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…

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…

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.

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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

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[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.

Warren: Progress, Survival of the Republic. Biden: More Plutocratization, Death.

Biden and other “democrats” in the 1980s voted Reagan’s anti-democratic laws (called by some the “New Jim Crow“). Then, in 1990s, those “Neoliberal” [1] democrats went further than even Reagan did, but in the same spirit, putting millions in jail, and then daring to unravel the banking reform of 1933 (passed by the Democrats of 1933, headed by FDR: the “New Deal“). Much of this extravagant return to the roaring twenties needs to be reverted.

One can’t have democracy and plutocracy at the same time. That’s why the Roman Republic put a cap on wealth: above some high level, Roman millionaires were taxed 100%. Yes, a margin tax rate of 100% (similar rates existed in the 1950s, when clean economic expansion was at its maximum: not a coincidence).

Also the Roman Republic taxed ostentatious wealth (“sumptuary” laws; an equivalent today would be to tax private jets; instead private jets are subsidized, while they contribute 1% of US CO2 emissions!).

More than 130,000 families have wealth above 50 million US$. Those should be taxed into extinction, Roman Republic manner. It is a question of survival of life as we know it on this planet. Why? Those 130,000 families worth more than $50 million, own roughly ALL WORLD MEDIA, which control cognition, hearts and minds. And they control the fossil-fuel-financial plutocracy system, which controls the world economy and the political class (truly their obsequious servants).

All this taxation of hyper wealth enabled the Roman Republic to last 5 centuries. However, because of the globalization the Roman empire brought, those anti-extreme-wealth laws became inapplicable, and the Roman rich became so wealthy, they could buy all politicians.,, and laws, or prevent the application of existing laws. When plutocracy took over Rome, the Republic collapsed.

Warren’s suggested heavy taxation of extreme wealth follows logic and history: otherwise the republic will die. So Warren’s candidacy is not just a matter of getting an experienced woman in power, it’s a matter of survival.

It is a woman with full power, queen Bathilde of the Frankish empire, an ex-slave, who, in 655 CE, outlawed slavery in Europe.  We need more of the feminine approach. Vote Warren, forget about the eternal return of the same, with Biden.

***

The preceding was a published comment to the New York Times. Then surfaced a history challenged Californian:

Cold Eye, from Kenwood CA, who said:”However, slavery in Europe was prevalent through the 19th Century.”

What is happening to the schools? The New York Times was kind enough to allow me to post the following answer:

@Cold Eye

You mean this figuratively in Western Europe. Russia was a different case, where serfs were often little better than slaves. It is true that, during the first century of industrial age , workers were treated very badly.

However, none of this is true slavery. In true slavery, people are bought and sold, as they were things. Those “things” performed like robots, enabling the colonization of the “New” World. For example, tobacco cultivation became very profitable in the English colony of North America, thanks to the massive utilization of slaves.

The colonies were far removed from Europe, and European law enforcement had proven illusory during the Spanish Conquista (in spite of determined efforts). The French colony of Canada imposed French law pretty well, it didn’t allow slavery, but the price paid was that the anything-goes English colony won the war, and ultimately conquered French Canada.

So I repeat my statement: queen Bathilde of the Imperium Francorum, ex-slave from Kent (England) outlawed slavery in 1066 CE. When the Franks conquered England in 1066 CE, they immediately freed all the slaves (explaining William’s popularity). Slaves coming from the Americas or Africa were immediately freed upon setting foot in Europe, for ever after (except in places under Muslim jurisdiction).

By the way, there is still slavery in some African countries. In the Kaye region of Mali, individuals who disagree too much with local slavery get killed. In Mauritania, there is at least half a million slaves. These two countries are next to each other. In Nigeria, Muslim Fundamentalists practice mass slavery, and so on. The reason is that the Qur’an takes slavery for granted:”those that your right hand posses” being the euphemism therein…

Who said progress doesn’t exist?

Outlawing slavery on most of the planet and formally at the United Nations was great progress, an extension of Saint Bathilde’s work (the foremost saint I recognize, if not the only one…). But all will come to nought, if plutocracy is able to progress and corrupt cognition, hearts and minds ever more. As I pointed out, we could start losing the oxygen making mechanism soon… And that comes from the fact a very small elite has perverted the planet mental system, by owning much of what matters.

Time to revert it.

Vote Warren.

Patrice Ayme

***

***

P/S: And for new European Commission head? A woman, once again!

Margrethe Vestager, the powerful EC competition commissioner ticks many of the boxes needed for a righteous candidate: she can get things done, she is acceptable to the centre-right EPP and the S&D. She is championed by the Liberals and now more powerful Greens, whose votes will be needed to make a majority.

Ms Vestager has served as education, interior and economy minister of Denmark. As a EC commissioner since 2014 she has applied both a liberal sense of consumer rights and an interventionist commitment to regulating technology giant monopolies. She has taken on tax dodgers, infringers of personal privacy and market distorters. Thrusting macho hare brained bullies from Silicon Valley have turned up in her office berating her and come off the worse… So she can operate with the French who have long wanted to tax those financial and tech bullies whose main business model is monopolization and tax evasion. 

The EU in 2019 faces an array of security and economic threats. It needs a powerful, efficient, undaunted leader with experience of the European Commission and a sense of how the world is changing (for the worse). Europe needs a leader who can stand up for Europe and suggest legislation defending its citizens. It needs someone acceptable to left and right, north and south. Europe has to chose Ms Vestager.

