brussels, indeed, spends a small fraction of the total spent by governments in the member countries. They, not the European Union’s bureaucracies, are the important political entities. Moreover, regulation of industrial and employment practices is more extensive than in the United States, and differs far more from country to country than from American state to American state. As a result, wages and prices in Europe are more rigid, and labor less mobile. In those circumstances, flexible exchange rates provide an extremely useful adjustment mechanism.

If one country is affected by negative shocks that call for, say, lower wages relative to other countries, that can be achieved by a change in one price, the exchange rate, rather than by requiring changes in thousands on thousands of separate wage rates, or the emigration of labor. The hardships imposed on France by its “franc fort” policy illustrate the cost of a politically inspired determination not to use the exchange rate to adjust to the impact of German unification. Britain’s economic growth after it abandoned the European Exchange Rate Mechanism a few years ago to refloat the pound illustrates the effectiveness of the exchange rate as an adjustment mechanism.”

This sounds all very smart, but, it’s mostly poorly informed BS. When one knows enough, and when one is in a mood favorable to European Unification, Milton Friedman just sound like a highly paid prostitute. What he sells is lies.

Examples of Friedman ignorance, or deliberate lying:

1. The member countries are more important, true, but only to some extent.Even France and Germany are tied up by the various European institutions, because the latter are part of the member countries national laws (that’s called the Single European Act). So France, for example, cannot contradict the European Court of Justice, without contradicting the FRENCH Constitution.
2. Member countries are of three types: great powers (France, Germany, Britain), middle powers (Spain, Italy, Poland; Italy is a middle power because its north is more Franco-German than Sicilian, so it’s de facto divided; Spain has the same problem: Catalonia historically is more French, or Roman, than Spanish). And then small powers. Small powers can stand in the way, but not for long (Greece being the best example).
3. That “regulation of industrial and employment practices… differs far more from country to country than from American state to American state” is simply, a lie. A lie disguised as a truth. European regulations are extremely similar to each other, and very far from the American ones. The exception is Great Britain, which asked for an exemption, and got it.
4. Labor is less mobile in Europe, because Europe is made of different nations talking different versions of English.
5. “If one country is affected with negative shocks”: the entire idea of Europe, Friedman, is to have no more “negative shocks”.
6. When Friedman talks of France, he brays like an ass. The strong Franc policy is an atavism of France. France invented the strong currency thing, like 12 centuries ago. Those who did not believe in it, were boiled in wine. Alive. France applied it in the 1920s and 1930s, when the USA, the UK, Germany, and other critters tried to devaluate themselves to health (some got mad in the process). The strong Franc is a case of Germany coming to think like France, not conversely. (True France devalued in the 1960s, but then Germany wrote off more than half of its debt, with the benediction of its allies, in the 1950s.)
7. The United Kingdom has been highly successful with its currency policies in the 1990s, and after 2008. However that is, first of all, because enough money was provided to run the economy. Although having a national currency allowed it to do so, currency independence is neither necessary, nor sufficient.
8. Wages, prices, regulations, national laws are under convergence in Europe. Recently Germany finally imitated France and introduced a high minimum wage. German workers are now for the first time as expensive as French workers.
9. Friedman ignores ways in which European countries are more similar to each other, than to American states: no death penalty, universal health care, strong privacy laws, labor protection are examples.
10. The important political entities in the Eurozone are France and Germany. United, they form a superpower, especially when adding their automatic influence zone (Austria, The Benelux, Northern Spain, including Catalonia, Northern Italy, and yes, Switzerland). Since May 8, 1945, France and Germany did not have ONE serious differences, and have pursued a steady program of “ever closer union” (to use the language of the European de facto constitution). The heads of France and Germany sit together at the European Parliament, during important events. I believe, and French and German leaders believed

All right, so Friedman does not know what he is talking about.

