Doomed Dems

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.

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

[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’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Philosophy named and defined much progress.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Patrice Ayme’

MIT Gangsters Rule

”Goodbye, Chicago boys. Hello, M.I.T. gang.”

Who says this? No less than Paul Krugman (himself with a PhD from MIT), in a New York Times editorial “The MIT Gang“. I will get back to the murder-friendly attitude of Krugman, who not only extols the MIT influence as a good thing, but moreover glosses over the nefarious influence of American trained economists, “The Chicago Boys“, in destroying democracy. And not just democracy. The role of economic ideology from the American plutocratic universities was so nefarious that tens of thousands were outright assassinated, so that Chicago economics could be implemented. Bad economics is bad in all ways, including the most murderous ones. Not only Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler and the Khemr Rouge had murderous economics. Arguably, present day economics may be even more lethal.

MIT Economics Favors Plutocracy (=Pluto Power)

After 2008, the MIT gangsters Krugman effrontly lauds, put trillions of dollars at the disposition of the very banksters who had caused the 2008 crash. Yes, those gentlemen gangsters have names. Those gangsters are so famously, they could be called gangstars. Those stars directed the world’s two most important central banks, or played the top roles, just below the ill-fated Dominique Strauss-Kahn at the IMF, or World Bank, etc. (Krugman sings their praise, and their names, in his “MIT Gang” essay).

The crash was actually the transfer of colossal amounts of money from the banks to a subset of plutocrats, ruining the banks. To refloat the banks, public money (see Greece) was called in, both from Treasuries and from Central Banks. The red graph above depicts that transfer as the scarlet exponential of shame. And no one, among those who control the world, condescend to observe it, let alone, explain it.

Although I was diplomatic enough not to even allude to these horrors, I sent the following comment to the New York Times. It was immediately censored:

The Chicago, and MIT economic departments rule. Who elected them, as our leaders? Who elected the Central Banks, and authorized them to buy at outrageous prices the property of private banks? That’s so-called “Quantitative Easing“… Thus enabling the bankers, banksters and gangsters who caused the crash of 2008 to keep on deciding who wins, and who loses, socioeconomically?

The private banks, extend credit to the richest of the rich.Thus they comfort, and buttress the plutocrats… Who then invite the president to gather money during parties in their mansions.

Why have so few people, so much power? Under which political theory? Which theory advocates that only a few people rule? Few: in Greek, Oligos. To rule: Arkhein. Oligos-Arkein: such a theory is called Oligarchy.

So the few rule. Question: why is a MIT gang better than a Chicago gang, a Wall Street gang, or a Sicilian gang?

Because we owe more respect to a MIT gang than to the Mafia? Why? Did we vote to have so much respect for MIT, we want them, MIT gangsters, to take all the decisions about the society in which we live? Our economic well-beings? Our employment? Our lives?

And when did we switch from democracy (Greek: Demos-Kratos, English: People-Power) to Oligarchy? Did we vote to surrender our powers to various gangs? I gather we did not. Thus, when, and how did this silent coup occur? What measures do we need to take, to return to democracy?

Patrice Ayme’

Note: Some commentators have complained that I am too tough on Krugman: he is a good guy, he is on the side of progress, he is on my side, I am biting a fellow creature. Indeed, Krugman is viewed as the standard bearer of social progress, and not at all the standard bearer of plutocratic universities. So let Krugman talk a little bit more in his own offense in the editorial at hand: : “If you don’t know what I’m talking about, the term “Chicago boys” was originally used to refer to Latin American economists, trained at the University of Chicago, who took radical free-market ideology back to their home countries. The influence of these economists was part of a broader phenomenon: The 1970s and 1980s were an era of ascendancy for laissez-faire economic ideas and the Chicago school, which promoted those ideas.

But that was a long time ago. Now a different school is in the ascendant, and deservedly so.”

Notice the pernicious context. What you have to know is that these “Latin American Economists trained at the University of Chicago, who took radical free-market ideology back to theior home countries.”

It sounds innocuous, but actually these “boys” set-up dictatorships in their countries, who killed tens of thousands of people in Argentina alone.

Similar “economic” performance was achieved in Chile, Brazil, and a dozen other Latin American states thus inspired. Nothing that Paul Krugman is allowed to remember while he wants to stay in good standing with plutocracy supreme.

