Archive for the ‘Finance’ Category

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

October 12, 2022

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?

Trump Haters Hate Hydroxychloroquine Too

June 4, 2020

Hate is the gift which keeps on giving to haters, and the worst it gets, the more they thrive.

It’s telling that hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) has become a political issue. Hatred has grown so much that one is considered a stupid pro-Trump racist, if one falls for HCQ. Everyday, the New York Times comes out with a new anti-Trump article accusing him of promoting hydroxychloroquine (he has “promoted” all plausible and potential COVID treatments)…. But the anti-Trump plutocrats have a good reason to hate the cheap HCQ. And it has nothing they want to crow about.

There are many other anti-Trump articles, from all sorts of angles, but the  anti-Trump-anti-HCQ article of the day is a tradition, at the New York Times. Like Goebbels they keep repeating the same lie: there is no evidence that HCQ, etc… Aldous Huxley — ‘Sixty-two thousand four hundred repetitions make one truth.

Most of the plutocratically owned press (sorry about the pleonasm) the one which hates Trump, has made that drug, HCQ, a political issue by observing that it was “promoted by President Trump and others”… Then they add that there is no evidence that it can prevent or treat Covid-19. It reminds one of priests singing the same song everyday. 

Actually there is plenty of evidence that HCQ could work, the only question is how well (the evidence is, disappointingly, not too well; whereas it is very effective for some diseases; however for malaria its effectiveness went down, as the parasite mutated)… for no less than three classes of reasons:

a) Hydroxychloroquine is an immune moderator, that’s how it works against Lupus. The worst problem with COVID seems to be a crazed immune system, overreacting (although the virus is itself bad, it infects neurons directly, it seems, as rabies does?).

b) for other reasons, HCQ hinders the virus. The effects are quite modest, but strong enough to be used in comparison to developing therapeutics in the world’s largest study in vitro… Stanford, part of this study published that some drugs “worked twenty times better than HCQ”. A difference between these potential drugs and HCQ, is that HCQ has been used by more than two billion people (I, and Raoult, both from Senegal, used it for years. The NYT no doubt will tell me that’s why I insist to be fair and balanced about Trump… For relaxation, they will censor ten of my pro-HCQ comments…)

c) HCQ has been demonstrated to reduce viral loads. d) In countries (Russia, India, Turkey) where HCQ is used massively, the death rates are spectacularly lower.

In Turkey Hydroxychloroquine plus AZT, the Raoult treatment, is used massively at the first symptoms. The results are spectacular. Turkey has 170,000 cases of coronavirus, for a population of 82 millions. By comparison, Great Britain has had more than 40,000 DEAD (actually final government counting turns out 40% higher after a few weeks… So expect 50K soon). The Indian research body, ICMR uses it for the healthcare workers (HCWs) who are at an elevated risk of contracting Covid-19.

The ICMR study indicates that “simply initiating HCQ prophylaxis did not reduce the odds of acquiring Covid-19 infection among HCWs. However, with the intake of four or more maintenance doses of HCQ, the protective effect started emerging. A significant reduction of about 80 per cent in the odds of Covid-19 infection in the HCWs was identified with the intake of six or more doses of HCQ prophylaxis. This dose-response relationship added strength to the study outcomes.

It goes without saying that, if HCQ plus a macrolide (antiviral) antibiotic mitigates COVID, the biotech stocks are worth much less, and they trade indeed according to fake studies on HCQ.

Many of the great priests of the Demo-Plutocratic Party are wheelers and dealers. They want those biotech stocks to go ever higher. So down with the twenty dollar treatment removing most of the problem! And Trump fixing it! They want Trump to lose so that all jobs can be sent to China again!

In the last few weeks one doctor made a BILLION dollars from investing in Biotech (yes, 10^9 dollars). I don’t doubt the august doctor hates Trump, who is all what’s between him and another billion. After he turned out that The Lancet and NEJM authors were at best greedy monkeys (the self-dealing of the study was obvious) and their anti-HCQ “study” collapsed, biotech stocks collapsed in turn 15%! (I’m tracking very closely, don’t ask…)

So the Lancet just published a “study” which was grotesquely self-dealing… But the French government full of corrupt manslaughtering idiots, immediately forbid HCQ. France has become a very fascist country recently, with even going on beaches, parks and mountains outlawed, even if they were out of your door. Everyday is about the mood and caprices of the ex-banker of M&A, the young king, Macron I.

Meanwhile, Germany, next door, by reacting intelligently and locally rather than by being led by a corrupt young fascist banker-Fuhrer, had a death rate 20% of that of France. See, the Germans have become five times more intelligent than the French, as measured by COVID! It took a while, but there is hope! The German situation is a consequence of being led by a physicist, and local democracy (regional governments took the best decisions).

Meanwhile, the New York Times will keep on wishing with all its might that as many US citizens as possible die from COVID, as long as Trump goes down too… That’s because they want the return of their gilded age, with all jobs in the Chinese dictatorship… That’s why they support the New Jim Crow laws author that much (those laws date from 1994, when Senator Biden led the charge… Black Lives Matter is officially against them, so I don’t see how they could support their author).

People go around and ponder human nature. How come? Lincoln! Definition of goodness! Killed only a million Americans! OK, not his fault! Better Angels, come around! Let’s celebrate the intrinsic goodness of man, and of its butchers in particular, as long as they are our butchers! And what of the worst angels? When do they come around? What if hatred was an exponential phenomenon? Last night a 22 year old white youth was killed in Vallejo, California. He was unarmed, kneeling, hands up, a youth advocate from San Francisco. When the looting is alleged, the shooting starts (that statement is viewed as racist by the haters, by the way, that’s why I use it). The police officer shot five times, through his windshield: death can’t wait. Black lives matter! Do white lives matter too? Or do people have to be painted particular to be worth of racial considerations?

Hate is the gift which keeps on giving, and the worst it gets, the happier the haters.

Patrice Ayme

P/S: There has been a whole slew of anti-HCQ papers. Those I read were grossly incompetent, violating blatantly the “scientific method”. For example by comparing HCQ patients with non-HCQ patients… For just two days. After these two days, the non-HCQ were switched to HCQ, and the conclusion was that HCQ had no advantage… The data of two enormous studies published in the New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet, came from a private company called Surgisphere, which claims to have granular patient-level information shared by 1,200 hospitals and health facilities on six continents (list not available). The founder and chief executive of Surgisphere, Dr. Sapan Desai, was listed as an author on both papers… Oops.

Debt As Tax Deferred, Or Why Public Debt For Public Interest Works Boosts The Economy

January 17, 2019

In A Way No Private Spending can replace

ECONOMIC ACTIVITY BOOSTED BY PUBLIC SPENDING FROM GOVERNMENT DEBT:

IN THE LAST decade, the US has happily run massive deficits. Under Obama, deficits were often around 10% of GDP, or more. Obama deficits peaked at 15% of US GDP. Meanwhile, the US economy grew so much, it overtook the entire, growing, European GDP output (UK included). In 2017 US nominal GDP was 19 trillion dollars, just above the EU GDP (which is still higher at PPP, $23 T). US yearly GDP, charging ahead at a Chinese like clip, has passed $20 trillions as these lines are written.

The Obama spirit of deficit was happily pursued by Trump… And now the new Democratic controlled Congress, wisely enough, has not uttered a peep about this (it prefers to distract its audience with the notion of billionaire Trump as an agent of Putin).

Each three months of 2018 America’s federal government borrowed nearly $320 billion, or about 6% of quarterly GDP. The deficit was 1.5 percentage points higher than in the same quarter the year earlier, despite the fact that unemployment fell below 4% in the intervening period (and thus borrowing more was just because the Trump government is embarked on increasing spending).

The USA borrowed as much in a single quarter as it did in all of 2006, towards the peak of the previous economic cycle.

That debt Graph would look very different if one incorporated EXTINGUISHED debt

Orthodox economists have traditionally been self-assured, arrogant, and idiotic about debt. “Government spending must be paid for now or later,” wrote Robert Barro, of Harvard University, in a seminal paper published in 1989. “A cut in today’s taxes must be matched by a corresponding increase in the present value of future taxes.”

“Must”? Why? How much more idiotic can one get? Governments can default on debt, and can do it soft, or hard. They can even make default look like an act of God: consider the Russian default when the Soviets took power, in 1917, leaving millions of French investors the poorer for it (yet also leaving Russia with a much improved industrial basis and better trains).

The USA also defaulted twice during the Twentieth Century (under presidents FDR and Nixon). A way to default is devaluation of the currency, another way to sneakily default is inflation.

The late 1920s bull mania was a deliberate attempt by the US Fed and the bank of England, to extinguish debt from World War One. So was the inflation of the 1930s (Paris, against it, argued with Washington, for it; the US was right, France wrong; of course Hitler inflated beyond reason, encouraged by Washington…)

Once again, a traditional, but misleading graph: it contains violently extinguished debt

Inflation is not just a way to extinguish excessive debt: I have argued that it is a way to accelerate the economy, making it more technological.

So why would a Harvard professor say such a stupid thing? Do I need to ask? Even rhetorically? Because it pleased the US plutocratic class at the time, which probably rewarded him handsomely.

Looking around history, one can see big differences between the economy of the last four decades, and the period 1935-1975. The first period was characterized by massive expansion of economy and education (in spite of the 100 million directly killed by generalized fascism). For example air travel, universal higher education and universal health care appeared and became dominant. After that, pretty much stagnation… except for the increase of inequality.

And what do we also see since the Glorious Thirties (the 1945-1975 period when Western economies saw a wealth expansion of the 90%; after that, all the growth in income went to the 1%…)? Public spending on infrastructure, educational, or industrial, collapsed, throughout the West, thanks to the Trickle-Down plutocratic ideology.  

Reciprocally, a return to massive public spending might raise the activity, hence the returns to private investment, generating more the latter. (Calling that “populism” worked for a while as an insult, but should be now backfiring… as We The People realizes that there is nothing wrong with We The People… contrarily to what the insulting elite keeps on claiming…)

Eurocrats and their masters, the Europlutocrats, brandish the scare of public debt. However, japan with a more elderly population, is roaring back thanks to Abenomics… And a 230% of GDP public debt.

