Obama, Clinton: Stealthily Regressive

So much lying! So much naivety! Oh Blah blah! Obama! Obamacare! Obama cares not: yes, GDP of the wealthiest, the .1% has been growing. But, in truth, Clinton and Obama were the most stingy presidents of the last 66 years. Far from being progressives, they were the top two regressives and regressors. Here is the graph:

Clinton And Obama Were The Less Progressive Presidents In 66 Years

I do not expect the insulting fanatics who worship Clinton and Obama to understand the preceding graph. Let me explain a bit more for the others.  The graph above looks at United States government purchases of goods and services. It looks at the purchases at all levels: local, state, and federal. Such purchases are, actually buying real stuff, and work, in contradistinction with transfer payments like Social Security and Medicare.

[Why was there a decrease around 1950? Because of super giant spending due to the Second World War, just prior; after that enormous spending, a retrenchment was in order. However, notice that President Ike brought up spending to 25%! Thus, if one makes, say a five-year rolling average, Clinton and Obama are the lowest in Net Government Investment since… President Hoover; that was 83 years ago; and even Hoover did the Hoover dam, and much more. One can advantageously consult “Wealthcare Endless Summers“.]

Obama has been far from presiding over a huge expansion of government the way he himself and the right-wing, Neoconservative fanatics who now support Hillary Clinton, claim. As a matter of fact, Obama presided over unprecedented austerity, in part driven by spending cuts at the state and local level. Thus it is an astounding triumph of misinformation and disinformation that lackluster economic performance since 2009 has been interpreted as a failure of government spending. Let’s zoom in on Obama’s first term:

Obama Cliamed He Was A Big Spender. Instead, He Spent Big Only On His Friends, The Plutocrats, Soon To Provide Him With Beaucoup Bucks

Here it is, massaged differently:

Clinton And Obama, By The Measure Of Annualized Growth Of Real Government Spending, Were The Two Most Conservative US Presidents

[Source: Economist View.] So now the hysterical ones on the pseudo-left tell us that Hillary Clinton is not at all like Clinton, Bill, her husband and Obama, her supporter. It is indeed likely: Clinton says she will spend more in education and infrastructure. How much she can deliver with a hostile Congress, is something else. However, Trump has clamored for more government spending since ever. Trump lambasted the decrepit infrastructure of the USA while Obama (and Clinton), in chief command, did nothing about it.

I have said that government spending should be massively  augmented, for years. (But intelligently augmented, a big but, not a big butt!) Even Krugman, the Clinton sycophant, has joined my long held opinion. Here he is, in August 2016:

“Time to Borrow, by Paul Krugman, NY Times: …There are, of course, many ways our economic policy could be improved. But the most important thing we need is sharply increased public investment in everything from energy to transportation to wastewater treatment.

How should we pay for this investment? We shouldn’t — not now, or any time soon. Right now there is an overwhelming case for more government borrowing. …

First, we have obvious, pressing needs for public investment in many areas. … Meanwhile, the federal government can borrow at incredibly low interest rates: 10-year, inflation-protected bonds yielded just 0.09 percent on Friday. …

Spending more now would mean a bigger economy later, which would mean more tax revenue…, probably be larger than any rise in future interest payments. And this analysis doesn’t even take into account the potential role of public investment in job creation…”

In any case, no president did worse than Obama, except for skirt-chaser-thanks-to-government-clout Clinton. Would the Clinton of the future be different from the Clinton of the past? Hillary hysterics foam at the mouth, and assure us, that such will be the case. However, as many called me a racist, xenophobe, fascist, hater of Muslim People, Trump lover and even less flattering term, in public, on the Internet in recent days, I now strongly doubt that they are capable of informed judgment.

Yes, be it Hillary or President Trump, real government spending will grow. Both from what they said, and who they are (Trump is a builder used to take loans and invest rather profitably). But also because, after eight years were Obama “signature achievements” consisted in bombing weddings in Yemen, in “signature strikes”, and deploying the health plutocrat friendly (think Buffet) Obamacare, real government spending could not be any lower.

