2022 Nobel Prize In Economics Given To Banking Inequity, And Financial Catastrophes

To impose an evil notion, namely that the banking system is a just pillar of society, there is nothing like celebrating its greatest priest with the ultimate prize. That intuitively says that his religion, private oligarchic banking, backed up by the state, is the greatest. 

 

Thus, giving the 2022 Nobel Prize to the chief central banker, Ben Bernanke, is a propaganda trick: the establishment, and in particular the financial oligarchy, gives itself a pat in the back, an academic applause, the nobility of the Nobel. 

 

All the assertions celebrated in that particular prize, and presented as new, shattering discoveries, are trivial, and well known, since there are bankers and they lend. In the modern era, that’s at least as old as the republic of Florence, nine centuries ago... Bernanke discovered that banking has to do with trust? What a discovery! A Neanderthal lending to another, 300,000 years ago, knew this…

 

Now of course the Nobel prize had been given earlier to Milton Friedman for the exact opposite discourse, which was obviously wrong. But then Friedman was tied to the Reagan establishment. Now we are more into straight plutocracy, and banking has to be venerated as an instrument of social justice: no plutocrats have been injured during the making of this financial movie, two huge central banking crises in two decades. 

 

Bernanke banking is the culmination of humanity and morality! That Nobel celebration of central banking augmentation of obscene inequity of the last two decades must persuade the naive that these crises, in which most people have been irreversibly hurt, did not happen: was not a prize given to celebrate how they were, after all, avoided? So inequity was just an illusion? And certainly of little significance? This is what the Nobel folks want you to believe. No doubt they can be in turn feted, invited to plutocratic universities and wealthy think tanks, rub shoulders with billonaires…

Patrice Ayme

New height of impudence as Economy Nobel was given to the guy who saved humanity from the fires he himself lit. What’s next? Giving the Peace Prize to Putin for Puting to eternal sleep hundreds of thousands of people?

Recent Globalization Meant Plutocratization, So It has Got To Go

There have been many globalizations of trade in sizable parts of the world before: unable to feed itself in small and desiccated Attica, Athens imported its wheat from the Black Sea and paid for it with high tech wares made in her factories. The philosopher Demosthenes was the owner of such a high tech small company. 

The city of Rome became huge. Unable to feed itself, it imported its food from overseas. Its metals, including for making currency, came from Spain, its swords and helmets were made by Gauls. However, Roman globalization soon took a sinister turn: wealthy Romans learned to escape the Roman absolute limit on wealth by fiscal optimization.

When Roman oligarchs became wealthy enough, by plundering overseas, just like Russian oligarchs who plunder inside Russia (mostly, but not only), they used their gigantic wealths to buy all they needed in Rome, in particular all arable land, and not just tribunes, and votes. Rome became an evil-power: pluto-kratia. Democrats (under this name) and Populares (Marius and his nephew Caesar) fought the plutocrats to death. But they lost. In the end, after generations of massacres, the population was greatly diminished, the Roman army, hiding behind the young Octavian, took power, and gigantic immigration from the Eastern Mediterranean replaced the ancient dead Romans [1].

The present globalization has much to do with the globalization which killed the Roman Republic and its direct democracy [2]. Immense fortunes have been made by the wealthiest, whose definition is that they pay little or no tax, and buy themselves politicians, laws, media, and conspiracies and plots all over the planet.

First thing to do is to tax the plutocrats, worldwide! (Biden just announced the wealthiest Americans paid only 8% tax, a very small fraction of what average US taxpayers pay!)

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The preceding comment was censored by Paul Krugman and The New York Times: perhaps because it identified globalization and plutocratization, a terrible  thought crime… Noble Nobel Krugman, famous for his celebration of globalization and his ilk explicitly say, and Krugman repeated that the end of globalization will cause us all to be less wealthy (as if we were all wealthy!) I was not surprised by this censorship, so I sent another comment, which was published, after being delayed 12 hours (so that nobody would read it while the NYT can claim that it doesn’t censor!) Here it is in a fuller version below. The version sent to the NYT was weaker, and didn’t have the first paragraph below. NYT is a crucial part of the world plutocracy presently bombing Ukraine… When I undermine that effort, and this link between the WEF/Davos and Putin, I get censored…

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The price of globalization through plutocratization, which we benefited from, according to plutocratic propaganda, was right… for the world’s wealthiest people, our masters and owners. They particularly liked the fact they could buy democracy on the cheap that way. 

Our freedom is surely worth paying a bit of it through lesser GDP, especially considering most of that GDP has been going to oligarchs…  

Russian oligarchs are a product of this system, globalization through plutocratization, same as Rome, with Putin playing a role similar to Jugurtha, the homicidal Numidian usurper.

Globalization through plutocratization made dictators in Russia and China very powerful. Xi made alliances with many US oligarchs and developed a murderous surveillance tyranny in close cooperation with the biggest global tach firms. All of this without paying taxes, claiming to be tax free foundations and advising, or controlling even the mightiest states, even in an educational role (foxes teaching chicken the ways of the world).

As this global corruption festered, pressing issues such as nuclear weapons and the CO2 crisis were not addressed beyond smoke, mirrors and windmills…

Evil-power, plutocracy, is a corruption of hearts, desires, and even pleasure. Plutocrats take pleasure in other people’s misery: this is why Putin goes around, saying that his war in Ukraine is going according to plan: what Putin wants is flattened cities. As they hog resources for their clans, global plutocrats want to flatten the rest of the planet, knowing well that increasingly more miserable conditions will lead to war, the unspeakable evil. 