Patrice Ayme’

 

Plutocracy’s Fascist, Europhobic Dream

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

Good propaganda starts with correct facts. Krugman:

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

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

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

Then Krugman operates his bait and switch:

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

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

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

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

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

Actually, lots of people.”

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

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

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

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

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

***

Krugman, Or The Pseudo-Left: 

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

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

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

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

***

Why are we submitted to so much anti-Europeanism?

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

Why the Euro?

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

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

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

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

How can the rest of Europe be excluded?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Patrice Ayme’

Bank Worship

BANK WORSHIP IS ALL WHAT MIGHTY ECONOMISTS KNOW:

I have fiercely condemned, for a decade, the policy of reducing the economy to interest rates. As I have said, and will say again below, this is identical to making (private) bankers into gods. “Liberal” (meaning “left” in the USA) economists love to say that low interest rates is all the socialism we need. Nobel laureate Paul Krugman is trying to make fun of the serious arguments found in scholarly critique of his “interest rate idolatry”. Says Paul:

“I’m With Stupid.

No doubt, dear Paul, no doubt. Being stupid is more profitable, quite often, than being smart and moral.

Banksters Steal The World, And Prosper, Ever More

Via FT Alphaville, James Montier has an interesting piece castigating economists for their “interest rate idolatry”, their belief that central bank-set interest rates matter a lot for the economy…” Montier writes down notions I used to brandish at the beginning of the Obama presidency. I stopped after I realized everybody (Very Serious People, Academia, High Finance, Politicians, Media) was on the con. That meant, in practice that, if one talked about it too much one was viewed as mentally imbalanced (just as pointing out that the Qur’an prescribes terrorism may one looks as a racist, according to the Politically Correct insects). Here is part of Montier’s well-thought essay:

“A wider idolatry: the greatest con ever perpetuated

Lest you think I am being unduly harsh on the world’s poor central bankers, let me turn to the wider idolatry of interest rates that seems to characterise the world in which we live. There seems to be a perception that central bankers are gods (or at the very least minor deities in some twisted economic pantheon). Coupled with this deification of central bankers is a faith that interest rates are a panacea.

Whatever the problem, interest rates can solve it. Inflation too high, simply raise interest rates. Economy too weak, then lower interest rates. A bubble bursts, then slash interest rates, etc., etc. John Kenneth Galbraith poetically described this belief as “…our most prestigious form of fraud, our most elegant escape from reality… The difficulty is that this highly plausible, wholly agreeable process exists only in well-established economic belief and not in real life.”

This obsession with interest rates as a cure-all rests on some dubious views about the way the world works.”

Montier points out that the fundamental official argument for lowering interest rates down to zero is flawed: …”firms generally rely on internal financing to fund investment, rather than borrowing – witness Exhibit 6. Over 100% of gross investment is financed by internal funds.”

The obsession with interest rates has meant, in practice, that so-called liberal, self-described “progressive”, friends of “We The People” economists, have prescribed, implicitly, to lower taxes on the hyper-rich as much as possible. So they masquerade as left-wing, but, in truth, they are plutophiles. This is an old method, and why Polar Bears are white, instead of brown or black as their ancestors were. Montier:

“Just in case you were wondering about the much-lauded ability of the central bank to create inflation via helicopter drops of cash (or its modern-day equivalent), this is actually a form of fiscal policy, not monetary policy. As I noted above, monetary policy alters the distribution of net worth while fiscal policy alters the levels of net worth. Because helicopter drops effectively give everyone a boost of cash, this is clearly a change in net worth and thus is likely to be helpful in stimulating demand.

As you may have gathered from the preceding paragraph, the good news is that there is an alternative to monetary policy, and that is fiscal policy. These days fiscal policy is deeply out of vogue amongst policymakers and politicians. However, it has a much more direct link to growth than any of the channels suggested for monetary policy – it is part of the construction of GDP, and has a clear impact upon incomes.”

Krugman made a very feeble defense, which mostly consisted, weirdly, but tellingly enough, to laud Lawrence Summers, one of the architect of the dismantlement of the financial regulations under Clinton, to create a class of hyper-rich financiers. To his credit, Krugman published my comment:

In the USA, houses are started massively all the times. It’s a mark of unsustainability (presumably flimsy housing is replaced). Reducing the entire economy to this, is imbalanced. Why not consider infrastructure starts? Research? Health?