***

[1]: “Neoliberal” often seems little more than “neofascist”….

 

 

Macron: Enable the RIC (Referendum Initiative Citizen) It Will Enrich Us, Make the World Go Non Aristotelian

France used to lead Europe, thus much if not most of civilization. Recently civilization degenerated, so did France… The latter best illustrated by the burning of Notre Dame, an event unimaginable for 856 years (and which did not happen accidentally, one way, or another…).

France is now a shadow of her former self. One first thing to do: cancel the ENA, the National Administration School, a sort of MBA gone Stalinist. The very idea of an MBA is bad, mix it with statism a la Stalin, and you get the tax Gulag, minus the efficiency. All those Enarques know is tax people, augment their own power, and chuckle at their own superiority, while they couldn’t even be janitors.

Once that ENA madness is out-of-the-way, hopefully maybe lots of other MBAs will follow, worldwide.

Next, the RIC, which will make us RICH. Macon should want to be the RIC RICH president.

In a RIC, the signatures of, say, 900,000 citizens (this is proportional to the Swiss system) support a proposition, it should come to a vote, what the Romans under the Republic, called a Plebiscite (as the Plebs voted)

The Roman Republican system was very complex, but it had many elements of Direct Democracy, more than any powers of Antiquity, but for Athens (Athens was democratic for two centuries, but Rome for a much longer five, and thus had plenty of time to grow). This near Direct Democracy is no doubt why Rome became a superpower.

Delphi, Temple of Athena. Motto: “Know Thyself!”… However, dear Delphi, If you want to know thyself, debate.

France must be at least as democratic as Switzerland: so let’s COPY the Swiss referendums system. This direct democracy does not have to be mislead us into madness, Brexit style. Switzerland has plenty of safeguards. After initial mistakes, like forbidding more minarets, the Swiss have been learning to use referendums smartly. So they use them ever more.

If a great power like France, nine times larger than Switzerland, adopts RIC, the world will change for the better. This will honor your presidency, by making it arguably as so historically significant as to enable the core of what 1789 tried to achieve.

Right now, worldwide, no more than 10,000 individuals take all the decisions. This is not just dictatorial and oligarchic, it’s stupid.Most of these 10,000 are professional politicians, a profession which should not exist. It is as if they were professional humans. The Polis, the City is ours, it should be ours. Instead, it becomes, theirs, the ownership, the rent, of a few, the politicians. In the USA, where who earns what is a bit clearer, many politicians have become extravagantly wealthy (up to above a billion dollars)… from influence trafficking, obviously (although of course they play on words and claim it’s not exactly what it looks like). Others used immense inherited wealth to reach the top (the two Roosevelts, JFK, the two Bushes, Trump).

The oligarchic system we have, electing a few individuals each “representing” hundreds of thousands of constituents, is infantilizing, eschew debates, and the built up of smarter ideas. It also makes politics uninteresting. Unsurprisingly it is counterbalanced by Direct Democracy in the USA, explaining much superiority thereof…

In green, the US states were initiatives and referenda are both allowed. As one can see, mostly in the economically highly performing, tech advanced and more liberal West, plus Maine, business savvy Illinois, and intellectual Massachusetts… Get the message?

The oligarchic representative system has to be completed by DIRECT DEMOCRACY, where people vote themselves, and think by themselves as if they were in charge, because, in democracy, they are. During the campaign on a particular issue, the example of California and Switzerland show that people debate.And they debate so much that, quite often, public opinion flips from a well admitted position at the beginning of the campaign, to its exact opposite.

Referendums will have to satisfy the Constitution, and even Court challenges: in 2018 in Switzerland, out of 10 propositions which passed, 5 were challenged in court. Then, of course Parliament has to make the referendum into law by implementing the details.

Another system used in Antiquity was to draw some commissions by lot: this way one could make it harder for vested interest to influence political oversight. The state of Oregon presently uses such a system to overview the referendum system there.  

Direct Democracy makes states wealthy and promotes a fairer society (Switzerland has some of the most egalitarian laws, passed by referendum; California passed a surtax on the wealthiest, by referendum, too)

***

Direct Democracy was killed in Athens after Macedonian dictator Antipater defeated democracy in battle twice, took control, and replaced democracy by plutocracy (only a few wealthy citizens voted, a bit what we have in practice now; from the brainwashing of Pluto media, the Sheeple votes as it is told, consider Brexit).

The disease is deep: Antipater was Aristotle’s Will Executor. Aristotle hated democracy. Just as his mentors and colleagues and predecessors Plato and Socrates, Aristotle was from the very top of society, and he preferred dictatorship, dictators, and monarchs as his student, Alexander.

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2014/09/28/aristotle-destroyed-democracy/

So Aristotle was popular with potentates, for 24 centuries.

The time has come for Macron to do to Aristotle in politics, as Buridan did to Aristotle in physics: Buridan, seven centuries ago, introduced impetus: if no force acted on an object, it would go as before indefinitely: the opposite of what Aristotle stupidly believed.  

Aristotle stupidly believed that the mind of one was better than the minds of the many. That was obviously petty and extraordinarily stupid, thus extremely seductive to potentates, who are always looking for idiocies the Sheeple can learn by rote, so they will be unable to think of anything else….

Athens demonstrated the opposite of what Aristotle promoted: in a few decades, during total democracy, Athens, with a tiny population, had defeated the enormous fascist imperial plutocracy of Persia, freed Egypt, and left many great works.