A detailed analysis of what went wrong with Carthage shows the same pattern. Carthage was an oligarchic democracy (one could say). Out of rage and anxiety from Roman gathering might, Carthage expanded forcefully in Spain. That was led by the Barca family (think Barcelone). So doing the Barcas, those ancient plutocrats cum generals, spurned Carthaginian legal control, and made the confrontation with the Roman Republic worse.

Plutocratization, especially when global, brings war. It brought it to Rome, it brought it to 1914, it brought it to us. In all cases, the origin of the global plutocratization was unbridled globalization, escaping the control of local laws, hence civilization.

Patrice Ayme

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[1] We have genetic proof of this, since 2019… Published in Science. Here is an extract: 

By the founding of Rome, the genetic composition of the region approximated that of modern Mediterranean populations. During the Imperial period, Rome’s population received net immigration from the Near East, followed by an increase in genetic contributions from Europe. These ancestry shifts mirrored the geopolitical affiliations of Rome and were accompanied by marked interindividual diversity, reflecting gene flow from across the Mediterranean, Europe, and North Africa.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aay6826

***

[2] https://www.resilience.org/stories/2018-05-29/new-data-reveal-the-hidden-mechanisms-of-the-collapse-of-the-roman-empire/

I wrote a lot on the subject, for decades…

Metal pollution in Greenland from the economic and technological activity of Roman civilization. One can ssee clearly the rise of activity corresponding to the growth of the Roman Republic, then the collapse due to the civil wars brought by the fight to death between plutocration and the democrats (Romans used that exact word: democrats… They also use massively “oligarchs” to qualify whom I prefer to call “plutocrats” (evil oligarchs). One can see the collapse of the fascist empire and its attempted recovery, from more fascism, starting with Diocletian… Circa 300 CE. On the far right one can see the Merovingian then Carolingian Frankish recovery, with the peak by Charlemagne’s coronation as Roman emperor… The Franks had conquered Eastern Europe, all the way to Ukraine…

Krugman’s New Trade Theory Would Be Idiotic, Were It Not So Criminal, Enslaving Us All To China

A problem preventing progress in the USA, thus the world is that plutocracy masters (and owns) the media, the universities, the international prizes, international organizations, and the intellectual discourse, even the haughtiest (as I have argued all top philosophy is in its grip, over as a vaccine against progress, rather than as a treatment against progress).

A famous example, the self-described “Conscience of a Liberal”, Paul Krugman. I stopped arguing with him, a few years ago, because I was tired of his censorship, and I was hoping Trump would demolish Krugman’s great work, GLOBAL PLUTOCRACY, and becoming all slaves to China. Krugman got the Nobel for his “New Trade Theory”. There have been Trade theories and practices since before the Bronze Age Era, the civilization of which collapsed spectacularly, and simultaneously, 33 centuries ago. 

Trade is engaged into for a myriad of complex reasons, from the point of a lance poking one’s behind, to “comparative advantage”. Trade was a matter of survival for hundreds of thousands of years, as local tribes couldn’t get that obsidian, or flintlock from far away, that is, necessary material to make superior weaponry. So much of trade theory consists into rediscovering the obvious and long-well-known. 

Even if it worked, NTT would work only between similarly sized countries. But China is much bigger, 40 tiimes bigger than the average country in population. I guess Krugman is reading that her for the first time…. And because it’s a dictatorship organized by US plutocrats, another type of dictators, decorated fro freedom by Obama, China is alway first, an advantage NTT venerates…

In NTT Krugman focused on returns afforded by scale. The bigger the industrial corporation, the cheaper quality/price it can fabricate goods. Krugman loves to talk in non understandable ways, here is on his own work: “The idea that trade might reflect an overlay of increasing-returns specialization on comparative advantage was not there at all: instead, the ruling idea was that increasing returns would simply alter the pattern of comparative advantage.” Whatever, the “Conscience of a Liberal” tries to obscure his evil work with what he calls “wonkish”.

New trade theory suggests that the ability of firms to gain economies of scale (unit cost reductions associated with a large scale of output) can have important implications for international trade… namely you will wallop the competition.

New trade theory suggests that: 

a)through its impact on economies of scale, trade can increase the variety of goods available to consumers and decrease the average cost of those goods.

b) in those industries when output required to attain economies of scale represents a significant proportion of total world demand, the global market may only be able to support a small number of enterprises.

c) Government may play a role in assisting its home based companies. This implies that all jobs will go to China, a dictatorship. Indeed, Chinese companies can achieve the largest scale: their interior market is nearly five times the US. Also it’s OK that China intervenes to assist its own behemoths: see point c).

Reading this, Stalin may have ordered Krugman send to Siberia for plagiarism. Stalin used to say:”Quantity is its own quality”. (He was referring to T34 tanks and planes, many of them from the US…) My point? none of this is new. What’s new is for richly educated economists (as they serve the rich) to discover those old truths.

As most Western European countries have no scale, they are just Hong Kong without financials, they will only be nations of “consumers”. But where will their money come from? Will they have to sell their children to the Chinese dictatorship?

“Variety And Reducing Costs” (one more lie!)

Without trade, nations might not be able to produce those products where economies of scale are important. With trade, markets are large enough to support the production necessary to achieve economies of scale. So, trade is mutually beneficial because it allows for the specialization of production, the realization of scale economies, and the production of a greater variety of products at lower prices.

NTT is either geographically challenged idiotic… Or takes us for geographically challenged idiots. His idiotic reasoning works only if the trading partners are all of the same size, roughly, and of the same political nature. But they are not. The average country population is only 35 millions, and the median country population is less than ten million, a fraction of one percent of the size of China. 

