No Knowledge, No Morality

Can a society be moral if most of its population does not know science? Of course not. And it generalizes: if a society does not know all it could know, and which is most significant, it cannot be moral.

The enquiry of why the US Army bombed a Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), or Doctors Without Borders, MSF/DWB hospital, and kept bombing it, even after it knew it was a hospital it was bombing, reveals a deep disconnect between morality and knowledge.

In truth: no knowledge, no morality.

The US Army filed no criminal charges: that may have been correct, it’s its entire culture of engagement which is criminal, at this point.

Strikes Inside An Innocent City Require High Morality, Not Just Sky High Bombing

High morality is the motivation for high precision.

Says the New York Times:

“WASHINGTON — Dispatched to eliminate a compound swarming with Taliban fighters, the AC-130 gunship circled above the Afghan city, its crew struggling to figure out where exactly to direct the aircraft’s frightening array of weaponry. Missile fire had forced it off course, and now the gunship’s targeting systems were pointing it to an empty field, not an enemy base.

About 1,000 feet to the southwest, however, the crew spotted a collection of buildings that roughly matched the description of the Taliban compound provided by American and Afghan forces on the ground. Nine men could be spotted walking between the buildings.

The gunship’s navigator called an American Special Forces air controller on the ground seeking guidance. The response was immediate and unequivocal.

“Compound is currently under control of the TB, so those nine PAX are hostile,” the air controller said, using common military shorthand for “Taliban” and “people.”

The air controller was wrong. His mistake was one link in a chain of human errors and equipment and procedural failures that led to the devastating attack on a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Afghanistan last year that killed 42 [innocent, staff, patients and doctors] people, the Defense Department said Friday… military investigators described a mission that went wrong from start to finish. Even after Doctors Without Borders informed American commanders that a gunship was attacking a hospital, the airstrike was not immediately called off because, it appears, the Americans could not confirm themselves that the hospital was actually free of Taliban.

“Immediately calling for a cease-fire for a situation we have no SA” — situational awareness, that is — “could put the ground force at risk,” an American commander whose name and rank were redacted was quoted as saying in the report.”

It turns out that the entire mission was conducted as if human lives were not important. The gunship left more than an hour early (for an “unrelated emergency”), before proper briefing, although that flying destroyer equipped with a 105mm cannon, was sent to a city full of people. Then a radio failed, preventing the download of further information to the plane, etc. The crew does not seem to have ever been told a hospital was in the general area of the target.

Not bringing any criminal charges was “simply put, inexplicable,” said John Sifton, the Asia policy director of Human Rights Watch. Indeed, there are plenty of legal precedents for war crimes prosecutions based on acts that were committed with recklessness. Recklessness or negligence does not absolve someone of criminal responsibility under the United States military code. In a famous example, the cruiser Indianapolis, which had transported the atomic bomb, was sunk by a Jap submarine a few days before the end of the war. Its captain was court-martialed, and condemned (in spite of the insistence of the Jap commander, Commander Mochitsura Hashimoto, that the cruiser would have been hit, from the position of the sub, and the fan of torpedo fired, no matter what. The conviction of the US Captain was reversed, 5 days after Hashimoto’s passing at age 91)

This attack against Medecins Sans Frontieres was in the mood of “signature strikes” (and helped by great anger of some Afghan commanders against Doctors Without Borders)… an accident waiting to happen from systemic recklessness. The famous signatures strikes are the most significant signature of the Obama administration in the matter of international relations (besides juicy transnational treaties to promote plutocracies and Panama papers arrangements).

“Signature strikes” consisted in attacking gatherings of people in a country the US is not at war with, just because, like your average wedding full of Arabs or Pakistani, they looked suspicious. Amazingly, the Obama administration went on with them for years. In great part because US Main Stream Media decided that killing crowds of unknown people in unknown parts did not matter: US inflicted terror, for no good reason, was a good thing.

What was the moral theory behind those “signature strikes”? Plausible denial that the perpetrators did not know what was going on. The exact same theory the Prussians inaugurated in 1914, and the Nazis perpetrated during their reign of terror, attacking the world (as in 1914), and killing 15 millions in extermination camps, plus many million civilians out there by bombing flour mills, etc.

To use evil ways against evil perpetrators may be necessary: strategic bombing defeated the Nazis and the Japanese military (although it killed only around 700,000 in Germany). However, using evil ways when they are not necessary, even in the service of goodness, is evil.

In the wars the French and American air forces are conducting against Islamists, from Mali to Afghanistan, hitting the enemy and ONLY the enemy should be the first objective.

Clearly, the US should do more like the French, and conduct more thorough examination of what they are going to attack (France has learned the lesson the hard way: see the massacres in Oran in 1945). At the slightest doubt, there should be no attack against a massively innocent population. One does not rescue people from oppression, by killing them.

The fight against Islamism is not the fight against Nazism. In the case of Nazism, the strongest means were justified: an entire nation had become criminally insane, and was the enemy. (Killing the innocent was unavoidable collateral damage. If Germans wanted to stop the insanity, they could stop collaborating with the Nazis; many did, in the end, enough to make a big difference.)

Whereas, in the case of Islamism, many pseudo-thinkers in the West made various theories to tell us that fearing Wahhabism was racist. They, not innocent civilians, throughout Africa and the Middle East, should rather be bombed.

Patrice Ayme’

Puerto Rico’s Default: Back To The 1930s?

We were told, for years, the outrageous lie that Greece’s debt crisis was “caused” by the Euro… Even by supposedly left wing economists of the USA (Paul Krugman, etc.), and their European parrots. I exposed this as a cover-up of the outrageous state of banking under a thick layer of Europhobia, even more than four years ago. Now Puerto Rico exhibits an increasing unwillingness to pay interest on its debt. Now what?

Puerto Rico’s Default Has Got To Be Europe’s Fault:

It’s only a matter of time before the plutocratic press, or, if you want, the Main Stream Media, make the Euro and Greece the reason for Puerto Rico’s failure. (For such a devious reasoning, see below.)

After 2008, the economy turned bad, and governments borrowed heavily to keep the society going. As the prospects got dimmer, https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2014/06/21/new-york-vulture-justice/, bought Puerto Rican debt. Vultures hate education, as education makes for rebels, and they are in position to reduce educational spending, in Greece or Puerto Rico. When Vulture Funds had their fill, of Puerto Rican debt, they sprang the trap: mistaking Porto Rico for Greece, they required the Porto Rican government to reduce spending in education… So that Porto Rico could pay them the extravagant interest payments.

Is Puerto Rico The Object Of A (Financial Engineered) Genocide?

