Europe’s Torture of the 1,000 Cuts

For horrible crimes, Chinese Justice had a memorable type of execution, the Torture of the Thousand cuts (Lingchi). Its name describes it pretty well. The last such official executions were around 1900 CE, but Europe is trying its best to renew with this tradition.

Europe, and not just Europe, is suffering from the torture of the 1,000 cuts made by a crazed, increasingly sadistic and controlling plutocracy. Cuts in identity, cuts in education, cuts in health care, cuts in dignity, cuts in industry, cuts in state support where it crucially matters, cuts in pride, cuts in hope, cuts in heritage, cuts in social services, cuts in research, cuts in biodiversity, cuts in responsible agriculture, cuts in public services, cuts in welfare, cuts in retirement, cuts in implementation of the laws when applied to Islam and immigration, cuts in money going to We The People, as ever more go to banks and plutocrats, etc.

And the worst? Europe doesn’t even know about the formidable extent of it all, and how much of a vast conspiracy it all is! Or, at least, Europe doesn’t know enough to do something about it! Why? Because the European media, as the media throughout the “West” is owned by the same class which keeps on cutting “We The People” in ever thinner slices. Thus, all preceding cuts are enabled by Europe’s deepest cut of them all, a cut in cognition, both affecting which facts are known, and which logics rule.

An example of plutocratic propaganda? Paul Krugman’s anti-Euro Obsession. On the surface, it looks an innocent quirk on his part. In truth, it incites those who read him to focus on the wrong thing, A technical mistake was done, a detail went catastrophically wrong, says Krugman. Instead, I assert there is a vast conspiracy, a plutocratic conspiracy, and that catastrophe was planned to control the entire planet. Says Krugman: “Many of Europe’s problems come from the disastrous decision, a generation ago, to adopt a single currency.”  

True, the Euro, as it is, was created only partly, it’s like a bird, with wings, but no feathers: crucial institutions were supposed to follow to support and organize the Euro. However Great Britain, not in the Euro (at this point, but supposed to join it later… until it decided upon Brexit!) sabotaged, as much as it could those Euro-supporting institutions, which the Euro was supposed to trigger (then Germany found the present Euro system all too comfortable…)

President Barack Obama and co-conspirators: One thing, one plot Europe suffers from: the US high tech conspiracy, which robbed Europe of freedom, innovation, revenue, among other things (now Trump wants to tax European cars 25%, on the pretext that US SECURITY is under attack by German cars parked below Trump Tower… And that proved my point that the US giant monopolies, “GAFA”, “FANG” make an assault against European security!). The spirits of how many laws are broken here, in this White House photograph? Political corruption, monopoly formation, mass surveillance of We The People, conspiracy, oligarchy inception, technology hijacking, patent law termination, among others. (See Note 7 below.)

The real problem of Europe, as of the USA and the rest of the West, is the rise of the .1%, gathering ever more power as it becomes ever wealthier. And that power it uses to confuses the issues, and make We The People non-cognizant of the tragedy at hand, such as how the .1% pay too little taxes. But it doesn’t stop there.

On Sunday, May 20, 2018, CBS’ “60 Minutes” finally explained the obvious, that it contributed to carefully hid for years, namely that Google is a (world) monopoly, that the US Federal Trade Commission found this, and recommended criminal prosecution, but the Obama officials decided to not do anything about it. They showed a picture of Obama all in love, smiling to the Google CEO, with dollar signs in the eyes (the Obamas cashed out big time on their Silicon Valley corruption, the next day). At this point Facebook and Google get 85% of the advertising revenue on the Internet. Spy agencies are doing great in the US, and their world monopoly is part, parcel and tool of the US plutocracy world monopoly (which Hitler led a subsystem of, until he could be disposed of, to implement an even greater conception…). Yes, 85% of revenue: good job, Obama, here is your cash!  

When some get everything and the others nothing, that’s called a tyranny.  

Tyranny and torture, the thousand cuts. It happened before. Many times. And civilization collapsed. Problem: this time, it will not be one, or a few civilizations collapsing, among others. Instead, it is civilization, the one and only, and the entire biosphere, which is slashed with a thousand cuts…

Patrice Ayme

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Note 1: As the situation degrades in Europe, the governments in place, and the oligarchies in place, are taking extraordinary measures which should be seen for what they are: the rise of fascism (details another time). And yes, they use FANG (Facebook Apple Netflix Google) to do so. The Obamas just got a cushy job at Netflix. Monopolies are economic fascism (to go with political fascism, as happens clearly in, say, Egypt, where the military state of dictator-president Sisi owns an enormous part of the economy).

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Note 2: The Obama administration was little more than the Google implementation office, and that has been known for years. See:

https://theintercept.com/2016/04/22/googles-remarkably-close-relationship-with-the-obama-white-house-in-two-charts/.

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Note 3: The two Italian anti-EU parties are now in power, as they  control Parliament. I share their (very important) dedication to Direct Democracy. However they have quite a few lunatic ideas which may obscure their focus. (The Lega (ex-Lega Norte), one of the two, admires Switzerland… without having embraced Swiss realism).

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Note 4: To my surprise, the New York Times not only published a shorter version of the preceding comment, but used it as a “pick”. My, my, my, times have changed at the Times since the editor changed last Fall! (The son of the owner replaced his father who was apparently too plutocratic by half…) Now I am “picked” again… As I used to be, more than ten years ago, before being banned from the New York Times, although a full subscriber, during the entire Obama presidency (teaching me for having helped Obama become president…)…

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Note 5: Annotating Paul Krugman’s “What’s the Matter With Europe?

Krugman: “If you had to identify a place and time where the humanitarian dream — the vision of a society offering decent lives to all its members — came closest to realization, that place and time would surely be Western Europe in the six decades after World War II. It was one of history’s miracles: a continent ravaged by dictatorship, genocide and war transformed itself into a model of democracy and broadly shared prosperity.