Friedman also asserts what is well-known, that the Euro is a political project (what he does not say is that it is a French political project, because he is not anxious to spoil his hidden bias with obvious francophobia). Notice that, if some project is mostly driven by politics, that does not mean that it cannot turn out to be economical. Says Friedman:

“The drive for the Euro has been motivated by politics not economics. The aim has been to link Germany and France so closely as to make a future European war impossible, and to set the stage for a federal United States of Europe.”

Of course a USE, a United States of Europe, would be a formidable rival to the USA, and probably less friendly to the people who paid Friedman for his flood of BS venom. Then Friedman, in his conclusion, slips into psycho-politics, a domain which mixes psychology and politics, for which, considering the long list of erroneous ideas I exposed above, he has no expertise whatsoever. Friedman is like somebody who does not know how to add, and now he wants to multiply:

”I believe that adoption of the Euro would have the opposite effect. It would exacerbate political tensions by converting divergent shocks that could have been readily accommodated by exchange rate changes into divisive political issues. Political unity can pave the way for monetary unity. Monetary unity imposed under unfavorable conditions will prove a barrier to the achievement of political unity.”

The truth? Milton Friedman, the economist does not the history of economics. Let me give him a F. F for “Failed”. The Thaler/Tollar, functioned as a currency in Europe for centuries without any political unification.

The truth? France and Germany are unifying ever more. The last divergence was about Libya: France decided to overthrow the dictator there, and Germany did not help. However in Syria, Germany, and Britain are now helping France. Germany is presently sending troops for occupation and control in Mali, because and while France is getting its shock troops for attacks in Syria and Libya.

The truth? When Saddam Hussein, Iraq’s president, decided to switch to the Euro for international transaction, thus exiting Washington’s orbit, Washington decided to make Iraq an example for those who switch to the Euro. The Washington strategists wanted a murderous mess for those who switch to the Euro, and now they have it, and one must them chuckling at night, far from prying eyes. (People like Paul Krugman absolutely refuse to understand any of the preceding, as it would murder their careers to do so. At the very least.)

The truth? In the 1940s, the Nazis and the French resistance, the Free French and the French Republic agreed that “divisive political issues” and “exacerbated tensions” came from “converting divergent shocks”. To eliminate divergent shocks, eliminate differences. In this respect, the Euro is helping France and Germany achieve an ever closer union. (Notwithstanding the sea of lies American economists swim in.)

And it’s all that matter. American Jews such as Friedman, Krugman, and all these other “mans”, should remember that, when “Francia”, the Renovated Roman empire, Franco-Germania, extended from Barcelona to Berlin and beyond, there was no discrimination against the Jews.

Why? Because the very nature of a sustainable, vast empire, is tolerance. So let a common European currency be, it will be more comfortable to divergences, hence ideas.

Patrice Ayme’

Long Live The Euro: 1) Basic History of Romans & Franks

Marine Le Pen proposes to go back to the Franc. This is rather ironical for a nationalist, as the Euro, a French invention, extends French power. However, as it is, in the present international context, the Euro is not functioning optimally, and indeed, seriously hindering the French Republic. Nevertheless, I will demolish the stale anti-Euro arguments imagined by servants of the USA’s plutocratic order, the ones Le Pen is following like a bleating sheep. There is a glaring problem with the Euro, indeed, but not the one talked about by those who dislike the Euro. And that problem has an obvious remedy (long found by the USA), a change in the mandate of the European Central Bank.

In a nutshell, the Euro was conceived as a top down mechanism to force one more unification device inside Europe. The idea is to create problems which only further European unification can solve. The Euro is functioning correctly that way, albeit too slowly. And no wonder: at this point, European finance is led by an ex-partner at Goldman Sachs, a Wall Street bank, under the mandate of making the Euro a store of value (even if kills the European economy). That has to be changed. Along… American lines.

Common Currency Area: Roman Empire Europe, 815 CE. In 1066 CE, the Franks Launched Their Re-Conquest of Great Britain

Those who don’t understand the map above, should not talk about the Euro. As we will see, though, they do talk about the Euro, while not minding whether, or not,France and Germany were actually part of the same polity, for half a millennium.

