Houellebecq’s “Sérotonine”, Or When Schizophrenia Causes Globalization. And Reciprocally.

Houellebecq’s “Sérotonine”, or when an anti-hero dies of sadness induced by globalization and lack of moral compass (of which globalization is a consequence)…

To my surprise, I read (among other things) a new book, Houellebecq’s “Sérotonine”. I don’t usually read novels because most novel authors and the resulting works they give birth to, are neither smart nor interesting enough (whereas a crocodile, although not too smart, is quite interesting, while being much more direct: the croc wants food, or, if tame, scratching of the neck, while not claiming to have higher pursuits such as wealth, fame and respect). 

I bought and I have tried to read Houellebecq several times in the past, and failed miserably within a few pages. I was put off by the sort of universe Houellebecquian heroes evolve in, a sort of universe I always avoided studiously, carefully, exhaustively, successfully, on various continents. (I remember some sort of cults trying to incorporate me at Columbia U, and another at Stanford U… For decades all my environment was academic, and an eminently stern academia …) So there I was in a bookstore, waiting for family, and I got intrigued as I sampled pages within Sérotonine. I was stunned. Was the famous author from the little Paris pseudo-intellectual scene, really attacking globalization, with an intensity similar to what presidents Trump or Cristina Fernández de Kirchner exhibited in the past?

When I say I cautiously always avoided Houellebecq’s style universes, I am not just talking about the chain smoking, and also the general aura of frantic sex with strangers, depression, etc., a perpetual fog with Houellebecq. I cordially despise serial sexers. Moreover I hate smokers, because not only are they drug addicts (a general indication of an unworthy brain, unworthy of my social skills, just there), but smokers aggressively direct their gases to poison others. They truly hate humanity, they are symbolic portable Auschwitz (I won’t tweet that one…) So smokers are actually lethal aggressors, differently from those who pump heroine, who are just idiots (this one I tweeted).

For me, the only positive side of smoking, definitively attractive, is that it gives me all the moral superiority to experimentally deploy my aggressive skills in retaliation, and study how creeps do to justify their creepiness (a science which can be put to good use in other domains). In the last few days I had US family visiting and that meant restaurants, hence the occasion of personally enforcing French law on smoking, beyond what timid French restaurateurs do. In one notable situation, a smoker held her cigarette as far from her lungs as she could, while her smoke went straight to my nine year old daughter’s innocent lungs fifteen feet away, thanks to a pernicious and persistent mountain breeze… The situation attracted my own counter strike (of the verbal type, but it was a scorcher designed to inflict maximal psychological pain).

We used to have pot types, with useless brains, just good enough to step in front of garbage trucks. It happened to a professional pothead friend of mine, a famous cover-of-magazine US climber. Ruined by pot, he confessed to me:”Patrice, my brain doesn’t work anymore.” (Pay attention, dedicated pot heads!) The next day, my pot head friend stepped in front of a garbage truck. Pot glues up synapses (yes, thus it may work for chronic pains, though)…

Now we also have the very worst, vaping. Vaping has been presented as an enormous progress: plenty of nicotine, for the nicotine addicts, no more smoke for their victims. Instead, the victims get dispatched with poisonous gases. Indeed. Killing from smoking kills in decades (although it degenerates people faster than that)… Whereas vaping can kill in hours (accordingly the WHO/OMS came out last week with a scathing, amply justified attack against vaping). It does that through innovative organic chemistry, generating deadly poisons such as formaldehyde.  [1]

Houellebecq observes the disaster, the self-immolation of Europe, its destruction by globalization. And Houellebecq thinks about it, but does he think enough? Baboons also think, but they are incapable of producing civilization, they don’t think enough for that… Or even survival: the baboon species now lives, just depending upon our good will, our human good will… which is not that good, much of the time. Dies Houellebecq think enough? No (as his idiotic opinions on Europe amply demonstrate, especially with someone living in Ireland!) Egyptian baboon, 4,000 years old, Museo delle Antichità Egizie, Egyptian Museum, Turin, Piedmont

Vapers are out of their drug riddled minds. I saw a (French) mom vape in her toddler’s face… At a climbing area. The toddler was coughing without stopping. I came upon the scene, and could smell the formaldehyde from ten feet away. I chewed her head off about killing her child in public. She replied that, if it bothered me, as it did, she would stop. But I was still bothered by her little plan to vape her own child to death behind closed doors.

Houellebecq’s “Sérotonine” theme is all-too real and important. The hero is an expert agricultural engineer employed as a private consultant by the French government. His task? Helping to dismantle European indigenous agriculture and food production, by providing a flow of reassuring and mitigating reports, as the Titanic of European food production sinks under the assault of treaties with distant countries such as Argentina.   

Serotonin mediates an animal’s perceptions of resources; In less complex animals, such as some invertebrates, resources simply mean food availability. In plants serotonin synthesis seems to be associated with stress signals. In more complex animals, such as arthropods and vertebrates, resources also can mean social dominance. That’s when “Will to Power” appears, endowing social groups with a well-ordered structure (in the mathematical sense).  In response to the perceived abundance or scarcity of resources, an animal’s growth, reproduction or mood, may be elevated or lowered. This may somewhat depend on how much serotonin the organism has at its disposal.

Houellebecq does not explain why such treaties, those treaties destroying Europe, have been signed, and are still signed (his livelihood depends a lot upon not explaining it). But I can explain it, and I have (however, my explanations are no explanation Houellebecq wants to read). On the face of it, it  may sound strange that Europe would waste so much energy, destroying itself. Why? Why signing treaties which ensure the eradication of European agriculture? Houellebecq does not explain that, not at all. He just implies over and over again, that this is the general mood of despair and destruction, from lack of solidarity now rampant in Europe, itself tied to glittering, flittering, fluctuating, chaotic activities which lead to irreversible disasters (as when the hero holds hands with a British black lawyer he just slept with, in  a train station, and they come across the hero’s real love, Camille… who is shattered irreversibly). 

The (anti) hero, this French engineer, is delivered to the deepest despair, as his job, his worth, consists into killing the means Europe has to feed itself. A subsequent girlfriend of his, a Japanese princess (of sorts; with government employ and connections, that’s why such a princess: governmental types rule the world, just below the Pluto class). The Japanese princes is all into Appearances, and secret, wild promiscuous sex with the multitudes, just like French agricultural policy is all into Appearances (and probably wild sex too, with undefined multitudes). In truth there is nothing there in European policies, and in the anti-hero’s muddled mind, below those Appearances: the core is fully empty. Houellebecq explains that human beings are made to live in small groups the size of a hamlet, a theme I have harped on for many years. Thus, living in cities guarantees solitude… And even worse one guesses from the mood of the book, it fosters not caring about humanity at all.

Taking medical drugs does not  solve the problem at all, it just destroys the hero hormonally and neurobiologically.  

So why is Houellebecq, so good at describing Europe’s self-destructive madness, yet incapable of suggesting its causes (besides anti-smoking regulations, speed limits on freeways, etc.)? It’s just because the novelist lives, admittedly on a small scale, off what is at the origin of what he decries.

More on this interesting contradiction… or is it feeding at two throughs (that’s always better than just one)? Latter…

Meanwhile, what we have now is not just dictatorship. It’s much less than that, we are even more deprived. Globalization has become annihilation, nihilism of realism. Minds in conflicting pieces. Serotonin has been implicated in cognition, mood, anxiety and psychosis. There is increasing evidence for a role of serotonin, as well as dopaminergic mechanisms, in schizophrenia. Schizophrenia means minds in pieces.