Indeed, by the early years of this century Europeans were in many ways better off than Americans. Unlike us, they had guaranteed health care, which went along with higher life expectancy; they had much lower rates of poverty; they were actually more likely than we were to be gainfully employed during their prime working years.

But now Europe is in big trouble. So, of course, are we… democracy is under siege on both sides of the Atlantic…

Many of Europe’s problems come from the disastrous decision, a generation ago, to adopt a single currency. The creation of the euro led to a temporary wave of euphoria, with vast amounts of money flowing into nations like Spain and Greece; then the bubble burst. And while countries like Iceland that retained their own money were able to quickly regain competitiveness by devaluing their currencies, eurozone nations were forced into a protracted depression, with extremely high unemployment, as they struggled to get their costs down.

Patrice Ayme’s answer: Iceland’s troubles have nothing to do with the Euro, everything to do with excess leverage in, and, crooked finance; and Germany, the Eurozone’ biggest economy is doing extremely well… To the point Merkel imported more than a million Muslims, wholesale: not enough workers…

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Krugman: “This depression was made worse by an elite consensus, in the teeth of the evidence, that the root of Europe’s troubles was not misaligned costs but fiscal profligacy, and that the solution was draconian austerity that made the depression even worse.

PA: [Right: the USA threw at least twice more money at the crisis than Europe did, through plutocratically biased “Quantitative Easing”; Nota bene: I long called it a depression, now I am happy to observe that, eight years later, Krugman has adopted my semantics.]

Krugman: “Some of the victims of the euro crisis, like Spain, have finally managed to claw their way back to competitiveness.”

PA: Thus proving that the problem is NOT the Euro itself… Spain is the Eurozone fourth largest economy, by a long shot!

Others, however, haven’t. Greece remains a disaster area — and Italy, one of the three big economies remaining in the European Union, has now suffered two lost decades: G.D.P. per capita is no higher now than it was in 2000.

So it isn’t really surprising that when Italy held elections in March, the big winners were anti-European Union parties — the populist Five Star Movement and the far-right League.

PA: [The “League” started as a Northern Italy autonomy party, the Lega Norte; Northern Italy, which used to be full of Gauls, before Roman conquest, is arguably more part of northern Europe than southern Italy… In particular paying taxes to Rome is neither here nor there: even in the Late Roman empire, Italy was governed from the Po Valley… In particular Milan… One should resist calling all the autonomy parties “far-right”.]]  

Krugman: “In fact, the surprise is that it didn’t happen sooner.

Those parties are now set to form a government. While the policies of that government aren’t completely clear, they’ll surely involve a break with the rest of Europe on multiple fronts: a reversal of fiscal austerity that may well end with exit from the euro, along with a crackdown on immigrants and refugees.”

PA: [Krugman seems to take for granted that one is bad, if one doesn’t want a billion Africans to move to Europe. Italy is flooded by more than 5 million migrants and refugees, around 10% of the population. By comparison, the savages who brought the Roman empire down were proportionally much less in numbers. Now, of course, the migrants into the Roman empire around 400 CE craved for Rome’s wealth, and although those migrants were Christians, they were illegal, and, although the Goths were finally accommodated, they still destroyed the Roman army… Nowadays many, if not most, illegal migrants to Europe are from a religion which has made a religion of hating all what the Greco-Roman Europe i world stood for… except for slavery and sexism… So why is Krugman so pro-illegal migrants? To better destroy Europe?]

Krugman: “Nobody knows how this will end, but developments elsewhere in Europe offer some scary precedents. Hungary has effectively become a one-party autocracy, ruled by an ethnonationalist ideology. Poland seems well down the same path.

So what went wrong with the “European project” — the long march toward peace, democracy and prosperity, underpinned by ever-closer economic and political integration? As I said, the giant mistake of the euro played a big role. But Poland, which never joined the euro, sailed through the economic crisis pretty much unscathed; yet democracy there is collapsing all the same.”

PA: Europeans, after centuries of religious terror from Catholicism, are afraid that the same is now imposed on them in the name of Islamism… which has a lot in common with Catholicism, including lethal hatred for the Jews. This is not all scholar talk: Erdogan, the Turkish tyrant, evoked it, in December 1917.

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Note 6: Obama & his goons didn’t outlaw financial derivatives trading, now bigger than ever, 1.2 quadrillion dollars, 20 times world GDP. By creating FACA, Obama & his goons said they did something about banks, but it was all sand in the eyes of his supporters, boosting world plutocracy!

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Note 7: Here is the BS propaganda of the Obama White House officially attached to the picture above, a depiction of the colossal hypocrisy of these power-grabbers and the money changers who propel them:”President Barack Obama joins a toast with Technology Business Leaders at a dinner in Woodside, California, Feb. 17, 2011.

(Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
This official White House photograph is being made available only for publication by news organizations. The photograph may not be manipulated in any way and may not be used in commercial or political materials, advertisements… that in any way suggests approval or endorsement of the President, the First Family, or the White House.“

Yet, what is the scene depicted by that picture, except the advertisement of a vast commercial, monopolistic political plot?… Which violates, as I said, the spirit of the most basic laws of a (pseudo-) democratic Republic? In the picture above, Obama is center-stage with fourteen other plutocrats or plutocratic servants, seated clockwise as follows:

Barack Obama, President of the United States, drunken on the power of killing civilians overseas with robots, in countries the US is not even in conflict with, while endowed with the Nobel Peace Prize, because no outrage is high enough to challenge plutocracy and its colored boy-servants.