Or then, it was a farce: consider the US government spending on Elon Musk (a South Africa born entrepreneur). If Trump is elected, SpaceX is gone in a year. And so it will be all over: watch Amazon go down in flames. Yes, I do finance heavily my local bookstore, and yes I purchase only two books once at Amazon. Nobody os perfect.

But those who say that Clinton and Obama were progressives, are either liars or ignorant, or cruel, or all the preceding. It is one thing to no be perfect. It is another to wallop in error: to persevere in error is diabolical, the Romans said (“perseverare diabolicum”).

Again, look at this:

I invest Nothing For You People, because You Are Unworthy. Call Me Progressive, Like The Anaconda Who Progressively Squeezes

[Notice the dearth of spending under Clinton. Pelosi-Bush invested, until last 3 months of 2008, when Pelosi-Obama signed on Bush’s Sec. of Treasury Paulson’s plan. Pelosi-Obama invested in plutocrats thereafter (mostly, although there was a small genuine ‘stimulus’ which worked wonders).]

I expect feeble minds and cultural retards to not understand such a graph. They will probably revert to insults. And I do not expect them to understand what this means for analyzing the reasons for the frantic support of the Obamas for Clinton. You see, ultimately, investing is a zero sum game, in the instant: the US government did not invest, because all its discretionary money went to plutocrats. And this is why the Main Stream Media, held by plutocrats, is so anti-Trump. Trump, who is one of them, plutocrats, know very well where the investment streams are going. If Trump wants a bigger name, and he does, he will have to divert them, towards We The People. And all and any president, but for Clinton, did this, investing in the USA, better than Obama did. Since president Hoover.

In retrospect, those who wanted progress, at least by the measure of investing in the country, should never have voted for Clinton or Obama. How can one hope that the creature closest to them would be any different?

Patrice Ayme’

Trump A Traitor?

This is what French billionaire (and newly found messianic Jew) pseudo-philosopher Bernard Henri Levy (BHL), wants you to think. BHL wants you to think Trump is a traitor and that BHL is just the opposite. Yet, BHL has been part of the powers that be, at the highest level, for his entire life, even more so than Donald Trump. After BHL made an editorial calling Trump a traitor, I was, naturally, titillated. A comment of mine was immediately blocked (censored). The following is a vast expansion of said comment. Basically BHL tries to drown Trump by inundating him with innuendos… Whereas, in truth, Trump’s major crime is that his dangerous rhetoric threatens the politico-financial milieu created by actors such as BHL. To enrich himself, BHL destroyed the African primary forest. Thus BHL has had much further consequences on world ethics, and lying as the new ethics, than Trump ever had. His hold on the media is frightening.

A foundational lie of modern plutocracy is that Obama and the Clintons are dedicated friends of the poor and downtrodden. Nothing of the sort. The government’s own statistics show it (look at the graph below).

If you don’t know what the Gini Coefficient is, that’s not alright.  It may mean you may have a life, but you cannot take an intelligent part in debating what ails the world. Thus, for the sake of general goodness and true progress, let me explain: when a dictator pushes the Gini up, he (and sometimes she) augments the plutocracy, the power of the few, the oligarchs, over the multitude. Here is the sad reality of Obama and Clinton from raw numbers of the Federal REserve Data (FRED): 

The Oligarchs Became Richest Ever Under Beloved Leader Obama I. Notice The Colossal Rise of the Gini Under The BelovedClintons & Their “Democratic” Congress. Contrary to repute, Gini stagnated under the evil G W Bush. So why are not Clinton and Bush viewed as even more evil? The ways of the simple are mysterious.

The Gini coefficient is a number between 0 and 1.  It is a number to evaluate how much the richest get (it could be income, wealth, education, health, etc.). A country with an income Gini coefficient of 0 means all income is distributed equally.  And a country with an income Gini coefficient of 1 means one person gets all the money.  This measure was created to show just how skewed goodies distribution was.