(For the election of Holy Roman emperor in 1519, the two candidates were the Duke of Burgundy, ruler of the Netherlands and Loraine, and the King of France, Francois I; both were native French speakers, born not far from Paris. The former became emperor as Charles V.)

Those who don’t know European history, including hordes of American pseudo-intellectuals, can only talk foolishly about the Euro. That’s the whole idea: they are supposed to make us all stupid. Once we are stupid enough, we will be eager to serve them, or so they have observed.

That despicable horde of greedy disinformers and impudent liars includes one of the leading (diminutive) bulls, Milton Friedman, bullying his way into a thicket of absurdities which he himself erected.

Friedman learned nothing, absolutely nothing, from the Second World War. That, too, is no accident. It’s a disease frequently found in American Jews. It’s not just the usual francophobia. There is a much more sinister mechanism at work. American Jews are supposed to know nothing much about the Second World War, except there was a big bad “The Holocaust”, and, somehow, the French were involved.

Why so ignorant? Preservation of their own Jewish sanity. If American Jews knew more of the history of the Second World War, they would have to explain why they did nothing, while their brethren and relatives were mass assassinated in Europe.

In particular, American Jews would have to explain why they did nothing, while racist American plutocrats were totally, massively supporting and enabling Hitler and Mussolini. Where was Friedman then? Well, he was employed by Roosevelt’s National Resources Committee (on which he more or less spit later, naturally).

Fortunately the Nazis and their enemies, the French, did learn from WWII what had to be learned. And what they learned, is that they had to unify.

Whereas, it is telling that people who allegedly claim to care about holocausts in Europe, want to divide Europe some more, when it is precisely those divisions which caused the holocausts. The basic flaw of Eastern Europe, where most American Jews are from, is that a divided, divisive, grotesque patchwork of little authorities at each other’s throats, some of this nation, some from another, some from one religion, some from one other, some from a language, or sect, some from another language, or sect.

The first fact of European history is that those who invented the modern usage of the word Europe, the Franks, conquered, unified, and… (to a great extent) created Germany. Including the German language! (The Franks, being themselves Germans, were in excellent position to bark out orders to other Germans.)

To understand the Euro, one has to go all the way to the first Roman State, and why it failed spectacularly:

The Roman empire’s border inside Germany, anchored on the Rhine and Danube, was too long, too fractal, hard to defend. The one and only solution was to conquer all of Europe (and make a short border across the European peninsula). The only Roman who decided to do this, Julius Caesar, was assassinated on the eve of his departure at the head of the most formidable army Rome ever had. After that unfortunate event, the assassination of the leader of the Populares, Roman plutocracy took over enough to impose its agenda. Roman plutocracy was more interested to exploit the Roman people, rather than to call on the Republican spirit to make Rome safer, and more sustainable.

Actually, the history of the next five centuries of Rome showed that Roman plutocracy preferred to be invaded by barbarians, rather than to call back the Roman Republic (analogies with what is going on today, are invited). In the end, it was the Franks who brought back enough Roman republican elements to progress beyond Greco-Roman civilization, and, later, thoroughly destroy the invading Islamists (once again, comparisons with today jump to mind).

As it sank in ever thicker plutocracy, the first Roman State never conquered Germania. The result was half-baked military solutions, beating the German hordes back, each time they raided the much richer Roman empire. It brought constant, expensive wars which Rome could not afford. It also brought catastrophe, when the Huns, charging through the steppe, all the way from Mongolia, pressured the Goths, and the latter decided to take refuge inside the Roman empire. It was a refugee crisis second to none, yet the refugees came in, fully armed and battle trained, and the Christian dazed Roman emperors confronting the problem, may have longed so much towards the apocalypse, promised by the Bible, that they may have spurred it along. (Once again, comparison with today, are invited.)

However, the Franks turned Augustus’ strategy on its head. As soon as it succeeded the first Roman State, the Second Foundation of the Roman State, the empire of the Franks, threw overboard Augustus’ stupid advice, to leave Germania alone. The Franks relentlessly pursued the conquest of all of Germany, and more. It took three centuries. Charlemagne, Carlus Magnus, finished the job.