Steve Jobs, chairman and CEO of Apple

Steve Westly, managing partner and founder of Westly Group

Marissa Mayer, vice-president of consumer products at Google

Eric Schmidt, chairman and CEO of Google

Art Levinson, chairman and former CEO of Genentech

John Chambers, CEO and chairman of Cisco Systems

John Doerr, partner in Venture Capital Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (hosting the event)

Larry Ellison, co-founder and CEO of Oracle

Reed Hastings, CEO of NetFlix

John Hennessy, president at Stanford University

Carol Bartz, president and CEO of Yahoo!

Dick Costolo, CEO of Twitter

Then an unidentified person, and Mark Zuckenberg, surveillance agent extraordinaire….

PLUTOCRACY: EPIGENETICS, Not Just Wealth And Democide

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inequality grew.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Plutocracy, Epigenetics of Evil:

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

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

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

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

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

Patrice Ayme’

Who IS, What IS, EVIL?

EVIL IS, WHAT EVIL HIDES:

There is no more important question than the nature of Evil. What it consists in. Let alone where it hides. Upon the definition of Evil given by civilization, depends the survival of advanced intelligence on this planet.

We have ever more power. We need ever more intelligence to manage it. We need an ever stricter morality, to motivate said intelligence.

As we will see by the end of this essay, enormous evil (starving all of humanity to increase the evil gains of those who lead us) is already in place. It’s not just my (long held) opinion. Science magazine even agrees.

To motivate ever stricter mentality, we learn to become ferocious. This is a long held truth, not just of Islam and Christianity, but also Buddhism:

Exterminator Of Evil, Tenkeisei. Obviously Such Hard Work, It Requires A Demon

I scoff when I see German TV making fuzzy the face of the mass criminal who just killed 149 people. What? To protect his privacy? The privacy of evil? Oh, some will say, to protect those who were close to him. Well, are they not co-culprit? From the village where the co-pilot was, he was well known to nuts. People knowing that ought to have contacted Lufthansa, or the authorities.

Evil is all too private.

Let’s make it public.

Some have said, the mass murder by a (implicitly well educated, disciplined) German was unlikely. But Nazi was, mostly, an enormous mass murder-suicide. It differed only in scale.

Fifty years ago, intellectuals worried about nuclear war. On the face of it, it was a strange worry: the USSR and the USA were fighting for world supremacy. Their elites wanted to control the planet, they were overstretched in all ways.

The USSR crashed and burned, Putin is trying to revive the ambers.

Now people have forgotten about nuclear weapons. But they are here, more than ever. Why did they forget? Because the world has become morally asleep. And why that? Because much greater danger are not just looming, but exerting their grip. Reality has become an inconvenient distraction on the way to lucidity.

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NUCLEAR WAR IS EVER MORE LIKELY:

The situation is worse now: it is easier than ever to make nuclear weapons. It is not just a question of ever more efficient ultracentrifuges in underground fortresses. There are now even more advanced methods, using lasers, to separate Uranium isotopes. The USA itself is starting to use lasers to separate the highly explosive U235.

France and the USA are the two countries in the West which make thermonuclear weapons (Britain just buys them from the USA, and Israel got the technology from France). France and the USA have not made a technological breakthrough that would allow to neutralize nukes.

Say death rays of some sort; although France and the USA dominate in high power, military grade laser technology, said laser tech has not got to the point it could shoot down 99.99% of incoming missiles; actually it could not shoot down one.)

So, at this point, from lack of technological progress, nuclear weapons are still the ultimate weapon. And they are getting ever easier to make.

What does that mean for the talks with Iran? Well, that it is the occasion to refine an intrusive regime of nuclear inspections, to be used as a paradigm with other nations.

And what of Obama’s naive will, initially, to do away with nuclear weapons (thus affording a pretext to give him a Nobel)?

Well, as the world is, the safest way to prevent nuclear war is to augment the military research budgets of the West (only Israel has been doing well that way, devising plenty of anti-ballistic missile systems, with USA help…) Yes, I know, it’s cynical. But flowers won’t work.

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EVIL HERE, THERE, AND EVERYWHERE:

Usually I roll out the usual suspect, Abrahamic entities. Here now, we have a 27 pilot. He wants to become captain. But he knows his sick mind will not allow it. So he let go with the very depth of the human Dark Side: he brings another 149 innocent people, including babies with himself. The Will To Extermination.

Hitler was just the same.

When the war was clearly lost, the Nazis kept on fighting. At this point many average Germans who previously supported Nazism turned against it: why could not the Nazis give up, as even the Kaiser had, in World War One? Because of the Will to Extermination. The extermination of whom they wanted to exterminate was the Nazis’ main industry in their last few months. If they did not know it before, now the Germans could clearly see that the Will to Extermination was the Nazis’ main motivation. That maybe why the day it surrendered, Germans never supported Nazism again (in most ways; and differently from Japan, where the population never saw their imperial forces in full extermination mode: that happened on the national territory, only in Okinawa, a smallish, distant island).

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WHEN IS EVIL HIDING? EVIL HIDES ALL THE TIME

The Greeks knew that Pluto could make itself invisible. The evil co-pilot hid his madness from his employer, just as he hid from his employer that he was under doctor’s order to stop working.

Pilots ought to be required to make their health physical and mental PUBLIC property. That ought to be true even for those piloting a car for Uber. If they don’t like it, they can do something else.

To be able to kill people en masse ought to be viewed as a privilege given by the masses to a few, in counterpart of what, they keep an eye on these few, at all and any moment.

Hitler claimed he was out to help oppressed minorities, oppressed workers, and make Germany proud, great. He claimed to be against “plutocrats” (his word!) In truth his real aims were not this, and he knew all too well that he brandished the red of revolution (Soviet style), when actually he was sponsored by plutocrats. And, while he claimed to be a nationalist, he was blatantly and gigantically supported by American plutocrats such as Henry Ford.

Nowadays, Pluto is hiding better than ever.

The world’s richest man, and arguably greatest monopolist, instead of being in jail, has self-defined as the greatest philanthropist, and now directs health research worldwide in the coffers of what he, his family and associates have invested in. All of this tax free, of course.