Athens knew very well that Aristotle was a dangerous snake: he had to flee for his life, chuckling all the way as an evil character from a cartoon for children.

France can show the way by going beyond Aristotle.

The rest of the world will follow.

Macron should take a bold step forward, forge civilization back into the shape of democratic humanity… As it was during the evolution of our species: in families, or small human groups, there is debate, not fascism. Fascism is something civilization invented on a massive scale, like CO2. It is something there is too much of, right now. We need all the smarts we can gather, thus plug all brains in parallel, return to our debating roots.

RIC! Enrich minds, debates and hopes!

Patrice Ayme

***

***

Note on the timing of the preceding: French President Macron will make an important discourse on measures he proposes to address Gilets Jaunes’ grievances, 4/25/2019.  I have pushed for Direct Democracy forever. If france adopted it, Swiss or California style, it would change the world. The USA has already partly such a system

Brexit: Keep Britain In, Under Lock and Key! Caesar’s and Charlemagne’s Dream, Not Waterloo’s Revenge!

The Roman empire succeeded a gigantic unification of Western Europe and North Africa. It was peaceful, and wealthiest, for centuries, before a sudden collapse from an invasion by Vandals (literally!) in 406 CE (after more than two centuries of military pressure from various German tribes). Now, nearly two millennia later, Britannia and Algeria are acting up. Britannia is out of sorts, after decades of anti-European hate mongering by wealthy manipulators. Whereas Algeria is acting up, for the best reasons, out of righteousness, after 57 years of FNL dictatorship engineered by a French general (however strange that may sound, that’s what happened, what I have been saying for decades; a paradox many young Algerians are daring to express at last!)

It’s another paradox that Brexit aims at unifying the continent, excluding Britain, exactly the opposite of British policy under… Napoleon. Was Waterloo, Trafalgar, for nought!… However now Brexit is turning into Brexinfinity, a malady of infinite uncertainty…

A little reminder, from a Remainer: England and Algeria were in the Roman empire for centuries. The empire was the wealthiest, most prosperous part of the world. That prosperity lasted until military decay, and then collapse, first at the hands of the Goths (mostly). In the century after the 406 CE collapse, the Franks started a long conquest of Germania Magna… Following Julius Caesar’s final message: the Republic could be made safe only under final borders. Now, in a way, the UN is the borders… As civilization in its best version so far, conquered the planet…

I am a mortal enemy of Brexit. I think the European Union as it is organized, is a disaster, but it’s less of a disaster than no Union at all. Of course, Britain should be part of the Union. However all too many British are Pluto pawns driven to madness by the deep emotional misinformation in which they bathe.

Indeed, there are lots of the problems of the present European Union, including pig-headed expansion, were caused by British bullying. The EU immigration so decried by the Brexiteers was therefore a British Pluto trick… second only to non-EU immigration to Britain… thus demonstrating in an even deeper way that massive immigration to Britain was organized by the same manipulators who are behind Brexit.

I have argued that ejecting Britain out of the EU could have unforeseen consequences, that alienation is a very bad thing, etc.

The classical case of this, I insisted, was the estrangement of Western Francia from the rest of the Roman empire in the Tenth Century (that Roman empire is often erroneously labeled by unfaithful historian “Carolingian” empire). That brought one millennium of war (all the way to Hitler). Now the Western Franks had a very good reason to split: the Roman empire had not defended them against the Vikings by eradicating the latter. Instead Western Franks had to defend themselves by their own means. So Frexit had an excellent reason.

So happy together. British press always refer to the Union as a “block”, or “club”. That’s how propaganda works, by disparaging those one wants to hate: would you like your union to be called a “bloc”? Macron and Merkel and their common republican home. Neither the Kaiser, nor Hitler would have been happy to see this, they would have been revolted, apoplectic, enraged, uncomprehending. But the Kaiser was the grandson of British queen Victoria. Republic s such as present day Germany and France, don’t need “Royal assent” (as British politicos do) Brexit, or Exit Britannia from its royal mind…

The case of Brexit is completely different from the Frexit of the Tenth Century: half of the British electorate has been rendered stupid, delusional and angry from plutocratic propaganda, and enormous lies. They have to snap out of it, they need psychiatric treatment.

However, the EU is in a maelstrom. The planet is dying, etc. Can we afford a few more years taking care of delusional Brits, at the exclusion of the needed further federalization of the European Union?

No.   

Did I change my mind?

Well, the head of (misleading called) European Research Group Jacob Rees-Mogg, changed my mind. I listened to him for a long time. The gentleman looks very calm and collected, full of certainty for his delirious absurdities, the sort of certainty many promoters of Nazism exhibited, with somewhat similar absurdities.     

Brexiters are determined to keep on sabotaging Europe, so that Europe can become a better poodle for global plutocracy and USA. Should wisdom then activate Waterloo’s revenge, and kick them out all together, or just keep them out of European Parliament?

Verified account @Jacob_Rees_Mogg: “If a long extension leaves us stuck in the EU we should be as difficult as possible. We could veto any increase in the budget, obstruct the putative EU army and block Mr Macron’s integrationist schemes.” Prominent Brexiteer MP Mark Francois, said that if the U.K. remained in the “bloc“, “then in return we will become a Trojan Horse within the EU.” In return, or will return to? Honesty requires to admitting the second formulation.