The preceding map of Europe is not understood by despicable people such as Milton Friedman and his ilk, who are paid not to meditate upon it (supposing they ever came across it). Friedman is paid to entertain the idea that Germany is bad for France.

Low intellectual lives such as Friedman typically don’t know that, under the Franks, freedom of cult was extended to all those who did not have a Cult of Death (thus the safe Sufi practice of Islam was tolerated). They don’t know that the Franks three times, earlier than Charlemagne, broke three massive Islamist, Cult of Death invasions, and that the Damascus Arab Caliphate fell consequently, having lost its armies (750 CE). They know nothing, these haters of Europe, and still they talk, exuding their venom, because they are paid to do so: it helps the American empire and its overlord, global plutocracy, to tell the world and themselves that the Europeans are self-destructive idiots. At this point the Friedman-Krugman venom is feeding Marine Le Pen (who has opportunistically jumped on it; as a Member of the European Parliament, she probably knows better; in any case she could only hope to implement her program if she had an absolute majority at the French National Assembly).

The Roman Currency failed, because Rome did not conquer Eastern Europe:

The Romans ran out of precious metals in the Third Century: using the technology they had, the mines were exhausted. By 300 CE, Rome, under emperors Aurelian and then Diocletian, had switched to a complicated mix of Fiat Currency and command economy. As the state, weakened by plutocracy, was not strong enough, the Roman Fiat Currency suffered inflation (although the Roman gold currency would not, and was used for another millennium).

China had the same problem, lack of precious metals and invented the ultimate Fiat Currency, paper money, in the Seventh Century to circumvent it (Bolivian silver traded by Spain would solve the Chinese problem nearly a millennium later).

The Franks solved the argentum/argent problem the old fashion way: they did what the Romans did not find the force to do. The Franks conquered Eastern Europe, where the silver mines were. Suddenly, there was enough money to operate the economy again, and, by 1000 CE, the Franks were the richest per person and per unit of energy (my AWE), in the world (contrarily to what the “China-on-top” school of thought has it).

[To be continued… Next: Milton Friedman ill-informed, asinine and biased observations about the Euro, and whether the Eurozone is not an “optimum currency area”]

Patrice Ayme’

Selection Of The Dirtiest

Plutocratic Circus Blossoms As Greek Tragedy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

Financial Terror Feeds Terrorism In General:

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

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

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

This, from crooks who fly in private jets.

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

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

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

Patrice Ayme’

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’

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’

AUSTERE BONDAGE TO PLUTOCRACY

GOVERNMENT IS BANK, EMPLOYER, ENTREPRENEUR OF LAST RESORT. No Need To Beg The Rich For Money, Work, Or Anything.

The will to austerity is justified by the on-going financing of governments with the selling of bonds. No economist disagrees with this dark scheme. I propose to turn on its head that Conventional Wisdom, and propose instead that both austerity and bonds are entangled plutocratic conspiracies. They form one of the ways enabling present governance to betray We The People (while hoping to share the spoils, as the Majors, Schroeders, Blairs, and Clintons did).

There is no need to beg the rich for work: if We The People were in command, we could just elect to work on whatever we deem worthy to work on. By just making it so.

RIGGING BONDS FOR PLUTOS, THE INCREDIBLE HEIST:

In the present financial system, governments borrow from those who have money. Then governments turn around and pay back those who have money, making them even richer. This was tried before. At least one Republic came and went that way:

Superb Warning Against Plutocracy: Florence’s Republic Collapse. Basilica (Built 1294-1436) World’s Largest Dome Until Then

All economists, politicians, and opinion makers find borrowing from the rich to make them even richer, entirely normal. They are that despicable, ill-informed, on the take, or astoundingly ignorant and not very smart. Paying interest to the world’s richest men is a sort of inverted tax, the world upside down… until one realizes that this is a marker for plutocracy, and that was is an abyss for democracy, is a summit of achievement in the inverted value world of plutocracy.