You want another example of spectacular evil? What about starving people to make corporations and their plutocrats even richer?

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DO BIOFUEL POLICIES SEEK TO CUT EMISSIONS BY CUTTING FOOD? YES!

A study published yesterday, March 27, 2015, in the journal Science found that government biofuel policies rely on reductions in food consumption to generate greenhouse gas savings.

How much more evil can one get?

Shrinking the amount of food that people and livestock eat decreases the amount of carbon dioxide that they breathe out or excrete as waste. The reduction in food available for consumption, rather than any inherent fuel efficiency, drives the decline in carbon dioxide emissions in government models, the researchers found.

(Indeed, it’s know that “biofuels” are very inefficient. Making ethanol from corn or wheat requires energy that is mostly derived from traditional greenhouse gas-emitting sources, such as coal, natural gas. But then it benefits companies such as Monsanto, which make the Genetically Engineered corn in which Bill Gates is invested!)

“Without reduced food consumption, each of the models would estimate that biofuels generate more emissions than gasoline,” said Timothy Searchinger, first author on the paper and a research scholar at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and the Program in Science, Technology, and Environmental Policy.

Searchinger’s co-authors were Robert Edwards and Declan Mulligan of the Joint Research Center at the European Commission; Ralph Heimlich of the consulting practice Agricultural Conservation Economics; and Richard Plevin of the University of California-Davis.

The study looked at three models used by U.S. and European agencies, and found that all three estimate that some of the crops diverted from food to biofuels are not replaced by planting crops elsewhere. About 20 percent to 50 percent of the net calories diverted to make ethanol are not replaced through the planting of additional crops, the study found.

The result is that less food is available, and, according to the study, these missing calories are not simply extras enjoyed in resource-rich countries. Instead, when less food is available, prices go up.

“The impacts on food consumption result not from a tailored tax on excess consumption but from broad global price increases that will disproportionately affect some of the world’s poor,” Searchinger said.

The models used by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the California Air Resources Board indicate that ethanol made from corn and wheat generates modestly fewer emissions than gasoline. The fact that these lowered emissions come from reductions in food production is buried in the methodology and not explicitly stated, the study found.

The European Commission’s model found an even greater reduction in emissions. It includes reductions in both quantity and overall food quality due to the replacement of oils and vegetables by corn and wheat, which are of lesser nutritional value.

“Without these reductions in food quantity and quality, the [European] model would estimate that wheat ethanol generates 46% higher emissions than gasoline and corn ethanol 68% higher emissions,” Searching said.

The Science paper recommends that modelers show their work more transparently so that policymakers can decide if they wish to seek greenhouse gas reductions from food reductions.

Actually “policymakers” is the concept that hide the truth. It is to We the People to decide whether we should starve so that plutocrats can jet around the world in their private jets, while plotting our fate, and future ill-gotten gains, and powers they attribute themselves ever more generously, while we are invited to partake in ever more austerity.

Plutocracy is not just an inconvenience. As its name indicates, it is the ultimate evil. And it hides. We have to make sure it does not become a fate. And that means, first, to roll it out of its hiding places, from the minds of co-pilots to haughty policies which are anything but.

We are not led by great leaders, intelligence and goodness. We have been led, astray, by viciousness and the basest instincts, all too much. Time to withdraw the respect, and change course. As Dominique Deux half-joked in a comment on this site, time to make an app where passengers will vote: “… automatic implementation of the majority vote.
They’ll never ever vote for doom.
Democracy wins again, and smartphones become useful.”

We are all passengers on this Earth. And any baby has more right to be, than Bill Gates. Or any of our other great leaders. And those who have already abused power massively (see the food for fuel policy above), ought to have less right to be in power than anybody else.

Patrice Ayme’

Searchinger, R. Edwards, D. Mulligan, R. Heimlich, and R. Plevin. Do biofuel policies seek to cut emissions by cutting food? Science 27 March 2015: 1420-1422. DOI: 10.1126/science.1261221.

 

Times: New York Heavens For World’s Wealthiest Criminals

There is a major article on the effect of shell companies and secret malevolent wealth increasingly hiding in New York (and the USA in general).

In at least 55% of properties worth more than five million dollars in New York City, the owners are kept hidden. The New York Times details a particular case. The most expensive real estate is booming, worldwide, because plutocracy is booming. A Gauguin painting was just purchased by an Arab plutocrat for 330 million dollars. Plutocrats have more wealth and power, and stealth, than ever.

Tallest Roof Building in the West. Highest Apartments $100 Million Each.

[Notice that this plutocratic building, the 426 meters tall 432 Park Ave. is higher than the top floor of the 1 World Trade Center, the so-called “Freedom Tower”, visible just on the immediate right. A fitting symbol! Plutocracy dominates Freedom.]

In “Stream of Foreign Wealth Flows to Elite New York Real Estate” February 8, 2015 the Times reveals that:

“Behind the dark glass towers of the Time Warner Center looming over Central Park, a majority of owners have taken steps to keep their identities hidden, registering condos in trusts, limited liability companies or other entities that shield their names. By piercing the secrecy of more than 200 shell companies, The New York Times documented a decade of ownership in this iconic Manhattan way station for global money transforming the city’s real estate market.

Many of the owners represent a cross-section of American wealth: chief executives and celebrities, doctors and lawyers, technology entrepreneurs and Wall Street traders.

But The Times also found a growing proportion of wealthy foreigners, at least 16 of whom have been the subject of government inquiries around the world, either personally or as heads of companies. The cases range from housing and environmental violations to financial fraud. Four owners have been arrested, and another four have been the subject of fines or penalties for illegal activities.

The foreign owners have included government officials and close associates of officials from Russia, Colombia, Malaysia, China, Kazakhstan and Mexico.