Economists out France or Germany say that Japanese public debt is a terrible thing. Why? If worse came to worst, the Japanese government would have to tell those who bought Japanese debt: ’Sorry, we can’t pay you back. At all.’ What would then have happened? A tax! Like in Europe! In other words, should the Japanese government 100% default, those wealthy enough to have lend to the Japanese government would then have to pay… a tax! They would be reduced to the status of French taxpayers, horror of all horrors!

Except, of course, in France, taxes, being mostly indirect, strike the poor and the poorest of the poor… whereas a Japanese default (which will not happen) would strike the wealthy (including a few wealthy foreigners…). The same is a fortiori true for US debt.

If the US defaulted on its debt (and it will not happen), lots of wealthy foreigners may cry… Meanwhile the US economy will have roared ahead… thanks to foreign money. What will the foreigners do, if the USA default, to get even? Invade? (No, the US military, paid by aforesaid foreigners, is too strong…) Refuse to lend some more? Not necessarily: when you can’t beat up the strong, you may as well join it. That’s exactly what happened when the US defaulted… and the USA defaults all the time…

There are many ways to default: first one can default on the interest only, or part of it.

Inflation also extinguishes debt. The CPI (the inflation measurement) in the San Francisco Bay Area, the biggest tech engine of the US and world economy, reached nearly 5% last year (2017). Such a healthy dose of inflation will absorbs lots of debt. Meanwhile, among many other things, said Bay Area fabricated for more than twelve billion dollars of electric cars in 2018…. While Apple Inc. based a few miles away, generated more than 200 billions in revenue…  

So the SF Bay Area is a perfect illustration that a roaring economy goes well with roaring inflation, thus roaring debt, etc. Looking in detail within the machinery of some major tech companies (say Oracle) show lots of debt at major points of development…

When the pace of economic (GDP) growth exceeds the rate of interest on a country’s public debt, managing indebtedness is a shrinking business: debt incurred in the past shrinks steadily as a share of GDP without any new taxes needing to be levied.

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Public Debt Helps The Public In General, and the Poor First of All:

Some are sure to whine that debt might nonetheless rise if annual deficits are sufficiently gigantic, as they are in US America now. Even so, at prevailing interest rates and growth rates, and with deficits continuing at 5% of GDP, it would take more than a century for America’s ratio of gross public debt to GDP to reach the current Japanese level…. And then, as I pointed out, so what? A tax? A 2018 French-like situation? Overtaxation? No, not really: remember, only the wealthy lend. So debt will reduce inequality. Actually MASSIVE debt reduces inequality in two ways:  it potentially taxes the wealthy, in the future, and, in the meantime, it feeds countries and the poor (who are the first to profit from public infrastructure)…

Hypocrites will come, and suggest inflation hurts the poor… However, although inflation extinguishes debt, there are other ways to extinguish debt, and thus rampant debt doesn’t mean rampant inflation…

Olivier Blanchard, long chief economist of the IMF, pointed out that since 1870, the average nominal interest rate on one-year US government debt has been 4.6%, though the average annual growth rate of nominal GDP has been 5.3%. Growth rates have surpassed interest rates in every decade since 1950, except the 1980s…. And guess what happened in the 1980s? Plutocratization! (Much admired by all too many “democrats”, including Barry Obama…)

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The Rise Of Evil Power, aka, Plutocracy was tied in to debt extinction:

(Perhaps unwittingly, and hopefully witlessly) Evil US president Carter launched a secret war in Afghanistan, using Muslim Fundamentalist and the Muslim Fundamentalist ISI of Pakistan… On July 3, 1979, and immediately afterwards, Reagan, helped by the evil Democratic Congress, led by fellow Irishman Tip O’Neil, launched officially trickle-down economics: instead of making everybody wealthier through public debt, Reagan and his “democratic” little helpers claimed that, the economy would do better by making the wealthiest wealthier…

Nicholas Crafts of the University of Warwick observed that the difference between growth and interest rates did more to reduce British debt loads in the 20th century than budget surpluses. Indeed, austerity-induced deflation in the 1920s frustrated attempts to pay down war debts (that was followed by the attempt of inflating out, which was too brutal, and helped bring the 1929 crash…)

Inflating out of debt was successful after World War Two. At the same time, the uppermost margin rates were pushed by Republican president Eisenhower up to 93% (nobody has accused Eisenhower to be a socialist… yet) Similar rates applied in Britain and high taxes on the wealthy also applied in throughout Europe…

In the past decade our great leaders have listened to their future benefactors, and sponsors, the wealthiest. The wealthiest want the poor ever poorer, so that wealth, power, can be worth having, ever more. So our great leaders, who are great servants of the wealthier, have done as ordered, and have stimulated public economies too little. (To make the lowest people feel good enough about themselves, while they undermined them, they have paid them with PC speech, and “identity politics”, that is, racism…)

Result? Rich countries have spent ever more time below their productive capacity than above it—at grave economic cost: while French, German, British and US  politicians explained to We The people that they cost too much, China, India and their satellites (population three billions) roared ahead, spending on the public as needed by the public. This is how Europe, its colonies and the US did it in the Nineteenth Century (and even in centuries prior, following the dominant economic theory known as “Mercantilism”)

An overdeveloped fear of public debt, invented by plutocrats, nurtured by prostituted economists, is to blame. But now a new class of “populist” leaders have appeared, who call a lot of it, for what it is. So some government economists have been ordered to acquaint themselves with reality.

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The 3% Deficit Limit Is Killing the European Union:

And guess what? Experience suggests that governments face much looser budget constraints than once was claimed on every rooftop. So governments enjoy more freedom to support struggling economies than previously believed. Economists, happy to get orders less debasing to themselves, are taking note, that, indeed, yes, governments can borrow more…..

“Neoliberalism” is fundamentally a lie. “Neoliberalism” is a creed, a faith, and a conspiracy for the gullible. “Neoliberalism” asserts that the economy does best, when left to private enterprise. This is a lie, just there, and propaganda. Indeed it always omits a detail: how money is created.

In the “Neoliberal” creed, the (private) banks create money by lending. To whom do they lend? The wealthiest. So the wealthiest privates get more and more money, and the poor, less and less, augmenting inequality, year after year, as observed: the color of the skin of the president has nothing to do with it.

The only way to cut that vicious circle is having the Treasury create money and use said created money for public work. The Treasury can do this by creating bonds. That will spur the economy.

Should a crisis arise, a sovereign government can grab the debt and extinguish it.

In 1790, Secretary of the US Treasury Alexander Hamilton did just that: he took all the debt, from all the states, and extinguished it, by making it into Federal Debt (hint to the European Union… do the same…).

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When Not Sovereign Debt To Foreigners Means Loss of Independence: the Case of Dauphiné

The French Crown had done exactly the same extinction of debt with the state of Dauphiné in 1349 CE. Long an independent republic in the Roman empire, that region, named after an altruistic sea mammal, found itself with crushing debts in the Fourteenth Century. In exchange Dauphiné lost its independence inside the Roman Empire, becoming instead subject to the kingdom of France, “empire in its own kingdom” (don’t ask: a consequence of the Frexit of the Tenth Century; France by then had discovered that it would be better to make one with the region east of the Rhone-Saône).

Dauphiné has a very long independent history, all the way back to before Hannibal. The Dolphin was selected as a symbol of the altruism of that Alpine quasi-republic. Differently from fellow Switzerland, debt enslaved it… But France was the superpower of the time… Switzerland solved the ownership problem by fighting its owners, the Habsburg, to death…

The kingdom of France, empire onto itself had debts, of course, but when it so pleased. Otherwise, it could always send the army to visit lenders with too much of an inappropriate attitude (as the soon to be ex-Republic of Florence found out…)

Sovereignty and debts are bound together. The EU should do as the US did in 1790 CE. Meanwhile, the present European situation is not sustainable: whereas the USA can grow debt as big as it wants, and the notion of debt doesn’t even exist in China, Europe is reducing its economic activity to profit its plutocrats.  

At least US politicians are not so treacherously corrupt, that they will stoop that low. 

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Conclusion: Debt is tax deferred. Public debt for public interest works boosts the economy, in a way no private spending can replace. Indeed, private spending is motivated by profit, but serving the public is serving the public, not profiting from the public.

The “Neoliberal” creed, truly the power of evil, has insisted human beings know just one motivation: greed. But humanity, in full, know many other motivations, including that of serving public good. Servicing public good is more deeply anchored in human psychobiology, because, prehistorically speaking, the individual couldn’t exist without the collective (the tribe).

We need more public spending, thus, to not overtax the economy, more debt.  

Patrice Ayme

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Even “The Economist” has noticed. Consider: Economists reconsider how much governments can borrowThe profession is becoming less debt-averse”

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Dauphiné lost its independence to Paris in 1349 CE… But not its Parliament. However, in 1788 CE, one year before well known events in Paris, the French Revolution started, for real, south of Grenoble in the city of Vizille, encircled by mighty mountains. A consequence of the Revolution would be the loss of regional parliaments, including that of Grenoble…

 

FAKE THINKING: That FAKE “FRENCH THEORY”, Now Complete With Highly Honored Fascist Spy!

July 1, 2018

Ironically labelled “French Theory” has always been connected to fascism. It’s basically fascism with a Latin Quarter face (it started with fascination for, and duplication of, the famous Nazi with a pensive face, Martin Heidegger… went on with Stalin, Mao, etc… while secretly enthralled by, and working for, Uncle Sam…).

Anyway, just when you thought things couldn’t get more ridiculous in the highest circles, new developments surface, in the same line of connection of “French Theory”, aka “Postmodernism” with political fascism and tyranny…

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Worse Than FAKE NEWS: FAKE THINKING!

The worst problem with fake news is that it leads to erroneous thinking… and erroneous emotions. And then vicious tribalization.