In democracy, the richest gets taxed enough so that they won’t become too rich, in plutocracy, the richest, are never rich enough, and the government makes it so.

In other words, Western governments have an official, in-your-face program to make the rich richer. And its name is austerity, and low deficits.

Why low deficits? Because they insure the value of bonds the rich bought in the past.

Do we need this program of borrowing from the rich? No, as it makes the rich richer. Quickly.

Filthy Wealth Is On Its Way Back, Thanks To Rotten Governance

[France has the best statistics. Similar graphs hold for other major Western powers. In the case of the USA, hyper wealth was about half of that of the Europeans in the 19C. See note below on this wealth graph. Plus a quote from Piketty’s “Capital in the 21st Century” where it comes from.]

Are there historical precedents of this financing of the state by the richest? Plenty. Bankers became all powerful, when they financed Francois I and Charles Quint’s war with each other. Francois I’s hotel bills went directly to his bankers, as he went around France and Italy.

Similarly with the Rothschilds when they financed both sides of a whole slew of wars in the decades around 1800.

An even more striking example is the Republic of Florence. Florence, founded by Iulius Caesar, was formally a subset of the Imperium Romanum (Roman Empire; the term “Sacrum”, holy, was introduced later). Florence was one of the many states which, during the Middle Ages, tried to re-establish a Roman style republic.

To defend herself, Florence financed its army with bonds. However that made the rich ever richer, and, after centuries of this, Florence ended as a total plutocracy. Between the revolution that established the Florentine Republic in 1115 CE and the de-establishment of the Republic and appointment of a Duke by the Pope to rule it, in 1532 CE, 417 years elapsed. Nearly twice as long as the USA: view this as a warning.

How come we tolerate this government bond based system to make the rich ever richer? Where are the youth, when a revolution is needed? Oh, sorry, I forgot they were too busy borrowing from their rich masters to finance their own studies: revolution is the first thing they learn they cannot afford.

ALL WE NEED IS WORK

We need work. We need infrastructure. We need massive, cheaper, more ecologically correct housing. We need a new energy system. We need more research in biology (as the thoroughly avoidable Ebola epidemics shows), physics (no replacement for the present, unacceptable base load energy system, worldwide). We need more investment in mass, free education (as was the case in the 40s, 50s, 60s).

We need the government to organize all this employment. To compensate the newly employed citizens, the government could, in exchange, give them money. How? “Print”!

No need to tax. No need to ask plutocrats for money. Because that’s all what the “government bond” system is: begging plutocrats and money managers for money. Begging them some more is not needed. They have been paid enough. Actually, one should stop paying them, in this emergency situation, as soon as they have been compensated for their initial lending: default on the interest.

The entire “austerity” machine consists into claiming that those-who-have-money should be well compensated by governments. It is mission number one.

It is high time to break this vicious circle. Italy should default. France should plan for a 6% deficit.

Instead France is asking the European Commission to plan a 4.5% deficit each year for the next two years. Or do Merkel and the European Commission want to send an air force they don’t have in half a dozen war theaters in Africa and the Middle East?

A study of the German Air Force showed that Germany does not have more than 45 (forty-five) combat aircraft which could be flown (France has hundreds, battle tested over Africa and the Middle East, in the last few decades of uninterrupted warfare). War, and the Military-Industrial complex to support it, is expensive. The weaker one gets, the more the miscreants, imperialists, and the like, will be ready to pounce.

The entire aerospace domain, in countries such as France, Britain and the USA, is the object of more or less obvious subsidies. Why? World War One and Two are the answer. Air supremacy (by France in 1918, the USA and UK in 1945) brought victory.

When people get on a plane, the engines are not made in China, Russia, or North Korea. They are made by French, American and British industry. Exclusively. By itself the Franco-American company CFM International sold 27,000 CFM56 engines (found on more than ten thousand jumbo jets).