How did the European psyche get into pieces? Ever since World War Two, the European (pseudo) intellectual mainstream has claimed we had to save all of humanity from European rage and destruction… Not noticing that the courageous and high minded powers who declared war to Nazism, France and the UK, were European powers… while the USSR and the USA helped Hitler, on an enormous scale (Hey, let me remind indignant cackling turkeys, that I am talking about 1933-1941, here. Not that such turkeys would know what happened in those eight years, which have been misinformed not to say deformed as convenient “isolationism“). Indeed it’s France (first) and Britain (belatedly following France as a contrite proverbial French poodle) which forced Hitler in a world war he wasn’t yet ready for… and thus that he could only lose.

So, instead of thanking France (especially) and Britain, for their good and heroic service, against Nazism, against mass-extinction fascist racism, the pseudo-intellectual European class embarked on a campaign of denigration of Europe, and its highest ideals, the mission civilisatrice, fostered by, and profiting (who were by then) Europe’s masters, Stalin and the US Deep State. Percolating down, this hatred of Europe’s best masked by highest principles, brought up a deep, murderous contradiction, the desire to serve distant masters, while murdering one’s neighbours (in “Serotonin”, death occurs). Despair is the only hope out of it.

Thus Europe is being destroyed in guise of saving it (for the greater profit of global plutocrats). No wonder we swim in an ocean of serotonin.

Patrice Ayme

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[1] I consider likely that my own mom got Inflammatory Pulmonary Disease (IPD) from a close relative who vaped in her face (makes for vigorous family dynamics). IPD kills in a median 5 years. There is no cure. It’s becoming the most frequent disease. My mom took more than a year to die. Once a 28 year old died in the US, within hours of being exposed to vaping…

As Africa Gets Colonized, So Do We

Abstract: Formal “decolonization” worked splendidly… for global plutocracy (with few exceptions). Otherwise, decolonization is a myth. Worse: a crime the way it was accomplished, in all too many places. Nowhere is that more blatant than in Africa, where regimes after regimes are horror shows, and should be viewed as having run out of excuses. And therein a lesson for the whole planet. And in particular for the whole “left” and other pseudo-intellectuals of the simplistic type, who have been more busy collaborating with a system they set-up, rather than fighting it.

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On April 18, at 6;50 am, heading for Turin Airport, I headed towards the Montgenèvre  pass. Montgenèvre is probably where Hannibal crossed the Alps, as it is the lowest pass. However the famous general suffering huge losses at the hands of the uncooperative Natives, the Allobroges… He lost at least a third of his army, nearly all his elephants. Those Allobroges with whom the Romans, under Augustus, would draw a treaty, two centuries after Hannibal, making them part of the Roman empire… as an independent kingdom: Augustus was so proud of himself, he mad a gigantic monument, still overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea. (The world owes to Briancon, the Roman Brigantum, the word “brigand”, depicting well the rapport between Rome and the Briancon area…)

In some places, all what is left are ancient baobabs, from desiccation, and abuse of the land. Baobabs like many African things, starting with the land itself, are enormous. Unfortunately, most of African ecology gets ravaged as we speak. The problem is not sourced just in Africa, we are all part of the problem, thus, the solution.

Along the road, suddenly ten Africans, Subsaharan African, black as charcoal, walking… All French speakers. They came, illegally, from south of the Sahara desert, crossed Libya, and the Mediterranean Sea, thanks to smugglers. Once in Italy, charities gave them clothes, addresses and cell phones, with subscriptions working in France and Italy. Train transportation was provided. From Sicily to deep inside the Alps, at the foot of formidable passes enjoying more than ten meters of snow over the last few months. Only one road goes through, passing in a tunnel below the Montgenèvre,  the world’s oldest ski resort. There are kilometers of tunnels on the “Italian” side. This is the road those outlaws took, obviously hidden in smugglers’ cars (the border between France and Italy is not enforced, but the French Gendarmerie has descended upon some technically Italian towns to make anti illegal immigrant raids, to loud protests from the Ligua Norte (a pseudo-independentist party)…. That whole area of “Italy” was French until Louis XIV gave it to the enemies he had created for himself by throwing 2 million protestants out, and making his grandson king of Spain… The fury of some Italian politicians is explained by their desire to see Africans go to France, instead of enjoying Italy.

Those smugglers through that one French Alps’ pass don’t view themselves as smugglers, but as friends of man, as charities. Yet, ultimately they are the accomplices of horrible regimes in Africa, themselves set-up by global plutocrats and the Western governments which served them (no relief to be obtained from China, which is arguably doing worse, under the guise of helping, as French and US politicians recently pointed out).

Of course, should I be stuck in Subsaharan Africa (as I used to be), I would also walk through the desert, and swim across the sea. Why?Far from the pleasant land I used to know, Subsaharan Africa is in danger of becoming a vast “shithole”, as Trump may have noticed in private… we are well into the process of following it down the toilet. And this we will presently address.

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A superficially absurd question in Quora, which turns out to be very deep:”Why aren’t the French colonies in Africa liberated? Why don’t they ask for their independence?

My answer:

Silly question, superficially: there are technically no colonies in Africa, at the present time. Or pretty much anywhere else. However, the reality is just the opposite. “Independence” and decolonization was pretty much a sham. It was more of a delegalization, and the creation of a wild west, with Natives to exploit freely, far from law and prying eyes.

Indeed, it’s not France, the French Republic which has the colonies (as it used to be). The truth is worse. Much of the world has been colonized. By global plutocrats, immensely wealthy men (typically men), conspiring with local leaders (“elected” or not).

When the French Republic was in nominal control of much of Africa, there were laws, rules and regulations, of a Republican, democratic character. Roads, trains, schools (mandatory, secular) were built, covered the land. Through Subsaharan Africa, one could find an hospital every one hundred kilometers, in populated areas (which was ruinous for France, from the point of view of some pro-independence French politicians… Most of Africa didn’t ask for independence, it was hurled at them by French racists).

For example, most of the Ivory Coast forest was protected from destruction. After nominal “independence”, very wealthy men came from the north, made deals with the local potentates, and freely exploited the African environment.

They were free, the rest were enslaved. Not just diamonds for Al Qaeda in Sierra Leone, forest in Ivory Coast, oil off Nigeria and Gabon, etc.

Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabists, decided to extend their influence worldwide with a Salafist project flushed with oil money. This completely changed the nature of Islam in Subsaharan Africa, sending the (gigantic) region into a turmoil that profited the Saudis, version 1970s… but few other people besides. Subsaharan Africa became partly a mental colony of Saudi Arabia, with disastrous consequences for economy, society, peace, wisdom, and knowledge.

Sadly, degradation is contagious. As exterior individuals became free to plunder Africa, African natives themselves duplicated the plunder, all the more as the top leaders were part of the conspiracy (consider the assassination of Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba in Congo, to be replaced by CIA pawn Mobutu). The later example shows it’s not just the French and the Saudis. For example the (quasi) dictatorship in Rwanda intervened in Congo, to grab rare earths, with discrete, ignored US support, bringing the death of 5 million Congolese citizens (and cheaper electronics for the rest of the world, and the fortunes of many a US plutocrat).