What to do? Throwing the UK out may be reasonable, at first sight, considering such a mindset from prominent UK politicos.

E U solidarity with the Republic of Ireland has been total. The EC chief negotiator, Michel Barnier confirmed that, in the event of a no-deal Brexit, the EU would make solving the Irish Border issue a prerequisite for any re-starting of trade talks with the UK. That’s the so-called “backstop”: the EU will enforce it. As things stand, the UK is due to leave the EU on Friday, April 12th, midnight, Franco-German time. As decided by the last EU summit. The rhetoric is escalating, as the EU is threatening to use some sort of force.

Tough? Yes. But we can’t Brexinfinity forever… So what should Macron do? Without Britain to sabotage in the name of global plutocracy, France has only to deal with Germany. And much can, and should be done.

Meanwhile, a number of EU states want the British government signed up to conditions that would bring “sincere cooperation” from the UK during its extended membership, including restraining from involvement in budget discussions or agreeing to go without a European commissioner (each full member gets one).

It is crucial that an extension of Article 50 and Brexit limbo, would not allow British politicians, and in particular, a Brexiteer prime minister, to damage EU interests. (I proposed that the UK would not sit on the European Parliament.)

If independence from British meddling, while the UK keeps on saying it wants out, but is still in, can’t be insured, Britain should be kicked out.

***

Trump Accuses Airbus To Have Sabotaged the 737 MAX with negative vibes, punishment coming:

Meanwhile, indeed, the most imperial Trump is acting up. As I exposed, Boeing’s 737 MAX is misshapen and shouldn’t be allowed to fly (if they correct the software which makes the plane plunge towards the ground, it will tend to stall…). That’s an immense disaster: more than 5,000 of the type were ordered, worth up to $130 million each.  So what does Trump do to come to the rescue? Accuse and punish Airbus with 11 billion dollars of sanctions on things like… cheese. That’s imperial logics at its best. Already French cheese sold in the US is mangled by the authorities in such a way, that’s it turns disgusting pretty quickly. But that’s not enough, Boeing designed a plane in the 1960s, tries to sell it in 2020s, doesn’t work, it’s the fault of Airbus!

***

Not to take those things lightly, the tit and the tat, the French Republic’s Parliament passed a GAFA law:

The law now goes to the French Senate (which is controlled by the opposition).

I have advocated to pass such a law for a decade. Tax according to revenues, not profits. The French GAFA law taxes 3% of revenues in companies with worldwide revenues above 750 million Euros. The rest of Europe, apparently paralyzed by terror, watches the French with the fascination of prey species seeing forces they can’t comprehend counterattack American predators.

US pawns and minnows, Sweden, Finland, Ireland and Denmark blocked a draft EU-wide GAFA tax proposal over the weekend. In the last World War, when Hitler killed himself as the coward he had become, Ireland sent condolences to his successor, war criminal Doenitz. Ireland had refused to help the Allies in WWII, to the point that it preferred being at Hitler’s (implicit) side rather than accept Churchill offer of Irish reunification! So now Ireland is Apple’s tax evasion agent, worldwide. Always going for the strongest, baddest empire around.

Whereas Ireland was passively pro-Hitler. Sweden was so pro-actively pro-Hitler that, had Sweden not been around, Hitler’s war effort would have been stunted from the start: Sweden provided Hitler with raw materials and weapons necessary to the Nazi war machine. Had not France fallen suddenly after 10 May 1940, the French Foreign Legion would have cut Sweden in two, as it was poised to do (that’s why the Legion was not in France during the battle of France). Finland was outright allied with Hitler (and stayed at war technically with Britain until 1948). And Denmark? Denmark fought six hours in World War Two, before surrendering… (Whereas the French ceasefire of 26 June 1940 turned into the Bir Hakeim battle 23 months later, where the Italian and the Afrika Korps suffered a strategic defeat they didn’t recover from…

See the note on Bir Hakeim at the end of: New Thinking Always A Combat.

In other words, small countries such as Sweden, ireland, Denmark, Finland refuse a EU wide GAFA tax, because they are US agents… And why that? Because they fear the USA more than they fear France, and they fear the European Union, not at all. Britain, of course, aspire to the same level of prostitution, forgetting reality in the process…

Confronted to the French GAFA tax, the American imperialists howled to high heavens, but skeptics pointed out that the French GAFA tax is probably not even a third of what should be the fair amount. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo warned last week that the tax would hurt both the American firms and the French citizens who use the platforms. Fortunately, the French are sadomasochists, so it should be alright.

The USA is an empire, China is an empire, Russia is an empire, Brazil is an empire, Indonesia, Japan, are clearly empire, India is an empire… And Pakistan (population 200 million) put a fatwa on yours truly.  

What is Europe in all of this? Throwing Britain out, as amply deserved, would make Europe into an empire, something that gives out orders (imperium, even lethal ones). But, at this point, it would not be the smartest thing. Better to let England fully experience the folly of taking one’s orders, hearts, facts and souls from global plutocratic media.