They have been able to make these multimillion-dollar purchases with few questions asked because of United States laws that foster the movement of largely untraceable money through shell companies.

Vast sums are flowing unchecked around the world as never before — whether motivated by corruption, tax avoidance or investment strategy, and enabled by an ever-more-borderless economy and a proliferation of ways to move and hide assets.

Alighting in places like London, Singapore and other financial centers, this flood of capital has created colonies of the foreign super-rich, with the attendant resentments and controversies about class inequality made tangible in the glass and steel towers reordering urban landscapes.”

I contributed the following comment to the preceding. This comment, underlined below, was censored by the New York Times. It is interesting to wonder why:

Cities such as London and New York have officially called the world’s richest people to come live there, and escape taxation.

Thus the United States has become the world first tax haven. It’s followed by the United Kingdom, with its archipelago of tax havens, from the Channel island of Jersey, the world’s number one exporter of… bananas, to the British Virgin islands, with half a million shell companies and Apple funneling through hundreds of billions dollars…

Shell companies may exist on paper only, with no real employees nor offices. They are untraceable. Thus perfect for money laundering, giving and taking bribes, sanctions busting, stealing, drug trafficking, tax evasion, financing terror, religious fanatics, and plutocratic plots. The trail has gone cold in countless criminal probes, because law enforcement was unable to pierce through a shell’s corporate veil.

One of the problem with home ownership is that prices have kept climbing, while incomes have been (at best) stagnating. International plutocracy has pushed real estate prices up in major cities, worldwide. They escape even most of local taxation by setting up shell companies. They don’t contribute to the local economy.

The preceding four paragraphs of mine are pretty much well established. Yet the New York Times found something to censor. Censorship is a delicate thing. The NYT is navigating delicately between Pluto propaganda that feeds it, and the necessity of talking about what everybody can increasingly see.

Here is an extensive quote from the NYT:

“it is nearly impossible to establish with certainty the source of money behind shell companies. Purchasers can register shell companies in the names of accountants, lawyers or relatives. Purchases are often made not just by individuals but on behalf of groups of investors or numerous family members, further obscuring the origin of the funds. What is more, ownership of shell companies can be shifted at any time, with no indication in property records.

The high-end real estate market has become less and less transparent — and more alluring for those abroad with assets they wish to keep anonymous — even as the United States pushes other nations to help stanch the flow of American money leaving the country to avoid taxes. Yet for all the concerns of law enforcement officials that shell companies can hide illicit gains, regulatory efforts to require more openness from these companies have failed.

“We like the money,” said Raymond Baker, the president of Global Financial Integrity, a Washington nonprofit that tracks the illicit flow of money. “It’s that simple. We like the money that comes into our accounts, and we are not nearly as judgmental about it as we should be.”

In some ways, officials are clamoring for the foreign wealthy. In New York, tax breaks for condominium developments benefit owners looking for a second, or third, residence in one of Manhattan’s premier buildings. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said on his weekly radio program in 2013, shortly before leaving office: “If we could get every billionaire around the world to move here, it would be a godsend.””

So why did the NYT censor my own comment? The most offensive part was: Cities such as London and New York have officially called the world’s richest people to come live there, and escape taxation.

However, this is a fact.

Foreigners sheltering capital in the United Kingdom and the USA pay no tax. “every billionaire around the world to move here” was Thatcher’s explicit strategy. As the New York Times revealed, those don’t even pay local taxes.

For shell companies, related crimes, and other plutocratic plots:

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2014/07/06/usa-financial-extortion/

The New York Times February 8, 2015:

“One type of corporate structure now commonly used in real estate transactions, limited liability companies, or L.L.C.s, did not even exist in the United States before the late 1970s. At first, they were primarily used by oil and gas traders in Wyoming to shield individual owners from liability — if, say, a well worker was hurt — and to avoid taxation of both the company and the investor.”

The end result is that honest people making an honest living find ever more difficult to find decent, affordable housing. Throughout the West. This, in turns, augments taxes of citizens, demotivate workers, and contribute to the general economic malaise.

The New York Times admits there is a problem:

“About a year ago, after the Group of 8 industrialized nations issued goals requiring identification of shell company owners, a British representative met with Justice Department officials to complain about the United States’ failure to comply.

According to two people at the meeting, the British representative, Dominic Martin, delivered a stern message: The lax American laws were being used by other countries as an excuse for inaction.

Such a message resonates with Justice Department officials who have advocated tightening the rules.

“For a long time we’ve taken the view that you have to focus on the people that manage the gateway to the financial system, and those guys are not only the banks,” said Stefan Cassella, a Justice Department lawyer. “Bad guys who are trying to invest money in the financial system — they use lawyers, they use accountants, they use real estate, they use jewelers and private jets.””

Law is local, plutocracy is global. USA based plutocracy has tried very hard to make sure that the USA stays the (control) center of world plutocracy. Hence the nice treatment for foreign plutocrats.

In general, USA legislation, or lack thereof, plus deregulation (from Clinton’s era) has been all too favorable to the hyper wealthy, not just on an individual basis, but as a class.

We were fed the propaganda drivel that the wealthiest are “job creators”, and wealth creators for all, and so ought to be taxed less, and they have been, now for decades. However the law of compound interest says that the more wealth, the easier is it to get more. To prevent that societies have invented progressive taxation.

Except, of course, in plutocracies, by quasi-definition, the richest go tax-free (European aristocracy did not pay tax). Thus, the very fact that the wealthy are taxed less is an indication of our rush to plutocracy.

NYT again: “The precise impact of wealthy foreigners on the city may be more complex, though. As nonresidents, they pay no city income taxes and often receive hefty property tax breaks. A program aimed at new condo development doles out about a half-billion dollars in tax breaks a year, according to the city’s independent budget office. These savings are passed on to owners in the form of lower property taxes. The Time Warner Center was not part of the most lucrative tax break program, but many other buildings around Central Park have benefited.