After he came to power, President Roosevelt ordered the construction of 24 fleet aircraft carriers. Having devalued the dollar by 33%, he had plenty of money. Just made it so. (The 24 carriers came in handy in 1941; Japan had only 10.)

Now we are engaged in a much worse war, one to save the biosphere, and try to prevent the planet to go Jurassic. Thus governments ought to be supporting not just aerospace, but new energy systems (see preceding essay), positive energy housing, efficient high speed trains, etc.

As populations age in the West, medical science to mitigate, or even reverse, aging, ought to be pushed (advances from 2014 show this should be possible).

How to do all this? How to do all what needs to be done? All what could be done?

Just make it so. Governments by We The People, for We The People, have just to support whatever enterprise is worthy… By financing it. No need to beg the rich.

Independent powers such as North America and Europe could live as complete autocracies (certainly the USA does not need anybody). Then money can be created by the government, and directed at whichever activity the government deems worthy. This strategy was the core of Marxism-Leninism, and in complete opposition to free market capitalism (not that the latter ever existed!).

The Nazis thought that was impossible. Rich plutocrats had financed Hitler. However, in December 1941, the Nazis reached, with difficulty, a subway station in Moscow. In the distance, they could view the gold cupolas of the Kremlin that Napoleon had brought down.

Facing the Nazis was the Soviet system, which just decided to create money, and work, out of thin air, without begging the rich. In this case the Soviet system was churning thousands of the very efficient T34 tanks. With horror, the Nazis discovered that their best tank, the Panzer IV, could only destroy the T34 at close range, from behind, hitting its engine.

Extraordinary industrial achievements by the USSR command economy were replacing the staggering losses suffered over the summer of 1941 (up to 21,000 Soviet aircraft had been destroyed).

In front of Moscow, 1.4 million Soviet soldiers counter-attacked 2 million Nazi soldiers. Losses and casualties were up to 1.7 million.

The USSR won. Decisively. Governmentalism won, decisively.

Definitively, it was proven that the command economy of a government could crush a for-profit, rich plutocrat system.

What was next? After Tojo and Hitler declared war to the USA, Roosevelt duplicated the Soviet machine, the Soviet way of organizing the economy, in the USA (in truth he had started in 1933). To organize the economy according to the diktat of the state, he named a young, but towering, Canadian economist as Czar, John Kenneth Galbraith.

We are in those sorts of times again.

The economists who put us up the (dry) creek of the present disaster will scoff that the so-called “free market” has proven superior. Not so. It’s not the free market which won World War Two, but putting We The People, massively, to work. In the USSR, the USA, the UK.

By the time the Nazis understood that plutocracy was not their friend, but rather their drug, and the free market was a bad joke played on them, not a machine, it was too late. The Nazis produced one tank when their adversaries produced one hundred, and one barrel of extremely expensive oil, when their enemies produced one thousand.

The truth about Nazism is that it was a puppet government; plutocrats were pulling the strings. Even with those strings attached, that government was weak.

It is time to understand that there is no strong economy without a strong government. It is time to understand that asking the plutocrats to pull the strings of the bond markets, while they require us to be on a diet, when not outright dying from ebola, makes for a weak government, and a weak economy.

Patrice Ayme’

Notes on the graph: Thomas Piketty, in his book “Capital in the 21st Century” stated the obvious:

“Whenever the rate of return on capital is significantly and durably higher than the growth rate of the economy, it is all but inevitable that inheritance (of fortunes accumulated in the past) predominates over saving (wealth accumulated in the present)…. Wealth originating in the past automatically grows more rapidly, even without labour, than wealth stemming from work, which can be saved.”

Yet, I doubt Piketty points out that the governmental bond system is rigged to insure that wealth grows faster than GDP: that could compromise his cute little career of official thinker.

The wealth graph above, if it were extended to earlier times would show roughly the same level. In other words, we are quickly going back to Medieval inequality of wealth. We are bringing back the world of serfs and lords. That world was characterized by injustice and stagnation. We don’t need it. The rich are too rich already; we need to make the rich poorer.