Meanwhile, those who don’t like a European empire as either Putin gas dependent (Germany), aspiring prostitutes (UK), and, in general, lovers of all empires, but for one leading European destinies optimally. This tendency in Europe is fundamentally a laziness, a lethargy, an infantilism. It was vastly behind the so-called decolonization movement… which was, all too often, a plutocratization movement. The best example there is Algeria, which, at last, is understanding that De Gaulle was the head of the FNL…  Hey, I must admit, a slightly harder notion to understand than the fact that PM May is a Remainer, a Remainer of the Machiavellian type, vastly underestimated by the enraged Brexiters she outmaneuvers at every turn and twist…

So let the European Union give a gigantic Article 50 extension to a defanged UK: the rights of the UK as a full EU member will be restored after its third EU referendum, the one when the UK will decide to Remain, in a year or so… Meanwhile there is a lot of empire to build…

Patrice Ayme

 

Plane Smart, Not Plain Stupid: The Evil Ones Hurt Equality, The Environment With Private Jets… And They Love It!

I have mentioned this many times over the years, here and there. Now The Economist tied it all up together in a neat little essay, which uses many of the concepts I used over the years, such as “plutocrats”, “subsidies for the rich”, “Isle of Man” (a European tax haven, Pluto friends of mine use it…), So I will quote, in extenso, this magazine to which I subscribe.

The Economist: “PLANE STUPID. Private jets receive ludicrous tax breaks that hurt the environment. Scrap them

Print edition | Leaders, Mar 7th 2019

The blue jeans and t-shirts of the global elite are no more comfortable than those worn by the middle class. They drink the same coffee, watch the same films and carry the same smartphones. But a gulf yawns between the rich and the rest when they fly. Ordinary folk squeeze agonizingly and sleeplessly into cheap seats. The elite stretch out flat and slumber. And the truly wealthy avoid the hassles and indignities of crowded airports entirely, by taking private jets. This would be no one else’s business but for two things. First, private jets are horribly polluting. Second, they are often—and outrageously—subsidised.”

Plutocracy rules the world, all the security we need: girls and jets for Plutos!

Let me notice in passing as I have done in the past: the truly wealthy do not pay, overall, taxes. Instead, it’s the other way around.  The truly wealthy are subsidized by the governments they are entangled with. The hold individuals have on the state is very clear in Russia, for all to see… because Russian economic plutocracy was created, ex nihilo from the Soviet plutocracy in the 1990s, a pretty blatant event; Western plutocracy is a much more convoluted affair, and the hiding is much better.

For example descendants of French aristocrats are very powerful and networked in France, but, for obvious reasons, they have become experts at modelling the minds of the simple folks in such a way that those simpletons in their yellow jackets can’t detect how much they serve the descendants of their old masters, through a state carefully tweaked, just so…

The Economist pursues what few media have dared to even approach, the obvious subservience of so-called democracies to global plutocracy. Because global it is: EU plutocrats serve wealthy masters, not just in Europe, but globally. The case of private jets makes that clear. The Economist:

“Private aviation was hit hard by the global financial crisis, when both companies and individuals sought to pare expenses. But now private jets are booming again. This is partly because new booking services and shared-ownership schemes are cutting the cost of going private and luring busy executives away from first- and business-class seats on scheduled flights (see article). But the boom is also a result of tax breaks, which are even more generous than those lavished on ordinary airlines. In Europe firms and individuals can avoid paying value-added tax on imported private jets by routing purchases through the Isle of Man. This scheme has cut tax bills by £790m ($1bn) for imports of at least 200 aircraft into the European Union since 2011. America’s rules are loopier still. Donald Trump’s tax reform allowed individuals and companies to write off 100% of the cost of a new or used private jet against their federal taxes. For some plutocrats this has wiped out an entire year’s tax bill. For others, it has made buying a jet extraordinarily cheap.”

And this is The Economist pointing at the outrageous subsidizing of plutocracy by statocracy. So why is it that European Union legislative process gave a billion Euro rebate to IMPORTERS of private jets? Surely, it’s not to improve European industry: those jets are imported, not made in the EU. Nor does this subsidy benefit any class of Europeans, except plutocrats. This is a particularly clear case where legislators are caught giving hot blow jets to their beloved plutos, source of their comfy future.

The Economist then dares to develop a particular example of how the full mechanism of plutocracy amplifies the Dark Side… the fact that plutocracy is not about just about abuse of power, wealth, subsidies for the rich, or jets, but about becoming more evil. Pluto_Kratia is really Evil-Power. Using private jets render individuals evil, and The Economist has the numbers to prove it:

“The case for flying on a private jet is that it can save time for someone, such as a chief executive, whose time is extraordinarily valuable. Hence companies can offset the cost of these flights against their corporate-tax bills. In some countries the use of a private jet is a tax-free perk for executives. But a growing volume of research suggests that flying the boss privately is often a waste of money for shareholders. One analysis, by icf, a consultancy, found that the jets are often used to fly to places where corporate titans are more likely to have holiday homes than business meetings, such as fancy ski resorts. A study by David Yermack of nyu Stern School of Business found that returns to investors in firms that allow such flights are 4% lower per year than in other companies. Users of such planes are also more likely to commit fraud: a careless attitude to other people’s money sometimes shades into outright criminality, it seems.“

In general user of evil mechanisms are also more likely to become ever more evil. This is not just a case of “qui vole un oeuf vole un boeuf” (who steals an egg steals an ox). This is the case of who abuses a child, and gets away with it, is enticed to destroy the planet. Nothing to do with fear, quite the opposite. It’s the (all too human) will to destruction unleashed.