Rousseau famously claimed everywhere he looked, people were in chains. Well, not really in literal chains, it’s worse. Instead people willingly, proudly, and comfortably, wear minds which subjugate them. Minds addicted to the power of fake thinking! The most fundamental form of fakery in establishing erroneous thinking takes real facts, but makes the logic whatever it wants, by selecting said facts carefully (an example is much of the theories about WWI). Now we have way worse.

Yes, there is also fake emoting, as in the “unboxing” of brainless corrupt “YOUtubers”, generally involving parents prostituting their children (should be unlawful).(Yes YOUTube is part of the Google “no-evil” empire.) As mercantilism has invaded all behaviors, the spectrum of mental diversity has shrunk below a shrinkwrap of overwhelming greed.

Fake thinking is devouring the world: see (in the notes below) the tribal attacks against Senator Sanders by pseudo-progressives, or the demand, in France by similar pseudo-progressives to have the “white persons” separate from the alleged victims.

A main mechanism of fake thinking, going back to Herder (18C), claims that it is not reasoning which matters to certify truth, but which tribe you identify with. (Or get forcefully identified with.) This was one of the main underlying principles of Nazism, but it also underlays any totalitarianism: any totalitarian regime embraces minds totally as tribes do, so it’s inherently harnessing all the tribal instincts.

The inclination to be seduced by that sort of incorrect thinking, its entanglement with tribalism, had a huge impact on the Twentieth Century; it is the root of all its ills.

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300 hundred pages showing one of the most celebrated French Theory intellectual was just a butcher of a dictatorship. It’s not just politicians like Clinton or Obama (Netflix!) who get paid to express thoughts conducive to the domestication and subjugation of “We The People”. Most prominent intellectuals are in payments situations: they are paid to play. Many of the most officially respected intellectuals of the Twentieth Century were worthless scums, and worse: Consider Heidegger, Brasillach, and an entire herd of German. Julia Kristeva, who has been showered with honors for her thinkerism was an agent of the Bulgaria’s State Security services, the Darjavna Sigournost, the Bulgarian KGB, a criminal organization organizing assassinations of human rights activists on foreign soil, while Kristeva was doing the bed of French intellectuals. A meta analysis of her conceptology shows her to be mad, abject and totalitarian… BTW, she denies being a spy although the evidence is overwhelming, and online, nearly 300 pages of it. Of course, Harvard supports Kristeva the liar. Will the French take away her title of “Commandeur de la Légion d’Horreur”? That’s the honorable thing to do! Otherwise the horror becomes blatant!

(There is a long tradition of intellectuals paid to influence the public, and, or leaders. Plato was exhibit number one, as he entangled himself so deeply with two successive tyrants of Syracuse, the first one ended up selling him as a slave. Aristotle was even worse: he may single-handedly have launched two millennia of monarchy. Socrates was executed for having been the teacher, influencer, lover

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FAKE Thinking Made The Germans Criminally Insane In World War One & Two:

Indeed, much of the conventional version of many a history is fake, because ultra significant dimensions have been omitted. Deliberately. By malevolent actors. This enables malevolent actrs to seize, or keep power. And soon the reality that these other crucial factors existed gets forgotten.

 

The history of World War One and World War Two are full of those. Fake versions of what really happened, alleged histories before, during and after World War One were the main logics which enabled the Nazis to be elected to power.

A particularly spectacular instance occured when a British general talked to Ludendorff, the effective head of the German army, in a cafe in Germany, around a table, after the German defeat. Ludendorff explained to his British colleague why he would have, for sure, won the war, but for the betrayal by German Commies and other saboteurs. The British officer, not believing one word of it, sneered back:”So you would have won, if you had not been stabbed in the back?” Ludendorff, delighted, opined. Ludendorff would soon help found the Nazi Party around a couple of ideas like that. He was the basic founder of Nazism, even before Hitler was sent to spy on it (and named it!).

So Ludendorff turned around an idea which was originally meant to be a scathing critique, and made it in one the sacrosanct Nazi myths: Germany lost WWI only because it had been stabbed in the back by bad actors, including, but not limited to Communists and Jews. So eliminating those would make Germany win, next time. (That was obviously false: the two Battles of the Marne which the French military won in September 1914 and July 1918 are the proximal causes of German defeat. And there is a whole cortege of causes after that, of a purely military nature: had not the US helped Germany in 1914-1917, the German defeat under Franco-German blockade would have been much earlier!)

Most Germans ended up believing that, indeed, they had been stabbed in the back… by other Germans: therein a key element of the so-called Holocaust (actually not everything burned!)

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Yesterday’s Lies Still Animating The World:

This is not just history. A similar flawed idea, launched this time by Lord Keynes, a key architect of the present, flawed world order, hated the Versailles Treaty… and especially the Poles. Thus was born the theory that the Versailles Treaty caused the Great Depression (a ridiculous idea, but basically written down inside Keynes’ work) and legitimate German gripes (entirely valid, if one believes, as Keynes did, that Germany should be the owner and sole proprietor of Eastern Europe!

To this day, the lie that the Versailles Treaty, and thus France, caused Nazism is learned, by rote in US schools. The next step is that Americans believe that France collaborated with Hitler (whereas the French empire declared war to the Axis, suffering in the process 2 million dead!).

France should sue about such lies. This is not a far fetched notion: Poland tried to pass a law that Auschwitz shouldn’t be depicted as a “Polish” camp. Global plutocrats, mostly in the US and Israel, just forced the Poles to withdraw their law! Thus proving that such laws, punishing lies, are indeed very dangerous for the established order! (I support laws against holocaust denials, but please notice the plural I use…)

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French Theory Accompanied, Chronologically US Plutocratization, No Accident:

Starting in the 1950s, great US plutocratic universities’ “Humanities” departments fell in love with a galaxy of French thinkers.

Some say “deconstruction” is “French Theory” main axis… As if all thinkers thinking creatively didn’t have to deconstruct, ever since there are primates and they create!

So forget that. The main axis of “French Theory” has been the claim that all systems of thought are tribal. Yes, the tribe is what makes the thought.

The French Theory’s main authors were many: Louis Althusser, Jean Baudrillard, Simone de Beauvoir, Hélène Cixous, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Félix Guattari, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Rancière, Monique Wittig et Pierre Bourdieu.

Some US thinkers duplicating French theory were: Judith Butler, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Stanley Fish, Edward Said, Richard Rorty, Fredric Jameson, Avital Ronell, Donna Haraway

De Beauvoir was a Nazi propagandist, Kristeva an agent of criminal mafia of assassins…

Well known nice charming little philosopher Martha Nussbaum from the University of Chicago suggested that the abstruseness is calculated to awe the naive (and as I will repeatedly explain below, not only, there is a much greater plutocratic scheme at work):

“Some precincts of the continental philosophical tradition, though surely not all of them, have an unfortunate tendency to regard the philosopher as a star who fascinates, and frequently by obscurity, rather than as an arguer among equals. When ideas are stated clearly, after all, they may be detached from their author: one can take them away and pursue them on one’s own. When they remain mysterious (indeed, when they are not quite asserted), one remains dependent on the originating authority. The thinker is heeded only for his or her turgid charisma.”

Here is an excerpt from an interview in which Noam Chomsky (something of a famous obscurantist himself, linguistically speaking) excoriates the unreadable Jacques Derrida and misogynistic Jacques Lacan, along with Lacan’s superstar disciple, Slovenian fashionable murky “Marxist” theorist Slavoj Žižek, for covering up intentionally below obscure, inflated, misleading language to make trivial “theories” seem profound. Chomsky  (himself prone to all too easy, inflated claims) calls Lacan a “total charlatan.”And indeed.

The “French Theory” is fascist (any follower of Marx is, by definition a fascist, as Marx advocated “dictatorship”… a concept on the face of it way worse than the original Roman concept of fascism). The “French Theorists” lined up against the, student led, genuine thinking led May 68 uprising. They pretended it was “insufficiently proletarian”. The problem here is that the “Proletariat” notion was the lowest of the low, originally (the concept goes back to Rome, once again). Why should the lowest of the low lead? They are genetically (modern science shows) unable to do so. Indeed Marx was from a very wealthy family, and he got angry when Prussia undercut the family vineyard side business. Hardly a member of the “proletariat”. His colleague, friend and sponsor Engels was outright a plutocratic heir.

Sollers, Kristeva’s lover, chief editor of “Tel Quel” hailed from a family of very wealthy Bordeaux industrialists, pontificated during May 1968: “All revolution can only be Marxist-Leninist!” Lenin, a co-conspirator of the German Kaiser who launched WWI, instituted Marxist terror, extermination camps, assassinate the Czar entire family, and entrusted the giant empire to Stalin, a reconverted seminarist turned gangster…

Then, as the appeal of Soviet degenerated terror faded away, the “French Theorists” embraced Maoist China. Kristeva celebrated traditional upper class Chinese foot binding as “empowering”… just as killing Israeli athletes at the Olympics in Munich in 1972 was “necessary”. Sollers later wrote an article “Why I was Chinese“. No, he was not “Chinese”, he was pro-dictatorship oppressing China and killing millions of Chinese…

***

Why did all this “French Theory” happen, and why did it become so popular?

Because it replaced The Enlightenment by Obscurantism. Idiotic theories were born, as from Edward Said, claiming one can’t talk about the “Orient” if one is not from there, otherwise one is an “Orientalist” (notice the analogy with “racist”). Instead I say it as it is: The Levant, and North Africa have been occupied, for 13 centuries by a succession of dictatorships hiding behind a fascist, militaristic religion, the ultimate metaphysical excuse, enforced by lethal threats within the religion.

Who profits from replacing Enlightenment by Obscurantism? Well, those who prosper from the Dark Side, that’s why it is called the Dark Side: its workings, emotions, logics are all obscure, many have to go unsaid. In particular plutocrats, and, more prosaically monopolistic technology exploiters such as Google and its YouTube channel, which prostitute children by the thousands… And instituted the global trade system which is boosting their already enormous powers, quickly!

