PUTIN, PLUTOCRACY & The WEST (Standard)

Putin played the West. But first the West played Putin. Or more exactly the powers that be in the West played Putin [1].  This deliberate instrumentalization of Putin by the West became obvious early on. 

A number of events, perpetrators and witnesses revealed that Putin an the secret service he used to lead, the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, lit. ‘Committee for State Security, FSB/KGB the Russian/Soviet secret security political police, had orchestrated the bombing of appartment building blocks in Russia.

Why?

The KGB/FSB had constrained (elected) Russian president Yeltsin to choose and nominate Putin as Prime Minister, first. Then Yeltsin made Putin President. The KGB/FSB had made Yeltsin an offer he couldn’t refuse, obviously. 

However elections had to be conducted soon and Putin was pulling only 2%. One factor that had humiliated and weakened Yeltsin was the first war with Chechnya, which Russia had lost, giving that Muslim country de facto independence. Putin accused Chechnya to have done these multiple apartment building attacks, which killed hundreds of Russians, and viewing this as a casus belli, Putin attacked Chechnya with maximal force…. Conveniently discarding all rules about civilized warfare… in the grand old tradition of Russian wars, especially those conducted in the Caucasus mountains. 

One Chechnen out of six was killed, the capital, Grozny was leveled, and Putin won totally over his imaginary enemy. Putin became wildly popular and got elected Russian president in a landslide. Considering how he got elected, though, we should not view him as a legitimate president.

Western intelligence knew all of this, and it was obvious Putin had orchestrated it, as Chechnya had no interest whatsoever to disrupt the status quo… whereas Putin had. 

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The West kept on shaking Putin’s hand, because the West knew the evil Putin did in Chechnya, and how he got in power, leveraging that. Knowing that he knew they knew, Western leaders thought Putin was their man, who would do their thing, namely a cheap energy policy. But minds, and, in particular evil, have an inertia of their own. So Putin kept on doing evil, what he did best, and the West kept hoping he was their man, providing cheap fossil fuel energy.

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Then Putin became the darling of the West. A genocidal mass murderer became central to world energy policy. At first sight, this is counterintuitive and paradoxal: how could a tyrannical murderous evil monster become the friend of representative democracies?

Well, what if these representative democracies are mostly only democratic in name, and mostly represent global plutocrats?

There is nothing new in this strategy: in the 1930s, the Western plutocrats did the same with Mussolini, Franco, Hitler, and, less well-known, Stalin. Hirohito got oil to invade China from US plutocrats. Plutocracy means evil-power. It was evil to enable these evil-doesr, but most profitable to Western plutocrats.

Plutocrats love evil tyrants: their kind, writ large.

The Putin problem is a plutocratic problem. It’s global plutocracy which played us, and Putin was one of its pawns, as Hitler and Stalin were. 

Patrice Ayme

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[1] (The French secret services were ordered in the 1990s, by elected leaders, not to have anything to do with Russia anymore; source the “25 years in the secret services” of “Pierre Siramy”, a top DGSE operative, who thought in 2010 that the policy of ignoring Russia was the gravest mistake; it is likely the same order was given to their US and UK colleagues.)

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P/S 1: The essence of this comment, that many of the world’s tyrants, in the last century, were instruments of global plutocracy, was censored by the plutocratic New York Times. Hundreds of innocuous comments were allowed, though.

I then sent another comment, not directly accusing global plutocracy, the one in italics underlined above. It was immediately published.

One has to understand that the descendants of those who crucially helped Stalin and  Hitler to get or stay in power, are themselves in power… And act through countless schemes, foundations, universities, think tanks, corporate boards, etc… All this held by anonymous corporations… 

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P/S 2: Many naive and ill-informed left leaning individuals, following sheepishly the propaganda they are submitted to by their minders in the Kremlin, believe that Putin is an opponent of the “West”… because that’s what he says. Hitler also pretended to be a defender of minorities, and just like Putin, was an instrument of global plutocracy. Hitler knew this, and told confidantes he was exasperated with making nice talk with plutocrats… For example before a dinner in Italy he told Rommel he resented having to sit next to some extremely wealthy Italian aristocrat…

Naive leftists have then made a weapon of global plutocracy, Putin, into their hero. 

Just as Hitler, or Mao, or Hirohito, Putin, forgetting that he is where he is because of Western plutocracy, has gone rogue.

Amusingly the French secret services (DGSE) knew very well that, in the 1990s, Western ecologists were paid by Putin and his ilk, the Russian intelligence services. So follow this: Putin and his ilk are put in power by Western fossil fuel plutocrats, and then, on their (apparent) own, feed ecologists, who, not by coincidence, demolish nuclear industry and nuclear research (for better nuclear industry)… With the final effect of ostering fossil fuels domination by Western plutocracy and its proxies (say ARAMCO)….

Putin did this in Chechnya, here is Grozny, 23 years ago. Then he did it in Aleppo an ancient metropolis in Syria, then in many places over Ukraine. The point is that Western leaders knew very well about Chechnya… and it excited them… Western elected politicians are selected, then elected, becuase they are most qualified to represent eil power. In Putin, they seriously saw their man, and kept shaking his hand. And this is not just a case of the big bad evil US governing classes… German and French leadership obviously look at the Warsaw-Kyiv axis with a jaundiced eye. Those who know history well know that, for centuries, Poland, Ukraine and Lithuania were the same imperial power. Hence the diatribe of the French leader against the Polishone, and unfounded accusation of corruption against Ukraine on French “service public” TV… While the blatant corruption in France (how come the hyper wealthy pays no tax, and thus kept getting wealtheir and more influenctial?) is carefully not adressed…

Heroism Needed To Survive The New Revelations

Human life is brutish and short, and that tends to make our wisdom brutish and short. However, a way to improve our lot is to attain better and fuller wisdom: even if we can’t make the world better, we can make the wisdom better, and bask in it, content to have achieved something important for us, thinking beings… Not forgetting that human beings have always been combat animals, fighting not just each other, but nature itself, the human condition, etc… and also fighting plain old mental inertia. The end result has been progress, and it has been considerable: in general, our ancestors would readily exchange their lives for ours. 

So a martial spirit is integral to the human condition in full… not as important as love itself, surely, because love is how we get started and instructed originally… But still, human life is not possible without combat, and the mentality to go with it, evolved by Homo over millions of years. Even evil is part of the slightly monstrous human condition, as it plays the role of limiting human impact in such a way that the ecology survives… because, without ecology, there is no human species. 

Humanity is now engaged in the greatest conflict ever. Not just the conflict of democracy and infamy (as with Russia attacking Ukraine). But also the conflict of humanity with terrestrial ecology (the CO2 crisis being only one aspect). This is not the time for whining, but the time for Mars in the service of hopeful intelligence. The time for heroism has come.

Europe has been fearing the reckoning that the time for the ultimate war, the war against mental inertia, had come. With mental inertia disguised as pacifism or brain dead ecology, there is no hope.

Mental inertia is one of the greatest factors of the psychology driving history: Russian autocracy built the world’s largest empire, over seven centuries, and this efficent, relentless brutality, is deeply embodied in Russian culture and psyche. When Lenin killed the Tsar, he killed the monarch, to take his place, with the exact same dictatorial mentality disguised as the exact opposite of what it was, a majority (which is what “Bolshevism” means). 

Similarly, but more recently, mass German culture has long made obedience to masters its prime directive (same as Kremlin based Russia since 1300).

Ces deux-la sont faits pour s’entendre…

So Germany needs masters to obey and in the modern era, thanks to who have been effectively double agents such as Schroder or Merkel, Germany has found in Putin a new master…. And said master copies the trick which Lenin, Trodsky and Stalin used, claiming to defend the world against “Western” abuse. (Ironically, Lenin and Stalin, while conquering Ukraine, killing millions, also made it into a republic, to soothe the survivors, and Ukraine became a co-founder of the United Nations.) 

This German mindset, of finding a master to please comes in part from lack of self-awareness. Germany is unaware that German war criminality of the racist type arises from this desire to please dictators. Eighteenth Century Prussia, which, partly thanks to British help, ended conquering Germany, lived off the racist mood it used against Slavs and Jews. Prussia was led by militaristic dictators.It’s the so-called “Prussian General Staff” which attacked the world on August 1, 1914… An attack which was itself a war crime, naturally followed by atrocities in neutral Belgium.   

More than 40 democracies have realized that the attack by the nuclear dictator of the Kremlin, who threatened to turn the world to “radioactive ashes”, is an existential threat to themselves… even more so than German Nazism, and this is why they have reacted so strongly (even Sweden and Switzerland who discreetly collaborated with Hitler when the going was good). This is why these 40 democracies are military allies of Ukraine (whereas in the first year of the Second World War, Hitler had powerful lallies such as Japan, Italy, and… Russia… France and Britain (and their empires) pretty much fought alone (Poland had been defeated by Hitler and Stalin, who turned around to attack Finland).