Debating Puerto Rican debt appears to be about finance, state debt, schools, hedge funds. Yet, ultimately, it’s about who owns Puerto Rico.

The Guardian, and magazine such as Slate, bought the hedge fund propaganda, bait, hook, line, sinker, if not the boat itself. Jordan Weissmann in Slate, a famous electronic magazine, blared: “Hedge Funds Think Puerto Rico Should Shut Down Schools to Pay Its Debts. Is That So Wrong?”

No, of course, it’s right. Hedge Funds should have all rights you can possibly imagine. They already buy and sell entire countries.

***

The Truth About Porto-Rico: Tax Haven, Millionaires’ Haven:

The total tax receipt in Puerto Rico is 10%, a small fraction of what it is in advanced countries (at least 23%). Taxes on the rich are small, full of loopholes. Moreover, the USA treats Puerto Rico like an exploited colony, so full reimbursements and compensations available to full citizens of the USA are not available in Puerto Rico.

Another truth is that educational spending is exploding in the USA, because health spending (Obamacare”) does not control costs (contrarily to what propaganda says). So plutocrats from hedge funds profit from an inflation which fellow plutocrats in health care engineered, thanks to an arguably too Machiavellian by half White House.

Porto Rico is a weird island, a territory of the USA which is neither destined to independence, nor a state. In the 1950s, four Puerto Ricans went to the Congress of the USA, and shot 30 rounds onto the Representatives, to ask for independence.

Krugman says Puerto Rico is not Greece: indeed, Puerto Ricans flee massively to the USA. Greeks no doubt ought to do the same and contribute free, or menial labor, to the splendor of the economy as celebrate by Krugman. People who are in the know stridently contradicted Paul Krugman’s positions and exposed them for what they are: the term “neo-colonialism” is too good. Pursued to the end, Puerto Rico would just vanish, except as a tax haven (just as the Virgin Islands next door).

***

Mussolini Fustigated What He Called “Demoplutocracies”:

Hitler joined the Italian dictator in complaining about the “plutocrats”… whom he knew all too well (top Nazis commiserated with him for having to dine with “plutocrats”, and make small talk to “plutocrats“, etc.)  

Does that mean that those who complain about “plutocracy” a lot, such as yours truly, are also fascist?

No. Of course not. First it shows that Mussolini and Hitler called their dinner guests “plutocrats” because that’s what they, all often, were. It also reveals that, in the 1930s, it was a common political truth, worldwide, that plutocrats had caused the financial and economic crisis… As they had, since they were in command (the bubble of the 1920s was deliberately engineered by Lord Montague and his American alter ego, to mitigate British debt from World War One by inflation and over-activity).

***

President Roosevelt, Knight Of The Dark Side:

People often ask me what the Dark Side is. Neither “Evil“, nor “Star Wars” do justice to the notion. That force is strong, but its strength varies. The politician who acted the best, for his own country, when faced with that plutocratic crisis, was President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Roosevelt devalued the dollar, shackled Wall Street and the banks, created a Command and Control economy (headed by a young Canadian!). Roosevelt, himself a plutocrat, behaved in an extremely progressive, socialist way. Because he had to. Sometimes, the Dark Side is all about doing what is necessary (I see Obama chuckling in the distance with his drones). Embracing many of the solutions of the hard left, was the price Roosevelt paid to save plutocracy.

Maybe to compensate, for his own exuberant socialism, Roosevelt was abusive with the French (who still adore him), and exploitative with the British. He also helped making sure that Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini could devastate Europe… To the great profit of the USA. In 1939, or early 1940, Roosevelt could have declared war to Hitler. That would have probably made him win re-election in November 1940 in a landslide.

Roosevelt ran for an unprecedented Third Term. President Washington had refused to do so; Roosevelt was not obligated to run for an unprecedented third term. But he was morally, civilizationally, and strategically obligated to declare war to Nazism. FDR never did: Hitler declared war TO him. So why did not he?

Because Roosevelt was a master of the Dark Side: he let Nazism being used as a blunt instruments to destroy the competition in Europe, the other representative democracies (France, UK, Netherlands, Belgium, Norway… and their allies: Czechoslovakia, Poland, etc.) In the USA, this makes him a great man, an immense patriot, the founder of the “American Century”. The judgment of history, is another matter, entirely, let’s hope I contribute to it with my own point of view (“theory“).

In any case, President Roosevelt was a master plutocrat, whereas Hitler and Mussolini depended upon plutocrats. The case of Stalin is different: the Dark Side was so strong with him, he was able to surf over lots of plutocrats, as if they were waves, one after the other. Early on plutocrats of the USA (such as the Harriman Brothers) financed him (say to develop Baku oil fields). Engel in his theoretical book had said to do away with marriage, and embrace, free, secxual love. So Stalin’s satanic approach was pragmatic. Allied to German fascists, from 1916, until savagely attacked by his colleague Hitler, Stalin dictated his conditions to a weakened Roosevelt who was all too happy to give him half of Europe to chew on.

The Pragmatic Approach Can Be Opposed to the Principled One:

The USA stays highly pragmatic, never having ratified the Kyoto Protocol. Obama presented a plan to lead from behind technological progress (it affects energy production, about 30% of the CO2 production, but not transportation, another third, or industry). The solution, of course is to take out all subsidies for fossil fuels, starting with the richest countries, and doing so progressively. If Europe and the USA decided this, they could impose it, worldwide, through a carbon tax.

A conference in Paris is supposed to make desperate efforts to stop the rush through the two degrees Celsius, but the largest sub-arctic zone, Russia, has already barreled right through.

As long as hedge funds feel they can order the world around why should it be any different? What else?

Plutocrats say: all the problems arise from French-like socialism, and the European Unification related to it. Thus, they have got to say that so it is, with Puerto Rico’s debt crisis.

Puerto Rico’s debt crisis has to be related to the hydra of European unifying socialism, sneakily propelled by the French.  How could that not be? Contagion, what plutocrats fear the most, this what Greece and France brought: contagion of rebellion. Destroying direct democracy is why Persia financed the war of Sparta against Athens. Plutocrats have profited of this Persian investment, ever since.

The Greeks did not want to pay for their banks’ errors, and the state debt resulting from it. So the Greeks started a mood, a mood where those who owe resist their lords, the lenders. Hence the Puerto Rican legislature sudden decision to resist its masters, the hedge fund managers. So, you see, European leftists are not innocuous, they are already attacking on U.S. soil.

And the climate crisis? Purely a French invention. Proof? The climate conference is to be held in Paris in four months.