NTT is correct that the pattern of trade we observe in the world economy may be the result of first mover advantages (the economic and strategic advantages that accrue to early entrants into an industry) and economies of scale.

New trade theory suggests that for those products where economies of scale are significant and represent a substantial proportion of world demand, first movers can gain a scale based cost advantage that later entrants find difficult to match. The US and China have been acting accordingly, while piously preaching the opposite, namely economic liberalism, open borders. An excellent example is SpaceX, launched under Bush, which received billions under Obama, under the table (and above the table, from Trump). Now Space X excellent products will destroy all and any aerospace industry, worldwide… except in the countries which decide to have their own aerospace (China, Russia, India… others not clear…).  

Official Implications Of New Trade Theory:

Nations may benefit from trade even when they do not differ in resource endowments or technology (so the Europeans have been persuaded to open to China and the US, because they may benefit… just like a fly may benefit from being devoured by a spider).

A country may dominate in the export of a good simply because it was lucky enough to have one or more firms among the first to produce that good (as we Americans are always first we shall DOMINATE, because we dominated first). Bing first becomes a respected form of comparative advantage (watch Tesla opening a giant plant in Germany next year).

An extension of the theory is the implication that governments should consider strategic trade policies that nurture and protect firms and industries where first mover advantages and economies of scale are important.

If progressives want to progress towards human rights and a better planet, they will have to learn to realize they have been led by crooks who made “theories” to justify the disappearance of local employment, dignity, education and income, fostering instead exploitation by a dictatorship.

Does Krugman realize what an abominable role new Trade Theory has played in the imposition of global plutocracy? Apparently not. He spews, editorial after editorial, horrible insults about Donald Trump… But, remove the insults, and the substantial thing he complains about is less “New Trade”, a euphemism for selling the world to China, in exchange for getting cheaper goods, which presumably we will pay for with money produced by China, as China produces everything…

In many countries, dozens of thousands of death happened, during the Corochinavirus, because everything, including masks, were made in China. Thanks, NTT and its comparative advantage to… China. China had no more death than Sweden (China lies, of course) All these deaths in these other countries would not have happened if we had the right NECESSARY TRADE THEORY.

As long as the crooks and even their crooqkery, have not been detected… where is the hope?

Patrice Ayme

    

 

Plutocratic Media Hates Wealth Tax, Censors Critics, Ignores Theft Of Intellectual Property By Monopolies. Save the Republic, Tax Pluto!

Too Much Corruption makes worlds collapse:

Forgive them, for they don’t know what they do. 2,000 year old wisdom from the crucified, completely obsolete nowadays in light of, say, Nazism. The first thing miscreants do, nowadays, is to make sure that they know nothing.

The swamp has investigated itself, and found itself clear as a mountain brook. Studying the Roman Republic shows the corruption was all over. Caesar’s main assassins, Brutus and Cassius were astoundingly corrupt. More than a decade before the assassination, Brutus and Cassius were exploiting to death (literally) Greece, Asia.

Thus now we have the world similarly teetering on the verge of collapse, in great part because of the corruption of our political leaders, who are in hock with the world plutocracy.

***

The New York wrote an article critical of the Wealth Taxes proposed by Warren:

… and now Sanders. It contained gems such as:”Progressive Democrats are advocating the most drastic shift in tax policy in over a century as they look to redistribute wealth and chip away at the economic power of the superrich with new taxes that could fundamentally reshape the United States economy…

But the idea of redistributing wealth by targeting billionaires is stirring fierce debates at the highest ranks of academia and business, with opponents arguing it would cripple economic growth, sap the motivation of entrepreneurs who aspire to be multimillionaires and set off a search for loopholes.”

… as if there were no loopholes now! The IRS code is a vast loophole, hundreds of pages long… 

What is hidden behind this graph. The wealthier the family, the more augmentation of wealth and income it got.

1,500 comments were authorized, my first and main comment was censored (as it alluded to precisely what happened, namely the Pluto media don’t like anti-Pluto comments, when those comments are not of an officially authorized type). This New York Times article had no content, except for the hare-brained cliché always evoked by plutophiles, namely that taxing wealth kills innovation. Actually it’s the other way around: plutocracy kills thinking, hence innovation. 

In an orgasm of dishonesty, an article in the NYT pretended that two university professors said the opposite of what they truly said in their original paper, by careful sampling of them… quoting others. That’s a type of dishonesty which should be publicized. Professors Sarin and Summers actually proposed to tax wealth more broadly than Warren and Sanders proposed, and thus, even MORE!… The exact opposite of what the NYT pretended. I agree with broad taxation of wealth (and there should be no cpaital gains tax on little guys, just like in Switzerland… which has a wealth tax, BTW… The Swiss economy is the best functioning in Europe.) 

Here is my comment censored (or delayed so much nobody would read it) by the plutocratic New York Times (I repeat, New York Times, pay attention, such censorship should be illegal, it breaches the US First Amendment, and you fiduciary duty as official press):

“Elitist US universities depend upon plutocratic money, and extreme inequality: this is what pays tuition and advertises them as the “best” schools on Earth. So one would expect wealthy economists therein plutocratic universities, feeding at the rich trough of plutocratic flattery, are all for extreme wealth and against taxing it. 

Plutocratic drift sucks society into a dark hole where not just the wealthiest individuals, but the basest, most cruel instincts, come to rule. One can already see this in media owned by plutocracy: an effect is Brexit. Wealthy British based plutocrats wanted to keep paying no or little taxes, they knew the EU’s new law that it is illegal to do so becomes effective December 31, 2019, so they made it so to create a cognitive bias against the European Union thanks to their control of British media.