***

“FRENCH THEORY” IS FAKE, And We Already Saw that Sort Of Fake “Thinkery” In Athens, 24 Centuries Ago:

“Thinkery” is an excellent concept originated by Aristophanes, a conspiracy of those determined to drag thinking in the mud. I believe that much intellectual activity in France in the Twentieth Century, among the most renown so-called “intellectuals” was fake. It was even worse than the works of “new philosopher” Bernard Henri Levy, a poster boy of the reaction against “French Theory” (and thus little appreciated in academe, but with his even more powerful networks; ultimately they served the same master, global plutocracy!)

“French Theory” was all about self-promotion, self-dealing… just like BHL who got huge subventions for French governments, as part of “France-Afrique”, making him a billionaire. Such was the corruption in French “intellectual” circlesu

The “philosophers” had sometimes the right idea, or two just like broken clocks do. But, mostly they were themselves engaged in a vast conspiracy which pretended that all systems of thought had no more validity than any other conspiracy organized by any other tribes. Pivotal to “French Theory” was something called “structuralism”. An idiotic notion: mental structures are everywhere. Speaking of “Structuralism” is as smart as thinking of “Thinkerism”.

Actually, when Aristophanes made fun of that other self-promoting idiot, Socrates, in “The Clouds” he made Socrates founder of the “Thinkery”….  

  1. What’s the difference between a Mafioso and a structuralist?
  2. The latter makes you an offer that you can’t understand.

The Clouds was a comedy of ideas, but it is also deadly, lethal stuff. Socrates undermined Athens. “French Theory” undermined more than civilization, thinking itself. Aristophanes exposes the idiotic theories of Socrates and his plutocratic accomplices, and observes they are so asmart, they make people believe in the most aburd notions, even about physical reality.

And this is exactly what happened: Aristotle, the philosophical grandson of socrates invented his thoroughly idiotic physics, which ruled until Buridan in Paris, a towering genius, demolished it around 1350 CE, seventeen centuries later (Aristotle had forgotten about friction; Buridan re-established it, and simplified all by discovering what is now called Newton’s First and Second law, in his impetus theory).

Plato considered The Clouds a significant contribution to Socrates’ trial and execution in 399 BCE. Well, indeed, and for very good reasons… One can’t just spend all of one’s time as Socrates did, riling against democracy (and science) teaching viciousness to the youth, when the democracy is close to extinction, to the point they lead a dictatorship against it. It is no coincidence that plutocrats and their schools have loved Socrates and his spiritual descendants, Plato and Aristotle. My logic is more historically informed than is usual among philosophers whose expertise is generally restricted to quoting dead people, not the fact which explain them. Aristotle gave, in his attack against democracy the arch example of self-dealing fake thinking. He should be repudiated:ARISTOTLE DESTROYED DEMOCRACY

Athenian civilization was killed by plutocrats, first Macedonian plutocrats, then Republican Roman plutocrats , then, another six centuries later, by Roman Catholic theo-fascist plutocrats… In the latter case the Athenian “thinkeries” were outright closed, because they displeased Christ (admittedly a susceptible moron).

***

“French Theory” became a Trojan Horse against civilization, and even thinking in general:

This attack against humanity, thus We The Peoples” of France and the West, in particular, left the field to global, tax free, working class free, law and regulations free plutocrats. That was the use of this apparently arcane and useless exercise, that was why “French Theory” became popular in the top (most plutocratic) universities.

Just as Socrates “Thinkery” undermined Athens, with his absurd theories, the “French Theory” thinkery undermined thinking itself.

How did “French Theory” do that? By barking up wrong trees frantically, “French Theory” prevented mental activity to be directed where it should have been. Thus French Theory hid the real problems. Most “French Theorists” were in love with fascist dictatorships (Kristeva being a perfect example, first a Bulgarian agent, then a Maoist propagandist, like  the ridiculous Sartre and his ilk. That made them rather similar to Aristotle, the lover, or teacher of Macedonian tyrants (Philippe, Alexander, Antipater, etc.)

***

Shooting De Beauvoir:  

The big mistake of the Versailles Conference of 1919 was not to have shot the top 1,000 leaders of Germany. Those monsters had caused an enormous world war which killed dozens of millions (including the epidemics and other health disasters they caused, like the “Spanish” flu and famines; concentration of armies lead to epidemics, that was well known, even 25 centuries ago). As they escaped punishment, they got ready to do it again, even worse. Hence not executing those 1,000 German traitors against civilization led straight to Nazism. And the head had to be punished. Nietzsche saw that clearly by 1880 CE.

The mood of love of dictatorship was central to “French Theory”. Marx and the Kaiser and Lenin, partook in the same mentality of the love of violence, terror, dictatorship, and “French Theory” extolled it. (The Kaiser used Lenin and his top accomplices to sabotage Russia, in a most striking conspiracy.)

This love for horror and tyranny should be viewed as turning most of the famous, publicity greedy practitioners of “French Theory” into obvious traitors, not just Simone De Beauvoir. De Beauvoir was a high level Nazi propagandist working at Radio Vichy as late as 1944!  Never mind. If you point that out at Harvard, they probably feel you are unworthy to be on a campus, on any university campus.

Simone De Beauvoir could have been shot in 1944, for having worked as a Nazi propagandist at a very high level earlier that year (As a teacher, she shouldn’t have needed the money). That she wasn’t shot, or even judged, tells volume about high level corruption in French intellectual circles! (France executed 40,000 Nazi collaborators, and  thousands did less than De Beauvoir!)

This is not so far fetched: the famous writer Brasillach was condemned to death (for Nazi propaganda). To spare himself penetration by red hot bullets, he sent De Gaulle (then president) a sob story to spare him that pain and indignity. De Gaulle refused: an example had to be made, a bit as one was made in Athens with Socrates in roughly similar circumstances. So Brasillach was executed. Much later, photographs showing he observed the massacre of innocent people by the Nazis, surfaced. In that particular case, De Gaulle acted well, rejecting the sob story appeal Brasillach wrote to him directly.

***

Today’s Plutocracy Arose directly From French Theory:

The  nefarious work of many other experts of “French Theory” was more destructive: by making fun of thinking itself to the point of annihilating it, they worked against civilization, and for the great empires, those of Stalin and Nixon/McCarthy, and Mao… And now their successors. The mission of these fake intellectuals, whether they realized it, or not, unwittingly or not, the reason why they were so rewarded. was to make fake thinking fashionable.

Fundamentally, the fakery of the obscurantist thinkery known as “French Theory” destroyed the Enlightenment in France, and the USA, hence the world. Preparing thus the mindset for ever greater inequalities, by abrading the very sense of what it meant to think critically.
This is also why so many intellectuals embraced  too much tolerance for Islamism, a terroristic system of thought Voltaire himself had condemned as stridently as he condemned Catholicism, for the same reasons (Voltaire’s critique of Islam is now censored in Europe, something which goes hand in hand with “French Theory”)

Those fake intellectuals succeeded in imposing their fake pursuits as all the truth we could aspire to. So now what is officially viewed as higher philosophy is pretty such a lie that it diverts any efficient critique against the established order.

That one of the most obvious fakers in the world was viewed as a a top, most honored, philosopher for so long, is revealing of the heights fake thinking reached. Yes, Julia Kristeva, was just a Bulgarian spy sent by a terrible dictatorship. She embraced tyrants, worked for them, she is an enemy of thought, her followers are despicable, that pretty much sums it up.

***

As Corrupt As It Gets:

When the Nazis came to power, young punk, pseudo-philosopher Heidegger, an ex-seminarist (like Stalin) cow splattering proto-Nazi BS, put a Nazi uniform, became chief of his university, and proceeded to fire all Jews and dissidents. What “French Theorists” did was even worse, because they had much more influence.

When the Soviet tanks invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, to crush democracy there, the foremost media of the “French Theory” celebrated that. The criminal idiot Sollers said it was to celebrate “his love for Kristeva” (the Bulgarian agent above, one of Europe, doomed Europe, most honored “intellectuals”, just referred to). One is talking as bad as intellectual corruption can go here. And make no mistake: such “intellectuals” are as, or more rotten than the worst “Big Capitalists”. They can be much worse, because they have more mind binding impact on the people at large. Certainly Nazism, Stalinism, Maoism were intellectual phenomena first: and they were inspired by… Marxism (a fact about Nazism that is little known, although Hitler wrote it explicitly!)

“Oh, I tried the Left Bank. At university I used to go with people who walked around with issues of Tel Quel under their arms. I know all that rubbish. You can’t even read it.”

— Philip Roth, The Counterlife

I did more than ‘try the Left Bank‘. I actually lived and studied there. But I lived and studied the real thing, all the way back, melding in spirit with the ruins of the Roman City still visible there.

The history of Western Civilization had ups and down, when Paris, for centuries, was the West’s largest city and the center of its intellectual life, it was considered an obvious notion known by all, that the “translatio imperii”, the translation of command, of intellectual command, had gone from Athens (not Rome) to Paris. When Athens had confronted, and fought to death Persia, and nearly two centuries later, Macedonia, moving Athens to Italy was considered, or even to move her further west with the help of Massalia (the Etruscans, 9 centuries earlier had moved from the Levant to Tuscany, to grab the iron mines)… Marseilles, which was the Greek city which stayed independent from Rome the longest (succumbing to Julius Caesar)… And which was first to measure the Earth (and very accurately), was ready to help.  

The Macedonian fascists found several treacherous Athenian intellectuals (cum politicians) of tremendous influence such as Aeschines to help them out in their war against Athenian democracy. The Nazis could have been stopped easily, had the US Republic lined up with its parents and creator, France, as it should have. But guess what, US intellectuals, supposing they exist, failed completely that way. And to this day, they fail: they are still making excuses for not having fought the Nazis, dropping the french Republic, the Jews, humanity and German generals, in one fell swoop…

***

You Want Nice? Then Start Thinking so hard that you get it right! 

Real thinking requires humility and clarity, and, above all, realism. In particular having the courage of calling thugs, thugs, and idiots, idiots. Not polite? Not the point! Not everything is positive: there are no peaks without abysses at their feet!