Nowadays, thanks in part to the Multiverse fanatics, no proofs are really necessary, screaming insanities is sufficient, to qualify for respect (as long as you have a big gun, or pocketbook, or aura given by those with guns, or pocketbooks). Everybody knows this, by now: the tedium of the medium is the message, and the massage.

Patrice Ayme’

Virtue Ethics Devalued

Virtue ethics consists into worshipping abstractly defined virtues: wisdom, prudence, courage, temperance, justice, happiness (Eudaimonia)… I will explain why this is erroneous.

Virtue ethics was founded by Aristotle, who considered slavery to be necessary… (Let me add immediately that Greco-Roman slavery was apparently by far the worst of those suffered by the Middle Earth in the last 5,000 years; only the Muslim habit of impaling slaves who had attempted to flee compares: and look what Islam did with civilization; in other ways the Muslims did not treat their slaves as badly as the Greco-Romans; the fact both civilizations collapsed is no coincidence.)

By approving of slavery Aristotle contradicted several of the eight virtues he claimed to found ethics on. The fact that the founder of virtue ethics could not make virtue ethics work, is telling. Indeed the “virtues” are derivative, not absolute. I have, and will show, this in other essays. Let me offer just a few words here.

It was virtuous for Aristotle to enslave. Yet slavery is unnatural.

It was so unnatural that, arguably, it caused the fall of the Greco-Roman empire (by enabling Senatorial plutocracy, which undermined the Republic). A civilizational collapse is no way to survive.

The Franks, who took control of the West, soon outlawed slavery, thus contradicting Aristotle, and enabling a civilizational system which survives to this day. So debating the nature of ethics is all very practical: it’s about why, when, how, and for whom, or what, to go to war. Look towards the Middle East for practical applications.

Naturalist ethics is much better than abstractly defined “virtues”. If one thinks about deeply, surviving as a species (or group) is the fundamental purpose of moral behavior. Ethics, or “mores” comes from “habitual character”. What’s more “habitual” than what insures the survival of the species. True, wisdom, foresight, prudence, fortitude are necessary to insure survival. But they are consequences.

Some brandish “religion” as something natural ethicists ought to respect. But there is more than 10,000 “religions” known, each of them actually a set of superstitions to enable the rule of some oligarchy (who adores the Hummingbird god of the Aztecs, nowadays?).

“Religion” means to tie (the people) together. A secular set of beliefs can do this very well, as long as it embraces the Republic of Human Rights, and, thus, survival. Indeed, human rights are best to insure long term survival of the species. They define the virtues Aristotle extolled, but could not define properly enough to insure the survival of his civilization (which was soon destroyed by Alexander, Aristotle’s student and friend).

The Republic of Human Rights is the only religion upon which all human beings can agree on, and, thus, the only one to respect, and found ethics on.

To this the editor of Scientia Salon objected (September 25) that:

“This idea that because Aristotle lived in a society that condoned slavery therefore virtue ethics is bullocks keeps rearing its ugly head, but seems to me a total non sequitur. You might as well say that we should throw out Newtonian mechanics because, after all, Newton was also interested in alchemy and the Bible.”

My reply:

I was unaware that I was ambling down a well-trodden road. Thus I can only observe that the notion that virtue ethics was a personal sin of Aristotle, although admittedly ugly, is entirely natural (as a naïve, untutored, independent mind, such as mine, discovers it readily).

Slavery, as practiced in Athens’ silver mines, and, later, Roman ore mines, was the worst. It was quickly lethal. And it did not stop with treating foreigners as less than animals. Aristotle’s student, and others he was familiar with (senior Macedonian general Antipater) enslaved all of Greece, shortly thereafter.

When the mood is to enslave, it does not stop anywhere, short of the brute force of invaders (and that’s exactly what happened).

Greco-Roman slavery was particularly harsh. There were much milder forms of slavery in Babylon, a millennium earlier, and Egypt used no slavery (except for captured enemy armies).

Peter Do Smith claimed that I suffered from “presentism” by condemning slavery. I guess, in the USA, slavery is just yesterday, and condemning it, so today.

But the Germans, at the time, condemned slavery, at least to the industrial scale the Greco-Romans engaged into it. Archeology has confirmed that small German farms did not use slaves.

Resting all of society upon slavery was not cautious: as soon as the Greco-Romans ran out of conquest, they ran out of slaves, and the GDP collapsed (it peaked within a couple of decades from Augustus’ accession to permanent Princeps and censor status). Another problem was the rise of enormous slavery propelled latifundia, giant Senatorial farms which put most Romans out of employment, and fed plutocracy.

Newton’s researches in… shall we call it proto-chemistry? Or Biblical considerations, were not viewed by him, or any smart observer, as consequences of his mechanics.

Aristotle’s ethical shortcomings were not restricted to his opinion on slavery, and one can only assume that they were consequences of his general ethics. Whereas Demosthenes was a philosophical, and physical hero, ethically, Aristotle sounds like someone raised at the court of the fascist plutocrats, Philippe and Alexander of Macedonia. As, indeed, happened (his father was physician to the Macedonian crown).

There were consequences to Aristotle’s ethics. Alexander had ethical reasons to annihilate Thebes, and sell surviving women and children into slavery. It’s natural to wonder if he shared them with his teacher. Another example of even heavier import: Aristotle’s enormous influence on Rome’s first moralist, Cicero. Cicero, literally, invented the word “morality” by translating the Greek “ethics”.

Aristotle comforted important Romans, centuries later, into the comfortable mood that ethics was all about feeling virtuous.

When Consul Cicero repressed savagely the Conspiracy of Cataline, without bothering with proper judicial procedure, he felt himself to be the incarnation of the eight virtues.

Cicero’s enormous ethical breach helped demolish the democratic Republic.

At all times, tyrants have proclaimed themselves virtuous. That’s tyranny 101. Proclaiming that, from now on, virtue will dominate ethics, besides being self-evident, and thus empty, is just self-congratulatory. Self-congratulations lay at the evil end of the spectrum of the examined life.

Instead, as Demosthenes pointed out, ethics ought to rest on survival. If the aim was survival, the non-conflictual, disunited approach to Aristotle’s bankrollers (Philippe and Alexander) was suicide.

Greece recovered freedom 23 centuries later. Thanks to the European Union.

Patrice Ayme’

Slavery: Black, White, Plutocratic

A French woman was condemned to nine months in jail, for insinuating that Taubira, a politician, was from the same family as a hairy relative of an apparently less intellectual nature. In France, when one insults the leaders, one goes to jail. That’s the law. A recent law, too, that did not exist four centuries ago.