People are not going to stop wanting to be even more wealthy, just because 2% of their wealth will be taken out above 50 million (if Warren proposes 2% it will probably end with 1%). Whereas right now small inventors cannot, thanks to pro-plutocratic, pro-monopolistic laws, exert their Intellectual Property rights in the USA. Instead, they have to file in the EU, or China! Indeed, they now have to prove they were economically injured by the stealing of their IP by powerful monopolies. So, right now, monopolies make it difficult for inventors to become millionaires. That is really a huge problem for the innovation system upon which a growing economy depends. This violation of IP and Patent Laws happened at the behest of present plutocracy, thus blatantly all too powerful already.

When billionaires reinvest billions in their own enterprises, they should be allowed to do so, after said enterprise have been determined to be of “public utility” (so part of Bezos wealth going to his rocket company, or energy investments of Gates, should be exempted, case by case, year by year).”

That was it. Hateful and racist comment of mine against the established order and its plutocrato-philanthropic, Trump hating class, was censored. Let me repeat with more detail: tech monopolies, that is, billionaires friendly with the NSA and Deep State, and Bush-SCOTUS-Obama-Biden, made it difficult for inventors to become millionaires (so that they, and only them and their friends and servants would become filthy rich, and inventors such as yours truly, dirt poor). The Supreme Court Of US decision of 2006 was the beginning of the end, but Obama is the guy who came out fiercely against little inventors, calling them “TROLLS” and “NON PRACTICING ENTITIES”. (He would know a troll, being the biggest of them all!) Only those who gave millions and services worth even more to the Biden-Obama families, and their puppett masters are “practicing entities” (I observed).

Just to compare, having sent my enlightened comment in the dark bowell of its Pluto conspiracy, the NYT got very excited by insipid remarks, the following one by “Ned” from Truckee being typical:

“Ned”, from Truckee, Times Pick:

“If an entrepreneur or inventor creates a huge amount of value for society, they deserve rich rewards – billions if that’s what it is. But, you can’t take it with you, and ultimately, external rewards are meaningless.

Warren and Sanders ought to refrain from vilifying the ultra-wealthy, and instead extol the virtue of those who create wealth and then return it to society, either through philanthropy or by paying workers more.”

Ned has spoken! In his gutter wisdom! And except the latter “extolled virtue” is not happening (without the threat of revolution).

***

Wealth in California augmented, but not as much for REAL INVENTORS as for plutocrats…

In truth, the REAL INVENTORS started to be shut down in 2006, and the Obama presidency finished shutting them off:

… big time, with Obama attacking IP “trolls” on TV. Ignorant semi-wits such as “Ned” don’t know little guys Intellectual Property has lost value, enormously, thanks to the pseudo-left, SCOTUS and super troll Obama. Nor does he know that most entrepreneurs are highly fungible: if Zuck didn’t exist, another 1,000 Zucks could rise. Same for Jobs, Gates, etc. All these guys exploited other individuals’ inventions. The guy who invented optical pumping, hence the laser, Kastler, got the Nobel, but that was it. Others, many others, made billions from the laser.

Under Bush (starting in 2006) and Obama, the Intellectual property system got gutted in the USA, thanks to the enormous tech companies and the Deep State’s little plan to connect them to intelligence/surveillance agencies: to prove that they had been wronged, small investors needed not just to demonstrate that they had been stolen. Now they also had to demonstrate to have been economically injured (which they couldn’t, as they made no money from their stolen inventions). Such laws were passed under the influence of tech monopolies. I am personally familiar with a case were a federal judge decided of a very important case in the morning, and then resigned and accepted five million dollars from Facebook in the afternoon (names can be provided on legal request).It was the case of a small electronic company which had won, thanks to a jury, yet its enormous legal fees from its defense were not paid by its giant attacker, thanks to the 5 million dollars judge.

Now Zuck, head of Facebook, and minder of the world, art expert banning Middle Age art, declares he will fight Senator Warren’s wealth tax OK, another time!). I declare Zuck has too much power. He is just a glorified high school drop-out, and the fact that he drops in presidential palaces, worldwide, aggravates his case… I replied to @Ned:

Ultra wealth kills the Republic. Money is power. Too much money in too few hands means too much power in too few hands.

Ultra wealth wants to gut the country of employment and and any other power from We The People (Demos-Kratia = People-power). Because removing power from We the People prevents revolution. This is exactly how the Roman Republic went down, and it was said at the time (read the Gracchi brothers). This is exactly the scheme in place today: ultra wealth has escaped taxation and law, by going overseas (“China”). Then it got so wealthy it can mold the minds of entire countries.

An example is Brexit. The plutocrat owned media in Britain wanted out of the EU for (new) tax reason. So it made it so that people would hate “Brussels”. That some people have a thousand times more power than others can be tolerated. But a million times? At some point, in Rome, the hyper wealthy started to own not just judges, but armies…

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Obama’s guru Summers has evolved: he is now FOR taxing wealth and lobbying, BROADLY:

I read the article from Larry Summers and Natasha Sarin which the New York Times refers to. It doesn’t mainly say what the NYT claims the article mainly says, just the opposite (the article sort of says it a bit, but it’s not its main point). What professors Summers and Sarin mostly say is the opposite.

The best way to reduce power from oligarchs and plutocrats is by first broadening the tax base. Indeed. Sarin and Summers want to close tax loopholes for the rich, first. Basically the professors point out that the wealthiest and powerful can invest, tax free into all sorts of consultancies and foundations (let alone universities) which are used to influence voters, media and politicians (they give the example of the mighty NRA). If taxation doesn’t strike this system of influence peddling first, a wealth tax will have the opposite effect: the mental control oligarchs exert through these tax evading loopholes will drive public opinion against taxing the wealthiest!  