The fundamental question is: what is an economic activity which is profitable for the society?

The conventional answer is that banks know best. As the banks’ lending goes up as interest rates go down, bringing the latter down, improves the economy, say banks’ friends.

Let’s call that BANK WORSHIP.

Bank worship has enabled big banks’ heads and associated high financiers they collaborate with, to be so powerful and dishonest, that they changed the hearts & minds of all the power that be in society.

The latest case is the French Societe Generale: the police chief in charge of an inquiry on an eight billion dollar fraud therein, now admits, years later, that she was manipulated by the bank (a lower level employee, Jerome Kerviel, was sued, chased down, and condemned severely, although he claims he acted under orders). The fraud was reimbursed by taxpayers. This means that Societe Generale bosses, just in this particular case, of this particular fraud, stole around 50 dollars to each French citizens. Don’t worry for them: the thieves live big. An even bigger picture is that, in the leading countries, big bankers are banksters, and they corrupted institutions of the Republic (including politics, government, justice and police) thoroughly.

The problem is the same in Anglo-America: time after time, giant frauds of the biggest banks are exposed, and they are condemned to fines. In the end, a bank-too-big-to-fail condemned to a fine means nothing: in the worst possible cases, it’s tax payers who pay. It is the case where the criminals’ punishment is to make the victims suffer.

The latest such case is the LIBOR “punishment”, proclaimed today. In it, big banks in London manipulated the world’s leading interest rate (they call that the “market”). You would think that, after stealing billions the heads of banks such as JP Morgan would go to jail. No. Taxpayers go to jail.

Zero Interest Rates, To Serve High Finance Plutocracy:

Another problem is that zero interest rates have proven devastating for small savers, while providing the banks and their accomplices with quasi-unlimited funds for playing with each other the derivatives’ market, something that is not a real economic activity, except by making the richest ever richer.

One lends to the rich. By making lending ever easier, government policy has made the rich ever richer.

Correct economic activity would consist in the government encouraging activities which are profitable to the people at large, very long term.

The “market” is driven with what bankers think is profitable, short term.

Conventional wisdom by the economists in power is that we can trust the bankers to encourage the economic activity most suitable to the “market”, hence society.

Governments were told by the economists in power to make the job of bankers easier, to make for a better economy, hence better society. Trust bankers, give them all the lending capability, hence all the power they want, and We The People will become richer.

Thus the general strategy of bank worship assumes a trait that is true: a banker is a government official. A banker is a non-elected, uncontrolled government official, with unlimited funds, and inexistent oversight by the People’s representatives.

Bankers control the market, which controls the economy, which control society. Is that the society we want? Do we want to be controlled, financed, by an oligarchy of non-elected little Big Brothers who decide what activities the society will engage in?

Bankers are little Big Brothers who are free to finance the high financial class they belong to, as much as they want. That’s why derivative trading is more than ten times larger than real trade, worldwide. This is also why half of the world’s money is in Dark Pools. And so on.

The cause of this nightmarish world is bank worship. Bank worship is very smart for the Big Bankers. Krugman is NOT with stupid, as he disingenuously claim. He is with the winning crowd. To go interact with people such as Paul Krugman and Joe Stiglitz, the fact is, one needs to be seriously independently wealthy (then one can become a “student”, meaning a future co-conspirator, or mingle at parties).

It is very stupid for the rest of us to have become adulators of bank worship. Bank worship made society subject to a dictatorial oligarchy operating in the shadows.

What happened to the Enlightenment? It seems to have sunk in “Dark Pools”.

Patrice Ayme’

Summers Summits Summits of Hypocrisy

Some people all they want is power, and will do whatever it takes to get it. Larry Summers is the ultimate example of this. Summers version 2015 just found that the mood is changing, and condemns 100% Summers, version 1990s, when he was Secretary of the Treasury under that class act, Bill Clinton (from dirt poor to dirty rich).

Two immediate family members of Summers were Nobel Prizes in economy.

Summers was part of a clique of young PhDs in economics who studied how to get rich and influential at MIT and Harvard around 1979. Paul Krugman, one of them, lauds them all the time. I sent a scathing comment on the whole mood of economics as the golden calf. It did not get published.

FDR’s Powerful Family Crest: Who Plants, Preserves

FDR planted a mighty tree, the separation of money creation from financial conspiracy. Larry Summers uprooted it.