And yet, as Galileo whispered, after been condemned for claiming that the Earth rotated: “she rotates”. But, in present day France, judges judge reality, they did not learn from their Papal forebears. Want some more reality? Here is the famous painting “Convoi De Femmes Captives”

Africa: Steel, Slaves & Guns Before Europeans Came

“Homo” and “Pan” (Chimpanzee) are of the same “family”, in the scientific sense. Both are “Hominidae”. French judges are blinded by the “politically correct”, rather than by science.

Because of the prominence of politically correct thought, rather than factually correct thought, the French unemployment rate is about twice what it is in Germany, Great Britain, and the USA. I probably just gravely insulted the “ministres”, and should be put in jail.

Dominique Deux, an esteemed commenter on this site said that:

“Calling Ms Le Pen an ape would be well beyond good taste, but nobody ever used that excuse to enslave her forebears. Calling Ms Taubira an ape is being an accessory after the fact to a monstrous crime. Jokes and insults have a rap sheet, and that one has a very heavy rap sheet. Hence the need to strike – hard.”

There are two issues here: a) The theory that alleged descendants ought to be punished for crimes alleged ancestors may have committed, centuries ago.

b) The facts of slavery: who committed the crime, and why, etc..

I will treat only the second issue here, as I treat many issues: with relentless truth, throwing away all caution to the wolves of commonality.

Ms Le Pen has probably slaves among her forebears. Does that give her a right to strike –hard?

Indeed, before the Franks under Queen Bathilde, an ex-slave, outlawed the slave trade within the Imperium Francorum (Empire of the Franks) in 655 CE, slavery was ubiquitous. Some of the largest slave owners were bishops.

Africans were enslaved for three reasons:

a) The occupying Muslims taught the Portuguese plutocrats that slavery worked harmoniously.

b) The king of Portugal asked the Pope for the right to reciprocate. (Portugal had never been part of the Imperium Francorum.)

c) The Pope wrote a “Bull” to that effect.

However, with all other “races” and the rest of Europe, slavery stayed unlawful. It was tolerated in the colonies, because the reach of the law there was tenuous (initially; then traditions were created).

That re-introduction of slavery has nothing to do with the facts Africans were deemed to be apes. The proximal cause of the reintroduction of slavery was the usual suspect, Christianity. Claiming that slavery arose from the theory of evolution is an argument that even the opponents of Lamarck and Darwin did not use.

That men and apes are basically the same is obvious to all, but French judges. Carthaginians captured what they called “hairy women”, with a strong fighting disposition, south of Mount Cameron. From their descriptions, it’s clear those were female gorillas. That identification to “women” was a stroke of genius, as we know now that gorillas are indeed hominids. Just like Taubira.

From: “Hominidae: chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, humans:

Until recently, most classifications included only humans in this family; other apes were put in the family Pongidae (from which the gibbons were sometimes separated as the Hylobatidae). The evidence linking humans to gorillas and chimps has grown dramatically in the past two decades, especially with increased use of molecular techniques. It now appears that chimps, gorillas, and humans form a clade of closely related species; orangutans are slightly less close phylogenetically, and gibbons are a more distant branch. Here we follow a classification reflecting those relationships. Chimps, gorillas, humans, and orangutans make up the family Hominidae; gibbons are separated as the closely related Hylobatidae. Thus constituted, the Hominidae includes 4 genera and 5 species. Its nonhuman members are restricted to equatorial Africa, Sumatra and Borneo. Hominid fossils date to the Miocene and are known from Africa and Asia.”

Some view Taubira as a victim because she has a brownish skin. Does that mean it’s politically correct to view all the brownish ones as slaves?

Who transported the Black slaves? Some Arabs and Europeans traders working on behalf of white, or whitish plutocrats. Where did they purchase their slaves? In Black Africa. Who captured the slaves? Black Africans, or Peuls, or raiding Moroccans or Arabs.

But mostly Black Africans. A dozen black African empire thrived on the slave trade. It’s black power, black plutocratic power, which enabled the slave trade. By, say, 1800 CE, except for the extreme tip of South Africa, and Zanzibar (Arabs) Black Africa was, still, completely unconquered.

Why? European military force could not make a dent on Africa. Africans had steel, and they made arrowheads, and even firearms with it. Besides, Europeans died like flies from African diseases.

Purchasing blacks from blacks, does not make the whites using slaves any less criminal. But it spreads further the question of criminality. It stops making slavery a disease confined to one particular race.

Stopping the Black African slave trade and related human rights abuses was actually used as reason for the European conquest of Africa in the second half of the Nineteenth Century.

How was that achieved? In Senegal, 5,000 Tirailleurs Senegalais were led by ten French officers. Yet, in 1900, a third of the population of Senegambia was still enslaved. The French administration brought that down to zero soon (yet, it’s climbing back up because of Quranic schools recently).

So let’s not cry too much about the black person, tortured by the white demons. It’s demeaning to all, including reality.

Let’s stay weary, instead, of those with demonic practice. And a first demonic practice, is to pose as a victim, and use this to engage in physical violence. Especially when, like Taubira, one is, instead, an overlord, as a profession (Taubira enacted the famous Taubira law in 2001). Someone so divine that, should you brandish a banana when she comes around, you go to jail. Big time. And, yes, putting people in jail is physically violent.

All societies had slavery, in the past. It was better than mass execution. Both were necessary, from ecological balance. Complain to god, or thank technology, for the (momentary?) improvement. But don’t accuse today’s people, of crimes they did not commit, because of the color of the skin of their ancestors. Amen.

Patrice Ayme’

USA: Rich Plutos, Poor People

The New York Times is waking up, and smelling the roses, Here is an extract of:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/23/upshot/the-american-middle-class-is-no-longer-the-worlds-richest.html?ref=economy,

followed by my further seeing remarks. By the way, before I unleash the New York Times, the numbers the NYT uses about the USA’s median income are way more optimistic than the official ones. Here is the real situation:

This Is Reality. Real, Inflation Indexed Dollars For Median Family Income

“The American middle class, long the most affluent in the world, has lost that distinction.

While the wealthiest Americans are outpacing many of their global peers, a New York Times analysis shows that across the lower- and middle-income tiers, citizens of other advanced countries have received considerably larger raises over the last three decades.

After-tax middle-class incomes in Canada — substantially behind in 2000 — now appear to be higher than in the United States. The poor in much of Europe earn more than poor Americans.

The numbers, based on surveys conducted over the past 35 years, offer some of the most detailed publicly available comparisons for different income groups in different countries over time. They suggest that most American families are paying a steep price for high and rising income inequality.”

I sent the following comments, to pursue the New York Times’ education:

***

The reality is way worse: one has to take into account what taxes provide with. In the USA, taxes provide the rich with even more services. In Europe, taxes provide the Non-Rich, with even more basic services.