The present conflict is then the greatest world war ever in the number of participating countries… Those who don’t see it as a world war, don’t know how to count. If the US had given France in 19139, or 1940, the sort of support it is giving to Ukraine, the Nazis would hev been promptly defeated, instead of killing so many and ravaging so much.

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Nazism is the abbreviation for National-Socialism. The real Nazi Party was neither national, nor socialist: it killed around ten million German speaking people, which does not strike me as efficient nationalism, and, far from being “socialsit” was mostly the toy, and tool, of various plutocrats (some in the US, some in Russia, some even in Italy as Hitler himself complained to Rommel… using the word “plutocrat”… adding that he detested having to sit with them and exchanged pleasantries).

Now in some ways Nazism succeeded to bring an ephemeral good life to most Germans, as long as they had peculiar “racial” credentials. That was paid by a moral apocalypse, borrowing money and the future, and also by stealing various minorities and opponents.

Putinism has also made life superficially better for many Russians, yet, as in Nazi Germany, that was paid by augmenting inequality and corruption, expelling intellectuals, rejecting an ever smarter socioeconomy, destroying critical thinking, establishing dictatorship, and borrowing from the future by creating a commodity dependent economy.

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This has become a small planet, and democracy can’t share it with nuclear armed dictatorships. Whether nuclear armed tyrants can share the planet with each other is irrelevant. In this world war, most democracies, nearly all the most advanced ones, are fighting for their survival in Ukraine, and they know it. 

This is indeed the time of the great revelations (apocalypses in Greek). Only heroism will carry us through. The era when heroism is necessary has come.

Ukraine is showing the way.

Слава Україні!, Sláva Ukrayíni!
Patrice Ayme

Caesar was assassinated just before he was going to leave with Rome’s best army ever, by a long shot, to solve the Persian and German problems, in one giant scythe move, mostly from behind. Augustus and his successors did not solve the German problem, so Rome was invaded by Germans. The Franks would solve the German problem over three centuries (~500-800 CE) through a direct assault… Shortly afterwards, by the Tenth Century, the Saxons became the most ardent defenders of Romanitas, and saved Europe from the savage Hungarians…… The Persian problem later became an Islamist problem, when the Arabs, armed with a war like religion, Islam in its Sunni, then Shiah versions, conquered Persia… To some extent that problem has not been solved yet. Caesar died in part because he was seriously too heroic, going into the Senate unarmed, and with Marcus Antoninus (who was held in conversation at the door by one of the co-conspirators… Caesar and MA were redoutable hand to hand fighters).

Forgetting History, Putin-Led Russia Compromises Siberia

FASCISM, NAZISM, RUSSIA, CHINA, The Past And The Future:

Fascism is justified by war. The more war, the more fascism. So the popularity of a fascist leader appears to augment as a war becomes catastrophic, especially when the leader has involved his entire population in infamy. It is infamy to let oneself be persuaded that Ukraine was going to attack, just from believing a thief-in-chief as if he were god).

This fascism from war effect is why Hitler’s popularity augmented during WW2… while increasingly much of the entire German population grimly perceived they had wronged the Jews, and perhaps done even more than that… and that they were going to pay a heavy price.

As the US army fought through its first German villages and cities, GIs were surprised to see Germans come out, after the combat had moved down the street, and calmly sweep in front of their houses. As Germans swept the combat debris, they seem to be sweeping Nazism off their minds. By 1945, the Germans had few illusions about Nazism, yet, still, many fought through the bitter end. Especially many in the ill informed and culturally stupid and thus, criminal, youth.

But of course the young were more vulnerable to Nazi propaganda. Hitler used to boast that he didn’t care what adults thought about Nazism, because “we own the youth“. In some cases, US officers were faced with young Germans holed up in some house with Panzerfausts. The US commanders drafted local German school teachers to order their pupils to lay down their weapons. So there you had German matrons ordering by loudspeakers their students to stop their ruckus and come out hands up.

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There have been many illusions regarding Putin’s tyranny: I fully predicted Putin’s attack, more than a decade ago… An autocracy is automatically evil. Yet most experts, completely drunk on neo-liberal, end of history, pipeline diplomacy, trade as master of the universe ideology,  believed it would not happen: well, their careers depended upon glorifying the fact everything, even peace, was for sale! Putin denial, like denial that, because they don’t experience limits to their powers, plutocrats are destroying democracy, or like denial about the CO2 crisis, have long been obvious, yet nothing is done about them, because that would doing something against the established order which plutocrats have captured (and this is why transferring arms to a democracy under attack by a fascist, racist genocidal regime is like pulling teeth…)  

Why did they think Putin modernized 80% of itsC nuclear forces, and developed, already 20 years ago, nuclear tipped hypersonic missiles? Putin was preparing his realm to exert nuclear blackmail, obviously. But the so-called “experts” had not noticed! They were paid, not to notice…

Another illusion is that the sanctions are hurting Russia real bad. Short term, no. Russia controls maybe 20% of the world’s arable land, and its gigantic land as all resources, except mangrove and coconut trees. Russia is an autocracy ready to live in autarky.. 

Could Russia end up like Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea or Iran. Isolated, forever inimical to most of the planet? No. Because Russia wants to be, and is, just from the land it controls, a superpower.

Notice this didn’t happen with China: After the Gang of 4 attempted takeover, China embarked in democratization… the opening of China to the world was recently interrupted by Xi, an ally of Putin… who discovered, like Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, Hirohito and Franco before him, that global plutocrats were natural allies: see Bill Gates of the Gates (of hell?) foundation providing Xi with the most sophisticated security expertise. See Gates and Xi holding hands, see Xi visiting Gates’ mansion in Washington, and holding court there with other plutocrats from “Big Tech”, before Xi proceeded to Washington to tell Obama how it was going to be.

(Obama is a weakling, Xi, reared in part by the Red Guards, is tough, that’s why Xi gives orders to Obama: “Big Tech” plots with Xi, a man who can pretty much order the death of anybody, anywhere, then Xi goes to see someone who is afraid of his own shadow, except when sponsored by oligarchs).

The reason China did not isolate itself from the world has to do with Mao and Nixon… Nixon himself was pretty much doing what US oligarchs (say Kaiser) told him to do.

China is big, ambitious, and has been for 4,000 years. China got defeated by an expansionist Russia two centuries ago, losing immense territories at the Treaty of Aigun (1858 CE). The Russians threatened to open a second front while China was losing the Second Opium War, against Britain and France (which went on to destroy architecture in the Chinese capital to avenge various atrocities with petty war crimes of their own… 

China wants to be a superpower, that means: opening itself to the world. Russia will have the same problem, if it wants to keep on being a superpower. 

Now, of course, Xi is a personal ally of the Kremlin mongrel, but that’s precisely Xi’s problem: Xi carries the mark of infamy “Putin”…  that may make Xi less popular with his comrades of the Chinese leadership. 

In the fullness of time, China is a major threat for Russia, because Russia occupies or control immense territories on which China has exerted imperium, sometimes for centuries, and sometimes already two millennia ago (Rome and China basically touched at some point, and Romans notable made it all the way to East Asia; an allegation is that Roman prisoners settled in China). Two huge cities, Vladivostok and Khabarovsk, sit very close to the Chinese border. Khabarovsk is full of descendants of Ukrainians deported to Siberia by Stalin (who also killed around four million Ukrainians, just to make sure Ukraine obeyed and agreed to be dispossessed… The Holodomor, one of these periodic genocides the Kremlin visits on Ukraine in its effort to keep as much of Eurasia under tits subjugation as possible).

Make no mistake: Siberia should be developed from the Russian base it has now, with the help of the European Union and its allies. I am not advocating a “return to China”. Actually Russia and the USSR seem to have been more respectful of Siberian peoples than 

Russia can’t depend upon China. The problem of Muscovite Russia is that, to realize its ginormous expansion to the east, the Kremlin embraced the ways of the Mongols. That was the opposite of the quasi-democracy of Kyivan Rus… which really got Russian civilization started. That tension remains. What we see with the cruel Moof scow attacking Kyiv is a civil war, and even more, a civilizational war, a war for saving the world…

As tech progresses, a point may happen where the formidable Russian nuclear arsenal may become obsolete. Much Russian military prowess rests on western electronics: that’s going to be cut off (hopefully; it remains to see how strong the embargo is going to be). 

Ukraine, a democracy assailed by plutocrats, must regain lost territory through military means… Because there are no other means, and the nuclear tyrant needs to be thoroughly defeated: Putin cannot be rewarded with some Sudetenland, as Hitler was… We know what happens in such a case.

So the democracies should help Ukraine militarily as much as possible. After having committed the worst threat, destroying all of humanity, Putin and his accomplices should be given no quarters: there is strictly no hope to be coming from this criminal organization. Democracies must choose between civilization and the only thing which can stop civilization, a rogue nuclear regime. 