The problem was ignored: individuals such as Bernard Henri Levy, who became a billionaire by plundering African forests, is also an influential intellectual in Paris, or Morocco, and respected not just by left wing but right wing presidents… who financed him. He also controls (nearly) all media.

Worldwide plutocrats own most media, so they colonize us all. After they have made up our minds, the way they like it, we are free to opt to serve them further.

Just as the plundering of Africa, post “independence” has been contagious, and the natives have joined in the plundering, so it is, worldwide: the more the hyper wealthy plunder the planet and control minds, the more average people don’t care. That’s how the sense of citizenship was lost when the Roman Republic became Augustus’ dictatorship (the Roman “empire”, or, technically, “Principate”).

For the preceding to happen, it was necessary that the self-described “left” or “progressive” be completely blind to the preceding. Worse: much of the naive “left” is controlled by plutocracy.

Is there hope? Just a little. French billionaire Vincent Bolloré, a ten billion dollar billionaire, was arrested and detained on Tuesday near Paris over allegations that he indirectly influenced election outcomes for governments in West Africa and secured lucrative port contracts for his company in return. A Bolloré Group subsidiary allegedly undercharged for work, helping two African presidents win power in return for lucrative contracts.

According to a report by the BBC, Bolloré, 66, who is the head of the Bolloré Group, was taken into custody as part of an ongoing investigation into how his company obtained contracts to operate the Lome and Conakry ports in Togo and Guinea respectively. Now he has been charged. All, I repeat, all, billionaires who had to do with Africa, should be charged. That may not seem fair, not according to the “state of law” but all billionaires have overridden the legal process in the last few decades (at least in Africa). (Weirdly, Trump, whose pseudo-progressives love to hate, to change the conversation, gets a pass for now, being the less bad of them all, as he tries to change things, and didn’t become wealthy from corruption, as, say, Xi, Putin, Berlusconi, and an immense cortege of those lurking in the swamp between politics and greed…) 

The spirit of the law, worldwide, has been confiscated by the .1%. It’s not just Africa. We are all been colonized, or, more exactly, possessed (much of French Africa was more administered than colonized, in the sense that few “colons” ever came).

It’s high time to do something about ourselves becoming the property of others (consider the social networks and the virtual slavery they exploit us with). Because otherwise our future will be as bad, or worse, than the worst colonization (and there were very bad colonies, for example Congo, personal property of the Belgian king, where millions were enslaved).

Ah, a few technical points to finish: the French military interventions in Africa, from Rwanda to Mauretania, were, and are, not akin to “colonialism”: just the opposite (they tend to be all UN approved). They are efforts to free Africa from outrageous exploitation and plunders by (“religious”) gangs, or the likes of Gaddafi (who tried to physically invade Subsaharan Africa, before being stopped by the French military).

Part of the disaster that Subsaharan Africa has become has to do with demographic explosion (itself a consequence from the lack of intelligent administration, education and good healthcare). Many countries went from six millions in the 1960s (when the French administration left), to 45 millions now. In many countries, women have eight children (many to be tempted by violent Jihadism)

No ecology can sustain this, especially one which was borderline to start with. Thus, now dozens of millions of Africans from Subsaharan Africa are plotting to go to France, and try to do it at immense risks of lives and limbs (most of them fail, raped, drowned, eaten by Saharan hyenas, enslaved, or desiccating in the desert… but thousands a month make it to France…)

Something needs to be done, something drastic, and it won’t come from the old playbook…

Patrice Aymé

 

Vote For Truth & Other Recommendations

OFF WITH THE CLINTON ‘GLOBAL INITIATIVE’ WORLD OF PLUTOCRACY UNCHAINED

I support much of Clinton’s program. However… It is not just that she is not “inspiring“ as Obama just said. She belongs to a party whose elite has done the opposite of what they claimed they wanted to do, and lied about why and how that happened. Moreover herds of idiots out there, believe said elite of plutocrats, hook, line, sinker, and the entire boat. For 24 years. Yesterday I was walking in my neighborhood, along the shore of the world’s greatest ocean. On the other side of the giant 4 miles bridge, apartments have been sold for 60 million dollars. In the streets, in the nooks and crannies, homeless people moved, in the last few weeks. They will not vote. They live in absolute garbage, worse than in the worst of India. Indeed, unbelievably, they build their refuges from garbage. It smells, there are broken bottles everywhere. They are on the move, police is hunting them, bulldozing them here and there.

Even in the poorest parts of Africa, I have never seen such misery. And those are mainly young white men, with the occasional woman and the slightly Afro-American white man thrown in. They are real US citizens, not recent (often illegal) Hispanic immigrants (those stick together, and have work). That’s the other side of the Clinton-Obama global imperial plutocracy. Or, as the Clintons like to call it “The Clinton Global initiative”. To see who support that “Global Initiative” look at the long list of dictators who have given money to the Clinton family, or look at the picture below:

The CEO Of Goldman Sachs (on the right) Is Inseparable From Hillary Clinton & The Clinton Global Initiative: Global Plutocracy Is The Clinton Global Initiative. GS Was Not Prosecuted For Its Crimes In Greece

But don’t say that to wealthy Californians: they have immensely profited from the global corporate fascist crony capitalist state. A few miles from these hordes of homeless drifters pushed around by police, the world’s richest corporations have their headquarters, paying no taxes and doubling as spy agencies for the global security state. Those who earn their lives well in the SF Bay Area are professionally bound to sing the praises of that system, lest they be ostracized (same story in New York).

Well known philosopher Zizek observed that:”“Humanity is OK, but 99% of people are boring idiots.” No wonder they vote for that:

Baby Is Hungry! Wealthy Idiots Found A President For Hire. But Destitute Idiots Did Not Hire Her. Instead, They Just Admire

Thanks to Donald Trump, the idiots are getting less boring. Now they have coprolalia, and it’s Hillaryous. The insults are flowing, thick and innovative. I roll out FRED (Federal REserve Data), and posers who claim to be “Democrats” pile up derogatory terms to describe me.

Funny how Trump went from pillar of the establishment, to universally reviled as a “populist”. The same reproach was made to Caesar; Caesar was the leader of the “Populares”.  Trump is a man who dared to campaign, with his own money, against Ronald Reagan, as early as 1987. You have to understand that Trump critics such as Paul Krugman and Bill Clinton had actually worked for Ronald Reagan, years prior to 1987. Paul Krugman was officially in the White House, advising him how to fleece the little guys by setting a worldwide global plutocracy of outlaws. Now the outlaws are in power, and they have bought the Main Stream Media. Worldwide .

Bill Clinton helped Reagan set Iran-Contra (see  Arkansas governor Bill Clinton president George Bush CIA drugs for guns connection for crusty details).

Ironically Daniel Ortega, Reagan’s great enemy in Nicaragua,  was re-elected this weekend president of Nicaragua for the fourth time, with his own poetess multilingual wife as Vice President; Ortega just got 71% of the vote… and Washington based World Bank recognized that Ortega has done a good job reducing poverty! So Clinton and Reagan killed all these people for no good reason.

(Yes Ortega practices crony capitalism, as the Dems do in the US; but the difference is that the median income in Nicaragua has shot up, whereas in the USA, the median family income is down 5% from what it was under Bill Clinton.)

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Voting Recommendations:

I vote for truth! Some will say it’s not on the ballot. Well, in California there are more than 12 propositions to vote on. Including: Outlawing the death penalty (I recommend yes), extending by twelve (12) years the supplementary taxes on wealthy income (I recommend yes), augmenting taxes on cigarettes (I recommend yes).