Some services, such as health care, education, or helping the poor, should be viewed as basic human rights.

Take the case of the French Republic. On the surface, French median income, after tax is significantly lower than in the USA. However, those French taxes pay for crucial services that then come for free, or are heavily subsidized in France. For example in health, education, retirement, etc.

France has the highest taxes, with Denmark, about 56% of GDP. However, those taxes are used for massive redistribution. Thus health care is first class and basically free in France.

Education too is free, in France, all the way to the doctorate.

Preschool is also free, and toddlers can be left, for free, in the care of the specially trained health care providers much of the day, for working moms.

In many European countries, parents get massive support, not just from day one, but from the day of pregnancy (then the care is free and intense; parents get extended parental leave, sometimes years).

***

Plutocracy is a redistribution of wealth, power, income, from We The People to a small minority of controlling parasites. Plutocracy paralyzes the minds with a warped case of inverted decency. Plutocracy is neither optimal for the society, nor the economy.

Plutocracy affects the USA more than Europe, and the minds, even more than the stomachs. The fact that average Americans feel that they are much better of than in the rest of the world reinforce the plutocratization of the USA. Including astounding tolerance for the amazingly corrupt so called Supreme Court (Supremely plutocratic!).

I’m “Black”, Mom Was White, & Thus We’re In The Black.

 

***

For more on how plutocracy has corrupted minds, see:

http://panterragolo.wordpress.com/2014/04/22/class-mind-in-the-usa/

Patrice Aymé

Russia: Va De Retro, Satanas

The revolution in Ukraine is anti-imperialist, anti-Yalta, and anti-plutocratic. It’s also anti-Czarist.

Some people will notice that the revolution is also anti-Leninist. Watch people pulling down the giant statues of Lenin. I bet Lenin, Stalin, and Putin spin in the graves they belong to.

But I am repeating myself. In my semantics, followers of the Dark Side follow Satan, that is, Pluto, or, as He was called before in Homer’s times, Hades. Even earlier Ahura Mazda, Babylonian god of wisdom, fought against Angra Mainyu (Ahrimen), chief creator of evil.

(Yes, the Old Norse angra “to grieve, vex, distress”, the root of “anger”, and the Latin “angere” are probably related, I would dare to say! Common Indo-European root.)

Ukraine 2014. Lenin Assassinated Justice, Let Him Bite The Dust.

Lenin was a pseudo-philosopher, and real life tyrant who advocated dictatorship (of the proletariat, whatever that is). That notion definitively belonged to the Dark Side. Human beings are not made to be dictated to.

Oh, Lenin and his high command were transported in a special train from Switzerland to Russia through fascist Germany in 1917. The plutocrats in Berlin were Lenin’s intrinsic allies. Lenin was very generous to his Berlin co-conspirators, once he controlled Russia. That military alliance was pursued by Stalin later, throughout the 1920s and 1930s, culminating in the division of Poland with Hitler, and the alliance against the French Republic (and Britain). France was invaded, thanks to Caucasus oil, and other resources provided by Stalin.

Here are a few quotes from Vladimir Lenin (although they sound as quotes from Vladimir Putin, they are Lenin’s!):

“There are no morals in politics; there is only expedience. A scoundrel may be of use to us just because he is a scoundrel… It is true that liberty is precious; so precious that it must be carefully rationed… When one makes a Revolution, one cannot mark time; one must always go forward – or go back. He who now talks about the ‘freedom of the press’ goes backward, and halts our headlong course towards Socialism.”

Lenin launched a fascist state, complete with concentration camps. The Tsar entire family was assassinated in a non-judicial proceeding (something that did not happen during the French Revolution, 125 years earlier). There is no justice that allows the assassination of non-adult children.

However, as he laid dying from terminal syphilis, Lenin discovered, to his horror, that Stalin an ex-seminarist who turned to professional bandit, was taking over the state. The wretch Lenin could stop the “Man-Of-Steel” (= Stalin). Stalin, helped by American plutocrats, succeeded to out-maneuver the more brainy Trotsky (who was the chief of the Red Army). Trotsky took refuge in Mexico; Stalin had an agent shove a pick through his skull.

At Yalta, a moribund plutocrat, Roosevelt, gave half of Europe to the mass murderer fellow follower of Satan, the ursine Stalin. To insure the rule of Washington and Moscow supremacists for centuries to come. Well times are changing fast.

Putin arrested a dozen more people for “dissent” inside Russia today alone. He rigged the last presidential elections, he (probably) bombed buildings in Russia to launch his war in Chechnya.

I proudly did not watch a minute of the Sochi games, although I love the Caucasus… Or is it precisely because I love the Caucasus? Some will say that it does not matter. Their co-spiritualists used to say the same in 1936, when Adolf Hitler organized the Olympic Games in Berlin.

Russia is already by far the largest country on Earth. Is not that big enough, already? Apparently not.

In recent years, Moscow more or less annexed three provinces of Georgia, one just a few kilometers from Sochi. Georgia is a tiny country, south of the Caucasus. Yet, Georgia is also a nation and a civilization older than Russia. Georgia rebounded better from momentary conquest by the Mongols than Russia did.

This leads to an interesting question: what needs to be dismantled in the Russian frame of mind that allows the likes of Putin to rule? Looking at Russian history, one can understand what happened: in the greater scheme of Russian history brutality worked and seemed to have been the only thing that could work (similarly to the case of the USA… Hence the Yalta accord was a natural!).

Russians got whole way down to California, because they were, in part, ruthless. But ruthlessness, by itself is not enough to make a well balanced civilization.

A world battle against the plutocratic principle is engaged. Ejecting egregious plutocrat Putin from the G8 would be a good start.

Patrice Aymé

Propaganda: Cruel, But Efficient

I subscribe to the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and The Economist (among others). Of the three, the New York Times is, by far, the most efficient propaganda tool of the hyper rich. It’s done in subtle ways. For example Krugman ran a blog post: “January 18, 2014, 12:11 pm. The Myth of the Deserving Rich.

You would think that Paul Krugman would show a graph of the growth of inequality that is recent. Problem: if he did, all fingers would point towards Barack Obama, the great Dark Trojan Horse. So Krugman shows an old graph that safely finishes with the Bush era. (Implicit message: Bush = Inequality.)

Here is a more recent graph about (after tax!) corporate profits.

Obama’s Plutocratic Wealth Breakthrough!

As you can see, corporate profits, even under plutophiles Clinton and Bush, just, in the end, tracked GDP.

However, under Obama, there has been a breakthrough in after tax inequality. True, Obama controls profits not, but he controls tax (and, looking at the fine print, one sees the jump occurred when the democrats had a super-majority in the Senate and Congress: no hiding behind the Bush!).