Here is my suggestion for Larry Summers’ Family Crest: Who Uproots, Destroys. Summers uprooted the financing of the real economy, and thus destroyed it. As corruption went up, innovation (true innovation, science based) went down.

Corruption is a barrier to innovation, warns Alina Mungiu-Pippidi, in Nature. Greater scrutiny of public spending is needed if science and technology are to fulfil their potential, she intones. However, there is more pernicious than that: when private spending and practice is deregulated by government.

After, deregulation of private practice is how, around 1620, slavery was made lawful in the future USA.

Another of the Harvard-MIT economist conspirators was Mario Draghi.

All these plotters literally knew each other, saw each other, talked to each other, learned form each other… How to please their masters. Mario Draghi got his PhD from MIT, in 1979. Later Draghi became vice chairman at the financial conspiracy outfit Goldman Sachs, and “trustee” at various USA plutocratic institutions of high repute (Brookings, Princeton, etc.).

Draghi is now in charge of giving money to giant private European banks. So they can become richer: then the money will trickle down to European pigeons, and they can thrive, eating the crumbs.

American plutocrats know and trust Draghi. Europeans don’t know anything about him, except they believe he is European (I know better: plutocrats belong to Hades, not the real world).

Larry Summers was put in charge of removing all regulations that this traitor to the plutocratic principle, or, more exactly, trickle down, Franklin Roosevelt, had instituted in 1933.

What had FDR done?

Basically banks create money. So they are agents of the government. Thus they ought not to intervene all over the economy, and, in particular, finance, without important limits to their powers.

Summers removed these limits.

The effect on High Finance was absolute power, thus absolute corruption.

The green light given to bankers to corrupt all of society had an effect on other mighty economic actors.

Those worthies felt a green light had also been given to them, implicitly: if the bankers could use their money creation capacity mandated by the government, to enrich themselves and their friends to infinity, why not the same for all?

Why could not fossil fuel plutocrats corrupt scientists and the media, and claim it was totally OK to augment CO2 in the atmosphere by

The democrats were in power in Congress starting in 2006: they did not stop Bush. The democrats were in absolute power just after Obama got elected: they pursued the program of rescue of the plutocracy, complete with tax cuts for the hyper rich.

Obama, to get elected, needed to mobilize those who do not usually vote, because they do not believe that whatever they do will change anything.

Nowadays so-called “democrats” in the USA are in a bind: to get their champion elected, they need the champion to mobilize those Obama mobilized, and who got very little in exchange.

Moreover, the plutocracy got entrenched in the meantime. To change this would require a revolution. Re-evolving.

Re-evolution is something the People may support, if it believed in it. To avoid it, it’s called “Populism” (sounds like Nazism, Socialism, Communism, Liberalism, Nationalism, Islamism, all pejorative notions).

Fast forward to the New York Times. A long ode to Summers called “Establishment Populism Rising.” by Thomas B. Edsall. Here is how it starts:

“Larry Summers, who withdrew his candidacy for the chairmanship of the Federal Reserve under pressure from the liberal wing of the Democratic Party in 2013, has emerged as the party’s dominant economic policy strategist. The former Treasury secretary’s evolving message has won over many of his former critics.

Summers’s ascendance is a reflection of the abandonment by much of the party establishment of neo-liberal thinking, premised on the belief that unregulated markets and global trade would produce growth beneficial to worker and C.E.O. alike.

Summers’s analysis of current economic conditions suggests that free market capitalism, as now structured, is producing major distortions. These distortions, in his view, have resulted in gains of $1 trillion annually to those at the top of the pyramid, and losses of $1 trillion every year to those in the bottom 80 percent.”

One has to pinch oneself. Summers has of course zero credibility. Trusting him on economics and social questions would be trusting an enemy. Summers put the entire planet on the wrong trajectory. He is part of a coterie mainly centralized on Harvard, which insisted on raping, pillaging, and letting Russia being devoured by plutocrats created ex-nihilo, because, for Harvard types, plutocracy is an absolute good, just as for Saint Louis Catholicism was an absolute good worth killing the world for.

The destruction of the Russian economy (more exactly a lowering of Price Purchase parity, within Russia, of at least 40%) was just one facet of their maelstrom of destruction these USA based public-private plutocrats visited on the world.