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How Come Victims Support Their Oppressors?

This is the eternal question when looking at history. But the answer is always the same: oppressors manipulate the victims’ minds (except for outright brutal military invasions like those of the Mongols, or France in May 1940, invaded by the Nazi army)

The obvious flaws in USA (and most of the West) are inequality, global plutocracy, the richest paying the less tax, mass crony capitalism, mass media lies. Clinton-Obama, following the initiative of Reagan, himself following Reagan, set it up.

To what John Michael Gartland commented: “I don’t think that I will ever live long enough to understand the fanatical devotion and level of irrational denial of their minions.”

Dear JMD: You have several types of minions. Those who are in for money, power, the REAL minions (in the etymological sense of Henri II’s court) who have a vested interest in it, that is all the Hollywood, celebrities, Crony Capitalists, wealthiest paying little tax, plutocrats made by the Deep State, etc. Those have interest, pecuniary interest and power interest in the Clinton-Obama world.

Then there are the multitudes who vote Clinton, and are in DENIAL. Then there are the multitudes who really believe Trump set-up the world as it is, because they have not been paying attention. They really believe that it is all the fault of the “Republicans” (when Dems were in full supermajority power in 2009, say; this is why some on the Internet went insane at that notion which I long exposed… in 2009, or even in an essay last week…)

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Why Are People So Idiotic? Media Propaganda.

Under the Soviets, the main newspaper was “Pravda” (“Truth”). It was full of lies. Now all the media in the West is under control.

It told the truth in 2009: I wrote in a comment to the New York Times that Obama lowered taxes a lot on richest incomes. The New York Times censored my comment. The. NYT recognized that was true only in 2016. Meanwhile, their readers were led to believe that Obama has brought taxes up on the rich (Obama did raise them a bit in 2012). Too many comments like that, and the NYT censored me totally (they don’t even bother to answer me anymore when I ask them why). I think that should be against the law, BTW (as the NYT has special prerogatives granted to it by the state, supposedly representing We The People).

Paul Krugman just accused Trump of anti-Judaism (by innuendo, Krugman did not produce any quotes). Paul Krugman is a an efficient propagandist of global plutocracy employed at White House under Reagan, while Trump raged against Reagan. At the White House, Reagan had put Krugman in charge of plutocratic globalization. So maybe we should call the “Clinton Initiative” the “Krugman Initiative”.

Says Krugman: “I had arranged for a leave from MIT and was on my way to Washington, to be the chief staffer for international economics at the Council of Economic Advisers.

It was, in a way, strange for me to be part of the Reagan Administration. I was then and still am an unabashed defender of the welfare state… I am also unable to pretend to respect “policy entrepreneurs”, the intellectually dishonest self-proclaimed experts who tell politicians what they want to hear. The Reagan Administration was, of course, full of people who hated the welfare state and had very little interest in the truth.”

Whatever. Power is power, some can’t resist the appeal of exerting power. Thus we end up, or rather, down, led into the abyss by the worst, those who are mostly motivated by power greed.

Paul Krugman became a professional, efficient propagandist of global plutocracy, singing the praises of trade. While Krugman was employed at White House under Reagan, Trump raged against Reagan about middle-income Americans being fleeced through international arrangements. Krugman got a Nobel for explaining scholastically that global trade was good. It’s good for global plutocrats (which pays the Nobel committee).

Trump kept raging against the system, sending millions to a succession of politicians who talked big about helping all (such as the Clintons).

Were Krugman and his ilk dishonest, or simply idiotic?  Paul Krugman, not a philosopher, behaved as if he did not suspect that global trade without global law would bring global plutocracy, world slavery, no more jobs in the West.

The median income in the USA is down 5% over what it was under Bill Clinton. Meanwhile the cost of quality health care and quality education has gone through the roof. So did real estate. Obama has been a disaster, but, because he is a “cool” guy, he is still wildly popular. Weirdly, whether Trump or Clinton, the president will be more up for the job. Obama is probably smarter than either, but he did not have either the temperament, nor the experience: he was too young when he became president. This being said, either Clinton, or Trump, will have a much more difficult situation… because the “cool” guy was so cool, he stayed below a rock for eight years, like a cool snake. 

With plutocracy owned Main Stream Media skewing the mood on all the financial-economic & social news & opinion, sanity can’t be regained. The Democrats found for themselves one of the world’s most corrupt family to lead the world again. Same old, same old, eight years after their financial conspiracies led to the world’s most spectacular financial crisis ever (the Great Depression went out of control when it was amplified as an economic-political crisis, starting July 1930). 

Oh, last but not least, Slavoj Zizek is viewed as a “Hegelian” Marxist philosopher. He said that he would vote for Trump. Zizek’s explanation:

“Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. When Stalin was asked in the late 1920s which deviation is worse, the Rightist one or the Leftist one, he snapped back: They are both worse! Is it not the same with the choice American voters are confronting in the 2016 presidential elections? Trump is obviously “worse.” He enacts a decay of public morality. He promises a Rightist turn. But he at least promises a change. Hillary is “worse” since she makes changing nothing look desirable.

With such a choice, one should not lose ones nerve and chose the “worst,” which means change—even if is a dangerous change—because it opens up the space for a different more authentic change.

The point is thus not to vote for Trump—not only should one not vote for such a scum, one should not even participate in such elections. The point is to approach coldly the question: Whose victory is better for the fate of the radical emancipatory project, Clinton’s or Trump’s? Trump wants to make America great again, to which Obama responded that America already is great. But is it? “

Zizek rightly dismisses the analogies with Hitler, pointing out that the hierarchies and geology of power in the USA are very complex. I agree with much of what Zizek says, especially the iconoclastic aspect, although I know the situation better than he does, and I know that on some important points Trump is way left of Clinton. What we have is two rightist plutocrats fighting, one global, the other national. [I will comment Zizek more in the future, if I find time.]

Electing Trump is the best reward Obama’s plutocratic, corporate fascism rule deserves. That will fit even better than his Nobel prize. However, electing Clinton is the best reward her idiotic, fanatical supporters deserve. Plus, she is a woman (and we need a woman leader). Decisions, decisions…

Patrice Ayme’

FREE TRADE FALLACY

We have just one civilization today: everybody, among common folks know what everybody else thinks. Yet, as resources previously used, such as fossil fuels, falter, civilization and the understanding of the universe which makes it possible in its present state, have to progress (not enough scientific and technological progress as needed, was the proximal cause of Rome’s failure). So it is crucial that really new, and correct, ideas be introduced (and not just in science).

If Those Are Best Friends Who, What Is The Enemy? Cockroaches? Those Among We The People Who Are Viewed As Cockroaches?

Yes even countries such as Saudi Arabia are part of this global civilization. And Saudi Arabia is fully part of the debate of what civilization means, and what it will have to consist of, looking forward. Watch France give the Legion d’Honneur to the heir of Saudi Arabia, and its Interior Minister, arguably the principal ideologue of the hardening of the Saudi line, inside out. So, in other words, while France fights the Islamist State (“Daesh”), France gives the nod to the hardening of the Wahhabist doctrine of Saudi Arabia (which, historically, was very minor in Islam), the ideology of ISIL. The results are increasingly strange: Salafist/Wahhabist terrorists attacked police and soldiers in Tunisia today. The security forces fought back. The coordinated assaults were shown, live, on the Internet. One could see young passersbys applauding the security forces in full combat (at least 28 terrorists got killed, plus seventeen fighting police and civilians who applauded the police).