Sadly, yet eloquently, despite, or rather precisely because of Obama’s ideologue-strength desire to claim to want to redistribute income, he’s craftily managed to make the rich get richer while the poor got poorer. And this, at record levels. Thus, if you hated Bush that way, you should excoriate Obama.

By 2011, the USA had become one of the top (most unequal) countries in the world in wealth. Just surpassed by four dictatorships. This can be explained by the rise of financial manipulators and conspirators such as Bloomberg, a plutocrat many times the wealth of Trump, who supports Clinton (as his ilk always do).

Obama & Democratic Congress Cut Taxes On Richest Taxpayers At The Beginning Of Obama’s Reign. [They also transferred trillions to the richest under ‘Quantitative Easing’, but that’s not in the graph above!]

And this is exactly how many Trump supporters are feeling like: the victims of a giant conspiracy, complete with lying media, pseudo-liberal economists, and pseudo-philosophers railing against We The People. 

‘Something Is Going On, And You Don’t Know What It Is, Mr. Jones’ (Bob Dylan)

The last few times I saw Bernard Henri Levy (BHL) on TV, 2016, he talked to no end about “Jewishness”, and the “genius of Judaism”. He had even just written a book about it. The French audience stayed ominously scornful. When he rose to leave the stage of the famous debate show ONPC, nobody, not even one person in the audience of hundreds, applauded (although BHL was the major guest of the evening). Nobody was amused.

Why? When the ugly face of religious war is surfacing in France again, fanatics of this, that, or the other cult, are intuitively disliked: they don’t seem like offering anything but strife. Many, among We The People, rightly perceive racism, which consists in treating people differently because of their origins.

Indeed, BHL does not like Trump to “emphasize Jewishness“. “Emphasizing Jewishness” is a crime if Trump does it, says BHL, yet a blessing when BHL goes ballistic about it. BHL should read carefully “Night” of Elie Wiesel, where the latter (one of many Jews to do so, including philosopher Hannah Arendt) considers that exaggerated “Jewishness” was a factor in the satanic brew which brought the Shoah. Indeed. There are rarely single causes, most often, web of causes.

The critiques of BHL against Trump, much of them hearsay or wild deliberate misinterpretations, may, or may not be justified. They would be justified if the facts were really as depicted, not just well-founded as industrial strength hearsay. Even then, Trump is a blabber box, who sometimes warns his audience that he may not know what he is talking about, and that his opinion may change in the future. This is an unusual approach for a politician, it strikes many as sincere… And it is. Yes, it’s frightening, but it’s intrinsic to the present system of government we have: a few people, elected or not, fairly or not, have too much power.

The final complaint of BHL against Trump is infidelity. “Infidelity to America.” Whines he:

“The implications of Trump’s election would be truly terrifying. The problem would not only be his vulgarity, sexism, racism, and defiant ignorance. It would be his possible infidelity to America itself. The party of Eisenhower and Reagan has been commandeered by a corrupt demagogue who betrays not only his country’s ideals, but also its fundamental national interest.

American vertigo. Global disaster.”

That’s rich. Eisenhower passed a 93% tax on the wealthiest. BHL himself is the exact opposite: he is one of the wealthiest, stealing wealth from the poorest (Africans, poor French taxpayers). BHL co-opted the entire French state under both Mitterrand and his successor Chirac to extract his father’s company from bankruptcy, and make himself a billionaire. BHL got the help of billionaire Pinault, to intercede with president Chirac, and pass the appropriate law in the French National Assembly. BHL’s life is a testimony to the sort of entanglement of political power and the hyper wealthy, which disgusts so much so many of Trump (and Sanders!) supporters. Ironically, BHL has been in very close, loud and clear relationships with many of the world’s leading politicians, in a way he hints Trump also does with Putin.  