One can’t have democracy without much more power than potential opponents, as Athens found the hard way, taking 2,300 years to recover (partially). Many good willing progressives don’t understand this. A dependance of Enlightenment, goodness upon the Dark Side is not comfortable! However, the story doesn’t stop here.

Indeed, if democracy, civilization, human existence and thinking can’t survive without the Dark Side, the Dark Side has to be managed well. That is both unavoidable, and at the core of progress, and even viability. The “French Theory”, following the most prominent parts of Marx’s mood, made such an advocacy of evil for evil’s sake, that they durably poisoned progressivism… to the point Islamism came to be viewed as progressist… just as Leninism, Stalinism, Nazism, Fascismo, Maoism, Castrism, even Chavism came to be viewed as good and true.

In the end, that served only the forces of plutocracy, and this is why “French Theory” is so popular in the wealthiest, most plutocratic universities, where they teach spectacular lies such that the French Republic caused Nazism by insisting (with the US, truth be told) that countries such as Poland or Czechoslovakia, or Hungary should be free of German hegemony and occupation and racism and exploitation. Or that the US let Nazism happen because it was “isolationist” (when in truth it was actively pro-Nazi and acted AGAINST the German military when the German military basically asked them for authorization to make a coup against the Nazis), or that the USA didn’t nothing against the Holocaust because they didn’t know (French and Polish governments knew, in details and informed the US ), or that, another great lie, that the US government gave half of europe to the butcher Stalin because there was no choice (Patton could have been in Moscow within months, or Berlin in days, had he been given the go-ahead). And so on.

So many lies, and they call it history. So many absurdities, and they call it “French Theory”. It’s no theory, just something to make us all stupid and discouraged, so we can be better exploited.

Patrice Ayme

***

***

Note 1 Sanders as anti-progress, because he is for content, not tribe, is itself an example of fake thinking.

Once Bernie Sanders said in a famous statement that it’s not enough for somebody to say, “I’m a Latina, vote for me… What we need is a woman who has the guts to stand up to Wall Street, to the insurance companies, to the drug companies, to the fossil fuel industry. For this Sanders was hated by loud pseudo-feminists and pseudo-transgenders (some people have considered me transgender too, and I am certainly feminist, thus, I feel very relaxed about denouncing the exploiters of these notions, having been called pejoratively everything).

(Attack against Sanders by pseudo-left look divisive, and of course they are. Such people are paid for division… by the powers which profit from division.)

***

Note 2: Consider World War One inception. What’s the real truth (according to me)?  As I have explained, six men at the top of Germany planned a world war.

***

Note 3:  The betrayal of progress by all too many French intellectuals is an ongoing process: watch French mathematician and Fields Medal Villani, a self-obsessed villain who spends lots of time being taken in pictures, posing this way and that, playing special, singing the praises of the hyper terrorist Algerian Front National de Liberation, FNL, an Islamizing terrorist mafia holding Algeria in its grip since De Gaulle, himself a double dealing racist, gave the country to them (so they better destroy it? That 47 years of iron grip dictatorship hundreds of thousands of Algerians killed (official reckoning)… and Villani loves it, in the great tradition of “French Theory”, where, the higher the body count, the greater the truth…

Villani is a Macron MP, who, fundamentally, spits on France by insisting that those who helped explode bombs, against innocent french civilians, are, fundamentally hero. Villani’s logic of horror and terror is of greatest help to the Islamists, Said Salah Abdeslam, sole survivor of the assassins who killed and wounded 500 innocent civilians in Paris, November 13, 2015: “Muslims defend themselves against those who attack them. Put aside your anger, and reason for a few moments, you are victims of the errors of your leaders.” (Original French: “les musulmans se défendent contre ceux qui les attaquent. Mettez votre colère de côté et raisonnez quelques instants, vous ne subissez que les erreurs de vos dirigeants.”)

This is exactly vilain Villani’s logic. Villani goes even further, as he wants to honor the terrorists… In Villani’s academic circles, this is well considered, and they pluff themselves with their importance and humanity, not understanding for a second that they serve those who control power, worldwide…

***

Note 4: When one crushes infamy, politeness shouldn’t be a consideration, indeed! See: “White America’s Age-Old, Misguided Obsession With Civility.”

(By Thomas J. Sugrue, a professor of history and social and cultural analysis and author who correctly holds that “those who say that the civil rights movement prevailed because of civil dialogue misunderstand protest and political change.)

***

Note 5: Bourdieu and Foucault said to a number of people (including yours truly, or Berkeley’s all too famous Searle) that if they wrote clearly, they would not be taken seriously in France. Why is this? Because of what is the main idea of this essay: the “French Theory” philosophers are esteemed by the global plutocratic establishment (which finances the world’s top universities, in particular the US ones) precisely because they obscure everything, and foster an adulation for obscurity, in contrast to one for Enlightenment. That’s their raison d’etre. (They also have interest to not make too obvious who their dark thinkery profits… Same problem as Socrates, Plato and Aristotle…)

“Philanthropy”: Propaganda For Plutocracy. No Less!

May 9, 2018

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

PLUTOCRACY: EPIGENETICS, Not Just Wealth And Democide

December 12, 2016

CHOMSKY FINALLY Agrees With Patrice AYME: AMERICAN DREAM DIED BECAUSE OF PLUTOCRACY… But Chomsky does not go as far as using the word. And that makes him, and his devoted followers, miss the most sinister aspects of it all, and the reason why it is so hard to fix plutocracy, the EPIGENETICS OF EVIL. Thus they complain about the fleas, not the wolf carrying them. Details about how that instrument of US plutocracy, Nazism, came to be, thanks to US plutocracy and its banks, illustrate the demonstration: as long as something that big in the calculus of evil is altogether missed, there is little hope…

***

English America did start as a plutocracy in the sense of an extremely wealthy class of the wealthiest investors sitting in England, after having ravaged Ireland. Jamestown was like that, Yes, it was a tiny hamlet fortress, but then the colony grew, mostly from using slaves for tobacco farming. Then England, wrecked by civil wars and revolutions, lost control of its American colonies until the 1700s. Attempts to make Lord Penn the ruler of Pennsylvania ended up in the American Revolution.

Washington, Jefferson, and Al. were very wealthy and somewhat satanic, as they held slaves, and killed Natives, but they were small fry relative to blue blood European plutocrats, who were much wealthier, and thus had to be much more satanic to stay in power.

So the English American republic became a not very plutocratic republic (if one doesn’t consider slavery, and the massacre of Native Americans, two huge ifs…) And on it went. The rebellious Confederacy was to some extent a plutocratic revolt centered around the idea of buying, selling and abusing people as if they were chicken: it failed.

The first US billionaire was Carnegie. Carnegie was far left, by today’s standards, advocating 50% tax on the wealthy, and punishing estate taxes. His widely advocated ideas brought a mood conducive to the passage of the anti-trust act under President Teddy Roosevelt. Here is how the top 0.01%, the top 30,000, are doing in the USA:

Inequality Fosters Plutocracy, The Rule, Not Just Of Wealth, But evil & Bad Genes

Inequality Fosters Plutocracy, The Rule, Not Just Of Wealth, But evil & Bad Genes

So when did the US democracy go bad? JP Morgan, a banker, escaped the anti-trust thrust.   Dr. Schacht, a German banker cum economist joined the Dresdner Bank in 1903. In 1905, while on a business trip to the United States with board members of the Dresdner Bank, Schacht met the famous American banker J. P. Morgan, as well as U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt. Schacht  became deputy director of the Dresdner Bank from 1908 to 1915. Meanwhile, when Wall Street collapsed in 1907, JP Morgan “bought all of it” (or at least a big part of it), bringing the market around.

By 1914, US plutocrats, and the racist president Wilson, conspired with the German Kaiser, enabling the Kaiser to hope to destroy his personal enemy, and the enemy of German, if not American and British plutocracy, the French Republic. That magnificent plot backfired on Germany when Great Britain declared war to the Kaiser within days of its attack on France.

But it did not backfire for the USA, just the opposite: the US supported the Kaiser for three years with ammunition components, etc., while the UK and France piled up debts to the USA. More exactly, US plutocrats made a fortune, while putting the UK and the French Republic in their debt.

In 1919, US plutocrats made it so that German fascists could have another go at the French Republic, by brandishing, of all things, the concept of peace.

Remember, for US plutocrats, the motto of the French Republic, Liberty, EQUALITY… sounded like a funeral bell tolling. They absolutely had to remove that menace: at the time, the French empire was larger in population and extent, than the USA itself, and had the world’s most powerful army and air force (yes France was then mightier than the USA in several ways).

While arguing that Germany should be protected from France, the US requisitioned giant amounts of German private property, then transferred that, with characteristic generosity, to US plutocrats, finishing the deal, by burning the records of these chummy transactions, in a highly convenient blaze, which made the transfer of these properties safe from retrospective consideration. I am not joking: the cause of the burning of the Commerce Building on January 10, 1921 was never determined: rats, smoking were excluded, and electric wires kept new and perfect. The fire started in the file room, was all over said room in a couple of minutes, and lasted five hours.

In any case, the US became the de facto overlord of the so-called “Weimar Republic” (the official name was “Second German Reich”; Hitler changed it to “Third German Reich” in 1935). That enabled US plutocrats (some of them Jewish) to turn around the US antitrust law.

The symbiosis between Nazism and US plutocracy was total, including the latter giving birth to the former. Dr. Schacht was central in this (and that’s why he was judged and exonerated, as one of the top 24 Nazi war criminals in 1945 at Nuremberg).

To win the war, the US became, de facto, a sort of social democracy. It slowly went back to plutocracy when Nazi operators and collaborators such as the Dulles brothers, took control of the USA in the 1950s. A quick learner and follower, Richard Nixon, became president in 1969, setting up the HMO system, while making an alliance with the Chinese dictatorship.