Such contradictions are rife, all over the world. Look at “free trade”.

Globalization Of Trade Without Globalization Of Law Results In Plutocratization. This Is Exactly What Happened To The Roman Republic, & Why It Faltered

Free trade, well done, is indeed excellent. However, the West has been exporting science, technology and know-how, while not investing in a way commensurate to making this sort of export sustainable.

In other words, here is civilization’s problem: the learning, teaching, and research functions have been starved, relative to what the (critical) situation requires.

The result has been a collapse of manufacturing and related high worth employment in the countries who recently led progress in science and understanding (with the result that, like Republican Rome, the knowledge and wisdom of the most advanced countries is increasing faltering relatively to the flow of new ideas which civilization need to survive).

To make matters worse, said “free trade” has happened in the shadows. So-called high-tech companies have made fortunes, while paying no taxes: France just hit Google with a 1.6 billion Euro tax bill. Such companies and their principal owners had found ways to escape most taxes, thus starving the governments, hence the fundamental research their trade rests on.

So free trade can work, but only if it’s fair. As it is, most money flows are hidden (in so-called “Dark Money” and “Dark Pools”), and the owners are also hidden (thus escaping taxation and corruption charges, not just against them, but also against the politicians they influence).

Last week European Commissioners were caught promising ExxonMobil that the Transatlantic Trade Pact under negotiation with Obama would allow companies such as ExxonMobil to escape local legislation, including labor, taxation and pollution laws.

So the Republicans may be lunatics. But, in a world already ruled by lunatics, they are no doubt welcome.

Fair, just, and profitable  international trade requires a registry of all ownership and detailed trading activity, worldwide. Otherwise the sort of Republic we enjoy worldwide (as institutionalized by the United Nations) will know the same fate as the Roman Republic: an increasing sinking in the turbid waters of mindless will to power and tyranny.

Patrice Ayme’

[P/S: A shorter, trade only version of the preceding essay was selected as a New York Times’ “Pick”. Since I have complained stridently about NYT’s censorship, I have to be fair and to recognize appreciation too!]

Is London A Cancer?

London is getting ever richer. Why this is, is, at first sight, a mystery. San Francisco is also getting richer. But that’s not mysterious: thousands of beaver geeks are busy building “apps” there, San Francisco actually produces products, common products which common people love to use. And code writers prefer to live there, in a big city, next to Silicon Valley’s centers of power and innovation. Apps made in San Francisco are then sold worldwide.

Excuse Us Not, We Are Building All over

But London? What does London make? The answer is not what London makes, but what it harbors… which we abhor. An increasingly serious world problem. The New York Times’ Roger Cohen ponders the situation:

“The streets look the same — if spruced for the new gentry from drab and dreary to spick and span — but London’s animating spirit is another. Money, and I mean the world’s money not Britain’s, now determines how London looks, sets it apart from the rest of the country, and defines what it is… it resembles a mausoleum reserved for the occasional use of the globe’s peripatetic rich and their ample staffs.

Real estate as investment and tax dodge, rather than as dwelling, is a life-sucking force. Georgian mansions of cream-colored splendor sit there, empty much of the time, with a banner to the great unwashed on their shuttered windows proclaiming: Stay out!…

The faraway “Continent” of my youth — full of such unfamiliar and vaguely suspicious items as garlic and French intellectuals and edible food — has defied the Channel and arrived. London and gastronomy are no longer strangers.

French and Polish and Romanian youths pour into London in search of a living wage and passable English, followed by young Spaniards and Italians. That they are undeterred by how crazy-expensive London life is testifies to the economic slump and high unemployment across much of Europe.”

It is most reassuring for me when mainstream commentators adopt pretty much word for word what i have been saying for years. All the following ideas I brandished in the past, iconoclastically:

“London is skewed in dangerous ways, indicative of European and global problems. House prices keep jumping. Cranes are everywhere, hoisting new luxury developments into being. Some are certainly for wealthy Greeks fleeing their country’s problems. There’s a bubble. The capital has become a glittering enclave in a country often resentful of its dominance. It presides with an air of superiority, like squeaky-clean Singapore looking down on Southeast Asia.

An alternative way of looking at the push for independence by Scotland, now a one-party Scottish nationalist state, is to think of London as having seceded from the rest of Britain, a city-state unto itself. There is widespread resentment of the city’s self-absorption. An alternative way of looking at the way London sucks in money and the affluent from the rest of Europe is as a reflection of the stagnation and unresolved structural problems of the eurozone. In some ways, London reflects both a country and a continent in which the fracturing forces are, for the first time since World War II, stronger than the unifying forces. London is a capital of culture, but also of inequality and tax evasion.”

An alternative way to look at the most recent phase of the Greek crisis is that it consisted in several Machiavellian shows, entangled with each other. Tsipras wanted to claim he had no choice, but to take some strong measures which he knew and wanted, to take. Merkel and Hollande did not feel like negotiating with Cameron, something they sure could not do, as long as Greece is on the front burner. Cameron himself may have felt that the Greece crisis gave him an excuse for having had no time for significant negotiations with the EU, thus dissimulating his impotence. After all, Cameron is only PM of Great Britain, not the power behind London’s growth. That is what really pulls the strings: world plutocracy, un-taxed, uncowed, unabashed, indomitable.

Politics is nothing, if not Machiavellian. London itself is so outrageous, that it presents, by its very absurdity, both crisis and opportunity.

London’s average metrics are getting ever richer, on the back of We The People, worldwide. And Roger to conclude, in a style reminiscent of yours truly:

“[London] is also a magnet for people looking for a safe place for their money. Having made it in countries like Russia and China with a cowed press, rampant corruption and no rule of law, oligarchs and crony capitalists reach the conclusion that they like nothing as much as democratic systems with real legal systems and a vigorous press. Having trashed the West they trust the West with their money.

Autocratic hypercapitalism without Western checks and balances produces new elites whose dream is an American or British lifestyle and education for their children, and whose other goal is to buy into the rule of law by acquiring real estate, driving up prices in prime markets to the point where the middle classes of those countries, with incomes stagnant or falling (and taxed), are pushed aside.

London is the capital of these trends. That is the different reek, of something amiss and skewed and wrong, in its purring streets.”

Roger does not go into the nitty-gritty of the tax code. However, this is the core of London’s ascendancy. The tax code allows “non-doms” and plutocrats from all over the world to come and situate themselves, tax free, in London, for at least seven years. No questions asked.

London has turned into Monaco, writ large. With much less stringent admission criterions. Plus the added twist of world financial conspiracies, so unethical that the law of the USA does not allow them to be conducted, even in New York.

England (that is, London) and the USA (in particular Delaware, Wyoming, etc.) are the world’s largest tax havens, for world plutocracy. The serious money is hidden in “dark pools” where the real owners cannot be traced, in the present system: the situation is similar to tax evasion in Greece, but much worse.

The leaders of the USA, Wall Street, and London thus try to control the world, by inviting the controlling plutocrats to reside there. It’s a sort of Faustian bargain, writ large. The New York Times has made a whole study of wanted international criminals, and completely opaque arrangements controlling the mighty towers in New York.