World War Three is on. It is more serious than any which preceded.

Patrice Ayme

One of the big chunks of Eurasia China (actually the Manchus) used to have, and wants back very much. Actually Stalin himself saw Mao maneuver to acquire it, and after that the relationship ended in near-war in 1969. All of central Asia, owned by the Han 2,000 years ago, is in play too…

Life Is A Riot

 

THAT LITTLE RIOT… NOTHING. BUT THAT BIDEN IS WORSE THAN TRUMP, A BIGGIE.

So Trump was dis-impeached, the plan of preventing the President to run again failed. At least that way. The Demoncratic forces will have to find another way… Meanwhile the Biden presidency is proceeding… Along the lines set by Trump. This is very interesting in several ways: basic Machiavellianism at work, and also the global plutocratic forces having perhaps learned something important: China is not the Third Reich, Trump had got an important point there. Also Biden flew a B52 escorted by Saudi F15s: an other important message, this time to china’s would-be ally, Iran.

That little riot, around and inside the US Capitol, incompetently managed by the Capitol police, was not a coup… And Trump’s free speech to go out and fight has little to do with that major police failure… The Federal government had proposed to help, days prior, and the capitol police declined because of “bad optics“.

What was a sort of passive aggressive coup was that the so-called “Democrats” impeaching Trump quite a bit for more than 4 years, by accusing him of being a Russian agent. The opponents of the so-called “Democrats” will remember this continual impeachment (which drowned reality in an ocean of lies). What was much more of a coup was that those who conspired to invade Iraq, in violation of international law, were never tried… or not even suspected by the sheeple, thank to plutocratic propaganda!

Democracies have riots, it goes with the concept of the People Power (Demos-Kratia). Debate itself is the core concept of democracy, and “debate” means beating up completely. Agreed, in a civilization functioning optimally, it is best that individuals do not get hurt physically, or even psychologically… But the later is unavoidable: the Socratic method, as related by Plato, could be very harsh.

Progress means turmoil. The best way to generate better, that is newer, ideas is emotions, even passions, thus turmoil. Idea making means trouble making…

And thus trouble making should be cracked down upon only when clearly it violates the law.

And free speech ought to be rarely in violation of the law. When free speech goes too far, one should go the British route, the way the French used to do it, and have the police give a “warning”. And circumstances are crucial. Say somebody writes on the Internet:”Kill all whites!”. That’s different from a teacher teaching children with:”Kill all whites!”

Is that a coup? Or a comedy organized by a self-declared “Nordic Shaman” (pictured, with horns)

So that little riot was not a coup. In a coup, even a self-coup, the army is involved. When ignorant Trumpists marched on the Capitol, it is not them, the rioters, who got tacit approval of the army. Quite the opposite. The Capitol Police had declined the help offered by the National Guard. I have been in a country during a coup, that’s something else entirely. Or look at Myanmar/Burma last week for what a coup is. I have ALSO been in street riotting (many times, and not on the side of law enforcement). The Capitol Police was incredibly incompetent. Since 1871, no riot ever breached a serious public building in Paris… with much more numerous, powerful and determined demonstrations (including one where more than 100 individuals got killed). The lack of nerves of the US elite calling that little riot a coup is part of the “Manifest Destiny” problem, a kind of hypersensitivity of the elite for any inconvenience coming its way. The fact the present president is held, in cogent circles, as a criminal against humanity is not “whataboutism”. Only those who don’t mind killing millions of foreigners say such a thing. It never happened in the history of the US, and rarely in the history of the world. Do you have any idea of the monstrosity visited upon Iraq? Is it un-American to notice it? Why?

One can be wrong by deliberately ignoring right.US citizens do not know the US attacked Afghanistan secretly on July 3, 1979, to provoke a Soviet reaction in 1980… Under DEMOCRATIC saint Jimmy Carter. US citizens should learn this, it is a moral imperative, because the initiation of massive war by the USA in the Middle East, in several alliances with ultra violent Muslim Fundamentalists, killed at least 5 millions… and the mood of secrecy and viciousness presiding over this assault is still NOT suspected, let alone examined. One needs to learn about the fact US leaders engage in secret wars: it is a coup against humanity and a war crime. Because they could get away with that, US leaders could get away with various crushings of rights, within the US.

So where are we at? Biden, so far, is leaving the meat, the core, the essence of the Trump era… in place. All the changes, so far, are cosmetic. The border has become porous: in a few weeks, the invasion situation (3,000/day, it is said) will become obvious, and Biden will say:”Sorry, but we have to do something!”. Same story, basically with the pipeline. Magically, the economy is not free of fossil fuels. As long as Canada is allowed to sell its tar sand poison, it will be transported… Doing it with a pipe in as lesser evil. And the Paris Accord will not change a thing: if anything it encourages those increasing the most their pollution (China, India, Poland)… to do even more so. Not that they are culprit, really, it’s the absence of new technology which is the cause of the problem, and that’s where the real fix is (aside from taxing the most polluting activities).

In any case, something real progressives ought to keep in mind:

COVERT ACTION MAGAZINE.COMBiden’s Key Role in the Crime of the Century: The 2003 U.S. Invasion of Iraq – CovertAction Magazine

Biden has much to do, if he wants history to forgive him for inciting and helping to invade Iraq (among other global plutocracy friendly conspiracies he was a principal of). We have to wish him luck, but we will verify, step by step…

And the way? NASA’s Perseverance, the Plutonium powered robotic rover cum helicopter successfully landed on Mars. A magnificent success including entering the atmosphere at 11 kilometers per second, around 400 times per unit of mass the kinetic energy of the fastest bullet, followed by a deceleration of ten gs (ten times Earth’s gravity), then braking with a hypersonic parachute, followed by braking with rockets, and finally a “sky crane”… There is no way forward but with much more and much better tech.

In 1976, the two US Viking landers found biological activity in Martian soil. The results were disbelieved (that’s OK)… But then its was not tried to repeat the experiments… And that’s not OK. Indeed the experiments are so far unexplained. The original head of the Viking project now believes life was detected.

Some will scoff about the interest of finding life on Mars. But biology on Mars, if it exists, is sure to advance our understanding of biology on Earth. Science is like that: any experiment helps, positive or negative. Even the very humanly costly COVID experiment… helps. Helps whom, what? The essence of humanity, to go where no monkey has gone before…

Life is a riot…

Patrice Ayme

Hedge Funds And Financial Bandits Financed Biden: The List

BEST PRESIDENT THUGS’ MONEY WANTED TO BUY. Read All About The High Finance Thugs Below!

Janet Yellen received $810,000 in speaking fees in 2019 and 2020 from Citadel, the hedge fund wrapped up in the Gamestop saga. Citadel has spent $240k per year lobbying Congress and the Treasury Department. The Gamestop story has thrown a light on one of the many ways in which the elite colludes. 

The collusion between immense financial wealth and politics is not new. President Jackson, a duellist with unextracted bullets in his body, the greatest general of his time, massive invader of a giant swath of what became the present USA, ethnic cleanser of civilized Native Americans on an epic scale, defeater of the British, declared on his deathbed that he was most proud of having kept the USA safe from European bankers. 

Well, they finally arrived through the backdoor… For example by secretly financing some American banks. This helped bring World War One, but was not really noticed. Next came the crash of 1929-1930, which ushered the Great Depression. The bankers had pulled the strings during the boom… but the politicians took the erroneous decisions, mostly by rising tariffs too brutally and letting everything collapse… In any case, bankers hated President Roosevelt, and he “welcomed their hatred” as he put it… FDR signed the Banking Act of 1933, repressing the financial plutocracy by separating speculative banking (investing in the financial markets), and industrial banking (investing in the real economy). However, under the reign of king Clinton I, the Banking Act of 1933 was greatly dismantled. The consequences were the collapse of an elite hedge fund, LCTM, which threatened the entire financial system. The Fed intervened, saving the system. The work of Clinton I came to light again in 2008, with a somewhat similar crash. This time the Fed , and kings Bush II and Obama I intervened and saved the wealthy, with taxpayer money, to the great applause of the ignorant Commons.      

President Joe Biden’s electoral campaign raised a known total of more than $1.6 billion that we know of so far, according to OpenSecrets (January 2021). This amount includes donations to his official campaign committee and outside groups like single-candidate super Political Action Committees and hybrid PACs. Many of those contributing to Biden belong to the Financial Plutocracy, the core of the Global Deep Plutocracy (the sort that already existed in the Sixteenth Century, when Francois I and Charles Quint, fighting each other, were financed by bankers… And the sort which financed the war against the French Republic in the Eighteenth Century, and their descendants which never seemed to have seen since something nefarious enough not to finance…)

During the Gamestop scandal, some financial institutions blocked trading to buy shares, advantaging massive hedge funds which were short. When Internet critters spoke about it, Big Tech shut down their babbling… Because it is nefarious to the elite, by suggesting that the elite conspires, which, obviously it does on a planetary, global scale. Not much of that Internet censorship differs in essence upon what is done in the Chinese dictatorship. The only difference is that in China, it’s the government which represses, whereas in the “West”, it’s the bandits themselves, without any pretense at governance, as they claim to be driven by greed… Whereas the Chinese Communist Party claims to be driven by its desire to make We the People thrive (and can justify this to a great extent!)