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Summers & Sarin truly said: “We have sympathy with complaints that economic policy decision-making gives too much weight to the interests of affluent elites. But we are skeptical that large rate hikes or wealth taxes are the right way to address this problem.

First, these proposals do not get at the main ways in which the wealthy exercise influence. The whole apparatus of think tanks, research institutes, advocacy groups — organizations like the Federalist Society, which has transformed the judiciary — are supported by tax-deductible contributions that tax hikes will not discourage. Indeed, increases in tax rates or broad wealth taxation would make it cheaper in terms of forgone personal spending to support advocacy efforts or to create elite enclaves.

Second, even draconian tax hikes will not have a major impact on the ability of very wealthy Americans to be politically influential. For a few tens of million dollars, an individual or interest group can become a major political player. Even if you took away half the wealth of a billionaire, that person would still be able to invest $50 million a cycle in political activity without dipping into capital…

Third, many of the areas of special interest concern that seem most serious do not involve players who would be substantially impacted by recent tax proposals because they are not hugely wealthy. Think about the way the NRA distorts gun control debates or how community bankers resist consumer financial reform.

If the concern is with the excessive power wielded by wealthy elites, there are more effective strategies. Consideration should be given to limiting the deductibility of lobbying expenditures; restricting the ability of political organizations to have allied 50(c)(3) organizations that can receive tax-deductible contributions; and tightening the rules on donor-advised funds that enable the wealthy to get essentially all the benefits of foundations without any of the requirements to pay out resources or provide any public transparency.

***

So Summers and Sarin, far from criticizing the principle of a wealth tax as lowering the innovation and animal spirits of society, advocate a generalization of the concept of wealth, and of taxing that first, instead. They say this guarantees thrice the tax revenue, and will avoid the backlash from the wealthiest by cutting first the very organs they use to transmit their influence on society. 

***

The next day, the NYT allowed my comment (safe: nobody would read it now!) and then ran later an article saying: “A Wealth Tax Is Pro-Growth. Don’t believe the scaremongering.” (By David Leonhardt.)

Well, more importantly, only with a wealth tax We The People can afford to have a republic. The Roman Republic lasted five centuries, in full, because it had a wealth tax. And it was confiscated, when the army had enough of civil war and inequality caused by the ultra wealthy.

Patrice Ayme

 

Emptying The Core Through Unemployment: the Plutocratic Way

There is no democracy, without an economy flush with employment. A society which doesn’t employ people disempowers them: they can’t even go on strike. Thus those who don’t want democracy, can destroy the economy first. That’s sneaky, and most efficient,  

This is exactly what has been happening in the last three decades, as employment and economy has been sent increasingly from the wealthiest countries to developing countries… This brought decreasing employment in those wealthiest countries. Thus it disempowered workers while empowering the investors, owners and managers who employed dirt poor workers overseas unprotected by social laws… basically slaves. The more the owners and the international elite were empowered, by this displacement of the economy overseas, the more they manipulated the ruling ideology which they controlled through the media they own and the universities they finance.

This is not the graph I was looking for, which was world trade versus inequality. However, that’s a good proxy, as patents tended to be deployed in places like China… as the economy was displaced there!

…Actually the US Supreme Court, starting in 2006, and boosted by Obama after 2008, gutted the US Patent System: it’s always the same idea: favor the giant monopolies (patents are micro, temporally limited monopolies…) and overseas production… Disempower normal US citizens…

We saw it all before, with the Roman Republic. It disappeared when its elite escaped the absolute wealth limit taxation by going overseas, and sending the economy there, while controlling the political process. This voided Rome, and later Italy, of employment, thus power. They remembered that, early in the Roman Republic, to protest the elite, the Plebs had gone on strike… forcing more equalitarian laws.

Beijing just accused Washington of “economic terrorism”. China can self develop now. Time to bring jobs back to the USA, the EU. That will bring back not just employment, but democracy.

Patrice Ayme

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This was a comment to the NYT, which was approved so fast, they couldn’t possibly have read it (do I have friends?) Here is the beginning of the article:

“Trade War Starts Changing Manufacturers in Hard-to-Reverse Ways
ControlTek, which makes circuit boards in Vancouver, Wash., has begun shifting supply chains out of China and designing products that don’t require Chinese parts.

The New York Times
By Ben Casselman
May 30, 2019

PORTLAND, Ore. — When the Trump administration first imposed tariffs on $34 billion in Chinese imports in July, Andy LaFrazia figured it was just another curveball for his company.

“Everyone was saying: ‘Oh, it’s a negotiating tactic. It won’t last long,’” Mr. LaFrazia recalled.

But nearly a year later, the trade war shows no sign of cooling off. So ControlTek, the electronics manufacturer that Mr. LaFrazia runs near Portland, is taking steps to protect itself, a strategic shift that has been repeated in boardrooms and executive suites around the world in recent weeks.

ControlTek is rewriting contract language to make it easier to pass the cost of tariffs on to its customers. It is shifting supply chains out of China where possible, and redesigning products to avoid Chinese components where it isn’t. And as a tiny player in an enormous global industry, it is discovering that there is only so much it can do.

“We’re very much at the end of the whip getting thrown around,” Mr. LaFrazia said.

Despite dire warnings from economists, Mr. Trump’s trade war has so far done little to derail the decade-long recovery from the Great Recession. Economic growth has remained strong, and the unemployment rate last month hit a 50-year low.”