Ford, Carter, Reagan, ramped up the plutocratic pressure. The dam broke under Clinton, who actually dismantled the MOST IMPORTANT legislative piece of president Franklin D Roosevelt’s long presidency: the Banking Act of 1933 (“Glass Steagall”).

The Deep State, suitably plutocratized then established a number of evil corporations which were used as intelligence agencies (internally and externally). This is when Sheryl Sandberg was parachuted from the Treasury Department where she was the official girlfriend of Lawrence Summers (successor of R. Rubin, ex- Goldman Sachs chair) to Google and then Facebook (she will meet with Trump Wednesday).

Inequality grew.

***

Chomsky, A Crow On Its MIT Branch, Crowing Lugubriously:

That was for the causes. Chomsky started to condemn the “financialization” of the USA for the acceleration of inequality in 2013, under Obama (Patrice Ayme explained that it was caused by the abrogation of the Banking Act, already more than 10 years ago; Chomsky vaguely describes, Patrice explains…).

Here is Chomsky’s latest description: “The ‘American Dream’ was all about class mobility. You were born poor, but could get out of poverty through hard work and provide a better future for your children. It was possible for [some workers] to find a decent-paying job, buy a home, a car and pay for a kid’s education… It’s all collapsed — and we shouldn’t have too many illusions about when it was partially real… The so-called American Dream was always based partly in myth and partly in reality.” Chomsky said, noting that Americans are losing their hope due to “stagnating incomes, declining living standards, outrageous student debt levels, and hard-to-come-by decent-paying jobs.”

“The inequality in the contemporary period is almost unprecedented. If you look at total inequality, it ranks amongst the worse periods of American history… However, if you look at inequality more closely, you see that it comes from wealth that is in the hands of a tiny sector of the population…

The current period is extreme because inequality comes from super wealth. Literally, the top one-tenth of a percent are just super wealthy,”

Chomsky describes. One of my trusted commenters asked me recently what I thought of Chomsky. A philosopher is not just a botanist. A philosopher would explain, and suggest new explanations. Chomsky also avoid to use the concept of “plutocracy”. He describes it, he describes how wealth, being powerful, grabs power… But he doesn’t label it… which prevents him to go at the bottom of things, as he usually focus on “imperialism”… a completely different notion (imperium, that is military command, may happen with or without plutocracy; initially the concept was from the Roman Republic, which was not a plutocracy). 

***

Plutocracy, Epigenetics of Evil:

However, that comes short. Very short. Chomsky does not dare to cross the semantic Rubicon of calling it for what it is, plutocracy, the evil power, the genetics, and epigenetics, of evil.

This is why Chomsky clings to the idea that the American Founders debated what is at stake now. Now, they did not: the Internet has changed everything, starting with the minds, the moods, hence the genes, or the genetic expressions, to be a bit more precise. We know that fishes in a changed environment, change genetically. Females can become not just males, but super males.

Plutocracy is not just the rule of wealth. We know, from studying epigenetics in other species, that animal behavior influences genetic, let alone neurohormonal expression.

The absolute power of enormous wealth does not just corrupt absolutely, it corrupts genetically.  

Complaining about the fleas is good, but seeing the wolf carrying them, better. Wisdom is not just about seeing what’s wrong, but doing better what can be improved.

Patrice Ayme’

Brexit Idiocy In One Picture

July 11, 2016

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.

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’

 

Doomed Dems

May 4, 2016

So Donald Trump will be the Republican committee (;-)) for the presidency. And Trump will, probably, be elected US president. Why? Because people want change, and they did not get it. Instead they got more of the drift down, after the reign of the teleprompter reading president. Average family income is DOWN $4,000 since (“Bill”) Clinton’s last year as president. According to a FOX News poll, 64% of Americans blame Wall Street. Meanwhile in a vast report in the New York Times, Obama celebrates, in May 2016, the alliance he said he made with Wall Street in 2008.

Obama Can Make All The Excuses He Wants: He Gave Money To TBTF Banks, Not To We The People. And Here Is The Result Of This Wall Street President.

Obama Can Make All The Excuses He Wants: He Gave Money To TBTF Banks, Not To We The People. And Here Is The Result Of This Wall Street President.

Corporate profits have been rising, and wages have been declining. The following graph is from the FRED (Federal Reserve Economic Data). Since the mid 1970s, wages have gone down 7% while corporate profits went up 7%. The average board member of an S&P 500 company works 250 hours, and gets $250,000 (more than $800 an hour).

Wages Are Going Down, Because Pluto Profits Are Going Up. And Other Pluto Policies

Wages Are Going Down, Because Pluto Profits Are Going Up. And Other Pluto Policies

[Profits and Wages are as function of GDP above. Wages in red, corporate profits in blue. Notice the huge jump of corporate profits after Obama became president, and while he and the demonic Dems had total control of the US Congress, and the US Senate. Obama and his Dems can accuse the Republicans all they want, they are accusing reality. The reality is that they, and not the Republicans, did it.]

Warren Buffet is a hero, for many Americans. He bought Heinz (using money from Brazil’s 3G Capital: did you hear about corruption in Brazil?), and fired 600 workers. Then Buffet merged Heinz with Kraft, and another 2,500 workers got the axe. Buffet made ten billion dollars out of these two operations, 3,000 workers lost their livelihood. However, trust him, Buffet will give it all back, after he is dead (so he clamors to all MSM propaganda outfits, which religiously repeat that, as if it were the word of god).

But back to our other hero, the one who feels unappreciated. President Bush called Candidate Obama, and told him to come inside the White House, to take his orders from Secretary of the Treasury Paulson. Obama, feeling honored, obeyed, and did just like Paulson (ex-CEO of Goldman Sachs, and a possibly brain damaged professional football player) told him to do.

Now Obama feels underappreciated, although he should be appreciated, he insists, because he exhibited such great “bipartisan”.

But that is precisely the point: Americans are starting to appreciate less Wall Street and its servants. Americans are getting tired of “bipartisanship”: half professional politician, half Wall Street. Soon average Americans will even see that multigenerational Harvard families are the problem. It feels to them increasingly like a conspiracy is going on, just like Trump says, again and again:”the system is wrong, I know, I was part of it”. And you know what? It is.

“I know a lot of Americans are angry about the economy, and for good cause,” Hillary Clinton said, February 11, 2016. “Americans haven’t had a raise in 15 years.”

So why not Trump? After all, the great leaders of the Democratic Party are often incomprehensibly wealthy (with fortunes in the hundreds of millions of dollars: the Clintons, Pelosis, Feinsteins, Bowles, etc.). And their financiers, those who tend to finance them and are explicit supporters, are among the planet’s richest people. Most of them are more or less involved in government for their business (for example, here is the latest: NASA is now giving help, for free, for Elon Musk’s Space X to go to Mars: it will be interesting to see if Trump pursues these policies of tapping public institutions for making particular plutocrats and their corporations ever wealthier).

Trump got rich from inheritance, and then building things. The plutocrats connected to, or inside, the Democratic Party seem to be rather into other sorts of deals: Feinstein’s husband set-up deals in China (wait until Trump gets on that blood trail!)

In other words, people who vote for the Democratic Party have been trumped. (Originally, in the 1500s, “trump” in English meant exactly what it means in French to this day: lied to.)

People already voted for change eight years ago (when they selected Obama over his conservative rivals). Unfortunately, all the change Obama brought was none at all. (Very recently Obama started to do little progressive things, like taxing the rich a bit more, or his clemency project: too little, too late.)

The big picture with Obama was conservative, not progressive. Obama pursued what Bush did: giving money to the biggest banks. I am not saying it should not have been done, but what was needed is what Hoover (yes, Hoover) and Roosevelt did in the 1930s: a massive stimulus program (instead Obama did a short, small stimulus program; the stimulus of the 1930s extended, overall, for more than 25 years, as it extended into WWII, and then into the “Cold War”.

Under president Hoover, masterpieces such as the Chrisler and Empire State Buildings, and the Hoover dam (across the Colorado, and still watering Las Vegas) went up, some of them in a matter of months. Roosevelt ordered the construction of an unbelievably massive armament program, the construction of 24 fleet carriers (Japan would start a world war with 10).

Obama, long an admirer of Reagan in economic matters, reduced the taxes on the hyper rich by 20% in his first mandate (then brought them back up, the rather trite story of the arsonist who douses the fire later, while posing as a great hero…) The idea was to stimulate the rich, so they stimulate you.

All what We The People Who Vote are going to feel increasingly like, is that Obama was Bush III, or Clinton III-IV. Indeed, where was the “Change We Can Believe?” Yes, none at all. It was all the way down further.

Meanwhile a friend of mine went to Yosemite ten days ago. She told me she could not believe the devastation of the forest. Most of it is fiery red. It is devastated by the Pine Bark Beetle. To kill the Beetle, one needs twenty days well below freezing. However, this hard freeze is now a memory. So the Beetle invades, and kills forest. Treating tree by tree is hopelessly expensive, and futile. Yes, the forests will burn soon, adding to CO2 in the atmosphere. And it is all the way like that to Alaska.

Fort McMurray, Alberta may not have seen the worst of a devastating wildfire.

Massive walls of flames prompted authorities to order the evacuation of all the city’s more than 80,000 residents last night. The blaze has been caused by un-naturally high temperatures. Such giant fires are our immediate future. Nobody said the Greenhouse crisis was going to be nice. More evacuations coming.

These are not normal times. Ever since the universe was seen expanding, and, like the all-seing eye, we have contemplated possibilities we never dreamed of, we have come to realize that the world was in our very large hands (even larger than Mr. Trump’s hands…). Obama had very small ambition. Just like the Clintons, he surrendered to Wall Street, preferring big bucks to come to the dreams of his father. Now Charles Koch, the notorious fossil fuel multibillionaire, and great influencer of US politics, is saying he may support Hillary Clinton (instead of Trump). All plutocrats sucking at the public teat, are scared stiff of Trump. As Trump himself observed, in his boldly introspective style: “They say, what is he doing? We can’t buy him!”.