Apparently the idea is to sell our democracy, in exchange for the influence, you plutocrats, you, our beloved plutocrats in residence, exert upon the world.

The price which is paid is not just measured in how much soul goes down the drain, but in the influence of plutocracy on politics. Academic studies have shown most decisions in the USA, have to do with what the .1% want, not what We The People of the USA want. The same phenomenon blossoms in England. Hence the Scottish rejection of the London wealth phenomenon.

It is high time that the Scottish rejection for plutocracy supreme spread around the world. If we do not reject plutocracy in a timely manner, it will come to control us completely, until a new serfdom becomes a fact.

Patrice Ayme’

Too Much Aversion To Aversion Is A Perversion.

Too Much Aversion To Aversion Kills Prevention.

Anger Sometimes Not Just Best, But The Only Way:

Many people are conflicted about conflicts. They are told conflicts are intrinsically bad, and they should wrought the conflicts out of themselves. Avert aversion, and conspiracy theories, and the world will be yours. This sweetly insipid medicine is central to the stability of plutocracy of the USA, and is repeated at all levels, from family therapists, to (nearly) all the media, to the presidency. “Black” and variously colored youth seem to increasingly disagree with this treatment. It is getting ever harder to swallow, as more and more youth are starting to understand Obama is more Wall Street than ex-disgruntled youth (whom, actually, he never was. Silver spoon is more like it.)

Anger is actually best, when it is the most appropriate attitude. Obama saved the private banks and the careers of the banksters who managed them, but what did he do for Black youth? If not now, then when, and what? Is breaking the necks and piercing with bullets those who disagree the solution, looking forward?

Look To The Right Of The Burning Police Car: All Obama Cares About Is Trade Deals For His Plutocratic Pets

Obama said it was all the fault of “thugs” who live in Baltimore, not banksters who steal on Wall Street. Don’t bite the hand that feeds…

The problem of the Jews confronting Hitler, is that they did not get angry enough. If they had, maybe the American Jews would have protested the pro-Hitlerian policy of plutocrats and the infeodated government of the USA.

Now we have Nepalis left to themselves, dying without rescue, while helicopters are used to ferry in style 1,000 gold plated “climbers” on Everest (who otherwise would have to well, climb down!). Hey, Nepalis are made to die in the service of the gold-plated ones, whereas the gold plated ones ought not to be expected to walk! In case like that, contempt is minimum service. Anger is more appropriate. And, appropriately enough, Nepalis are getting angry.

Europe, in the past was crumbling under plutocrats and religious fanatics (including Great Britain). So was, say, China. Flowers and smiles did not work. Violence is how one got rid of these predators.

But let’s give a the party of apathy a chance to open its mouth for a minute, or so:

***

Anthony Biglan, “senior scientist” at the Oregon Research Institute, a “leading figure in the development of prevention science” has helped over the past thirty years “to identify effective family, school, and community interventions to prevent the most common and costly problems of childhood and adolescence”. He uses “prevention science to build more nurturing families, schools, and communities throughout the world.”

Says Mr. Biglan: “The world has struggled with how to deal with others’ aversive behavior for millennia. The fundamental problem is to get people to not respond to others’ aversive behavior with their own aversive behavior because, more likely than not, doing so will simply perpetuate coercion and conflict.”

The way the author has it, aversion causes aversion, which causes aversion… So what caused aversion in the first place? Aversion? It sounds like the chicken and egg problem: the egg gave the chicken, who made the egg… It’s the chicken and egg problem, without the chicken.

The author blames responding to aversion by aversion. He advocates turning the other cheek, quoting Jesus, Gandhi.

But he does not roll out the violent quotes of Jesus, of which there are several:

Matthew 10:34. “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.” Or Luke 19: 27 But those enemies of mine who did not want me to be king over them–bring them here and kill them in front of me.'”

Or Jesus’ last message to his disciples: He said to them, “But now if you have a purse, take it, and also a bag; and if you don’t have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one.” [Luke 22:36.]

And don’t tell me I deform Jesus’ message! Jesus threw the merchants out of the Temple. Proof that not only he was physically violent, but that he was some sort of Kung-Fu master, or the like. Yes the best known version of Kung-Fu was invented by the Shaolin Monastery for defense against from bandits around 610 CE (and at the crucial battle to establish the Tang Dynasty in 621 CE).

Jesus knew that turning the other cheek was not the only valuable strategy to bring the reign of goodness. All too often, aversion to aversion brings forth only toleration of abomination.

The Nazis eliminated hundreds of thousands of Germans viewed as mentally or physically defective. (The Nazis had justified this by claiming that Germany’s population had augmented by 50% in 70 years, whereas the mental retards and degenerated specimens’ population had augmented by 450% in those same 70 years; so soon, the Nazis ominously concluded, one German out of four would be degenerate; thus the need to act now; simultaneously the children of Franco-German unions who were not pure white, were sterilized; there were several thousands.)

The Nazis’ plan was to see how little aversion to extermination the population could be trained to develop. After this, they exterminated Poles, and then Jews (many Germans had Jewish, or somewhat Jewish, friends or relatives, so the case of the Jews was most delicate).

But let’s go back to the aversion of aversion.

The author of the quote above, Mr. Biglan, the self-defined specialist of aversion, also quotes Gandhi.

To see his full essay, consult Scientia Salon: Nurture Effect On Caring Relationships.)

However Gandhi, by posing in Hindu clothes, forever, and with Hindu symbols, such as the Wheel, helped to antagonize the Muslims. This boiled over in 1939. As the Indian Congress voted to declare war against the Nazis, Gandhi, who called Hitler “my friend”, and had corresponded with the mass-murdering, war criminal dictator, did all he could, in vain, for India not to go to war against the racist in chief.

In the end, Gandhi had to turn against the Hindus, and for the Muslims. Gandhi recognized Muslims should get their part of the national treasury. He was rewarded for this perceived “aversion” towards Hindus by being assassinated by Hindu nationalists.

Mr. Biglan also evokes Martin Luther King. However, the entourage of MLK was armed to the teeth, with loaded guns: they were not born yesterday.

So the real fundamental problem of “aversion” is how does “aversion” arises in the first place. In general it does because human beings find themselves in adverse circumstances, or because evil tendencies by a few were not opposed early enough.

So it is the lack of aversion to various adversities, as they are gathering momentum, which leads to large scale aversion appearing in the first place.

An example is the Greenhouse Gas Crisis (“AGW”). If not opposed in a timely manner (and that will require some “aversion”), it will lead to large scale misery and war. Also North Korea, soon to have 40 nuclear weapons according to Chinese specialists, ought to looked at with appropriate aversion.

Prevention of the causes of aversion is how to prevent aversion. And the best way to do this is to have terminal aversion to abomination.

Time to value anger, people!

Appropriate anger, that is.

Appropriate emotions are appropriate. There is no emotion which is not appropriate to all and any situation. Full aversion to aversion is perversion.

Patrice Ayme’

De-Americanize This!

OK, the USA will not default now, but reserves itself the right to do so later. Say in three months.

Amusingly, the official Xinhua news agency from the People’s Republic of China is repeating much of what I have been saying for years. About the USA, of course. Before unleashing the hypocrites from Beijing, let me point out a few facts:

Can the USA default? Sure. The USA defaulted in 1789, 100%, and in 1933, 40%. So the USA defaulted when it was convenient. As the Romans used to say: caveat emptor USA (=Let the buyer of USA bonds beware). And you know what? Deep down inside, the USA’s elite does not care.