Where Is Big Money Funneled?

Large donations in U.S. presidential elections are directed toward super PACs (super Political Action Committees), or hybrid PACs because of the $5,600 limit on how much an individual can give to a candidate’s official campaign committee per election.

Priorities USA Action, a liberal, hybrid PAC in its fifth election cycle, has received the most money of any pro-Biden, single-candidate organization. Millions of dollars have come into the PAC from the affiliated Priorities USA nonprofit, but since it doesn’t disclose donors, it is a “dark money” group: we can’t be certain who contributed to it. Biden supporters may also give to joint fundraising committees set up for the presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee like the Biden Victory Fund and Biden Action Fund.

Top Industries

The biggest industries represented among Biden donors are (thuggish) Finance, Securities & Investment, and Internet plotters, known as “Big Tech”.

The following were the top donors to the Biden 2020 election cycle, according to processed Federal Election Commission data.

1. Donald Sussman, Paloma Partners – $9 Million

The founder and chief investment officer of hedge fund Paloma Partners, Sussman has been a long time major donor to Democrat candidates. He gave to the Priorities USA Action and Pacronym political action committees. What is the problem with hedge funds? First only the hyper wealthy have access to them. OK, next donor, and here comes evil so deep, most people are never heard about it, as they pursue their enslaved low lives:

2. James Simons, Euclidean Capital – $7 Million

Jim Simons, a mathematician of definite renown (“Chern-Simons differential form”), co-founded the legendary, but all too real, hedge funds of Renaissance Technologies. Renaissance was founded in the 1980s by Simons and other mathematicians (who crucially contributed mathematical trickery). Simon, an award-winning mathematician and former Department of Defense code breaker, is known as the “Quant King“. 

The idea is actually extremely primitive: it consists in stealing people before they know it. As the idea is rather embarrassingly simple, pigeons do this everyday to each other, it is hidden below a mathematical mumbo-jumbo to make the naive and easily dazzled, believe in wizzardy. All what Simons and his henchmen do is to process massive trades a tiny bit faster than everybody else, while leading the market where they want it to go (by using their size and an arsenal of tricks). 

This sort of trading is thoroughly unethical that it should be unlawful, because it is a sure way to transfer more wealth to the wealthier, by giving a systematic trading advantage to the wealthiest. From there to systemic racism, there is a distinction without any difference. Thus, Simons is a revered figure, especially among mathematicians (he gives them crumbs, founding an institute… where I was hosted, sort of). Simons gave to the Priorities USA Action and Unite the Country political action committees.

3. Deborah Simon, Retired – $6.1 Million

Her father was the late Melvin Simon, the co-founder of America’s largest mall operator, Simon Property Group. This self-declared friend of man, “philanthropist”, gave to the American Bridge 21st Century and Unite the Country political action committees. Her sister Cynthia also donated $1.75 million.

4. George Marcus, Marcus & Millichap Co. – $4 Million

The billionaire real estate magnate is the founder of Marcus & Millichap Company and chairman of Essex Property Trust. Last year he co-hosted a fundraising event for Biden, and he has contributed money to the Priorities USA Action, Unite the Country and American Bridge 21st Century political action committees.

PPP On September 23, 1998, the chiefs of some of the largest investment firms of Wall Street—Bankers Trust, Bear Stearns, Chase Manhattan, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, and Salomon Smith Barney—met on the 10th floor conference room of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York 

5. Michael Moritz, Sequoia Capital – $3.5 Million

The Welsh native is a partner at venture capital firm Sequoia Capital. He’s also an author and former tech journalist. The venture capital firms and Silicon Valley in general have been operating in concert with the US Deep State. They too use tricks which should be illegal (founding startups which are bound to get sure contracts with Big Tech down the street, in exchange for what are basically kickbacks…)

It is better than the anti-innovation attitude of the Roman imperial state… But not that much better. After all, Louis XIV financed the famous physicist Huyghens… And this sort of pseudo-intellectual pseudo-goodism may have persuaded Louis he was a good person, enabling him to engage in repression against Protestants, which brought tremendous wars which were catastrophic for civilization and Europe in general and France in particular. Moritz gave to the Pacronym and American Bridge 21st Century political action committees.

6. Kenneth Duda, Arista Networks – $3 Million

Duda is the co-founder, chief technology officer and senior vice president (software engineering) at cloud networking solutions provider Arista. He gave to the Pacronym and American Bridge 21st Century political action committees.

7. Seth Klarman, The Baupost Group – $3 Million

Billionaire investor Seth Klarman is a longtime independent and has given to the Republican Party in the past. “I’ve seen meaningful numbers of people put aside what would appear to be their short-term economic interest because they value being citizens in a democracy,” he grandly told The New York Times in August. He gave to the Pacronym, Priorities USA Action and Unite the Country political action committees.

8.Reid Hoffman, Greylock Partners – $2.5 million

Hoffman is the co-founder and former executive chairman of LinkedIn. The billionaire tech investor is currently a partner at a venture capital firm. He backed Alloy, a data exchange platform for the Democratic party which will begin to wind down its operations next year. He gave to the American Bridge 21st Century and Unite the Country political action committees.

9.Stephen Mandel, Lone Pine Capital – $2.5 million

Mandel founded hedge fund Lone Pine, which has an excellent long-term track record. He was among the top 10 highest paid hedge fund managers in 2019, with an income close to $1 billion. He gave to the American Bridge 21st Century political action committee.

10. Phillip Ragon, Intersystems Corporation – $2.5 Million

Also known as “Terry,”Ragon is the founder and CEO of private healthcare software company Intersystems. He and his wife, Susan, have signed The Giving Pledge, a trick to persuade the Commons that the plutocracy will redistribute all its money to them: so no need to tax plutocrats, aka “philanthropists”. Ragon gave to the American Bridge 21st Century political action committee.

Other Biden Loving Plutocrats:

Renaissance Technologies director Henry Laufer and his wife, Marsha, together contributed $4 million to back Biden. Stewart Bainum Jr., the chairman of Choice Hotels International, gave $2 million to the Unite the Country political action committee.

Big donors from the media industry include director Steven Spielberg and his wife, Kate Capshaw, who together gave $2.5 million. Jeffrey Skoll, the first president of eBay and founder and chairman of Participant, which has produced more than 100 feature and documentary films, gave $2 million. Family Guy creator Seth Macfarlane donated $700,000 and media mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg gave $200,000. Kathryn Murdoch and James Murdoch, son of News Corporation executive chairman Rupert Murdoch, together contributed $1.6 million. That’s called hedging, in case you wonder. The demolition of Donald Trump by Fox News’ “moderator” Chris Wallace in the first presidential debate looks less of a coincidence in this light….

Is Biden hopeless for progress? Not necessarily. As he put it long ago:

“Politics is a damn expensive business. I had one hell of a time trying to raise money as a candidate. I had to put a second mortgage on our house to get that campaign started, and I ended up spending over $300,000 to get elected. I believe that public financing of federal election campaigns is the only thing that will insure good candidates and save the two-party system. It is the most degrading thing in the world to go out with your hat in your hand and beg for money, but that’s what you have to do if you haven’t got your own resources.”

Well, it’s not just about little Biden getting humiliated. This is about the planet. When vicious thieves become the wealthiest, most influential persons in the world, we get a world founded on vice and thievery. No way to ensure the survival of civilization, being guided by the most despicable. This is a lesson to meditate worldwide, including with the Russian and Chinese dictators.

These bandits did not steal pizza slices. They stole the future.

Patrice Ayme

A Civilization Whose Media Is Controlled By A Few Is Despicable

The New York Times wants us to worry about the cruelty directed to avian dinosaurs. Why chicken? Why not rats tortured by rat poison, dying over hours in indicible suffering? Aren’t rats closer to humans than chicken? Being too concerned by animal welfare was the mark of the Nazis: they passed very advanced animal welfare laws. That enabled them to present themselves as “humane”. It was a cover-up, a change of conversation.

On April 21, 1933, almost immediately after the Nazis came to power, the parliament began to pass laws for the regulation of animal slaughter. On April 21, a law was passed concerning the slaughter of animals; no animals were to be slaughtered without anesthetic. Those Nazis were obviously keen to project an image of goodness.