The city’s first condo costing more than $100 million, which sold in the last few weeks at the new luxury tower One57, had property taxes this past year of $17,268, according to the city’s finance office. Those taxes will go up over time, but for now that is a savings of more than $359,000.

The Fiscal Policy Institute, a nonprofit in New York, recently suggested a downside to the influx of billionaires who are in the city only sporadically.

“In terms of the local economy, you don’t have people who are going to plays, going to restaurants,” James Parrott, the institute’s chief economist, said. “They’re not spending at the dry cleaners, the grocers and all of that, so it deprives New York of all that local multiplier effect.”

What is more, Mr. Parrott said, the skyrocketing prices of the pieds-à-terre are affecting the price of real estate in the city more broadly. “There’s a downside to having such pressure at the top. It pulls up the prices overall. When owners of $10 million condos see that there’s a big market for $95 million condos, they’re more likely to raise their prices,” he said. “Then the person at $2 million raises his prices, then the person at $1 million sees that and there aren’t any prices below $1 million.””

Home Ownership Declining In the USA Because Homes Are Too Expensive Relative to Stagnating Incomes

So much for the Obama prosperity.

Prosperity in the Hamptons, destitution elsewhere.

The leadership of the USA has engaged in a deliberate take-over by the wealthiest. An example is FATCA, a legislation to reveal money held overseas mostly by middle class USA citizens working overseas. FATCA was imposed on countries worldwide. This has given a weapon for USA authorities to crack-down on foreign banks and investment firms. The result? The USA controls, or more exactly, possesses, much more of the secret (“Dark Pools”) money than before. Indeed, that was not to decrease the secrecy. Quite the opposite. The practical effect is that most money centers, worldwide have been infeodated to New York and Washington now, more than ever.

Much of the class of people gravitating around the leadership of the USA has perceived, consciously or not, that helping world plutocrats and other malefactors, was useful to augment the power of the USA leadership. So this will go on, until, We the People of the USA realizes that the rise of plutocracy is not in their best interest. (If and only if We The People has still enough power to do something about it!)

So it is nice that the New York Times is revealing the problem. However, the fact they censor comments such as mine shows that they are clearly revealing only what everybody already sort-of knows. I went one truth (or two) too far. Revealing that the USA is the number one tax heaven for plutocrats, that’s definitively too far. So, crack, censored, for an imprudent, and impudent, truth.

England and the USA have made a Faustian bargain with Pluto (who else?): they gained wealth, but lost their soul. Understanding global plutocracy’s dark machinery offers an opportunity to recover both.

In Greek mythology, one of Pluto’s characteristics, was his ability to make himself invisible. (Something Pluto Putin cultivates in Ukraine, and throughout Western media.)

At its peak, the Roman empire taxed wealth to finance the education and welfare of poor children. This rested on a cadastrum, a repertory of wealth in the empire. We need the same, worldwide. And then we need to tax wealth. And we need force to do both.

Force in the service of goodness is no sin. Love and weakness in the service of evil has no future, but mayhem.

Patrice Ayme’

Will To Destruction

The West rots in a crazy political crisis propelled by carefully engineered ignorance, misunderstanding and herd like behavior. It has drastic economic, social, and even ecological consequences. None of this is an accident. Instead, it’s the expression of a will. And no, it’s not just a Will To Power, as Napoleon and Nietzsche would have it, in their simplicity, and general lack of cynicism.

Before taking flight above the morass of commonality, let’s roll out Krugman in “Build We Won’t” (07/ 3/ 2014):

“You often find people talking about our economic difficulties as if they were complicated and mysterious, with no obvious solution. As the economist Dean Baker recently pointed out, nothing could be further from the truth. The basic story of what went wrong is, in fact, almost absurdly simple: We had an immense housing bubble, and, when the bubble burst, it left a huge hole in spending. Everything else is footnotes.

From Obama To O Blah Blah

Krugman pursue, playing naïve: “And the appropriate policy response was simple, too: Fill that hole in demand… In prosperous times, public spending on roads, bridges and so on competes with the private sector for resources. Since 2008, however, our economy has been awash in unemployed workers (especially construction workers) and capital with no place to go (which is why government borrowing costs are at historic lows). Putting those idle resources to work building useful stuff should have been a no-brainer.

But what actually happened was exactly the opposite: an unprecedented plunge in infrastructure spending. Adjusted for inflation and population growth, public expenditures on construction have fallen more than 20 percent since early 2008…an almost surreally awful wrong turn…

And it’s about to get even worse.”

Krugman explains that public spending is evil, because that would increase the deficit. Deficits are evil, when there’s a Democratic government that can borrow at incredibly low interest rates. We can’t raise gas taxes: that would be a tax increase, and tax increases are even more evil than deficits. So public infrastructure can decay.

Krugman does not know if this is politics or madness: “If this sounds crazy, that’s because it is… The collapse of public investment was, therefore, a political choice… how self-destructive that political choice has become. It’s one thing to block green investment, or high-speed rail, or even school construction… But everyone… thinks we need good roads. Yet the combination of anti-tax ideology and deficit… means that we’re letting our highways, and our future, erode away.”

In simple terms:

Trillions of dollars are sitting idle, a huge amount of work needs to be done, around 40% of the working age cohort is not employed. Crazy? Not at all. It’s the logic of the plutocratic phenomenon. Gut the People. We have seen this before, when the Roman empire entered its terminal decay (which took more than two centuries).

Here is my explanation:

Public investments are those made for the common good, because they are too large, or too much about public property, or too unprofitable, short term (fundamental research in science and philosophy).

No capitalist can buy the air, for example. The air is a public good. No private individual ought to be allowed to possess the atmosphere. Thus it’s public investment that has to take care of the air.

And so on.