Here are a few numbers:

53% of the bonds of the USA are held inside the USA. 47% outside (mostly by other central banks).

61% of the world currency reserves are in dollars.

42% of the world transactions are made in dollars.

One dollar out of two is outside the USA.

Around 60% of 3.66 trillion dollars of Chinese reserves are in dollars.

The bonds of the USA were long claimed to be the safest holding in the world. However, in light of constant threats to default, in recent years, at the very least, the reasons for that conclusion have to be changed. One cannot argue with a straight face, that a default of the USA is unimaginable. The threat of default of the USA keeps on re-surfacing ever more urgently. It has obviously become a chronic disease.

Certainly, one cannot argue that it’s a big surprise. One has, instead, to explain why a default of the USA does not matter. The People Republic of China has to explain why, knowing full well that the USA loves to threaten default, it nevertheless kept on pouring up to 1.3 trillion dollars in US bonds.

The naïve reason usually given is that China has to put its money somewhere. However, the more Machiavellian reason is that the plutocrats in Beijing want to please their masters in Washington. And the more they help their masters, the more the masters will be pleased, and co-dependent. Or so the silly Chinese leaders hope.

As I have explained in the case of the Chinese and Spanish empires, there is a co-dependency. Right now it is between Washington/Wall Street and the global plutocracy (including the one in China).

Thus investing in the bonds of the USA is, for China, and not just for China, as if paying for protection money from the Mafia. The plutocratic Mafia.

Consciously or not, the leaders in Washington are playing this BOND RACKET. Like a global violin. That will work, as long as global plutocracy calls the tune.

Before a bit more on this, let me roll out the Chinese government’s melodious hypocrisy (with my comments between brackets):

“Commentary: U.S. fiscal failure warrants a de-Americanized world

BEIJING, Oct. 13 (Xinhua)…it is perhaps a good time for the befuddled world to start considering building a de-Americanized world.

Emerging from the bloodshed of the Second World War as the world’s most powerful nation, the United States has since then been trying to build a global empire by imposing a postwar world order, fueling recovery in Europe, and encouraging regime-change in nations that it deems hardly Washington-friendly. [“Washington” is one thing, plutocracy a much more general one.]

With its seemingly unrivaled economic and military might, the United States has declared that it has vital national interests to protect in nearly every corner of the globe, and been habituated to meddling in the business of other countries and regions far away from its shores.

Meanwhile, the U.S. government has gone to all lengths to appear before the world as the one that claims the moral high ground, yet covertly doing things that are as audacious as torturing prisoners of war, slaying civilians in drone attacks, and spying on world leaders. [If it were covert, it would not be as bad; the worse was trying to officialize torture and assassination without judicial process. Obama seems to start to understand this belatedly, though!]

Under what is known as the Pax-Americana, we fail to see a world where the United States is helping to defuse violence and conflicts, reduce poor and displaced population, and bring about real, lasting peace. [That’s a lie: the USA has done a lot for refugees, for example in Syria. China has done nothing.]

Moreover, instead of honoring its duties as a responsible leading power, a self-serving Washington has abused its superpower status and introduced even more chaos into the world by shifting financial risks overseas, instigating regional tensions amid territorial disputes, and fighting unwarranted wars under the cover of outright lies.

As a result, the world is still crawling its way out of an economic disaster thanks to the voracious Wall Street elites, while bombings and killings have become virtually daily routines in Iraq years after Washington claimed it has liberated its people from tyrannical rule.

Most recently, the cyclical stagnation in Washington for a viable bipartisan solution over a federal budget and an approval for raising debt ceiling has again left many nations’ tremendous dollar assets in jeopardy and the international community highly agonized. [Strange English; poor PRC with its “tremendous $ assets”.]

Such alarming days when the destinies of others are in the hands of a hypocritical nation have to be terminated, and a new world order should be put in place, according to which all nations, big or small, poor or rich, can have their key interests respected and protected on an equal footing.

To that end, several corner stones should be laid to underpin a de-Americanized world.

For starters, all nations need to hew to the basic principles of the international law, including respect for sovereignty, and keeping hands off domestic affairs of others.

Furthermore, the authority of the United Nations in handling global hotspot issues has to be recognized. That means no one has the right to wage any form of military action against others without a UN mandate. [Agreed, yet not every regime is acceptable: Chap VII of the UN.]

Apart from that, the world’s financial system also has to embrace some substantial reforms.

The developing and emerging market economies need to have more say in major international financial institutions including the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, so that they could better reflect the transformations of the global economic and political landscape.

What may also be included as a key part of an effective reform is the introduction of a new international reserve currency that is to be created to replace the dominant U.S. dollar, so that the international community could permanently stay away from the spillover of the intensifying domestic political turmoil in the United States.

Of course, the purpose of promoting these changes is not to completely toss the United States aside, which is also impossible. Rather, it is to encourage Washington to play a much more constructive role in addressing global affairs.

And among all options, it is suggested that the beltway politicians first begin with ending the pernicious impasse.”

Lots of true statements, yet colossal hypocrisy. Let’s not talk about Tibet, or Xi Quiang. Or even of the plutocrats in power in China. Xi owns about half a billion dollars, the preceding Prime Minister, 2 billions, and the just condemned Bo Xilai had impressive properties all over Europe and a child at Harvard, driving a Ferrari. 

Let’s just talk coal: the People’s Republic of China is the world’s largest consumer of coal, using more coal each year than the United States, the European Union, and Japan combined. More than half of the coal burned in the world is burned in China. Half of China’s power generation capacity to be built between 2012 and 2020 will be coal-fired.

The end result is a guaranteed disaster, rising seas, and that means war.

And who can make war better than the USA?

This explains why the bonds of the USA will always be desired, default or no default. One always want to be bonded to the strong, even if it means bonded by the strong.

***

Patrice Ayme

What Plutocracy Giveth…

Paul Krugman long favored currency collapses to solve economic problems efficiently (he said). He advocated such curative apocalypses for Greece, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Italy… while lamenting for years that the Euro was an unquestionable disaster because it… prevented such disasters!

I think that currency dramas do not reflect economic reality, as much as they reflect the wealth of highly leveraged currency manipulators feeding off the Public.

Not yet aghast, the noble Princeton luminary is looking at the Rupee Panic: “OK, the plunging rupee is the big economics story of the day, and I’m trying to get up to speed on the issues. My immediate question, however, is why the panic?

We are talking about the worth of entire countries going down 20% in a few days. Krugman, unfazed, pursues:

“Yes, the rupee is down a lot in a short time — along with other emerging market currencies. In fact, its fluctuations are small compared with the obvious comparator, Brazil…

So the recent decline is sharp. But should India panic?

This would be scary if India was like the Asian crisis countries of 1997-1998 or Argentina in 2001, with large amounts of debt denominated in foreign currency. But unless I’m misreading the data, it isn’t… So at first examination this doesn’t look like as big a deal as some headlines are suggesting. What am I missing?”

Well, honorable Krugman, you are missing most of the argument. What has animated the BRICS (Brazil Russia India China South Africa) is the massive flight of Western plutocrats there. For various reasons, the plutocratic tide is now recessing, so Old Economies Rise As Emerging Markets Falters.