At least, through all the smokes and mirrors (in which Obama admires himself), this has the merit of clarity. By choosing Hillary Clinton, the Dems will choose business as usual. But this is not business as usual. And, increasingly, through all the smoke and mirrors, people feel that way, all around the most advanced countries, from Siberia, to California.

Change means Trump or Bernie Sanders. Clinton will surely bring only doom, as she did, ever since she and her husband helped fellow traveler, and implicit mentor, president Ronald Reagan with Iran-Contra…

Patrice Ayme’

Economy: Moods Are Changing

May 2, 2016

“TROUBLE” WITH EUROPE? WHY NOT THE US?

New York Nobel economists viewed from Europe, or the US, as “liberal”, or “leftist” do not like Europe, nor do they understand that the USA’s superior economic performance is just something the Clinton crowd likes to crow about. When one looks inside, and compares, ain’t pretty. Joseph Stiglitz: The Euro is the Problem (April 14, 2016) https://youtu.be/30xfMtJZ6iY  http://bit.ly/24k2oC2  #video #lecture.

No, the Euro is not the problem. Actually, Europe just smashed growth forecasts. The problem is that Europe is managed by people from Goldman-Sachs, or who wish to be employed by Goldman-Sachs, or who have a high opinion of Goldman-Sachs, or by people who take advice from people affected by the preceding disease. (As usual, I use here “Goldman-Sachs” as a shorthand for the malevolent, parasitic “money changers”, as Roosevelt and the Bible called them, based mostly in New York and London, with state machinery at their beck and call).

European Productivity, Especially In Franco-German Euro Zone, Has Long Been Higher Than In the USA. So The Scorn Of US Economists Should Consider This Important Fact

European Productivity, Especially In Franco-German Euro Zone, Has Long Been Higher Than In the USA. So The Scorn Of US Economists Should Consider This Important Fact

Question to Stiglitz: Do you think any of the groundwork has been laid to reduce that inequality going forward?

Stiglitz: “We’re in a little bit of better place, but not a lot better. It’s obviously better to have 5 percent unemployment than 10 percent unemployment. And there’s been the beginning of a housing recovery that has helped restore some of the wealth of ordinary Americans. But the damage that has been done is very deep and has persistent effects. The labor force participation rate of people in their 40s, 50s, is still lower than it’s been in decades. People who lost their jobs in 2008, didn’t get jobs in 2009, ‘10, ‘11, maybe aren’t likely to get a job ever. If they do, it’s not going to be anywhere near as good as their old job. There are many people for whom they lost their job at 50 or 55 and are unlikely to ever work again. The scar is permanent.

Another aspect of what I would say is the imperfect recovery, is that the marginalized groups remain marginalized. And while they’ve benefitted, the levels of unemployment are still very very high.”

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/04/stiglitz-inequality/…

Entirely right, Mr. Stiglitz. So why do American economists give lessons to Europeans? The US economy is chugging along at 2% per annum, rather less than Franco-Germania at this point. And it can be argued that the inflation of the US GDP is mostly asset inflation.

When Stiglitz obsesses about unemployment, it’s obviously neither here, nor there: Unemployment is not the end-all, be-all, of the wellbeing of a socioeconomy. Slaves, in all and any economy, tend to be fully employed.

In the San Francisco Bay Area, unemployment is only 3%. However, a one bedroom rents for $3,000 a month, and that’s more than half the median family income (pre-tax). So is that good, or is that hell? I want you to contemplate a twenty lanes freeway, all gridlocked, and the eight lanes overpasses above, too, if you approve, Stiglitz style. (Jam augment GDP!)

Meanwhile, Trump is going parabolic in California, because tolerating the intolerable has become intolerable. Only when tolerating the intolerable becomes intolerable do revolutions happen. Maybe Trump should pick up Sanders as running mate, ha ha ha.

Revolutions are the engine of evolution. They re-unite Homo with the natural ethology from which plutocracy had torn him from. To evolve again, for the better.

Another editorial from Krugman along the same half-wit lines as Stiglitz: “The Diabetic Economy”. Krugman: “LISBON — Things are terrible here in Portugal, but not quite as terrible as they were a couple of years ago. The same thing can be said about the European economy as a whole. That is, I guess, the good news.

The bad news is that eight years after what was supposed to be a temporary financial crisis, economic weakness just goes on and on, with no end in sight. And that’s something that should worry everyone, in Europe and beyond.

First, the positives: the euro area — the group of 19 countries that have adopted a common currency — posted decent growth in the first quarter. In fact, for once it was better than growth in the U.S.

Europe’s economy is, finally, slightly bigger than it was before the financial crisis, and unemployment has come down from more than 12 percent in 2013 to a bit over 10 percent.

But it’s telling that this is what passes for good news. We complain, rightly, about the slow pace of U.S. recovery — but our economy is already 10 percent bigger than it was pre-crisis, while our unemployment rate is back under 5 percent.

And there is, as I said, no end in sight to Europe’s chronic underperformance. Look at what financial markets are saying.”

Children such as Stiglitz and Krugman have great oracles, called “markets”, and they “look” at what they “say”. (Beats saying what they look like, any day!)

Krugman: “Responding to critics of easy money who denounce low rates as “artificial” — because economies shouldn’t need to keep rates this low — [A Fed Reserve Bank governor] suggested that we compare low interest rates to the insulin injections that diabetics must take.

Such injections aren’t part of a normal lifestyle, and may have bad side effects, but they’re necessary to manage the symptoms of a chronic disease.

In the case of Europe, the chronic disease is persistent weakness in spending, which gives the continent’s economy a persistent deflationary bias even when, like now, it’s having a relatively good few months. The insulin of cheap money helps fight that weakness, even if it doesn’t provide a cure.

But while monetary injections have helped to contain Europe’s woes — one shudders to think of how badly things might have gone without the leadership of Mario Draghi [ex-Partner Goldman-Sachs, Patrice Ayme nota bene], president of the European Central Bank — they haven’t produced anything that looks like a cure. In particular, despite the bank’s efforts, underlying inflation in Europe seems stuck far below the official target of 2 percent.

Meanwhile, unemployment in much of Europe, very much including my current location, is still at levels that are inflicting huge human, social and political damage.

It’s notable that in Spain, which these days is being touted as a success story, youth unemployment is still an incredible 45 percent…”

For once, Krugman gets it half right. Right for Germany, but not for France, which has discarded the Euro 3% deficit spending limit, and is going at an official, near-British like 4.5% (official):

“The thing is, it’s not hard to see what Europe should be doing to help cure its chronic disease. The case for more public spending, especially in Germany — but also in France, which is in much better fiscal shape than its own leaders seem to realize — is overwhelming.

There are large unmet needs for infrastructure and investors are essentially begging governments to take their money. Did I mention that the real 10-year interest rate, the rate on bonds that are protected from inflation, is minus 0.8 percent?

And there’s good reason to believe that spending more in Europe’s core would have big benefits for peripheral nations, too.

But doing the right thing seems to be politically out of the question. Far from showing any willingness to change course, German politicians are sniping constantly at the central bank, the only major European institution that seems to have a clue about what is going on.

Put it this way: Visiting Europe can make an American feel good about his own country.”

Why is Krugman feeling so good? Because the US is “producing” three times more GreenHouse Gases (GHG) as the French? Not a non-sequitur, or just a slap in the face: the US expansion, in the last six years as largely been driven by fracking for oil and gas.

***

Patrice’s Grain of Salt: MOODS THEY ARE CHANGING:

The “trouble” in Europe is not just economic. A new philosophy, a new mood, is taking over. Monetary spending, what GDP looks at, is increasingly looked at as a sin. In France, exchange and repair Internet sites are booming. People increasingly repair the devices they use, and recycle and, or, exchange them for others.

Another point, well-known, is that, to re-establish the economy, banks were given money, lots of money. But the bank driven economy comes short. If anything, banks are viewed as organized crime institutions. In other words, people have had enough of the way the economy is organized.

Who needs a car, when public transportation, or the occasional rental will solve the problem? Some car companies sell electric cars, yet, when people need to go on a family trip, they can get a fossil fuel driven machine, which goes much further. The end result is to lower demand. This is also the effect of increasing efficiency. Solar cells on a roof kill a lot of the old economy, the more efficient they get.

The economy serves the society, not vice versa. Moods have to change to incorporate more of the society. A recent example: two professors working at UC BErkeley (one of them French), invented a revolutionary method to cut DNA into desired pieces. They applied for a US Patent. The US PTO sat on it: indeed, what could two women invent? Six moths laterr, a macho team of males from MIT applied for the same patent, for the same invention. Ah, males, thus pillars of society, said Conventional Wisdom. The MIT gentlemen (or is that horsemen charging, Genghis Khan style?) were immediately granted the Patent.

A lot of the economy organized according to the old mood is just organized thievery, or crime. Giving twenty trillion of dollars to the very same banks and connected financial types who organized the 2008 crisis is organized mismanagement of the economy to replenish the criminals. It would have been more just to give the money to We The People directly, instead of giving it to our oppressors. Ah, but it could not be done, because conventional economics prevent it.

Conventional economy right now is little more that the instauration of a feudal order. Malia Obama, eldest daughter of president Obama, will enter Harvard University. There the peers of Stiglitz and Krugman will teach her of the rightful place of the haves, and why it is just that they own the world. And the fault of the have nots, that they do not.

Malia’s present school is “Sidwell Friends School“, a “very exclusive” (as it self-defines) school. Her sister attends it too. Tuition is a modest $40,000 a year. So the two girls, together, cost $80,000, just to enjoy the “very exclusive” position they earned in life. That’s a third higher than US family median income, pre-tax.

It cost significantly more to attend the school where great liberal economist Stiglitz preaches from (Columbia). American economists are right to trash Europe. After all, the European model is the enemy. Should it win, American economists would earn just a fraction of what they presently get.