 

 

Politically Correct Famous Democratic Economist Admits To Treachery of Political Leaders After 2007. Good. Yet, Why Just 2007? To Laud Plutocratic Clintonism?

It seems obvious to me that the official economic doctrine is the theoretical justification of plutocracy. Roman emperor Constantine used what he called Catholicism, his invention, to justify his increasing plutocracy. Nowadays, plutocracy is haughtily brandishing the philosophy of “economic science”. Now a famous economist looks at that, and blames everybody else. Mr. Delong is a friend and colleague of Krugman, and their ilk. We are talking here of the mainstream ideology of the self-declared “left”… Which is just stealth plutocracy: a definition of plutocracy is inequality. Inequality increased under Obama, when it reached its highest level ever (as measured by looking at the top 1%, or top .1%, etc.) Right, it’s probably getting worse under Trump… But Trump never claimed to be “left”.

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Inequality augmented under Obama. Here is the slice 2013 until 2016. This was caused by the fact Obama helped most the bankers, hence the wealthiest…

“Blame the Economists?

Nov 1, 2018 J. Bradford Delong

Ever since the 2008 financial crash and subsequent recession, economists have been pilloried for failing to foresee the crisis, and for not convincing policymakers of what needed to be done to address it. But the upheavals of the past decade were more a product of historical contingency than technocratic failure.

BERKELEY – Now that we are witnessing what looks like the historic decline of the West, it is worth asking what role economists might have played in the disasters of the past decade.”

Unsurprisingly, famous economists protect Clinton from any blame. When, in truth, Clinton demolished the New Deal most effectively. Learning from Goldman Sachs, even before he was elected president, that, if he wanted to be re-elected he would have to do as he was ordered to, by the wealthiest men, Clinton told Robert Rubin Goldman CEO:”You are telling me by reelection depends upon fuckin bnd traders?” (Nowadays, the once famous quote has disappeared from search engines: no accident.)

Brad Delong: “From the end of World War II until 2007, Western political leaders at least acted as if they were interested in achieving full employment, price stability, an acceptably fair distribution of income and wealth, and an open international order in which all countries would benefit from trade and finance”

Patrice Ayme: Not true: Clinton, a so-called “Democrat” ruined the separation of banking and speculation (installed by president Roosevelt and Congress in 1933). Instead of serving all, banks were reset to serve mostly the wealthiest. Moreover Clinton enabled so-called “financial derivatives” with total free rein. Even more serving of the wealthiest, enabling them to leverage themselves tremendously. That led to the 2008 crisis, when a bank dealing mostly in US Treasury Bonds and an insurer, AIG, got acutely bankrupt from derivatives… with nearly all other major banks, just as bad. Bush, in accord with Obama, and then Obama alone sent to the banks all the money they needed and some.

Brad De Long: “Then came 2008, when everything changed. The goal of full employment dropped off Western leaders’ radar, even though there was neither a threat of inflation nor additional benefits to be gained from increased openness. Likewise, the goal of creating an international order that serves everyone was summarily abandoned. Both objectives were sacrificed in the interest of restoring the fortunes of the super-rich, perhaps with a distant hope that the wealth would “trickle down” someday.”

PA: Right. So why do we still call individuals like Obama, “Democrat”, and act as if they were,  when all they did was to serve the wealthiest, the plutocrats (feeding them ever since)?

De Long: “Others, like me, understood that expansionary monetary policies would not be enough; but, because we had looked at global imbalances the wrong way, we missed the principal source of risk – US financial mis-regulation.”

PA: One reform is necessary: banks are there to serve We The People and the real economy serving We The People. Banks should not serve speculation to make the wealthiest wealthier. Plutocrats hate it, so so-called “economists” can’t understand its utility (to themselves!)

De Long: “Between the financial crisis of 2008 and the political crisis of 2016 came the presidency of Barack Obama. In 2004, when he was still a rising star in the Senate, Obama had warned that failing to build a “purple America” that supports the working and middle classes would lead to nativism and political breakdown.

Yet, after the crash, the Obama administration had little stomach for the medicine that former President Franklin D. Roosevelt had prescribed to address problems of such magnitude. “The country needs…bold persistent experimentation,” Roosevelt said in 1932, at the height of the Great Depression. “It is common sense to take a method and try it; if it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.”

The fact that Obama failed to take aggressive action… With policymaking having been subjected to the malign influence of a rising plutocracy, economists calling for “bold persistent experimentation” were swimming against the tide – even though well-founded economic theories justified precisely that course of action.”

PA: Need one say more? Delong congratulates himself with the present state of affairs. But actually US society became much more unequal under Obama. Rising inequality brings the collapse of civilization: such is the lesson of history. One can’t get a worse result than collapse. Time to redefine “left” in light of increasing potential collapse..

That collapse didn’t happen yet is why we can still talk about it.

But never, in the history of humanity, has collapse seemed more likely, long-term. In no small measure, because of the cecity of official economy, which is more focused in increasing inequality than in realizing that this is another name for rising plutocracy.

Economists, like most of those working in the media, are just employees of the world’s wealthiest men. Directly, or indirectly through plutocratic universities. Plutocratic universities are not universal.

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2015/04/03/plutocratic-universities-are-not-universal/

Nor is the present economic theory resting on a universal foundation: it rests only on pleasing plutocracy. Economy will become universal when it rests on energy itself, more exactly, Absolute Worth Energy.

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2008/01/03/energy-is-the-fundamental-unit-of-economics/

Meanwhile, let those who managed the increase of inequality under Clinton, Bush and Obama blame others: that’s what they do best.