Why inequality has grown is not complicated: the hyper rich financiers stole the financial institutions that they were supposed to manage (2008 “Bush Crash”).

Instead of recovering the money from the thieves he was golfing with, Yes-We-Scam Obama found the money in the Public purse. The thieves got to keep what they stole (see Fuld and his two friends at Lehman Brothers, who stole a cool 5 billions between them, while taking out the world financial system).

The exact same trick was implemented in Europe, thanks to the ignorance of the flabbergasted public.

(That’s why the recently proclaimed banking Union in Europe piously asserts that it will not happen again: next time the hyper rich steals everything, they will pay for it, it’s a promise!)

Don’t expect Krugman to explain any of this to you, as long as pitchforks are not visible from his Princeton office. Speaking of Krugman, here he comes in that post I started to describe:

“Many influential people have a hard time thinking straight about inequality. Partly, of course, this is because of Upton Sinclair’s dictum: it’s hard for a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

Part of it is because even acknowledging that inequality is a real problem implicitly opens the door to taking progressive policies seriously. But there’s also a factor that, while not entirely independent of the other two, is somewhat distinct; I think of it as the urge to sociologize.”

Sounds good? But what is this “sociologize”? And what with that old graph? Did Krugman saw nothing new ever since The One became president and had dinner with him?

Notice that the corporations’ “profits” in the graph I posted are what’s left after the CEO class has been paid pharaonic salaries. Marissa Maier, a blonde at Yahoo, just gave a severance package to a man she had recruited a year ago, for a fortune. It’s in excess, that severance, just that severance, not the signing bonus, of 42 million dollars.

Marissa has done well, and will receive her own colossal severance one of these days soon. Then, now that she is hyper rich, she can go to another hyper salaried CEO job, or do her duty and become a “philanthropist”, or a politician.

Did Barack Obama visit Marissa Meier’s Silicon Valley mansion? Of course. Slept there, ate there, beamed giant smile, etc. The whole gamut: people of wealth, and taste. That was when Marissa was at Google, an apparent subsidiary of the NSA. Hey, she was just at the White House, to talk about that with Barack. No blood, no foul.

By “socializing” Krugman means the theory that the poor  is poor, because it deserves to be poor, as it lives badly (dysfunctional families, drugs, unwillingness to learn, etc.). Krugman concludes disjointedly, by adopting some of what I said over the years:

“This is, by the way, why the Occupy slogan about the one percent is so brilliant. I would actually argue that the number should be even smaller. But one percent is an easy to remember number, and small enough to make it clear that we’re not talking about the upper middle class.

And that’s good. The myth of the deserving rich is, in its own way, as destructive as the myth of the undeserving poor.”

I sent the following comment, among the early ones.  Although more than 100 comments were published, mine was not. One has to know the New York Times is owned by the same plutocratic family since the Nineteenth Century.

Not publishing my comment allows the New York Times to claim I need to be watched, and carefully censored, as I am what it calls “unverified”. I am indeed, officially under a surveillance program at the New York Times! Here is my censored comment:

There are some people who earn their lives well, and then there is the plutocratic phenomenon.  The two concepts are distinct.

One would assume that most creatures contributing regularly to Krugman’s  blog live well enough to find the time to do so (I have contributed more than $10,000 to the New York Times’ coffers over the years).

The plutocratic phenomenon is something completely different. It has to do with the exponential growth of wealth and power. It can only be prevented by punishing taxes at the very top (the .1% and .01%). Eisenhower had a 93% tax bracket, at the very top.

As it is now all these myths Krugman talks about, and condemns, live on because plutocrats control the media, and are, unsurprisingly, plutophile.

For example, California Governor Brown organized, and won, a referendum to rise a tiny bit taxes on the 1%. Last week California papers had front page stories about the rich fleeing the state. In big black capital letters. Spending the time to read the article (it was basically the same article all over) showed nothing of the sort. But, to the common citizen in the street, what was impressed was the flight of the hyper rich due to a 1% augmentation of tax on the 1%…

That was, of course, a propaganda operation. The sob stories about the hyper rich selling their commercial centers to flee a 1% tax are just implausible.

Effective propaganda is subtle enough to not be seen by Common Wisdom. Thus we have to keep on digging in to find out how it is that the serfs willingly serve the great Lords.

This was my censored comment. At first sight, it does not look that terrible. The question is: what was so subterraneously, unconsciously terrible in my comment above that was worth censoring?

The fact that, having got a subscription for decades, at the same street address, the New York Times persists in calling me “unverified” is a lie? And that all can see this lie, as I allude to the extravagant cost of my decades of subscription to the NYT?

Or is it the terrible fact that had had to be censored, the sob stories about the hyper wealthy fleeing California. And claiming that they are obviously planted?

Or did I gravely sin when I proposed to follow republican president Eisenhower’s leadership?… And tax the hyper wealthy 93%?

Einstein famously said, a little bit fast, albeit in the context of Quantum Theory: ”Subtle is the Lord, but he is not cruel!”

Well. Einstein was not inclined to be so forgiving for the Germans who had killed the Jews. At least that’s the way Einstein put it to his dear friend Physics Nobel laureate Max Born, when the latter returned to Germany from England. Einstein was not happy that Born acted as if everything had been forgiven.

By refusing to forgive, Albert Einstein recognized something which is true: cruelty is a central part of the human character. Those who deny that are not just stupid, but dishonest and dangerous. Same as the righteous, pseudo-“liberal”, but truly plutophile, New York Times. (That has been splendidly embodied by frantic NYT propaganda for the plutophile health trick set in Massachusetts by Romney, now known as… Obamacare.)

Plutocracy is a phenomenon that rises mechanically when taxes at the top are not colossal enough (Apple pays 2% global tax, the local bookstore, if it has not been devoured by tax dodging Amazon yet, around 30%). Then plutocracy becomes an obvious injustice. Yet, primates are genetically engineered to hate injustice.

So how does the injustice persist? Through sophisticated tricks, as above, motivated by sheer cruelty, will to power, and viciousness. It’s cruel and vicious to censor my rather innocuous comment, but it’s of the essence of those who crave power.

Subtle are the plutocrats, and they are cruel. Cruelty is actually the essence of plutocracy. Welcome to reality.

Patrice Ayme

Plutocracy Rising, Demos Sinking

Oligarchy: the rule of the few. What we have.  Democracy: the rule of the People. What Switzerland has, legislatively speaking.