It is scornful to let a few wealthy families, who all know each other, control the world media. Therein the source of monothinking… And its erroneous outcomes. The climate catastrophe could have been mitigated. But it’s not going to be. Record beating temperatures in North Eastern Siberia (the world’s coldest place, outside of Antarctica) were recently measured: 38 Celsius, more than 100 Fahrenheit, more than Houston, Texas… The mad greenhouse is supposed to cook the polar regions, as it starts rampaging. And it is. So Siberia is burning, unleashing gigantic quantities of CO2 and methane. Two weeks ago, the area on fire was as large as Switzerland, and affecting air quality in North America.

So far, so funny. But when global HEATING goes nonlinear, it’s going to be even less funny than the COVID virus… (Picture NASA, July 2, 2020)

Nicholas Kristof of New York Times in his blog, Saturday 11, 2020:

I noted in my last newsletter that I was wondering, as we pull down controversial statues, what our great-grandchildren will find bewilderingly immoral about our own times — and about us. Some of you sent in your thoughts, and the thought nagged me enough that it became my Sunday column.

I think our descendants will find our passivity on climate change unforgivable. They’ll be staggered by our indifference to human suffering. And I think they’ll be baffled by our systematic cruelty to animals, especially poultry and livestock. Read the column and then post in the comments about other moral blind spots of our time that I missed.

I sent this:

A characteristic of the recent indignation of the upper middle class reminds me of the Puritans or old: namely, they think they are so pure, and they are not. But, to make sure that they feel pure, all howling the same way, while enjoying the spoils, they accuse The Devil… namely Trump.

However, Trump is a newcomer in politics, and he did not originate most of the well installed evils in place. An obvious evil is the housing crisis, and it came directly from NIMBYism (Not In My Back Yard). Where I have lived for decades, the NIMBYists argued that non single family housing had to be demolished, because it spoiled the views. Even billionaire Feinstein (married to a Senator) said this.

What upper class “democrats” didn’t say was that, by strangling supply, they caused enormous price appreciation of their houses, and homelessness. Better to talk about “systemic racism”,as it accuses We The People to be vicious, perverse, and… despicable. Besides, it accuses of what we are not, thus confusing us.

Meanwhile public transportation was also strangled to make IPOs (Uber, etc.) while Google (etc.) enjoy their own private transportation bus system (using regular bus stops which they stole for themselves, as they generally did not pay for them).

Another despicable manoeuver? Obamacare was rolled out: 25 million new insured (getting government money to pay for it), but small people can’t see their doctors anymore, although they pay private corporations for insurance they don’t get the fruits of (I have used Obamacare for real: it’s a rip-off). Single family housing is also causative of the climate catastrophe, by the way…

***

Not holding my breath that the employees of the conspiracy of the world’s wealthiest men will dare to publish such a contribution to global thinking (the most sedate, cogent, and polite parts above constituted comments to the New York Times; they were all censored; this puts a question towards the honesty of individuals such as mr. Kristof: he reads individual comments. Then he blocks them because, well, his salary depends upon it… La grande excuse des pires salauds à travers les ages: my salary made me do it…)   … They don’t want us to think thoughts we are not supposed to have. Bleating, they like.

A Civilization Whose Media Is Controlled By A Few Is Despicable… and also idiotic. That’s why they die… but it can take a while…

Patrice Ayme

A Closed Society (China) is More Open To PANDEMICS (Coronavirus)

LACK of INFORMATION & DEBATE in NON OPEN SOCIETY FOSTERED DISASTROUS PANDEMIC

The Wuhan coronavirus spreading from China is now a pandemic that circles the globe. The prospect is daunting. A pandemic will have global consequences, despite the extraordinary travel restrictions and quarantines now imposed by many countries.

Science does not yet know how lethal the new coronavirus is. However, I can compute: we have less than 15,000 official cases and more than 300 dead so it seems the death rate is at least 3% (on the face of it that would be 5%). That means if one billion people get infected, 30 million will die. 

To these preliminary considerations, several caveats: first, out of the 15,000 infected, much more than 300 will die: the virus is known to kill patients who were improving for days in hospital beds. Second, and on a more positive note, information is exchanged between doctors, and methods to mitigate the effects of viral pneumonia are no doubt found. Even more important, the governments in the leadership of the world, the so-called “West”, governments are highly organized and have huge means: the USA has installed its first quarantine in 50 years, and uses large military bases to isolate potentially infected people.     

The Wuhan coronavirus is spreading more like influenza, which is highly transmissible, than like its slow-moving very lethal coronavirus cousins, SARS and MERS. [1]

How did we get there? It’s not just about markets mixing humans, live bats and live snakes, all infecting each other in a weird bat-snake-human ecology.

It’s also about China being huge, way too closed, and thus, too stupid for its own size. 

***

China is not an Open Society. The concept of Open Society was originated by Aspasia, a philosopher married to Athenian general and politician Pericles, who famously declared, quoting his famous funeral oration as reported by Thucydides:

“Our political system does not compete with with institutions which are elsewhere in force. We do not copy our neighbors, but try to be an example. Our administration favors the many instead of the few: this is why it is called a democracy. The laws afford equal justice to all alike in their private disputes, but we do not ignore the claims of excellence. When a citizen distinguishes himself, then he will be called to serve the state, in preference to others, not as a matter of privilege, but as a reward of merit; and poverty is no bar.

… The freedom we enjoy extends also to ordinary life; we are not suspicious of one another, and we do not nag our neighbor if he chooses to go his own way. … But this freedom does not make us lawless. We are taught to respect the magistrates and the laws, and never to forget that we must protect the injured. And we are also taught to observe those unwritten laws whose sanction lies only in the universal feeling of what is right….

Our city is thrown open to the world… We are free to live exactly as we please, and yet, we are always ready to face any danger…. We consider a man who takes no interest in the state not as harmless, but as useless; and although only a few may originate a policy, we are all able to judge it. We do not look upon discussion as a stumbling block in the way of political action, but as an indispensable preliminary to acting wisely.”

Debate is crucial to advancing understanding. Debating with oneself is indispensable, but debating with others enables debating with others enables one to go where none thought of, and thus to advance understanding. 

Beautiful words, yet, disastrously, Pericles didn’t act accordingly to them! Just the opposite. 

Chinese Dictatorship Politicians with advanced specialized N95 masks (which stop the virus particles which are 10^7 meter across, so 5 billionth of a meter bigger than the meshes in these N95)… Whereas the doctors welcoming them have pitiful masks which can’t do that. Best masks out there stop at 300 billionths of a meter, 3 times too big to stop the 2019 Coronavirus, Some chinese doctors had to make masks out of garbage bags, due to penury.

Instead in a dictatorship, few decide; the brain power is if not minute, drastically reduced. Actually it’s the multi-debating aspect of Western Europe which enabled most of the advancement of civilization in the last millennium. China, which used to be very advanced scientifically and technologically missed the debating aspect, motivated by mighty intellectual passions. Lack of fierce debate, independently of social hierarchy, is the main missing link of Confucius philosophy, which views the respect of one’s “station” in life, the most important feature of society. Hence Confucius is most compatible with Xi’s regime.

Let alone that Xi got his job in part from his parents’ station in life… 

Whereas intellectual debate and its descendants, in particular scientific, medical and technological advancement, are the exact opposite: they respect only truth, and, more generally, the search thereof. To equal the West, China will have to accept to see truths, and love thereof, be hurled around. 

Tribalists come to me and they whine; if you are not blue, you have got to be red. Their simplicity is hurt, their minds are reeling, they are looking for something to color their bland lives. Well, children, I am campaigning for the truth. Not for a particular potentate to satisfy his or her greed for power.

***

PANDEMICS FROM TYRANNICAL STUPIDITY:

On a great historical scale, one is struck by the fact the Roman State was wrecked by pandemics in the Second Century, The Third, and the Sixth. The first pandemic, during Marcus Aurelius’ reign, weakened the empire considerably. It’s not clear what happened. Clearly the army was struck as Marcus died. The lack of information is, by itself, an indictment: an Open Society would have debated and found ways to fight the epidemic. Instead, the tyrannical empire behaved as if the disastrous pandemics were no more than bad air not worth commenting upon. (By comparison, we know of the authorities in London abating pollution from coal burning already in the Fourteenth Century.)

We have more information from democracies than from the wretched Roman dictatorship. At the onset of the Thirty Years Peloponnesian war, a (highly) predictable pandemic (typhus?) hit Athens. All the population of the Attica peninsula was within the walls, thus very crowded, while armored Spartans roamed outside, destroying the land. Pericles ordered the Athenian fleet to sail to go attack the other side of the Peloponnese. Unsurprisingly, the pandemic exploded in the hyper crowded ships. The expedition became a disaster.