So why does a plutocrat such as BHL dislikes Trump so much? Because Trump said many times that the plutocrats who do not presently pay taxes, for example hedge fund managers, will, should he become president. BHL is scared that this mood, this mood of taxing the wealthy, will propagate (even in France, the wealthiest legally escape tax in many ways made to strike the poor hard). 

Policies Engineered by US Leaders Since Reagan’s Reign Are Obviously Wrong. Time For A Vast Change We Can See. European Parrots May Follow.

In his editorial BHL claims Trump’s call to renegotiate some debt would reduce the US to Argentinian status. Yet, some debt could be renegotiated: after all, president Roosevelt devalued the dollar and cut US national debt by 33%, the day he got to power.

That a pillar, and prime recipient of the present established order, such as BHL, does not like Trump is hardly surprising.  Trump has stated, loud and clear that he would severely modify the established order, making lots of bad actors, and free riders, pay. Trump want bad actors and free riders, from Amazon Inc. to hedge fund managers, to sanctimonious members of NATO who don’t pay for their own defense, to pay for the advantages they enjoy.

That so many of the “vulgum” BHL despises so much, so explicitly, are ready to vote against the established order, is refreshing. I would have preferred Sanders. Individuals such as BHL, who found the money in the coffers of states, they needed to cut the entire forests of some African countries, to buy themselves palaces all over the world, and dominate the media relentlessly, should get their comeuppance.

Trump demolished Jeb Bush by calling him a “liar” about the invasion of Iraq. Bush could not find a way to reply to that. Not just once, or twice, did Trump call Bush a liar, but hundreds of times. And Trump insisted with outright blustering anger that the entire government of Jeb’s brother G W Bush had lied too. And it worked: average right-wing Republicans, by voting for Trump, agreed that the Bush family was a family of liars. It is telling of the sorry state of US  politics that no American politicians had ever made such a furious denunciation of the Iraq invasion prior to that. (Yes, Clinton, as a crucial Senator, voted for the Iraq invasion, to help her friend G. W. Bush; Trump will accuse her to be either a liar or an idiot, or both, on this subject.)

Of this, this alone, real progressives should be grateful. And what of the wall Trump wants to build? Some will whine. Well, the wall already exists. Just look at that Gini above. That’s just the one on income. The one on wealth is way worse. And the one on after tax income jumped after Obama became president, because democrats decided to help the economy by taxing the wealthiest less, and pumping into them trillions through the Federal Reserve (“Quantitative Easing”)

In Africa, huge crocodiles look like friendly trunks, placidly laying there in the water. Lying there or laying there? That is the question many animals are not able to solve. Trump may not be the friend of the common person. However BHL has spent his entire life trying to demonstrate, to himself, that he was a good person. When obviously, he knows perfectly well that he is exactly the sort of crook the world is sick with, doing the sort of things which should be rewarded in the future not with billions, as he was, but with long prison sentences.

I am not for Trump. I am not advocating to be trumped by Trump. The choice between the insufferable Trump and the corrupt Clinton illustrates perfectly well the abysmal nature of representative politics. But I am certainly against liars, and lying in general. Much of what was presented as “progress” in the West since the Fall of the Berlin Wall was actually addictive lying. Yes, GDP went up, in the UK, or the US. But mostly GDP of the rich: watch Irish GDP going up 26% a year, thank to tax evasion.

The lie? That this sort of industrial strength legal tax evasion has nothing to do with most people’s lives getting ever harder. Lying is addictive because, with humans, perception, even perception of happiness, is (nearly) everything. When We The People lives the lie that exploitation is redemption, they live happy.

Increasingly it feels as if lying were most of the industry of the West: contemplate the fact that Obama and Clinton, who brought up the US Gini (on both income and wealth) up to heights never seen before, are really viewed by the losers they stole as their best friends. At some point though, those who do not view We The People as vulgar, may win. A different regime of truth will apply.