The result, in the case of Russia, is the rise of Putin, someone who advocates using nuclear weapons on Warsaw if his conventional attacks get in trouble. Why? Because, as the entire West propaganda and governments lauded, for more than twenty years (time flies), the Rubin-Goldman-Sachs-Summers-Clinton-Greenspan view of the world, Putin just got mad with rage. Rightly so.

But the damage is not confined to Putin. All over the world, from Xi to Assad, to all and any politicians in Brazil, Larry Summers and his ilk preached. They preached that corruption and plutocratization ought to have no limits, as long as the gullibility of We The People went along.

“Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names.”

— President J.F. Kennedy.

The elite is fearing the hatred, which is growing. Even in the naturally rich USA. The rapacious elite wants to marshal the anger, to drive it to a safe place. Safe for itself to keep on enjoying Earth a little bit more, as its feudal domain. It is a race between knowledge and folly.

Patrice Ayme’

Picking Piketty Peeks

Thomas Piketty, a young and successful French Science Po economist wrote “Capitalism in The XXI Century”. I bought it ASAP, and then did not read one page. The reason is that there was a waiting list. By the time I got the book, it was clear it was rehashing part of what I have been saying for years.

For example, to my knowledge, I was the first to make the rapprochement between the present situation and the Ancient Regime. The Nobles (2% of the population) did not pay (most) tax.

Piketty recognizes that he just discovered “his book’s principal idea” that the “taux de rendement du capital” (return on capital) was higher than return on work. “Moi je ne le savais pas avant”. I have been pounding that fact for a decade or so.

The Higher The Return On Capital, The Lower the Growth (Piketty)

It is nice to see Piketty saying these things I have been saying, now, but I have moved on, long ago. I condemn the very way money is generated (by the private-public banking system).

It is first obvious to whoever has studied past societies. Plutocracies are basically those societies where, at some point, taxation on the wealthiest has not been applied enough to limit the EXPONENTIATION of capital.

I do not find alluring to listen to my old observations. Not to demean Piketty. Others such as Saez in Berkeley, also French, had published enlightening research on inequality, for years.

I agree with all what Piketty proposes. Yet, many of his answers are all too mild.

In the period from Roosevelt to1981 (arrival of Reagan), the upper marginal tax rate of the USA averaged 82%. It applied above one million dollar income (constant dollars). Growth was maximum.

What Piketty did not say: In the next 20 years the maximum margin on the richest came down to (less than) 15%. Yes, less than secretaries.

Piketty wants to rise the upper margin tax rate of income millionaires to 80% or 90%. I agree.

To this critics of Piketty, in France or the USA, reply that will kill innovation. A French cutie interviewer told Piketty that with rates like that the robot who heads Facebook (OK, she did not use “robot”) would not have been motivated to invent Facebook.

Who cares?

As it is, Mr. Z from Facebook stole an idea from France. Besides, Facebook-like companies already existed (Myspace). There is also plenty of evidence Facebook was a government operation (the protégé of Larry Summers, parachuted to the USA government under Clinton, was parachuted to Google, and then parachuted to Facebook).

Piketty vaguely mumbled something about the research which really mattered was public. But he was weak and indecisive.

Why? Well, after all, Piketty teaches at Science Po, a place full of young arrogant greedsters who think they are becoming qualified to lead the world. They live according to a principle that Piketty himself condemns: politics as a profession. Piketty said that the fact Hollande had been in politics all his life was a problem (the same is true for roughly all politicians).

Professional politicians should not be condemned to clean the toilets exclusively, but certainly ought to be left to sort out the details, of the laws passed by the People, like they increasingly have to, in Switzerland. That’s the only exclusivity they should pretend to.

In truth, business creators are nothing much. Business creators motivated first by money are even less.

Piketty to Bill Gates: ‘If 30 years ago, one would have told you: you will earn one billion dollars, not 50 billion, would you have refused to invent Windows?’ Of course not says Piketty, answering his own question.

Piketty: Without counting that all these innovations rest on an ecosystem of public research.

Piketty missed the obvious remark that France was at the forefront of the electronics age: transistors and CPUs (chips), and even the Personal Computer (PC), were all invented, and produced first in France. He probably does not even know this.

And the fact he does not know is testimony enough to the dirty ways of money.

The hard creative work is from engineers, scientists and the philosophers who back them up, not forgetting the historians, sociologists, writers, artists and poets helping to inspire the preceding crowd.