Of course, civilization has decided that what is the most precious: free will, freedom, life, cannot be owned any more. They used to be, at occasional, crazy points of history, never sustainable: in this country, nearly four centuries ago, slavery was reintroduced, and human beings, and their children could be owned, and abused (the slave trade was unlawful in the Empire of the Franks since 655 CE, in the Seventh Century, the great conceptual, and technical break with Greco-Roman Antiquity).

As the most precious cannot be owned, and traded privately, they can only be taken care of publicly. By cutting down on public investments, the powers that be have decided that what was the most precious was not worth investing into.

So the economy, society, and civilization itself go down.

You may wonder: what usage are the powers that be pursuing, by smothering the most precious values? Are they not suffering too? Well, by making ever more life into a living hell, the plutocrats who lead our politicians feel ever more at home.

Who needs roads, or trains, when one can private jet around? This is exactly the reasoning that was made when plutocrats destroyed the tax base of the Roman Empire: plutocrats did not need roads, they could live in their villas. They did not even need a public army: they had their own private armies. Nor did they need public schools, they had private schooling. It is the same now!

What drives this Will To Destruction?

Something deep in the genus Homo. The Will of Homo To Destroy… Homo.

This is what the plutocratic phenomenon taps into, that Will To Destruction. It is its reason of being.

Patrice Ayme

The Satanic Imperative

I explained in Black Hole Inequality that if inequality grows too much, a society will be sucked by it as if by a Black Hole. Such collapses typically conclude with war, invasion, or a natural calamity: Jin, Song, Yuan, Ming dynasties, & the “Fall” of Rome, or the Maya are examples.

The situation we have today possesses unparalleled perils we are not addressing because we are not in democracy, and the ruling elites are doing their best to distract themselves with corruption, in a fit of psychology reminiscent of the Nazi elite stealing treasure and art all over, while the Great Reich was falling. (See below for the Chinese elite’s theft of at least 4 trillion dollars, a pale imitation of what the American elite has been doing since it has been hiding behind the Bushes.)

Inequality is born from the exponential growth of power (in particular capital), that’s a purely mathematical effect. It became possible when capital appeared. That is, when artifacts appeared rendering life comfortable… Two million years ago (first stone tools). In conjunction with a failure of taxing said growth of capital enough, capital will grow exponentially.

In turn, inequality, being widely perceived, experiments show, as insufferable by primates, has to be covered-up under a thick layer of lies and dissemblance, to be entertained further by those who profit from it (Note 2). Even madness is not far, because those who rule have want the rabble believe that white is black, and black is white. Indeed, ethics is absolute, but, in an unjust society, it’s those who rule, who want to be absolute.

Hence the greater the inequality, the worse the emotions, the more satanic the behavior of those at the top. This is why the reign of the rich brings up the Dark Side, Satan, Pluto. That insight was reached by the Greeks at least 26 centuries ago (and later reinforced by the mythical Jesus).

Hence inequality is not just about injustice, and diminished economic opportunity for the average citizen. It’s also about a society increasingly led by fewer and fewer people gathering all the money and power, and ever more so, as long as a strong mechanism to block further inequality is not put in place.

But, even more horrifyingly, a society where inequality grows is a society where the leaders learn to increasingly lie and use the worse methods for their class to keep on ruling.

As inequality grows, so does the Dark Side.

***

KRUGMAN KEEPS ON DISCOVERING INEQUALITY:

Inequality is the drama of the Obama presidency, his signature achievement, even more than Romneycare. Obama’s is the Inequality presidency. Obama lowered taxes (mostly to the non rich) thus allowing him to leave untouched taxes on the hyper rich that were way too low. (So Obama used the former to hide the latter, a nice magician trick; Note 1.)

Krugman, his lower eye on his rather dim readership, and his upper one on his masters, wrote a less grand, but still educative editorial in the “The Populist Imperative”:

“The outstanding faults of the economic society in which we live are its failure to provide for full employment and its arbitrary and inequitable distribution of wealth and incomes.”

John Maynard Keynes wrote that in 1936, but it applies to our own time, too.

If, as has been widely reported, President Obama devotes much of his State of the Union address to inequality, everyone should be cheering him on.

They won’t, of course. Instead, he will face two kinds of sniping. The usual suspects on the right will, as always when questions of income distribution comes up, shriek “Class warfare!” But there will also be seemingly more sober voices arguing that he has picked the wrong target, that jobs, not inequality, should be at the top of his agenda.

Here’s why they’re wrong.

First of all, jobs and inequality are closely linked if not identical issues. There’s a pretty good although not ironclad case that soaring inequality helped set the stage for our economic crisis

…Yes, we’re a nation that admires rather than resents success, but most people are nonetheless disturbed by the extreme disparities of our Second Gilded Age. A new Pew poll finds an overwhelming majority of Americans — and 45 percent of Republicans! — supporting government action to reduce inequality, with a smaller but still substantial majority favoring taxing the rich to aid the poor. And this is true even though most Americans don’t realize just how unequally wealth really is distributed.

By contrast, it’s very hard to communicate even the most basic truths of macroeconomics, like the need to run deficits to support employment in bad times. You can argue that Mr. Obama should have tried harder to get these ideas across; many economists cringed when he began echoing Republican rhetoric about the need for the federal government to tighten its belt along with America’s families. But, even if he had tried, it’s doubtful that he would have succeeded.”

Krugman is funny: a man can’t teach what he does not understand. There is this famous saying that: give a man a fish, feed him for a day, teach him to fish, feed him for life.

In his unforgettable books, the irreplaceable Obama teaches that life is all about… navigating. I did not see Obama teaching values such as employment, or how to do anything productive, such as fishing and thinking.  Obama is not the Old Man and the Sea. It’s the Young Man and the Pot of Gold.

Obama’s confused policy in science and technology is a testimony to that. Obama wasted 150 billions (said his guy in charge) supporting friendly capitalists like the Elon Musk. That augmented inequality: Musk is just a filthy rich South African immigrant, who did not need all those billions from the USA president.