So is Trump a traitor? Let’s hope so. He would betray his class, as he already betrayed the Neoconservatives (who were all about invading Iraq).  When one looks at history on the largest scale, one can see that revolutions are often led by plutocrats who betrayed their own class (the Gracchi, and Caesar were from the very top of Roman society; they were assassinated; had they lived, the Roman Republic may well have survived, and progress forged ahead without the Dark Ages; a queen of the Franks outlawed slavery in the Seventh Century; several otherwise vicious Russian leaders propped Russia forward; and so on).

Maybe Trump is a piece of trash. Yet, when he got people to vote for him by decrying the “wrong system” he admitted he was a product of, and he was “wrong” and “part of the establishment”, Trump says important things, and set-up a different mood. A better mood that the one of embracing lies, just because they feel good.

The future is here: it looks just like the past. Lying is its cement, generously provided by the ruling class. Decrying lying is nothing new: the Cathars insisted that most of Christianism was a gigantic lie. Maybe the part of the universe humans lived in was controlled by Evil. That would explain the “Catholic Orthodox” church’s nature. The Cathars were, obviously, and in retrospect right. They were most believed in the most democratic and republican part of Europe, the giant county of Toulouse and surrounding areas. The establishment was not amused, and kill both the Cathars and their books, to the last (millions died, one million in France alone).

At some point, history did not repeat and real progress was made. First by analyzing the past. The time has come to analyze with more subtlety than ever.

Patrice Ayme’

Brexit Idiocy In One Picture

Hard core Brexit idiots pontificate that they will renew their ties with the British Commonwealth and the USA. As if the quaint British monarchy imported from the Netherlands had anything in common with the hyper violent, domineering American republic, a country of immigrants, a world country, the world’s hyper power, which can purchase anything… but a soul, and a past it is ready to admit it had. The proud British are, relatively speaking, Europeans, and they don’t even know it.

Here is the European situation, the web of relationships, with the spider in the center, depicted with the most basic mathematics, set theory. I present to you the spider and the fly:

The Situation Is Even More Complicated Than That: Switzerland, For Example, Has More Than 600 “Bilateral” Treaties With The European Union, And Has To Respect Free Circulation Of European Citizens.

[Nota Bene: the GDP numbers above, due to the tremendous immigration of people and capital into the United Kingdom, the UK, due to the laxity of France and Germany, brought an extreme overvaluation of the British Pound, and a swelling of all things British. This house of cards is collapsing: British GDP has now shrunk below French GDP, in barely more than two weeks…]

Switzerland voted against the Free Circulation Of European Citizens, including Croatians, in winter 2014. Some sanctions were applied by the EU on an aghast Switzerland, the next day. However, Switzerland still has to accept everybody. Should it change that requirement, Italy, France and Germany would block the borders, and let Switzerland die. Really, not kidding: Switzerland has only one refinery, producing 25% of Swiss fossil fuels, and it gets all its raw petroleum through a pipeline, from Marseilles, France… Thus, Switzerland will have to vote again. Or learn to ride horses again.

Why is such ferocity welcome in enforcing European unity and free circulation? Simple: Enforcing cogent, fully informed reason upon, and by, We The People, is the best way to avoid war. Thus war tends to happen when unexpected.

Europeans have bent over backwards frantically for twenty years to accommodate increasingly crazed, selfish, grotesque, hypernationalist British demands.  The British thanked the rest of Europe by an insulting vote. (Remark: the Swiss referendum was just about refusing the diktat of free circulation of any EU citizen; it was NOT about rejecting the 666 treaties with Europe… Although of course, it could have this consequence… Nor, a fortiori, the European Union )

Right now Europe is suffering from three mentalities:

1. The first problematic mentality was English sabotage. The English entered the “ever closer Union” and decided it was just a free trade “club”. Basically NAFTA. That was a lie, a breach of trust, and a betrayal. No wonder so many European leaders are keen to get Brexit done. For twenty years, English governments have prevented the built-up, in-depth of European laws and institutions. Instead of electing the head of the European Administration (“Commission”)  directly, by the People’s vote, one still uses the ancient system of nomination by the heads of governments. That sort of undemocratic blockage was the work of English Europhobes, mostly.