All the world of lasers and the like came from publicly funded lab in Paris. In 1953, Kastler invented optical pumping:

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2013/06/20/genius-irreplaceable-jobs-follow/

The same lab has made more Nobel prize winning work founding outright a completely new field: how to see light with atoms (my own formulation, don’t accuse Serge Haroche!)

Such labs are now starved by austerity.

If you ask people at Apple Inc. why they are so good, they don’t say “Steve Jobs”. It’s not just that Steve has experienced technical difficulties, it’s that Apple engineers feel empowered. Apple has $700 billion in market cap (twice Google).

After a level of inequality, it has no effect on the motivation of individuals: why to pay traders millions of Euros? Say Piketty.

What I say is that much of trading itself, should not exist.

Much of what Piketty says about Europe and the Euro Zone is correct. One should homogenize the core part of the Euro Zone, and those who don’t like it, like Luxembourg, can stay out.

Right now in Europe, large companies pay less tax than medium and small ones. It’s even worse with middle class people versus the wealthiest.

A point Piketty makes is that inequality is not everything, but opacity also matters. He mentioned that Carlos Slims (world’s richest man) obtained juicy contracts from the government. (Piketty is careful not to say that this was a case of obvious corruption; he obviously knows this, but he wants to be keep on being invited in the power circles, and his books to create the buzz that brings millions of sales).

An objection made to Piketty is that the classification of the richest people has changed over 30 years. To this, Piketty has not clear retort, but I do.

That is indeed a silly objection: The founder of Walmart passed away. His heir have, all together, more money than Bill Gates.

More historically, under the terrible Roman plutocracy, the richest of the rich changed all the time, for similar reasons. But, although it was hard to maintain just as high a status, it was easier to maintain one just below. The Curial class (= local plutocracy) survived for 4 centuries.

Karl Marx? Piketty rightly points out that Marx wanted to cancel private property, but did not think about what would happen the next day.

Piketty suggests to create new notions of property, including hybrids between public and private property as conceived now.

Piketty was asked why he was so keen, him, such a young guy, to go all around the world, to be received by Obama, to be admired by all, etc. … Instead of being working hard? Especially with the crisis we have now?

Piketty replied he believed in the power of ideas. He believes politicians are just into doing what they believe is the dominant thinking We The People (he did not use that expression) go by. So, in the democratic debate, one should try to modify this dominant opinion.

Notice the naivety: one is very far here from my Satanic interpretation of common human behavior, especially at the leadership level

The answer to this is simple: some play, some think. Real thinkers are not in the White House, they are in distant caves, watching the sea. Occasionally, when not thinking deep.

Piketty points out that oligarchic regimes bring social problems, thus scapegoats, thus nationalist drift, and then, ultimately, like Hitler, or Putin, war.

All right, truth be told, Piketty did not mention Hitler, but he did mention Putin. Not a word on the problem of banks. Out of 29 extremely dangerous banks, the equivalent of potential super-novas on the verge of explosion, four are French. BNP is roughly the same size as French GDP. Those banks are the main engines of inequality, besides the fact any of them, by imploding would make the situation instantaneously worse than in 2008.

Those banks are still allowed to engage in a form of trading which is the modern equivalent of slavery. Piketty does not mention the problem, which is at the core of the money generating-austerity craze.

And he is not afraid to say that many of the time honored ways of economics are actually outright insanity (he repeatedly uses the word “delirium”). Piketty is no genius, but he makes an excellent impresario.

Patrice Ayme’

Europe’s Greek Tragedy

Finance Without Morality, Is Only Ruin Of The People:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Krugman concludes:

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

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

Can they do it? We’ll soon see.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

33 million dead, and now you ask for more?

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

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

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

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

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

Instead, blame General Economics.

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

MORALITY HAS TO REACH ACROSS CENTURIES:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ah, and of Greece and the Euro?

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

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

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

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

Patrice Ayme’

European Politics: Wall Street Servant

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EUROPEAN LEADERS ARE SERVANTS OF THE GREAT WALL STREET SPIRIT:

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

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

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

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

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

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

WE PLUTOCRATS RULE HELL:

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

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

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

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

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

THE EUROPEAN ELITE IS CORRUPT:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Will Europe revolt?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Patrice Ayme’

Krugman’s Ignominious Retreat on Quantitative Easing

In the 1980’s Paul Krugman worked at the White House under Reagan. In later decades, he somewhat mysteriously acquired a left wing reputation for what he wrote (in particular for daring to oppose the Iraq War; that, in 2003, qualified you as far out leftist). Naturally, after he got the Nobel Prize in Economics, his colossal reputation gave him great influence in the Obama administration.