Pericles was recalled and tried for this, under the accusation that everybody knew crowding would make the epidemic terrible. Thus Athens was an open society, but not so open as to be able to avoid such an obvious blunder (much of the population died)… Pericles admitted he “had anticipated everything, but not not this”. Maybe if there had been more of a debate, when planning for war with Sparta, the pandemic could have been anticipated. 

Interestingly, when the dictator Napoleon attacked Russia, a similar situation developed. Apparently the Grande Armee suffered from typhus. In a democracy, the situation would have been revealed, and debated. The obvious solution was to take measures to stop the epidemic, and put off the assault against the Czar to another year. Instead, the dictator kept everything secret, and the idealistic young soldiers from Poland, Germany and other countries, in close quarters, infected each other. So efficient was the dictator that the scandal was kept secret for two centuries (archeology revealed the contaminated corpses recently). Napoleon thus undermined the spreading of revolution to Russia, and enabled the likes of old enslaving aristocrats such as Tolstoy to gloat.

If Rome had been a democratic state in the Second Century, perhaps it would have been able to mitigate considerably the pandemics which weakened it so much. 

During the terrible plague of 1348 CE, not one European aristocrat seems to have died: the nobles knew what was coming and took efficient counter-measures. However around half of the population, often ignorantly crowded praying in churches, died. So obscurantism doesn’t help.

***

SPACESHIP EARTH NEEDS TO BE OPEN TO DEBATE:

In the case of the present Coronavirus, some authorities loudly proclaimed the virus could not be transmitted from human to human, when doctors already knew with certainty that was a lie. So no timely measures were taken in Wuhan, a city of eleven million. 

We are all sharing a small planet, our common spaceship. No country owns the spaceship. No country can endanger the spaceship. Obscurantism and closed societies, anywhere, endanger us all. It was telling that Russia, Mongolia, Vietnam and even North Korea closed their borders to China: when they got informed, they acted as Open Societies should have. More generally, increasing more cooperation, by making the world more of an Open Society will enable to decrease suspicion, hence military spending, and thus augment spending on science, and in particular biology, medicine.

They said “Climate Change”. We said: WORLD CATASTROPHE. They scoffed. Now they are going to sneeze. They will sneeze because the world’s ecology has been all open, and kicked around to new possibilities, while the old biosphere dies. The intellectual climate needs to change and warm up. The time for imagination and passion has come.

The Open Society is not just a choice anymore, it’s a duty. A world duty. Not just a world moral duty, a world survival duty. China can’t ship out, so it will have to change. And not just China. As in China, throughout the West politicians and potentates have confiscated decision power. Debate needs to grab it back.

Wars used to be made about territory. It’s time to have one about fostering the proper open attitude.

Patrice Ayme

***

***

[1] Together SARS and MERS caused less than 11,000 official cases. Their lethality rates were 10% (SARS) and 33% (MERS). The 1918 “Spanish flu” killed only about 2.5 percent of its victims — but because it infected so many people and medical care was much cruder then, and disorganized by World War One, 20 to 50 million died. The evidence is that it started in crowded US military camps.

The highly transmissible H1N1 “swine flu” pandemic of 2009 killed about 285,000, fewer than seasonal flu normally does, and had a relatively low fatality rate, estimated at .02 percent. It is hoped by authorities that 2019 Coronavirus has a death rate of less than 2% (when more mild cases surface). The argument was made by Chinese authorities that Wuhan is more disorganized than the rest of China. Thus a death rate of 4% in Wuhan, 2% in the rest of China.

***

P/S: February 6, 2020. The Chinese doctor who tried to warn other medics about the coronavirus has been reported dead after contracting the infection in Wuhan. According to local state media, Dr Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist, died from the virus on Thursday.

#Breaking: Chinese doctor Li Wenliang, one of the eight whistleblowers who tried to warn other medics of the #coronavirus outbreak but were reprimanded by local police, dies of coronavirus on Thursday in Wuhan, the Global Times has learned. Li sent a message to fellow medics in a group chat on 30 December, and days later was summoned to the Public Security Bureau to sign a letter in which he was accused of making “false comments”.

Li was one of eight people being investigated by police for “rumour-mongering”.

1989: End of Cold War. Start of Unbridled Oligarchic Plutocratization. Now… Terrorized By Warren !

Warren Scares Financial Plutocracy:

There are periods for revolutions: From 1776 (onset of US war of independence), or 1789 (French and US republican and human rights constitutions) until 1848 (revolutions all over Europe) and 1865 (end of US Secession War and US slavery). Just like there are times for fascist attack: 1914-1945.

In 1789 US Vice President Al Gore announced that there was a terrestrial emergency, from the CO2 catastrophe… Not in these terms, so it was not taken too seriously by the deciding elite. 

Since then world plutocracy instrumentalized the globalization rendered possible by the end of the Cold War.

China was excluded from ISS to protect Intellectual Property

Yet even if Ms. Warren cannot get most of her more far-reaching proposals through Congress, as is likely, finance executives fear and moan that as president she would appoint regulators who would actually take a far stricter view of the industry, and enact laws and regulations passed… Under Obama.

Consider this:

“Everyone is nervous,” said Steven Rattner, a prominent Democratic donor who manages the wealth of Michael R. Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor. “What scares the hell out of me is the way she would fundamentally change our free-enterprise system.”

So the ex-mayor of New York is so wealthy, another hyper wealthy man financing “democrats” (of his own choosing, with his own ideas, and feelings) is managing his fortune… 

Meditate this:

Mitch Draizen, a former fund-raiser for Mr. Obama who made his money in the financial industry (surprise, surprise, remember we have no corruption in the USA, financing Obama is no corruption), said he would back Ms. Warren’s candidacy against Mr. Trump’s. But he is supporting former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. this time, worried about Ms. Warren’s disruptive approach. “She would be just as unpredictable and unproductive as Trump if she were to become president, and who needs that,” he said. “She’s getting a little carried away and to me it’s irresponsible.”

What is is more responsible than a great white shark?

“She’s screwing around with the wrong guy. I want to give it all away, but I want to control the decision. I don’t want the government giving away my money. The idea of vilifying wealthy people is so bogus,” billionaire Leon Cooperman, worth more than three billion dollars. Cooperman declared Warren’s proposed wealth tax is “morally and socially bankrupt.”

Plutocrats know everything about morality, they rape it, everyday. And of course everybody gives it all away: that’s called death.

Hour after hour, day after day, month after month, plutocrats use their present wealth to steer the world in the direction they like, where their perverse morality, their satanic, Dark Side morality rules. And this is the gift they leave behind. Look at Augustus.His gift was called Tiberius. And others he personally knew, who came to rule too, including… emperor Galba…

Actually Trump has mostly fought globalization, the exportation of jobs, investment and know-how to, mostly, China. And that was very effective: the US economy got a boost from it, obviously. And one can compare. Europe has been affected just as badly by the phenomenon of exporting industry and IP to China. For example, the French nuclear know-how was exported to China… while being forgotten in France. Thus now China makes and sells reactors most of the research on was made in France, for a generation. The same happened with trains, is developing with Airbus. (China was excluded, at US insistence, from the International Space Station, just from fear of IP theft… Not happening with Russia, as Russia was more advanced in more ways than one…)

However, the US, thanks to Trump’s local plutocracy drive, has reacted to the exportation of everything to China (by and for the intermediaries, those wealthy, world controlling plutocrats). Conclusion, the US has avoided a recession, for the longest time, ever. As Europe is slowly sinking into one, led by… Germany. 

A small financial elite has grabbed the levers of command of the planet. This is not really a new phenomenon, it was condemned already in the Bible. The hyper wealthy will go to paradise less than a camel through a needle, hence the interdiction to lend to one’s coreligionists found in Judaism and its descendants. The “money changers” are parasites, as soon as they earn too much money for what they do, as is presently the case. To help moneyed individuals to invest is one thing. What we have now is something else, a giant corruption machine. 

The finance industry has money laundered cash from corrupt regimes or fossil fuel industry, as set up by FDR in 1945.  Too much money is made by transactions so fast that normal individuals cannot partake, and which the “industry” itself creates. Also some of the leverage used is enormous, out of proportion relative to the size of the world real economy, it’s a case of the tail moving the dog, and a case of free money for a tiny gang. A way to cut that out is simply to introduce a financial transaction tax: even if very small, of no consequence for normal investors, it would be enough.

The hyper wealthy financial plutocracy a dreadful influence on decision makers, worldwide, starting with banks, governments. Thus the world keeps investing in fossil fuels instead of new energies (such as hydrogen, fusion, etc. energies which get less money in a year than many individual financial parasites), and in sports and the like, instead of housing for the needy (a reader here pointed out here, the salaries of a couple of sport idiots is as great as all thermonuclear research in the USA)…

The Roman Republic survived 5 centuries, thus as long as it had no billionaire (Roman Republican taxation was 100% above the equivalent of $30 million). Globalization enabled the wealthy to escape that, they plotted, and the Republic died.