The more they get away with it, the more they do it, because destruction is what they are longing for. An example is Brexit. Plutocrats of all sorts paid (illegally) to prop the Brexit campaign, using everything from private jets to hypnotists and paid Labour officials. And murder was no problem, for them Plutos, naturally:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/mar/08/arron-banks-ignored-deal-to-stop-pro-brexit-ads-after-jo-cox-death

Actually Member of Parliament Jo Cox didn’t just “die”. She was murdered by a right wing extremist unemployed loser, driven mad by anti-European propaganda, one week before the Brexit vote. He targeted Cox, long a volunteer at Oxfam, a “passionate defender” of the European Union and immigration, because he saw her as “one of ‘the collaborators’ [and] a traitor” to white people.^[1]

But back to We The People subsidized private planes, now that we have evoked People subsidized plutocratic media, and subsidized plutocratic abuse and arrogance (I am repeating myself, Plutos being all over opinion is formed). Says The Economist:

“The environmental effects of corporate jets are dire. A flight from London to Paris on a half-full jet produces ten times as much in carbon emissions per passenger as a scheduled flight, according to Terrapass, a carbon-offset firm. New supersonic business jets under development will make that a lot worse. On one estimate, their emissions will be five to seven times higher than for today’s models. Amazingly, these emissions are largely unregulated. Aviation is not covered by the Paris agreement to limit climate change, and most private jets are excluded from corsia, a carbon-offsetting scheme involving most airlines. All in all, private planes could produce 4% of American emissions by 2050 compared with 0.9% today.”

All air travel is bad for the environment. Business class is worse than economy class, because it burns more jet fuel per passenger. Private jets are more damaging by an order of magnitude. The tax breaks for cooking the planet in this way cannot be justified. They should all be scrapped. Carbon emissions should be taxed, not subsidised by the sleepless masses in steerage and the even less fortunate souls who never fly.“

[This article appeared in the Leaders section of the print edition under the headline “Plane stupid”]

Thus spoke The Economist! it’s nearly as if reading yours truly. Or when even the pro-plutocratic press has had enough…. of plutocracy.

All air travel is bad for the environment? Yes. And it’s going to get worse: within two decades, air travel, from growth of air traffic is supposed to become 25% of total CO2 emissions (a technological solution would be to go hydrogen, or hybrid… but either requires much more work.)

Private jet service offers many advantages to plutocrats: it’s much faster, there is no security, one can be driven to the door of the aircraft (thus a hijacked private jet can thus be flown into the White House… and then pundits and politicians will declare nobody could imagine that…). However, the more society offers to plutocrats, the more they want: greed is the specifically human oldest instinct. Greed means our ancestors were not satisfied living in the trees, they needed to conquer the savannah. Good. However, too much greed kills, it always has. And now it’s the planet which is getting killed.

The situation with private jets subsidies demonstrate how grotesquely bought our politicians are.  It’s not because Obama and his friend the Plutos fly private, that’s a good thing. There are plenty of private jets in Nigeria, a desperately poor country. It’s related: extreme poverty is caused by plutocracy: it’s the lake plutocrats love to reflect on. Clip their wings.

Hurting humanity is plain smart, and what doctor Planet Earth ordered. At least plain smart for the winners. However, that has to be done in moderation, and the alternative to mass destruction is to navigate out of excess before the former becomes necessary, or unavoidable. This way winners and losers can share destiny… in those times of unfolding mass extinction.

Patrice Ayme

Brexit Breakshit. Evaluating Brexit In Light Of California, Athens, Rome, Empire and Common Sense.

On the Brexit Insanity: EMPIRE & LOCAL DEMOCRACY AREN’T ENEMIES, They MAKE EACH OTHER POSSIBLE.

Space Exploration Technologies, SpaceX, a California Corporation, just launched a rocket, and the habitable spaceship at its tip, with a capacity for seven astronauts, the “Crew Dragon” docked with the ISS, the International Space Station. “Crew Dragon” has its own engines, which it can use to escape the main vehicle, if the latter gets in trouble, or to maneuver in space. “Crew Dragon” was launched from the space pad at Kennedy Space Center as the Apollo missions to the Moon. Crew Dragon is much more advanced than Apollo in all ways.

Now think what it means, economically and politically speaking: California has a GDP larger than Great Britain, and a population equal to England. California rockets get launched at the Vandenberg Air Force base in California, but also from Florida at the Kennedy Space Center. Trucks and barges leaving California can go straight across the continent to Florida to carry rockets for launches. No customs. Same regulations. Same empire, continent sized.

Who founded SpaceX? A middle class South African immigrant. Whose family first migrated to Canada. Then he went south to San Francisco and co-founded PayPal… Then used all his money to launch SpaceX, Tesla, etc… Now he wants to make a giant sweating rocket.  Yes, sweating, to cool it down the way evolution cooled down the genus Homo. 

More than 27% of the population of California is not US born. That is, 11 million people. Most are not even European: there is an enormous flow of highly skilled Asians, Chinese, Indians (37% of the immigrants).

Now compare this to nervous, prickly, “British” obsessed Great Britain: 3.5 million people living in the UK are Europeans, but not British born. To compare, France has six million foreign born. (40% of French newborn have at least one foreign born grandparent.)