Civilization is first rendered possible only by another type of organization. Civilization is an increasingly complex machine, that works only because of the nature of a sophisticated hierarchy of laws. This was known by the time of Babylon’s Hammurabi, 37 centuries ago. Thus the state of law is a necessary pre-condition for civilization. However, to have a state of law, one needs a state. That’s shrinking in the USA… just when it should be expanding:

If the USA Government Shrinks Enough, So Will Law

[This covers all governmental spending as percentage of GDP: local, state, federal.]

In a related development, Obama’s own Food & Drug Administration, just woke up, and decided to do something about the feeding day in, day out, of all meat animals in the USA with enormous amounts of antibiotics, as I had requested, with my usual subtlety of crashing asteroid. See: “Fish Rots By The Head”

One has to explain the graph above a bit. The strong peak of spending at the time Obama took power (so to speak) was related by the failure of corporations, such as General Motors. Saving General Motors cost 50 billion dollars at the time, but saved 1.2 million jobs (because of all the car parts makers). Final cost was ten billions. The rescue of AIG cost 180 billion, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs 60 billion each, and so on. All these programs were started under GW Bush, Obama extended them.

Thus Bush was not just the self-described “decider”, but also the rescuer. (This emergency spending is not in the graph, by the way.)

To be taken ever more seriously, Krugman makes a point of lauding Obama always. However he says:” You can see that there was a brief, modest spurt in spending associated with the Obama stimulus — but it has long since been outweighed and swamped by a collapse in spending without precedent in the past half century.”

Krugman in :”Unprecedented Austerity” then draws the inescapable conclusion: “a strange thing has happened on the fiscal policy front. Intellectually, the case for austerity has pretty much collapsed, having been reduced at this point to the Three Stooges Theory: we’re supposed to consider austerity a success because it feels good when you stop, or at least let up. At the same time, however, austerity policies continue to be imposed, on both sides of the Atlantic.

And amid the punditizing over the latest budget deal, it’s worth considering just how unprecedented US austerity has been….to do this when the private sector is still deleveraging and interest rates are at the zero lower bound is just awesomely destructive.”

[Notice that this is the very respectable, very serious Krugman saying this, not the horrendous Tyranosopher.] What is going on? The Three Stooges?

No. The Wolf and the Lamb is the fable that depicts our times best.

An example of wolf-lamb interaction is the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP). As Prof Krugman points out, the GDP impact of the TPP shall be infinitesimal. So why bother to negotiate it?

A hint about the TPP’s true purpose is that the Trans Pacific Partnership is negotiated secretly. This habit, secrecy, is not compatible with democracy. So the TPP negotiation is another trick to weaken democracy.

This is confirmed by the fact the corporations have 600 lobbyists negotiating the TPP, whereas each state has only three (3!) negotiators.

In other good news, the democrats, to make a budget deal, negotiated the cutting of unemployment subsidies to millions. The more rags dress the rabble, the greater the lords. Austerity for the rabble, is what the Wolves of our ages, our Lords, want. However, we are in a nominal “democracy”, where the “Demos” redistribute quite a bit of the Lords’ money, to itself. A way to stop that redistributive non sense is by imposing austerity to the government, that is, to The People (who theoretically rule in democracy). The hyper rich have never paid fewer taxes (relatively to their global income), on this side of the Middle-Ages. And that’s directly related to this will to shrink the government.

Why are the rich reducing government spending? Superficially, because it enables them to pay fewer taxes.

The fewer taxes the hyper rich pay, the more their wealth grow, and the more they can eat their way through representative “democracy” by buying influence among the few elected officials who are deciding our destiny.

It’s a vicious circle.

But, even deeper than this circle, the plutocrats want to return society to the law of the jungle. The more they transform society into a jungle, the more they justify their demonic tendencies, that is, themselves. Those who are vicious can only feel welcome in a vicious world.

It provides them with satanic social security.

It’s an even more vicious circle. Dante’s Inferno revisited. And down we go. In America, and in Europe.

Patrice Aymé

***

Note: A country cannot be a democracy without first being a state of law, an état de droit a Rechtsstaat. Athens tried it, and crashed. The USA and Great Britain before it, both following the orders of ther West Country Men, tried to do without, and it worked great so far (that’s why South Africa, the USA, Canada and Australia all developed Apartheid, under the guise of multiculturalism…).

In truth, the common ideology in the Anglo universe, revised by the West Country Men,  was relentless exploitation, of whatever could be exploited.

That’s why the USA Supreme Court is not really a Constitutional Court (see Bush versus Gore), and Britain added only a Supreme Court thanks to liar Blair.

The Wolf & The Lamb

A FABLE FOR OUR PLUTOCRATIC AGE.

My translation, direct from Jean de La Fontaine, complete with the most important parts emboldened and underlined:

The logic of the strongest is always the best

We will show this presently

A lamb was quenching his thirst

In the flow of a pure wave

A fasting wolf, looking for some adventure, shows up,

Attracted to these surroundings by hunger 

Who emboldened you so much that you disturbed my drink?

Said this animal full of rage:

You will be punished for your temerity.

Sire, responded the lamb, would it be that Your Majesty

Would not get angry;

But rather that She considers

That I am quenching my thirst

In the flow,

More than 20 paces below Her,

And thus consequently, in no way whatsoever,

Could I trouble Her drink.

You trouble it, retorted this cruel beast,

And I know that of me you spoke ill last year.

-How could I have done this, as I was not yet born?

Answered the Lamb, I am still at my mother’s breast.

-If it was not you, it was therefore your brother.

-I do not have any.

-It’s one of yours:

Because you do not spare me much,

You, your sheperds, and your dogs.

One has told me so: I must avenge myself.

Thereupon, in the depth of the forests

The Wolf carries him, and then devours him.

Without any other form of justice.

***

This fable captures the essence of the demonic mind. The desire to have one’s way is strong, even overwhelming, as it elevates to the sky the poisonous tendrils of the most perverse logic, while justice is flat and uninteresting.

The Wolf wants the Lamb, his desire itself is justice. The more the desire is denied, the more insistent it gets. Cruelty and rage ease the way of the Wolf’s desire. The tendency of making our want what universal justice enables is the ugliest, most irresistible device at the heart of man. The Lamb represents justice, it gets devoured.

So do not ask what plutocracy wants. It wants you. Bathing in gastric acid. Object in vain. It’s only justice.

***

Patrice Ayme

United Stasi Of America?

The real boss at the CIA, Deputy Director Mike Morell, just retired. He looks fit, strong, nearly young. He was there 33 years. He also gave an interview to 60 minutes, Oct. 27. He concluded by telling what preoccupied him the most. The increasing division of society in the USA:

“What keeps me up at night is the inability of our government to make decisions that push out our economy and our society forward and one of the things that I learned looking at the world is that a country national security, any country national security is more dependent on the strength of its economy and the strength of its society than anything else.