India’s population is growing at 1.4% a year, three times the Chinese (or French!) growth. So India needs to grow fast, just to maintain the status quo ante, especially considering that most of India’s population is very poor (much poorer than China; around $6,000 per capita in China, a fourth of that ($1,500) in India).

Thus India is very sensitive to its lifeline to the world’s economy, in other words, the plutocracy. (Apparently India has 172 billion dollars in short term debt owed by March 2014; the collapse of the Rupee will not make this easier.)

This planet’s main organization is the global plutocracy. Not the United Nations. Thus greed, not human rights.

The plutocrats go somewhere, corrupt all their interlocutors, make their money, and flee before the short arm of the law can catch them. Or, at least they used to operate that way (and they dearly hope their boy and symbol, Mr. Summers, will come to head the federal Reserve of the USA, as a reassuring presence). It’s becoming harder these days. Is the game over?

Global plutocracy? What’s that? The few getting all the money, hence all the power. Let me illustrate.

Watch the 30 year old Chelsea Clinton buying herself a 10.3 million dollars apartment, across the street from her present 4 million dollars home. Or watch the children of the Fats Cats who lead China (yes, some attend Harvard, of course!).

In most countries, fate is what the global plutocracy does.

In the world we live in, no idea is an implemented idea, unless it’s backed by power, that is money, that is the plutocracy and its hungry babes. So don’t worry your little head: Chelsea thinks for you. Or prepare for war.

Plutocrats loved India in recent years, but now a cold breeze is rising, as the People of the West are starting to ask questions about the way their masters treat them. Their lords act concerned and have imposed a few regulations. Which are starting to bite.

Industry is actually coming back to the USA, and not just because of fracking (saving the auto industry helped).

I have personally advocated a worldwide carbon tax to hasten this movement (not just to fight unemployment in the West, but also as transportation is subsidized now, an unfair advantage to the mighty plutocracy, and a cause of major pollution that kills the planet).

In 2003, it used to cost 60% LESS to produce in China rather than in the European Union. Ten years later, in 2013, the gap is down to only 23%. A major (Swedish headquarterd) textile maker followed others, Chinese ones, and opened a factory in Ethiopia. Textile workers are paid about 40 euros a MONTH in Ethiopia, a tenth of what they are paid in China.

China has a solution to save itself from the retreating plutocratic tide: hunkering down, purifying itself with time-tested Maoist redemption. It’s not called the Middle Kingdom for no good reason. President Xi, himself the half billion dollars man, seems aware that the compromission with the global plutocracy has gone far enough.

Interestingly, Mr. Xi had his justice department accuse some major Western pharmaceutical companies of massive corruption inside China.

The USA department of justice followed. Not to enquire about Xi, but about the pharmaceuticals the Chinese are accusing. (It’s completely obvious that the pharmaceutical-health industry machine in the USA is corrupt from top to bottom; Obama, too crafty by half, apparently thinks his ObamaCare monster is going to eat it alive, with its full cooperation… well, good luck!)

Sending corrupt plutocrats to jail for life will do wonders in China against the frantic corruption (the wife of the ex-mighty princeling on trial tomorrow, Bo Xilai, an assassin of a dubious UK businessman, is already enjoying life imprisonment).

India does not have a solution at the ready. India, a representative democracy, is much less in a good situation to crack down than China is, should the population get more agitated. It is already agitated: a Marxist rebellion reigns over a huge part of the country (maybe a third; there is no rebellion even remotely resembling that in China).

There is every reason to believe that, should the plutocrats be forced to invert their globalized flight to distant shores for tax and law evasion purposes, the West could monopolize growth. After all, that’s where most of the know-how is.

The very latest growth numbers out of France and Germany (2% and 2.8%, annualized) are now higher than in some BRICS…

This discussion would not be complete without mentioning Quantitative Easing (QE), the Carry Trade and Derivatives. Derivatives allow to use tremendous leverage when trading bets about where currency markets will move. They give sleek operators tremendous manipulative powers, because most of the world “money” is made of derivative contracts.

QE is the giving of money to banks by the central banks, that banks then leverage to create “credit”, that is, money. Then the fast buck artists take the cash and run to places where interest rates are much higher (like emerging markets). That works splendidly, except when said emerging market currencies collapse. Then they stampede the other way.

In other words, the financial plutocrats are still out there, playing, and their accomplices the politicians on the pay roll (see Chelsea Clinton, above) still let it happen. (The total volume of derivatives has barely gone down 10% since 2008, and is still around ten times world GDP.)

Some will say I took a cheap shot at Chelsea Clinton, the first corrupt babe. But she was a hedge fund manager paid by one of the rich financiers who fed her father like a pigeon. So is her husband. How many Indians did they sell to get that rich?

The funny thing is that there are laws against this, such as the “Foreign Corrupt Practice Act”. USA authorities, at the request of the Chinese, are looking at whether the bank JP Morgan (one of Hitler’s sponsors) hired the children of some Chinese officials to win business. What about Ms. Clinton? Ah, I forgot, she is not foreign!  For American justice, corruption happens only overseas.

The number one enabler of the extreme corruption of the plutocracy we, and India, enjoy, is the ex-pigeon in chief. He gave full powers to Rubin, Greenspan and Summers to organize the world as they saw fit.

So here you have it, my dear Krugman: what Our Lord The Plutocracy giveth, Our Lord the Plutocracy taketh away! Especially if We The People of the West spur it that way.

In a world where plutocracy has been allowed to go on a rampage, and control nearly everything, rebalancing the world economy democratically, will not happen without shocks to the system: contemplate Egypt.

The globalization of scoundrels has brought an enormous disorder. A study just published by Nature showed that flooding from sea level rise will cost in excess of 750 billion dollars by 2050. Each year. One will have to build dams along entire coast lines.

This is mostly happening because “democrats” (demoncrats?) such as the Clintons could not care less. All they worried about as the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd just pointed out, was what their sponsors paid them to care about, so they could get more “Money, Money, Money, Money, MONEY!” 

Let me quote Maureen, to show I am not the only one to worry about insufferable Lords: “CLINTON nostalgia is being replaced by Clinton neuralgia… The Clintons’ neediness, their sense of what they are owed in material terms for their public service, their assumption that they’re entitled to everyone’s money.

Are we about to put the “For Rent” sign back on the Lincoln Bedroom?

If Americans are worried about money in politics, there is no larger concern than the Clintons, who are cosseted in a world where rich people endlessly scratch the backs of rich people.”

George Packer observed in The New Yorker: “The top of American life has become a very cozy and lucrative place, where the social capital of who you are and who you know brings unimaginable returns.”

And they suck up it, worldwide: last year, Clinton, Bill, extracted about a million dollars from Nigeria, one of the poorest country on Earth, from which the USA already extracts oil. The giant sucking sound of plutocracy without any decency.

In the future, to limit shocks, and over-exploitation, there is just one solution: the rule of governments controlled by We The People, real democracy, using full blown governmentalism, worldwide.

The Swiss example can be followed, to start with: direct democracy undermining corruptocracy.

But first, one has to get rid of the corrupt ones, and become allergic to the stench of corruption.

A necessary precondition for that would be for the USA, to prefer electing somebody clean and effective, such as the governor of California, Jerry Brown. Rather than the thoroughly corrupt Clintons, and the giant decomposition they wrapped the world with.

Because, yes, of course, it’s Mr. Clinton’s sponsors who profit from the collapse of the Rupee. That’s what Paul Krugman is mostly missing.

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Patrice Ayme