Patrice Ayme’  

US Plutocrats: Delaware, Not Panama

April 8, 2016

I long said that the USA was the world’s number one tax haven, followed by Great Britain. And this is exactly why these two countries are the seat of global plutocracy. (London boasts that it is the world’s number one financial place, ahead of New York.) The New York Times in “Need to Hide Some Income? You Don’t Have to Go to Panama”, April 8, 2016:

“For wealthy Americans looking to veil their assets and shield some of their income from taxation, there is no need to go to Panama or any other offshore tax haven. It’s easy to establish a shell corporation right here at home.

“In Wyoming, Nevada and Delaware, it’s possible to create these shell corporations with virtually no questions asked,” said Matthew Gardner, executive director of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a nonprofit research organization in Washington.

In some places, it can be more difficult to get a fishing license than to register a shell company. And it doesn’t cost much more.”

Delaware Is The World’s Pluto Center. 285,000 Companies Are Registered In That Delaware Building Alone.

Delaware Is The World’s Pluto Center. 285,000 Companies Are Registered In That Delaware Building Alone.

Delaware allows companies to shift the seat of their business and their profits to Delaware, where, conveniently, there is no tax.

Speaking of the Panama Papers, “This is just one firm [Panamanian Mossack Fonseca law firm] in one place,” said Gabriel Zucman, an economist and the author of “The Hidden Wealth of Nations: The Scourge of Tax Havens,” “So it cannot be representative of what’s happening as a whole in the world.”

“But Mr. Zucman, who estimates that about 8 percent of the world’s financial wealth — more than $7.6 trillion — is hidden in offshore accounts, said another reason was that it is so simple to create anonymous shell companies within the United States.

Wealthy individuals and businesses that want to mask their ownership can conveniently do so in the United States, and then stash those assets abroad.

Yet while the United States demands that financial institutions in other countries share information about Americans with accounts overseas, its reciprocation efforts fall short, critics say.

“You see a ton of wealth in tax havens in Switzerland and the Cayman Islands that is owned by shell companies that are incorporated in Panama or in Delaware,” he said. “The bulk of this wealth does not seem to be duly declared on tax returns.”

The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy in “Delaware: An Onshore Tax Haven” observed that the state’s obscurity, combining with a loophole in its tax code “makes it a magnet for people looking to create anonymous shell companies, which individuals and corporations can use to evade an inestimable amount in federal and foreign taxes.”

***

Not to think the New York Times is going against the branch on which it sits, plutocracy. The preceding extracts were hidden away from the electronic front page. What we found on the front page was Krugman going all-out against Bernie Sanders in Sanders Over The Edge.

A good way to say bad things is to sound reasonable’ Krugman excels at that:

“…most liberal policy wonks were skeptical about Bernie Sanders. On many major issues — including the signature issues of his campaign, especially financial reform — he seemed to go for easy slogans over hard thinking. And his political theory of change, his waving away of limits, seemed utterly unrealistic.

Some Sanders supporters responded angrily when these concerns were raised, immediately accusing anyone expressing doubts about their hero of being corrupt if not actually criminal. But intolerance and cultishness from some of a candidate’s supporters are one thing; what about the candidate himself?

Unfortunately, in the past few days the answer has become all too clear: Mr. Sanders is starting to sound like his worst followers. Bernie is becoming a Bernie Bro.

Let me illustrate the point about issues by talking about bank reform.

The easy slogan here is “Break up the big banks.” It’s obvious why this slogan is appealing from a political point of view: Wall Street supplies an excellent cast of villains. But were big banks really at the heart of the financial crisis, and would breaking them up protect us from future crises?”

Actually Krugman is a specialist of trade, not banks. Bank specialists like Simon Johnson, have called for the break-up of the 21 biggest banks (which are recognized as special by the present US government).

Krugman detests Sanders saying Hillary has no clothes:

“It’s one thing for the Sanders campaign to point to Hillary Clinton’s Wall Street connections, which are real, although the question should be whether they have distorted her positions… But recent attacks on Mrs. Clinton as a tool of the fossil fuel industry are just plain dishonest, and speak of a campaign that has lost its ethical moorings.

And then there was Wednesday’s rant about how Mrs. Clinton is not “qualified” to be president.

What probably set that off was a recent interview of Mr. Sanders by The Daily News, in which he repeatedly seemed unable to respond when pressed to go beyond his usual slogans. Mrs. Clinton, asked about that interview, was careful in her choice of words, suggesting that “he hadn’t done his homework.”

But Mr. Sanders wasn’t careful at all, declaring that what he considers Mrs. Clinton’s past sins, including her support for trade agreements and her vote to authorize the Iraq war — for which she has apologized — make her totally unfit for office.”

Speaking of exhibiting extremely deep, vicious dishonesty, I sent the following comment, it was censored:

It was obvious, during the ramp-up to the Iraq war that the top leaders of the USA had lost their mental balance. The United Nations did not believe their lies and refused to give them an authorization to attack Iraq. Bush attacked, without a UN Security Council authorization, because he was supported by New York Senator Clinton. The invasion of Iraq by the US caused millions of people to die or being wounded. It brought the Islamist State.

Those who engineered this debacle should have been prosecuted for crimes against humanity. Suggesting they are decent, because they apologize, is to deny civilization has merit. Proposing to be led by them again is proposing to learn nothing from the past.

Specialists of banks long suggested to break big banks and big shadow banks (Simon Johnson, 2009). This is not a revolutionary proposition. Teddy Roosevelt broke big oil. When President Franklin Roosevelt came to power, he closed all the banks. That was much more revolutionary.

Global trade treaties enabled giant corporations to extend their monopolies to the entire world. This way, they escape local legislation. An example is the “Double Irish” Apple Inc. and many other corporations use. The CEO of Apple admitted that two-third of the profits of Apple were not taxed.

End of my comment. Krugman never mentions subjects such as the preceding with the angle I use. In his world, big banks, big trade, big bucks, etc. are absolute big goods.

Hillary is his “sis”, with a bit of luck, she will be grateful, and make him big something, some more. Heathens such as me, with their strident Clintonophobia, have no doubt “not done our homework” because, like Sanders, we are just reprobate school children of no intellectual merit.

Try not paying taxes, as big fishes do, if you are a little guy. You will be sent to jail, anywhere in the West. Plutocracy central? You bet!

Another, completely innocuous comment of mine to Krugman later in the day was also censored. Krugman’s post was entitled “Why Cruz is worse than Trump“. Exactly what I have been saying for five months. I guess the dear professor noble Nobel whatever, is not too keen to expose where he gets (some of) his inspiration from. These are sad, nervous days, for those who love plutocracy, the old fashion way.

Nine 5 Star Hotels In Bariloche, Argentina, & Golf Courses To Receive Obama & His Secret Service, In Style, Next Year

Nine 5 Star Hotels In Bariloche, Argentina, & Golf Courses To Receive Obama & His Secret Service, In Style, Next Year

In “USA Financial Extortion“, the essay linked to at the beginning of this essay, I pointed out the connivance between New York “Justice” and financial “Vulture Funds”. Meanwhile, the son and scion of one of the richest persons in Argentina was duly elected president, and Obama rushed to celebrate him, after 15 years of cruel, demented, anti-Krugman, anti-financial plutocracy rule in Argentina. That new Argentinian plutocrat and president is called Macri. He is a dancer. It turns out he was the name on shell companies in several places of the Anglo-Saxon plutocratic empire (such as the Bahamas). That was just revealed in the Panama Papers. Never mind.

Macri, as president, reduced the arrogant financial demands of the lower classes in Argentina: he needs all the money in the world, to pay his Vulture Fund friends in New York, whom Obama serves so well. So brand new president Macri threw more than one million people in poverty, by gutting their allowances: more than 2.5% of the total population of Argentina. Such is the way of the admirers of Reagan: make the rich richer, and the economy will reward you (thus, when Obama came to power, he saw the economy and its big banks were sick: so he gave all the money in the world to the big banks, and reduced the tax rates of the hyper rich by 20%, and now you can see the economy is right).

In any case, throwing more than a million to the poor house is glorious: not bad in a few weeks of assuredly very presidential work. Maybe Macri’s dad can propose newly retired super star noble Nobel Obama some 5 star stay in Bariloche, next year? Just an idea. What are friends for, among the world’s rulers, if not grateful?

Patrice Ayme’


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GrrrGraphics on WordPress

www.grrrgraphics.com

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because all (Western) philosophy consists of a series of footnotes to Plato

Patrice Ayme's Thoughts

Striving For Ever Better Thinking. Humanism Is Intelligence Unleashed. From Intelligence All Ways, Instincts & Values Flow, Even Happiness. History and Science Teach Us Not Just Humility, But Power, Smarts, And The Ways We Should Embrace. Naturam Primum Cognoscere Rerum

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Dogs are animals of integrity. We have much to learn from them.

ianmillerblog

Smile! You’re at the best WordPress.com site ever

NotPoliticallyCorrect

Human Biodiversity, IQ, Evolutionary Psychology, Epigenetics and Evolution

Political Reactionary

Dark Enlightenment and Neoreaction

Of Particular Significance

Conversations About Science with Theoretical Physicist Matt Strassler

Rise, Republic, Plutocracy, Degeneracy, Fall And Transmutation Of Rome

Power Exponentiation By A Few Destroyed Greco-Roman Civilization. Are We Next?

SoundEagle 🦅ೋღஜஇ

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Artificial Turf At French Bilingual School Berkeley

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Patterns of Meaning

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in truth, only atoms and the void

West Hunter

Omnes vulnerant, ultima necat

GrrrGraphics on WordPress

www.grrrgraphics.com

Skulls in the Stars

The intersection of physics, optics, history and pulp fiction

Footnotes to Plato

because all (Western) philosophy consists of a series of footnotes to Plato

Patrice Ayme's Thoughts

Striving For Ever Better Thinking. Humanism Is Intelligence Unleashed. From Intelligence All Ways, Instincts & Values Flow, Even Happiness. History and Science Teach Us Not Just Humility, But Power, Smarts, And The Ways We Should Embrace. Naturam Primum Cognoscere Rerum

Learning from Dogs

Dogs are animals of integrity. We have much to learn from them.

ianmillerblog

Smile! You’re at the best WordPress.com site ever

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