Patrice Ayme

Trade Is Not Just About Bananas, But Mental Capability

Europe conquered the world, and the world of minds: the United Nations is little more than the Declaration of Human Rights of 1789, writ large. How did Europe do that? By building superior intelligence, superior culture, superior mentality.

All things the Politically Correct Perfect Cretins claim don’t exist. Call them PC square.  

When a country C (for China) invests into another country U, U, for USA), C doesn’t just put money at the disposal of We The People of U.

That is what a ridiculous article in the New York Times, by a five-star economist from the Plutocratic Corruption claims, and exclusively focuses on… forgetting the most important point. (Politically Correct Perfect Cretins Perfect Corruption: PC Cube!)

And the point is military. I will develop it further in a companion essay (of an even more robust nature!)

This Trade Deficit is NOT just about money, far from it! It is about who is smarter in the future, it’s about who is a slave, in the future, it’s about who sells only bananas in the future, it’s about who has a future in the land of the free!

Reminder: battles decide the world. On the battlefield, or in the mental field. And trade is not just about money. The most important trading is about ideas, sentiments, culture, moods, mentalities.

Trade deficits can be good or bad, yes (as standard, Perfectly Corrupt economists, correctly observe). However, not all trades are equal. Selling bananas is not selling cars. A car has much more “added value” than a banana. Some of this “added value” involves knowledge. If one loses the ability of making high-tech products, one loses cognition and know-how. Selling bananas will not compensate for this dearth of mind and intellect brought by an imbalance in added value trade: one will become, irresistibly, the proverbial banana Republic.

For 6,000 years China has been the “Central State” (as China called itself), because of superior Chinese know-how (even in the Nineteenth Century, all what Britain could sell to China in exchange for advanced Chinese products was opium).

A deficit in added-value jobs will lead to a deficit in know-how. Ultimately, this becomes a question of national security deficit. The converse is true. This is why China maintains an enormous trade surplus in added value job products with the rest of the world. China was not born yesterday. The Perfectly Corrupt Political Cretins, though, were, and now relish their slavery at the hands of their masters, who have one foot in China, one foot on their faces, and they don’t get it yet.

The enormous trade imbalance with China enables major companies in the West to escape local Western laws, taxes and regulations by offshoring the work to China. This makes the owners of these companies, which are entangled with ownership of Western media, keen to defend that trade imbalance which makes them ever wealthier, and more influential politically, thus anchoring their domination. This fits China’s strategic purpose just fine.

A civilization which doesn’t maintain mental added value in the trade of ideas is doomed (by internal decomposition or external invasion, or both). So beware the nature of trade!

Patrice Ayme

“Philanthropy”: Propaganda For Plutocracy. No Less!

The concept of “Philanthropy” is a disguise, & an insult. Of course we all love (phil) man (anthropos). It’s not just the hyper wealthy who “love man”. But they are that vain and stupid, and semantically challenged, that they don’t even know that they insult us all, the 99%, while gorging themselves on their moral superiority, being, that way, like all ridiculous tyrants of old…Or then maybe as the main dish? Verily, the word “philanthropy” hides the reality of the .1% preying on the rest of the planet!

From the World Economic Forum, in other words, “Davos”, today:
World Economic Forum‏ Verified account @wef
The impact that the global age of #philanthropy is expected to have on the world https://wef.ch/2G0lndz 

This is an amazing graph, but the comment of the WEF, not perceiving that they implicitly and unwittingly identify “philanthropy” and gross inequality, is even more priceless!Something has to be done to stop the evil philanthropists: Global Laws

Quoting from the WEF:

“As the rich get richer, the world has entered an “age of philanthropy”, with education the most popular focus of some 260,000 foundations globally, researchers said on April 26.

Increasing numbers of rich individuals, families and corporations are setting up foundations for social investment amid persistent inequality, said study author Paula Johnson of Harvard University’s Hauser Institute for Civil Society.

“(Due to) the rapid growth of wealth around the world, more individuals and families (have) the ability to create philanthropic capital,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

The richest 1 percent of the world’s population owns half of its wealth, up from 43 percent in 2008, propelled in part by gains in financial assets, like stocks and bonds.

Many super rich Americans have set up foundations which run their own programmes or give grants, including Bill Gates of Microsoft, Warren Buffett, who heads the Berkshire Hathaway conglomerate, and the industrialist Koch brothers.

There are more than 15 million millionaires and close to 2,000 billionaires in the world, while 10 percent of the population live on less than $1.90 a day, said the report, which was funded by the Swiss bank UBS.

Globally, foundations have combined assets of $1.5 trillion – slightly more than the U.S. federal government’s 2018 budget – the report found in an assessment of 39 countries around the world, including in Asia, Latin America and Africa.

The sector is notable for its youth and recent growth. Almost three-quarters of 80,000 foundations that gave their age were started in the last 25 years, the report said.

“We indeed live in a ‘global age of philanthropy’,” it said.

“If this trajectory continues, philanthropy will be poised to have an increasingly significant social and economic impact.”

What could go wrong? When what is already wrong is viewed as the ultimate friendliness to the human genus?

Foundations pay no taxes. Does that ring a bell? The definition of super rich, nowadays means: little taxes paid, plenty of wealth and power (like free travel for “business”).

Want to fight inequality?

North Korea, Iran, Trump: time to get global! Time to enforce civilization globally. France arrested one of her most famous plutocrats, for violating, corrupting, bleeding dry, two African countries. A good first step towards the refugee crisis! All plutocrats violate. If not local laws, or their spirit, then decency and civilization.