Yes Trump will probably defeat Warren: too much misogyny around… And Trump has actually been effective against globalization. But what is important is to advance the ideas, change the underlying emotions. And, in four years there will be another campaign.

Patrice Ayme

***

***

Some of the essence of the preceding was sent, under more moderate guise, to the New York Times as comments of articles critical of Elizabeth Warren’s program. Such articles focus on the distress of the financial industry, the anxiety of the medical industry, as Warren threatens in the distance, etc. The latest such article confronted the ogre Warren, boldly identifying her to… Trump (as quoted above) the article also revealed the financial plutocracy is so scared that the laws and regulations passed under Obama, thanks to Sen. Warren, would be applied… Because, turns out, they are not.
Those comments of mine were censored, because the New York Times is terrorized of Warren and her alleged alter ego, Donald Trump (!) So in depth analogies and advocacy are unacceptable.

Meanwhile, to add insult to injury, Obamacare was nothing (I have long said, except a gift to the wealthiest in US health care)… Warren confirms this.

As Sanders campaigns with the Sharia refugee and perpetrator, Omar, who got elected to the US Congress to promote her opinion that women are half of men legally. Is it progressive to be pro-Sharia now? Because subjugating women is the future, according to pseudo-progressives?

***

[1] Trump supported Farage, the financial guy who became the inventor of the Brexit notion in a long phone call, last week. Now Trump is very much disliked in Britain. So that call led, unsurprisingly, to an immediate collapse of Brexit Party support by 50%! (OK, Farage not running may have helped.) People who have no feeling for Machiavellianism may not understand that, this way, Trump was helping Boris Johnson, in the guise of helping his opponent (like Nero helped Claudius with a serving of mushrooms). Another example of Machiavellianism is the Trump Impeachment by the plutocrats and plutophiles leading the “Democratic” party… It is designed to make Warren fail…

 

Chirac Damnatio Memoriae

Chirac, a prominent French dictating (and cackling!) as the great French leader. He was one, and decided Chirac presided over the degeneracy of the French Republic. So this prostitute (the true name of most politicians most of the time: they are paid and honored for the most disgusting feats, most of them, most of the time), just died, and everybody with official worth is very sad and howling their sorrow to the stars (including Angela Merkel). My way to address Chirac good riddance is a variant of the times immemorial Roman notion: a significant variant of damnatio memoriae. Whereas the Roman elite wanted to hide the fact that some of its members had been the worst of the worst, I prevent to condemn, as harshly as possible, but full exhibit, precisely to teach why and how the elite principle, in politics, is hell on Earth, and feeding it some more.[1]

Some will say Chirac doesn’t deserve so much opprobium (opprobe in French: righteous scathing censure). But the principle of celebrating such oligarchic creeps as Chirac should certainly be condemned (OK, Trump will probably say that Chirac was “beautiful”, I can already see it from here, as Chirac, followed by Trump, opposed Bush’s Iraq folly).

Does that mean I condemn all and any politicians and their actions? No. Although Direct Democracy (People-Power, people vote directly the laws) is a must and should rule, so-called “representatives” will keep on having their uses. For example even Chirac, first Paris mayor, ever, in that function, had some positive use (and I am 100% behind Anne Hidalgo the present mayor of Paris, a socialist, who pursues pro-construction and anti-car policies I approve; I enjoyed her 3.80 Euro all day all transport ticket, during the Paris peak heat day in July, 43.6C, two whole degrees above the all time preceding record…) 

Selecting the lesser devil is selecting a devil. The problem can be mitigated in politics, by introducing more direct, real democracy. Then we have to select ideas, not devils.

Chirac was one of the vision deprived leaders presiding over the decay of France in the name of a half-baked, half-finished construction of the European Union. 

Chirac was indeed loquacious, but not eloquent. Most electable politicians are loquacious, not eloquent; they have nothing deep to say, besides feel good sentiment spread all around, so as to better reflect onto their self-obsessed selves. 

However, we are in times which require depth never imagined before. Hugging Germany,as Chirac did, is nice, but Germany is now a real republic (not a fake one like Weimar, truly the “Second Reich”). One needs to tell Germany the truth (its economic and ecological policies are medium term disastrous)and go much further to integrate Europe in a timely manner, and there Chirac was a brainless zero. (OK, Britain prevented any in depth integration, preferring to call the European Union a “club”)

Jacques Chirac led France primordially for no less than four decades, including a long stay as Prime Minister, Mayor of Paris, and then 12 years as elected king (“president”). So much importance for one man is not just insulting, it is a disease the planet is dying from: a small number of seducers (“elected politicians”) take all the decisions, among themselves, while serving who will pay them next, the wealthiest and most powerful persons on the planet. The result is that there is no debate, and disastrous policies are followed.

Chirac correctly opposed the Iraq invasion by W. Bush, preventing its formal approval by the UN. 

That, only that, can be celebrated.

***

However, overall, the fact remains that professional politicians are ruining the planet. Honoring the memory of one of them, and, through them, the principle of a leading oligarchy, is not just morally wrong. It is celebrating the engine of destruction of the biosphere and, potentially, humanity. 

Patrice Ayme

***

***

[1] Damnatio memoriae means “condemnation of memory”, from Latin damnare “to adjudge guilty; to doom; to condemn, blame, reject”. The Romans used it by excluding that person from official accounts. There are and have been many routes to damnatio, including the destruction of depictions, the removal of names from inscriptions and documents, and even large-scale rewritings of history. The practice came from Egypt, where it was used, forever. A famous case was the eradication of Egyptian pharaoh Hatshepsut in the fourteenth century BC… probably because she was a woman, and her successor was leery, after three decades of a powerful reign, to admit he owed his position to a mighty female) Soon after, the highly controversial dictators of monotheism, Akhenaten and Nefertiti were also eradicated when the ancient socio-religious Egyptian system was re-established after their death. The Romans may well have learned those ways from Egypt…

Damnatio Memoriae could be passed by the Roman Senate on traitors and criminals who brought discredit to the Rome. However, I disapprove of official scrubbing; instead, the abominable person (say Louis XIV, Napoleon, Heidegger, Clinton) should be condemned, again and again, for pedagogical and cultural reasons

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[2] I also approve of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren wealth tax campaigns: hopefully they will persuade the semi-educated rabble out there.The new “No More Billionaire” slogan of Bernie, I have used in the past… Wealth control at the billionaire scale should be authorized only for companies legislated as of “public utility”. An example would be Bezos’ “Blue Origin” rocket company. 

So politicians like Warren and Sanders communicate and propagate themes intellectuals such as your truly have advocated previously. That’s good and necessary. Just like the decisions making of Trump against global plutocracy implement policies I have advocated for decades.

(And what did Obama do? Basically nothing… and that hurts.)

Europe United States’ (Of America!) What Deep Greek and Frankish History Teaches On Brexit Pettiness

Brexit repeats a mood of enmity from hysteria and pettiness, seen in Ancient Greece, feeding Greek hatred for Greeks. That self-defeating obsession was Greece’s undermining, enabling Rome to subjugate Greek mindfulness with Roman greed. Greece subjugation, when not outright annihilation, brought, in turn, two millennia of fascism and plutocracy, thereafter, having forgotten what democracy truly is.

However, the Greeks had the excuse of variegated origins, and the intrusion of an alien superpower, Rome. Instead, right now the USA and the Europe have a common origin, the latter being not just parent of the former, but having long been one superpower made of bits and pieces. Common Euro-American origin undermines the division ideology, not just because we don’t want to go down the Greco-Roman, dog eats dog suicidal slippery slope, but also because this common origin deprives division of its motivation.

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Empires are a fact. Not just a theory, but a fact. “Empire” means the government is endowed with imperium, a powerful, sometimes lethal command of elected authority. It does not necessarily mean fascist dictatorship. The Roman Republic was an empire, before it got rotten, fascist, mass exterminating and inhuman. The USA is certainly an empire, and a representative democracy, and nearly a direct democracy in California. Empires present advantages, by breaking down barriers, and petty local regulations, corruption, creating big markets, powerful defense, etc. Ancient Greece failed because it failed to constitute an empire. Athens tried, and failed, because of the plutocratic alliance of Sparta and Persia. A century later, Macedonian plutocracy imposed plutocracy to Athens. Later, while Greek city states fought each other, Rome came in, and annihilated Corinth, viewed as too democratic because it was fighting Sparta. Then Rome proceeded to reduce all of Greece into slavery (with a few tiny counterexamples, to justify the rest).