British European CHEATING, not paying a fair share of the EU budget: For years the UK boasted that it had a much bigger GDP than the French Republic.  So why was the UK paying only 50% to the EU of what France paid, and, while having a smaller population, had as many Members of the European Parliament? This sort of British cheating was all over the EU. Contemplate for example British tax havens

Of all the 27 European Union states, Germany has the second highest percentage of immigrants in its population after the United Kingdom. By UN estimates, as of 2017, 12,165,083 people living in Germany are immigrants, or about 14.8% of the German population. Germany also put into law, in 2005, that it was an “immigration country”. By the way, most immigrants in the UK are not EU. Thus one would assume that cutting off the EU would change nothing to what brexiters view a sorry state of affairs.

But let’s go back to SpaceX. SpaceX has all the enormous resources of the USA potentially at its disposal. Should SpaceX be based in a Brexited Britain, the resources at its disposal would be much smaller. To start with, Great Britain doesn’t have a spaceport (the European spaceports are in Kazakhstan and Guyana) . And barely more than 10%of US GDP.

In San Francisco alone, there are more than ten satellite companies startups. How many in the UK? Zero. That has something to do with launching from Vandenberg, 400 kilometers to the south.  The first stage of the rocket then maneuvers and go back to land there. Rockets fly over the Golden Gate. And what for? The US government has authorized some companies to launch more than 10,000 satellites. For worldwide communications. So sure enough, Brits will phone in the future, on their foreign built phones. Through US satellites enabled by US regulations. What will happen to UK GDP after Brexit? Turn into a profitable semi-dictatorship a la Singapore? With hyper massive immigration of added value individuals? Or see its GDP collapse? Slaves don’t need GDP. They can just Brexit with their minds.  

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Europe bending over backwards for Britain:

British media insists to call Europe a “club”. This is a deliberate infliction of mental disinformation. The EU is actually an Union, something more akin to the USA than to those places British gentlemen used to make plots to exploit the world.

There is a long tradition for other European states to bend over backwards to please the UK. For example, UK science is heavily subsidized by the EU, whereas France and Germany are net donors. British science magazine Nature itself analyzed this here (“Austria, Italy, France and Germany were net donors of funds, particularly Germany, whose scientists received only 18% of the funds for their country’s 30% contribution to the budget (Fig. 1). Most other countries were net recipients of funds, with excess funds received by the United Kingdom and Greece representing 30% and 140% of their contributions, respectively”).

The anxiety at pleasing free wheeling Britain may have come, for many European states, as a desire to counterbalance France, which initially opposed UK membership, and tends to be psychorigid.

Why didn’t the UK want to fix Europe? Well, because it was initially pampered, as its economy was weak. That turned, under PM Thatcher into a spoiled brat behavior. Thatcher forced the EU to octroy privileges to the UK, and foremost the British rebate or staying with the pound. Looks like a good thing, staying with pound. Indeed, the pound enabled the UK to have more money for its economy. However, had the UK been part of the Euro, maybe all of Europe would have ended with more, enough money, under British pressure (and not just that, but Britain getting so much of the money creation, made the rest of Europe poorer). Hyper nationalistic Brits would say, who cares? Well, you get richer if your neighbors do. The uncontrolled accumulation of inequalitarian wealth is precisely what brought the rage which led to Brexit. And, as Brexit is a fake solution, the situation will get worse. 

Broadly, the UK gets back 66% of the difference between its share of member states’ VAT contributions and its share of EU spending in return. France technically makes a net contribution to the EU budget about twice that of the UK,[20] and is the greatest contributor towards the UK rebate, which means it would benefit most from its abolition.

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Esteemed Contributor Hazxan: “Since the referendum, I must have read millions of words from all sides. Before the referendum, I was not convinced by UK membership of the EU. The issue is complex and there are many different sub-groups who support Brexit for different reasons. However, I am more convinced than ever that the political drive for Brexit is an extreme right wing project.”

This is the most significant part of Brexit: it’s extreme right wing, it’s perverse, a pack of lies, hatred of strangers, and evil, in all sorts of ways. Brexit is a plutocratic conspiracy, and a very well financed campaign of lies and fake news. Pseudo-left people focused on Trump, perhaps not knowing that Trump used to be a rare anti-Reagan democrat (most democrats collaborated with Reagan’s extreme right wing deconstruction of civilization). As the pseudo-left went Trump 24/7, with the most absurd accusations, they overlooked Brexit… the real racist right wing conspiracy (Trump is just a conspiracy of one, with the voices in his head).  

Watch sleek videos such as: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Kub69c6Sr4

… a pile of subtle disinformation about what it calls the “Brussels EU”. The perfidious video erroneously implies that the first head of the European Union, Walter Hallstein, was a Nazi (something not technically true… to say the least; and remember I am the first to condemn Heidegger as a Nazi, and many Germans, admired to this day, as those who taught Nazism to Hitler).

Plus, that video and similar material Brexiters got drunk on, are a seriously misleading and obsolete description of how the European Union works. Also omitting significant details, such that De Gaulle got Hallstein out of the EC.

Nowadays, as per EU Constitution. power is in the hand of the European Council (heads of the 28 EU governments, also often called the Council of Ministers) and the European Parliament. “Directives” from Brussels have actually to be approved by the European Parliament, and are truly directed by the European Council (which is democratically elected). The EC in Brussels has only the power to exasperate common Europeans with grotesque little details. If a European country says seriously no, it gets its way (as the UK may find out very soon: it’s not to be taken for granted that other EU countries will agree to extend Article 50… Especially after European elections; France already growled).

And the truth?