Meanwhile, Trump nominated Gina Haspel a 33 year veteran of the CIA, to head the agency (she was second in command under Mike Pompeo, now Secretary of State, visiting Pyongyang, North Korea), Gina is a woman, first of her gender nominated as head of CIA. “Democrats” are giving her a hard time, especially the billionairess Feinstein (yes, billionairess, with a b, although she pretends she is not, by committing her husband fortune, acquired when she negotiated with China, while he traded there…)

Kamala Harris, Verified account a young chick who is the ever cute “junior” Senator of California now endowed with gigantic powers, is proud of her own moral cluelessness:  

@KamalaHarris:  “Earlier today I asked CIA director nominee Gina Haspel if she believed enhanced interrogation tactics like waterboarding were immoral. It was a yes or no question. She refused to answer.”

I made an effort to educate unsophisticated Kamala… Although I don’t think gigantically powerful people, such as our elected and selected “representatives” can be educated, they are too full of themselves, they are too unequal in powers to ours, and they are there because they are ambitious for the sort of money political power can bring… And when to live the high life, as Obama does! So I wrote:

Was 9/11 moral or not? Why not ask CIA Haspel that? For Sheikh Mohammed, who planned 9/11, 9/11 was moral. CIA “waterboarded” him. Real question is not whether “enhancement” was “moral”, but whether it was smart. Middle Ages stopped using torture because it was very ineffective!

No doubt Ms. Haspel is the most qualified nominee to the CIA in ages. And she is a woman! Quit the sexism, and confirm!

Patrice Ayme

Open Society & Open Minds Start With An Open Economy

A friend of mine made a panegyric to Apple, Inc. Many of his followers applauded. Some expect Apple to become the first trillion-dollar corporation (in market value), and are thrilled by the notion. Others say that Amazon will get there first…

Kudos to the giant tech monopolies! say those whose (materially winning) morality is just the win. Most people can’t be winners, so they settle for applauding, and “supporting” winners (even when the winners win to their own detriment!) Do I have to be the first to decry this form of emotional fascism? Supporting winners because they win, is defeating to the self, and others! That hysterical behavior should be handled with extreme caution!

Moreover, and indeed, winners can profit from self-feeding exponential effects, the phenomenon at the root of plutocracy: the more power one has, the easier it is, to get even more. However, too much power in too few hands is intrinsically inhuman. Indeed, prehistoric humans didn’t live, and thus didn’t evolve, that way. And too much inhumanity is intrinsically evil.

I believe that open products, such as the open source model is superior than being dependent upon a particular corporation. The open-source model is a decentralized software-development model that encourages open collaboration. A main principle of open-source software development is peer production, with products such as source code, blueprints, and documentation freely available to the public.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_model

Open societies are better than too much power in too few hands, as Pericles and philosophers around him pointed out, 25 centuries ago.

Be it only because too much power in too few hands kills innovation, democracy, justice, equality, hope, civilization, the climate and coast lines.

These are the stock values, BUT they are roughly proportional to the revenues of the companies in question, and the explosion of the latter has everything to do with the monopolistic positions they were allowed to acquire by the US government (it may have to do with their spying potential, direct inquiries to the NSA). GAFA (Google Apple Facebook Amazon) has three times the revenue of IBM + Microsoft + Intel (or so). Google and Facebook monopolize 75% of US media income from advertising!

The monopolistic tech economy which has developed in recent years is a disaster for innovation, democracy, morality or even cognition. I still own an old Mac, and when Steve Jobs had his own computer company (after being fired from Apple, and before being re-hired!) I bought one of his (very expensive) state of the art computers. Still have it. Also owned ipads… So I am not anti-Jobs or anti-Apple, by any means.

But I practice the open economy, open tech, with a  way better laptop than any Apple sells presently, etc. Please excuse my negativity, but I have seen a Fed judge pass an outrageously biased, pro-monopolistic tech judgment at 11 am, resign at noon, and accept a 5 million dollars payment from Facebook at 2 pm… (I can hear the powers that be, applauding in the distance…)

While an ex-president goes from super yacht to private island, to super yacht, a plutocrat reigns in the White House, while the National Rifle Association gives millions to key US politicians. Each. Meanwhile the European Union has proclaimed there are no tax havens in Europe (thus, by that token of measure, none anywhere in the world). And Vlad Putin insists to show his might, from forbidden military neurological chemical weapons, to nuclear powered nuclear armed cruise missiles, perpetually flying around the world, or, at least, South America.

But there is worse: an entire generation is molded by Zuck’s conception of relationship, a gooey notion of search, and willingly offering all of one’s privacy, so the wealthiest can get wealthier and more powerful, while they pay back the “innocents“, in the Medieval sense of the term, with a sense of tribal rage to soothe their simple minds…

Open society brings open, thus stronger minds, as Aspasia told her husband Pericles, 25 centuries ago (and Pericles needed to be told, because, as he himself recognized later, he was not as smart as the circumstances required, by a very long shot; his banning of immigration, and his little plans about how to fight the Peloponnesian War backfired dramatically, with extreme prejudice to civilization: his sons were considered non-citizens, thanks to their dad, and his war plans brought the “plague”, devastating Athens!)

As the fate of Athens, and thereafter, of Greek democracy and even civilization, clearly demonstrated, stronger minds are not just a luxury, they are key to the survival of the noblest aspects of the human spirit (the Roman Republic made a similar demonstration, itself partially a consequence of the preceding one). We think, thus we survive…

Patrice Aymé

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

Stupid Is Depressing:

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

***

Crash of Wall Street & Great Depression:

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

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

***

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

***

The Great Depression Brought The Mood Of War:

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

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

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

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

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

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

***.

Divided We Can’t Stand:

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

Patrice Aymé