We have change we can believe: ever more plutocracy. And this is the main enabler:

Leggy, Not Brainy

CIA Morell’s fear: “For some reason I do not understand there has been a change. Both parties are at each others’ throats to score political points. I don’t know why that occurred, and I don’t have a good understanding of why it’s so don’t know how to fix that but that is what needs to be fixed.”

In these later remarks, Mr. Morell is naïve, I will show.

As I have pointed out many times, the reason the Kaiserreich attacked the world in 1914 was the extreme division of German society at the time, with an increasingly active socialist party (SPD) revolting against the reigning plutocrats.

What worries me the most is the ignorance of people and their ardor to accept the lies which are served to them. All sorts of Obamacrap are recent examples.

The USA is the only country in the world where citizens are forced to enter a contract with for-profit companies. (OK, I did not carefully consider Zimbabwe.) USA: United Slaves of America? Yes, for profit. This would not have happened in, say, France: millions would have got to the streets.

Even the Lords, in the Middle Ages, were not for profit.

In Switzerland, where a sort of Obamacrap exists, the “caisses” (insurance) are not for profit. Anyway the Swiss, squeezed by France (complicated story) are moving towards a French like health care.

According to the  New York Times, Obama himself directed strikes against civilians, using drones. That there were strikes against civilians who were obviously civilians, like repeated strikes against a grand-mother surrounded by grand children was detailed by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (survivors were interviewed thoroughly).

This sort of premeditated “signature” strikes has no antecedent. It’s fundamentally different from even the way Genghis Khan’s generals were conducting their massacres. Mongol generals were always at war for cause. They gave fair ultimata: “surrender, and live, or else!”.

The USA is not at war against Yemen, or Pakistan. Or, for that matter, Sudan (when Clinton destroyed a pharma plant there).

The truth is that the leaders of the USA have been conducting systematic lying to their own population. Bin Laden was a major deputy of the CIA. he was recruited by the CIA, and led to lead a major army in a war of aggression against the Socialist Republic of Afghanistan. Osama Bin Laden, a simple engineer and scion of plutocracy, came to hate his recruiters, not the least because they led him to commit crimes against civilians.   

All of this was buried by thick propaganda.

If the NSA records 70 million French conversation in 20 days, it’s not because the USA’s security would be at risk otherwise. It’s because people at the NSA are making money from it. They probably sell the information to the likes of Musk, Boeing, nuclear plant makers, helicopter companies, whoever. France has state of the art industries in aerospace, nuclear, composites… Or even less well known areas like power lithium polymer batteries, software, or advanced microchips.

In the case of Obamacare, Obama exerted his usual level of care, characterized by neither oversight nor foresight. I have written dozens of pages on what would happen, 4 years ago. it’s happening.

In the case of intelligence, as in the financial sector neither oversight nor foresight is also the rule.

When the simultaneous attacks in Benghazi against the USA consulate and a CIA base a mile distant happened, the Obama administration did nothing. After an hour had passed and the well planned Al Qaeda attack was fully on, personnel under attack was told help would not be coming.

“For the people who go out, on to the edge, to represent our country, we believe that if we get in trouble, they’re coming to get us, that our back is covered. To hear that it’s not, that’s a terrible, terrible experience.” [— Gregory Hicks, former deputy chief of mission in Libya, on “60 Minutes,” Oct. 27, 2013.]

Why did not the administration ask, for example, the French to intervene? Supersonic Rafales could have been on the scene within an hour. French jets have exhibited extreme targeting precision. They did not even try.

Like Obama did not even try to extent Medicare by giving it the power of full negotiation. He could do it tomorrow. It’s legal, it would save money, both to the state, and the country, it would make health care more accessible.

The chair of the Senate intelligence committee is California’s senior Senator, Dianne Feinstein. “It is my understanding that President Obama was not aware Chancellor Merkel’s communications were being collected since 2002,” Feinstein said. “That is a big problem. With respect to NSA collection of intelligence on leaders of US allies – including France, Spain, Mexico and Germany – let me state unequivocally: I am totally opposed,”

It is indeed a big problem. In 2010 the spying machinery comprised 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies in more than 10,000 locations in the United States. The USA intelligence community as a whole includes in particular 854,000 people holding top-secret clearances. In ten years and real dollars the budget has augmented by at least a third. And kept on augmenting briskly under unawares Obama.

Vice President Dick Cheney declared to CNN: “We do collect a lot of intelligence. Without speaking about any particular target or group of targets, that intelligence capability is enormously important to the United States, to our conduct in foreign policy, to defense matters, economic matters, and I’m a strong supporter of it,”

Translation: the USA is turning into the USSR. Case closed. As usual, the White House denied, but some of what it denied last week, now Feinstein herself says it’s the truth. And one does not spy on up to seven million French conversations a day of French economic actors without those economic reasons thieves have. The evidence is incontrovertible.

Obama has been going through his presidency, unawares. Or worse, claiming to be unawares. That was a big problem.

This was made possible because his supporters have been also unawares. Or claiming to be unaware. This was, and is, an even bigger problem. Instead of proposing immediately ways to progress positively, all they do, those pseudo-progressives, is to criticize the Tea Party, as if Obama were the president of the Tea Party.

The extreme right wing of the Republican Party is for No Government. Very bad, indeed. My question: how does that differ from Obama’s practice? So is Obama president of the Tea Party? Why not? Watch what they do, instead of listening to what they say they do. Before you scream, remember; a ten million dollar a year banker in Obama’s cabinet suggested sequestration. even the Tea Party did not dream of that one.

So let me help Mr. CIA, Mike Morell. In truth, there is just one party in the USA. The strife between the two parties is just theater, kabuki. In truth, there is just one party, the plutocratic party. This is what “being at each other’s throats” hides.  

***

Patrice Ayme

***

1) Morell also said “president” Karzai of Afghanistan got direct cash payments of 100 million dollars. His associates and family also got their own considerable payments. Well worth dying for.

2) Cheney also said: “When people say torture, that may be their opinion, but with respect to the attorneys and the lawyers that are charged with reviewing what we do, it was not torture. I don’t believe it was torture,” Well, I know some of these attorneys. I was actually invited for dinner at the home of the leading one, John Yoo. I believe Yoo is just criminally wrong, and mad a career of it. The Nazis also had lawyers and judges to justify all they did. Not many, but enough. (The worst of them unfortunately died in an air raid in February 1945, so there no trial of torturous justice. Unfortunately no one has arrested Yoo yet.)