So Obama wasted those 150 billion, while carefully starving the science missions of NASA, including some international collaborations. The science budget at NASA is only 5 billion a year., but that makes work lots of workers and engineers, let alone scientists.

And Krugman to conclude: The point is that of the two great problems facing the U.S. economy, [employment and inequality], inequality is the one on which Mr. Obama is most likely to connect with voters…

So I hope we’ll hear something about jobs Tuesday night, and some pushback against deficit hysteria. But if we mainly hear about inequality and social justice, that’s O.K. “

It never hurts to listen to the birds singing in the trees, either. It’s more troubling when we have been navigated into a disaster by a guy who knew only to navigate to the masters. As I showed, after tax corporate profits have never been higher under Obama. But don’t worry: he will sleep well. He is not Magellan (who died pierced by arrows in the Philippines).

***

PLUTO HAS BEEN A GOOD MASTER FOR SOME:

So let me repeat slowly: plutocracy central is the USA, As I explained in USA, Den Of Thieves. USA plutocrats have been the world’s mightiest and most durable ever since the Kaiser bit the dust. Kaiser Wilhem II of Germany, that is. USA plutocracy was the indispensable Deus In Machina that has ruled for more than a century, although sometimes through servants and collaborators: Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, are examples (even Mao was helped by USA plutocracy, not just in the 1940s, but by Nixon).

Obama does not know much, but he knows that the big corporate actors of the USA don’t pay much tax. That’s not a violation of the law, because they are the law (that’s the way he has got to see it, according to his “navigation” morality). At least so he was told, or decided, in 2008.

The way many strategists in the USA (be they in think tanks, the intelligence agencies, the military and rarefied pluto circles, Davos style) figure it out, rogue plutos and their corporations made the empire of the USA, by leveraging the world wars. And the struggle for world domination is not over. Just as they made German plutos an offer they could not refuse, a century ago, they made Russian plutos and Chinese plutos similar offer, that they could not refuse.

We are witnessing an attempt to implement the same trick. (However, that can work, see: Note 4.)

***

CHINESE PLUTOCRACY, PART OF THE WORLD’S PLUTO MACHINE:

The corrupt, not to say satanic, Chinese leadership has hidden at least 4 trillion dollars in the Caribbean and other balmy places, for more than 22,000 tax havens clients, including 15 of the apex political animals in China.

This is what the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists announced this week.

Those files come from JUST two offshore firms — Singapore-based Portcullis TrustNet and BVI-based Commonwealth Trust Limited — that help clients create offshore companies, trusts and bank accounts.

(That’s part of a cache of 2.5 million leaked files that ICIJ has sifted through with help from more than 50 reporting partners in Europe, North America, Asia and other regions.)

PricewaterhouseCoopers, UBS and other Western banks and accounting firms are middlemen helping Chinese plutos setting up trusts and companies in the British Virgin Islands, Samoa and other tax havens. Example: giant Swiss bank Credit Suisse helped Wen Jiabao’s son create his British Virgin Island company while his daddy was leading China and terrorizing Tibet.

Obama loved to golf with the aptly named Wolf, head of UBS USA. Meanwhile UBS was found by the USA to have engaged in criminal conduct, but strangely enough, no American banker ever goes to jail (though the USA has no apparent problem jailing Swiss bankers, meaning that the USA is after market share, not justice).

A century ago, except for one large republic, France, Europe was dominated by plutocrats who all knew each other very well. War was the answer they found to the questions We The People asked, especially in Germany.

Right now, we have a somewhat similar situation developing: a new plutocratic Internationale has developed, and entangled all the world’s leadership systems. “democracy” is just a word they use to hide corruption. That they all know each other is not reassuring is anymore than in 1914. Just as in 1914, it makes them too confident and tolerant of the Dark Side.

The Prime Minister of Ukraine, an agent of Putin, gives interviews at the plutocratic conference in Davos, implying that he will keep on killing protesters, as needed.

Meanwhile, the Earth’s affairs are not attended by these golden clowns. A major catastrophic development in the CO2 crisis could happen any day, and then what? Everybody is unprepared to take intelligent, drastic countermeasures (remember that fundamental research budgets were actually reduced because of the 2008 plutocratic crisis… which makes sense in plutocratic logic!).

The first counter-measure? Increase educational levels. And that means increase funding for the likes of NASA or the Department of Energy, DOE (because, after all, there would be no CO2 crisis if we had more advanced energy sources). But the rumor is that Obama wants to save on laser fusion research (so he can give more money to his hyper wealthy “friends”?)

By refusing intelligent and soft counter-measures to rising inequality, we are preparing the worst.

Hence inequality is not just about giving in to the Dark Side, it’s about making the bed of war. And no doubt, among those who have nearly all and want to give nothing, war is always better than any alternative they can think of. Thinking is not their forte.

Patrice Aymé

***

Note 1: Obama, the Changeling, not to be confused to Chinese Princeling, brought us change we can believe: the greatest corporate profits ever, after tax, relative to GDP.  To compensate, he talks about inequality more than ever.

This is the State of the Union: schizoid (= a form of schizophrenia, being of two minds on one thing).

Note 2: Chimpanzees or Baboons have a strong sexual dimorphism, and thus a greater tolerance for injustice. Humans are closer in dimorphism to Capuchin Monkeys, who detest injustice.

Note 3. The graph of higher education hides a worse truth: a lot of the public spending helps actually fund the plutocratic (“private”) universities.

Note 4: Repeating exactly the same trick can work: the fascist German army defeated twice the French at Sedan (1870 & 1940). Even better, a more than 10,000 strong Persian army allied to Macedonia held the Thermopylae, just as the Spartans had done before, and, just as before, the Roman army took the same mountain path to crush them from behind.