This shows only a fraction of the Greek world (which extended to Egypt, Libya, Crimea, Georgia, etc.) Moreover the map itself oversimplifies. For example Thessaly, in blue, south of green Macedonia, was, itself, a CONFEDERATION of cities. So this is a map of confederation, mostly! So far, so good, but they were actually fighting each other. So cities with, say 20,000 citizens, fought each other… And the Roman legions showed up. Republican Rome in 150 BCE had a population of at least three million, and that expanded enormously, by a factor of ten, as many states (say other Italians, Provincia (“Provence”), Africa, Iberia) became part of the empire. With a demography at least 40 times the most populous Greek city-state, Athens, Rome could do whatever its increasingly brutish instincts told it to do with Greek civilization. Civilizationally speaking, Rome, relative to Greece, was a big noise and fury, signifying nothing… Had the Greeks being federalized, with a Greek army, Rome could not have subdued them. But that was completely impossible: cities such as Sparta and Athens had just the love of (their own) freedom in common… Whereas the USA is the child of France and Britain 

There was no Ancient Greek empire, because the Greeks were too busy developing crazed out peculiarities, and putting lots of pride in this… similar to Brexiters. The ancient Greeks were obsessed by their little selves and quirks [1]. A Greek empire could have instilled some reason, and enabled ancient Greek civilization, the most advanced to survive. Same nowadays in Europe.

For example, Great Britain is corrupt. Corrupt in a way peculiar to Great Britain. Thus, being part of a larger ensemble may enable the UK to come out of this corruption. Indeed, the EU tried to make Great Britain less corrupt, but the corrupt ones rebelled, and, through their dominance of the minds of their unenlightened subjects, got them to decide against their best interest.

113,000 potential taxpayers are living in Britain while also being a ‘non-domiciled’ in the U.K… as far as taxes are concerned. Those extremely wealthy individuals control the UK media… to the point even intelligent Brits don’t know any better.

Tax avoidance by the global elite is eating the world’s social structure with extreme inequality. It was high time to do something about it within Europe, starting with the most egregious behavior.

EU member states have until 31 December 2019 to make this sort of blatant tax avoidance scheme by plutocrats illegal in their own national law. British plutocrats paying tax? Unimaginable! God save the queen of tax evasion!

This tax evasion is the driving force behind Brexit: the advocates of Brexit, pigeons paid by some of the world’s richest individuals have imprinted millions of parrots, who love to imagine themselves as “Non-Doms”. Why isn’t this motivation advertised more?

Why? Consider France: the media there is owned by plutocrats too, just as in the UK, and they have huge tax avoidance schemes in place as laws in the tax system. If the Pluts were stupid enough to call attention to the non-Dom reason for Brexit, they would bring along a mood questioning tax avoidance schemes in general…. and in particular, the schemes contrived in the legal system they profit from…

British Plutocracy Hates Losing Its Tax Advantages, hence Came To Hate Europe. And made sure to make the minds of the British that way, through its control of media. We The People should control control of the media by the few and wealthiest. It is a case where absolute control is needed.

The world is divided in empires, and some are vassal to others. One empire is dominant: the USA. One recently decided to be uppity: China. It’s put back into its proper place by its former sponsor, the USA.

The European UNION is an empire, yet just a subsidiary of the USA, and will stay that way forever, just as parents become dependent upon their child. A standing alone UK would be even more of a US puppet.

The present world picture is enlightened by considering what happened in the Middle Ages, or in Ancient Greece. In the Middle Ages, the two superpowers, England, the child, and “France”, the parent, were in conflict. The kings of Francia, a number of Valois, versus the Plantagenets, the guys who planted genets… It was a big mess, roaring about, signifying nothing.

The EU is a confederation vassal to the USA, similar to the “free” Greek Confederacies, themselves made of many city-states, vassal to Rome in the First and Second Centuries, BCE. The UK breaking away from the EU is similar to a Greek city-state separating from the Confederacy it belonged to. It happened many times, fostering divisions among the Greeks… thereafter to be gobbled up by Roman fascism…   Brexit is more of this petty hysterical nationalism which characterized the Greeks, while Rome was thinking universally…

However, on second, deeper inspection, the relationship between France, Britain, Germany, the USA (and their ideological satellites, including Australia and Italy) is not as in between Greek city-states, or Greece and Rome. Indeed Greek city-states had just one language, but various origins.

And Rome was still something else, tracing itself to Ilion (Troy). Whereas, in the “West”, all can be traced to Celts, Romans and Greece, through the gauntlet of the Franks (Imperium Francorum, by 800 CE the Renovated Roman Empire, RRE).

Things get even more complicated, when one realizes that France and Britain, in a number of ways, gave birth to the USA.

Now, indeed, the Greeks brought to the Romans knowledge, and even the alphabet (through “Magna Grecia”,as in Neopolis, “Naples”, to the south). So this way, Greece gave birth to Rome, intellectually speaking.

But in Western Europe, most of the Greco-Roman law, organization, moods, let alone language, and religion, survived through the Franks, and then drove the unification of Europe, complete by 800-1066 CE. See the Franks conquering all of Germany by 800 CE, and Eastern Europe, finding silver there, thus relaunching a currency economy, which Rome didn’t have enough precious metal to run; see the Franks conquer England by 1066 CE, and freeing the slaves… Or conquering Sicily against the Muslims, a few years later.

This is this united Europe, yet fighting with itself, which gave birth to the USA. As I said, even when fighting itself, as Greece was fighting itself, Europe was much more united than Ancient Greece, because of the common Greco-Roman-Frankish origin: the Greeks never had any such unification event: even when they went to attack Ilion/Troy, that was an alliance of city-states with very different origins (for example Sparta had nothing in common with Athens, their origins, Dorain for the former, were different).

European unification is actually very old, older than Rome: the big god of the Celts was… Hermes, the Greek god of commerce, travel, etc. Later, the rising Roman military power depended upon (purchased!) Celtic metallurgy.

Delusional Brexiters claim California will someday want to secede. They don’t understand that the US empire is an advantage and amplifier, for California. Why would California want to leave an Union it leads by the nose… with an average of a few referendums every few months?

The real problem of Europe right now is not enough local, direct democracy. Switzerland should be imitated, instead of going the Napoleonic route favored by Boris I Johnson… Because that the funny thing: Brexiters are proposing to impose the Napoleonic “Continental System“… complete with blockade…

Certainly, if the British people understood that the Brexit scheme was just motivated by having the wealthiest British citizens keeping on avoiding taxes, they would vote through referendum for exactly what the EU is trying to impose on December 31, 2019. That sort of EU decisions is taken actually by all the elected governments getting together inside the European Council, and hashing down a consensus. It would be better if such decisions were assisted by global EU referendums.

The EU will stay vassal to its child, the USA. Because the US is a stronger federation (some of its strength due to luck, some to diligence). The US is already a European Union… But on its own (conquered) continent.

Meanwhile, the pettiness of Brexiters waste all Europeans’ time away from more significant issues. And it will never end: the present drama is just about the transition period. After that, there will be ten years of exit negotiations. Brexit is Brexinfinity, because Britain is in Europe, whether it likes it or not, and whether it’s led by Henry VIII, Boris I, or Napoleon… Dumb stuff.

Meanwhile an hostile agent (Iran or proxies) made at least 17 impacts on the world’s largest oil installations, in Saudi Arabia, using GPS guided cruise missiles. (yes GPS is a US system). That took out 7% of the world oil production (5.7 million barrels out of 81 millions). At the limit, that doesn’t’ affect the ruling empire, the USA… which is the world’s top oil producer, and also the world’s top sustainable energy producer. But it does affect its European vassals, which are livid… And soon to feel much more affectionate to Uncle Sam, and its big muscles… Trump doesn’t want a war, especially now with a tough election ahead. Iran knows this. But, when the Deep State is really smart, and really capable, it knows nothing beats maximal force.

In an empire, force, applied well and best, is more important than elections, because survival is more important than formalities [2]. Not just my opinion: the Roman Republic, the longest Republic, ever, lasted five centuries. Rome had the function known as the “dictatorship” (for special emergencies as when a Gallic horde sieged, sacked, and blackmailed Rome, before being justly annihilated…)

Patrice Ayme

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P/S: The preceding is not meant to assert that, say, British fishermen are wrong, when they complain French fishermen come over and fish in their more fish rich waters… That seems to be true, and is, at first sight, an injustice. However, the first reasoning is fishy, because much, if not most, of the British fish production is sold on the continent… Without custom duties! The EU, as it exists, doesn’t have the means to impose its laws: they are enforced by the member states. The fish quarrel can, and should be, solved on a local level. There are thousands of those, no problem.

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[1] As I said, Athens had an empire for a while… and needed one because of its wheat coming from the Pont (hundreds of kilometers east of Byzantium). That empire was broken because of the satanic alliance of Sparta with Persia… And later, again, by Macedonia’s Antipater…

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[2] Greek city-states, most of them real, that is, direct democracies (to Cicero’s disgust), had emergency provisions to suspend all laws in case of vital emergencies… Just like the Roman Republic.