Krugman gave the advice to institute a massive “Quantitative Easing”. In this the Central Bank (“Fed” in the USA) buys assets held by the largest banks (so a branch of government, the Central Bank, buys something sold by another branch of government, Government Bonds, and held by others, supposedly private parties, large banks; it’s all very absurd).

The USA and the EU engaged in trillions of Quantitative Easing.

Result?

More plutocracy than ever, as I had anticipated, more than 6 years ago by calling TARP (the lending of nearly a trillion dollars to the largest banks), Transfer of Assets to the Richest People

Increasing the money supply to banks is not increasing the money supply to people. Especially with the derivative trading being 12 times world’s GDP. So no wonder QE does not work: most of the financial activity is not about financing the real economy, but the big banks casino.

Under the last part of his reign, when Clinton demolished the Banking Act of 1933, FDR’s great work, financial derivatives trading was only 80 trillion dollars. Now it’s 800 trillions. A weakening of rules in effect only weeks ago, written by Citigroup, is now the new law…

People need money and they need work. The government is the lender, and employer, of last resort. When things go back to normal, the government can withdraw. Cyrus the great, founder of Achaemenid Persia used the government, and then, wild private capitalism: there is a time for either. Now we are at a time where governments need to provide with an economy for common people, not just an economy for fat cats.

Absent the will to do this renewal of economic activity in a civil way, the military option will show its ugly face… Yes, could start in Russia… Wait…

Here is Krugman:

“Money isn’t everything… Well, the money supply isn’t everything, either.

… I argued that it’s hard to see why anyone believes that money supply increases will do the trick after the past six years. … maybe describing my own conversion to monetary pessimism may help clarify what’s happening now. 

So, back in 1998 I was looking at Japan’s troubles, and — like Evans-Pritchard and many others now — believed that the Bank of Japan could surely end deflation if it really tried… doubling the monetary base will always raise prices, even if you’re at the zero lower bound… To my own surprise… when you’re at the zero lower bound, the size of the current money supply does not matter at all. You might think that it’s a fundamental insight that doubling the money supply will eventually double the price level, but … short-term interest rate is currently zero, changing the current money supply without … raising expected inflation — matters not at all.

And as a result, monetary traction is far from obvious. Central banks can change the monetary base now, but can they commit not to undo the expansion in the future, when inflation rises? …

But, asks Evans-Pritchard, what if the central bank simply gives households money? Well, that is, as he notes, really fiscal policy — it’s a massive transfer program rather than a conventional monetary operation… it would have no effect … households would know that future taxes will have to rise to pay for today’s gift, and save all of it.

[How silly and wealthy can Krugman be? Really poor people have no money… And very good things to spend it on, should they have any. All poor people know that, but Krugman never interviewed any of them, apparently. If the government gave the poor money, they would spend it right away. It’s actually a well-known fact that all the money given to the poor is immediately recycled in the economy!]

More Krugman:

“… Central banks aren’t in the business of just giving money away; what they do is always some kind of asset swap, in which they buy assets or make loans which then become assets. I’m pretty sure that neither the Fed nor the Bank of England has the legal right to just give money away as opposed to lending it out; if I’m wrong about this, put me down for $10 million, OK?”

Still, isn’t this just theory? Well, no. Huge increases in the monetary base in previous liquidity trap episodes had no visible effect.

And now we have the post-2008 experience, and it’s certainly not an example of central banks easily dealing with economic downdrafts.

Just to be clear, I have supported QE in both Britain and the US, on the grounds that (a) central bank purchases of longer-term and riskier assets may help and can’t hurt, and (b) given political paralysis in the US and the dominance of bad macroeconomic thinking in the UK, it’s all we’ve got. But the view I used to hold before 1998 — that central banks can always cause inflation if they really want to — just doesn’t hold up, theoretically or empirically.”

So Krugman supported Quantitative Easing for the same reason as a drunk searches for his keys below a lamp post: it’s the only thing he sees. How smart is this?

As I said, the state will have to be the employer of last resort, it has always been, and always will be. The free market is great, but it’s not really free; the state pays for it.

Patrice Ayme’