Fanatic Brexiters insist they never voted for a European “Superstate”. That is not just a total lie, but it means they want Europeans, and their ex-colonies and present allies, to be ruled by Superstates (USA, Russia, India, China).

2. The second problematic mentality is the fact that the European defense system is mostly operated by the French Republic, which is supposed to pay for it, while leaving its deficit below 3%. Logically, French tanks should first roll through Brussels, Luxembourg, Belgium, Lichtenstein, while addressing an ultimatum to Eurozone member Ireland, and force all these miscreants to pay taxes. (Since Germany has the same problem as its sister republic, France, it would rather applaud the usage of force… which is exactly what both of them did, with the help of Italy, to pressure Switzerland that way… It helped that the latter was not a founding member of the EU, and a rather small fish.)

What about the refugee crisis? Well, go back 17 centuries: the Goths, fleeing the Huns, invaded the Roman empire. Initially, the Goths came as refugees, and were allowed in. Later, even more Goths, now fully armed, came in, and thew Roman Empire said no. The solution? Have an army strong enough to kill the Huns. This was finally done in France, 80 years alter. First the inhabitants of Orleans inflicted a defeat on the Huns, inside the city itself. Then the Franks shadowed and harassed the retreating giant host of the Huns. That gave enough time for the Roman Field army headed by Aetius and to the Visigothic army to join the fray. Then the Huns got crushed in the titanic battle of the Catalaunian Plain. Having suffered tens of thousands of dead, if not hundreds of thousands (the number 300,000 has been advanced by sources), the spirit of the Huns was broken. Just as that of the Nazis in May 1945.

That was how to handle Assad: destroy him and his family, occupy Syria, re-establish secular, republican order. And it was not to the Russians or the Americans to do that, but to the Europeans. But there is no European army, no European will. Just European wealth for the world to steal. And for this, the ectoplasmic Britons are much to blame.: did they not learn anything from the Kaiser and his spiritual son Hitler?

As a result of formidable austerity imposed on France, the French defense system is woefully insufficient, although not quite as moribund as the British one. This is a grave situation in several ways: first it weakens the West enormously. Secondly it makes the USA more dominant than ever in defense. And thus, it augments the aura and diplomatic might of the USA in all matters, including the economic one… which pays for defense.

3. The third problematic mentality is indeed austerity itself. It was imposed by a coalition of conservatives and the evil influence of the ruling plutocracy. Great Britain saw less of it, thanks to the plutocratically owned tabloids, and the fact that plutocracy has made the wealthiest in Britain so much wealthier. Austerity is no less than a complete plutocratic plot, and a direct consequence of not taxing the wealthiest enough to spare us being in their debt.

So deep has the propaganda been for the plutocrats whom have made us in their debt, that only now the German SPD seems to realize that austerity is a plot of the wealthy. The “S” in SPD is for “Social”: Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, SPD… The SPD is in coalition with the German Conservatives, who are white-hot, foaming at the mouth demanding ever more austerity (especially from other Europeans… It’s understandable as Germany is in a virtuous circle presently…)

Brexit can potentially break that logjam. First, British sabotage of the “Ever Closer Union” will stop. Appropriate superstate structures could now be erected, as needed… Secondly, the austerity party in the EU, right now led by Britain and Germany, is going to be halved. Thus one can hope that the French, these austerity specialists since 1932, will snap out of their madness, and lead a revolt against the austerity party. Simple: the European Union has just do what the USA has done under Obama. The Federal deficits amounts to something around 100% of US GDP (if one adds Quantitative Easing, an unusual addition, not usually made for obvious, vicious reasons, to the official deficits).

Will Europeans understand this?

Meanwhile, it’s fun to see the Brexiters struggle with the spider web above. Good luck coming out, to sink in the ocean…

Patrice Ayme’