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2019/02/25/brexit-is-racism-and-thats-why-it-wont-happen-the-uk-will-stay-in-the-eu/

As I have explained, the worldwide plutocratic conspiracy has been worried that the EU could become too powerful, too socialist, too egalitarian. If the US followed, there was nowhere to hide. Hence the idea of a potentially fatal wound: Brexit. Brexit has turned to a comic mania. However, as the EU has been consumed by it, significant anti-plutocratic endeavors, such as a financial transaction tax, have been completely forgotten.

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Hazxan: “You can’t get most Brexit supporters to see this [Brexit is an extreme right-wing project], because for many of them, Brexit isn’t about the complex trade or international relations, it is an emotional issue about their identity as British and separate from Europe.”

Yes, they talk that way. But what is Britishness exactly? Being cool about the cult of plutocracy, the Lords, the Queen and Her Son, while pretending to be living in democracy? Brexiters believe Great Britain is not in Europe, just as flat-earther believe the Earth is not round. Maybe they looked at a map, but they have not understood it. Believing Great Britain is not in Europe can’t be explained, except as an insanity, and a will to war. Like all insanities, Brexit has its reasons that the sane can’t emotionally share.

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Hazxan: “When asked why, Brexiters will say things like “Sovereignty” , “control of our Laws”, the EU is undemocratic”, and “we’re British, not Europeans”. None of which means anything to me, I have to admit! This “Sovereignty”, for example, when we “take back control”, how does it benefit us? Do we all get wage rises? Lower cost of living? A more efficient health service? Well, no, none of those. In fact, all of them will deteriorate because apparently “Sovereignty” has a cost and it “is a cost worth paying”. I still do not know what we are getting for our money.”

Brexit slogans are meaningless, one may as well listen to Nazis talking about their great white race, and how it would reconquer sovereignty by alienating its neighbors. What the Nazis were saying was indeed not grounded in the very values they extolled, including nationalism (the most telling example: all Germans had to prove they were not Jewish, according to the (insane) definition of Judaism of the Nazis… They was one blatant exception: HITLER HIMSELF! When Brits say the EU is undemocratic, they literally are insane: they have an unelected chamber of Lords.

The EU government is very complex, and the EU is over-legalistic, the French way. However the European Commission just executes the big notions from the council of the democratically elected governments. Nothing really prevents European governments to refuse to obey edicts from Brussels, or even European laws (France deliberately violates some of them, for more than half a century).

But the EU doesn’t have a unelected chamber of Lords and an unelected head of state, as Great Britain the Greatly Democratically Broken: the decision making of the EU is collegial among democratically elected governments, and laws have to be approved by the democratically elected European Parliament. One EU democracy can block everything as last week, when France vetoed calling Gibraltar a “colony”.

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Hazxan: “Then they [Brexiters] talk about hearing people “talk foreign” in the street, how this “isn’t right”. Again, I do not see the problem, I feel no fear, or anything at all if I hear someone speak another language. The media have used this a lot, so clearly, it is important to some Brexiters (including my family, who says it), but means nothing to me. It’s like their words sail 6 feet over my head.”

That brings considerations back to what I view as the essence of the problem, at the level of the Brexiters (not at the level of the plutocrats who pull their strings): racism.

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The Open Society is superior, as Pericles said, before doing the exact opposite, losing the war in the process:

In California, election ballots are in dozens of the world’s languages: California is not afraid of foreigners, because California is persuaded it has the best political system in the world, so it can afford to be an OPEN SOCIETY…. California is Brexit in reverse. Tellingly, that was Pericles’ great theme and semantics. Ironically, and tragically, Pericles himself made an exit on the OPEN SOCIETY, as he passed laws saying that only children from parents BOTH Athenians, were Athenian. Pericles was married to an Ionian philosopher who did much of his thinking for him, and because of the laws passed by his idiotic father, said son found himself non-Athenian, just when Athens needed maximal manpower….

So California doesn’t make the terrible mistake Pericles did, contradicting the very values Athens was based on… Just as the Nazis brought the weakening of the German race (scrapping all the recent immigration in Germany, Germans of German descent are only 65 millions… less than the French…  France having always been an open society (but for the occasional loud expulsion of Jews… who were either right back, or never left).

California doesn’t make the alienation mistake of Pericles, rejecting strangers, but the UK does. Or more exactly, Brexiters want Britain to. go the way of Athens, and commit suicide…  

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No empire, no law, no freedom:

None of this is funny. Lack of union in Europe is weakening Europe, hence civilization. Take for example North Africa, which is the geographical support of Europe. It’s in a mess, greatly because Europe rejected all of Africa after so-called independence (= let Africa be devoured by home-grown and international) plutocrats. Instead, more distant Turkey was developed (although it had fewer human and ideological, and cultural and economic ties). Result: Turkey is turning into a wealthy dictatorship, whereas places like Algeria, which voted for the Republic in referendum, were left to dictators to thrive in exchange for oil, gas and votes at the UN.

How did that happen? Because rejecting Africa was never debated. Africaexit and Frexit was imposed upon (France and) Algeria, for example (although Algerians had voted just for the opposite, twice!) Instead a religion was created around obsessive sex abusers degenerates such as the revered Sartre, and his sex offender “Beaver”, who posed as great humanists, when they were just greedy opportunists, ready to kiss any “communist” dictator’s butt to look interesting. Europe was weak militarily, and even intellectually.

Brexit is more mental weakness. Some, even on this site (Benign) have wondered: why can’t Great Britain trade with the European Union and leave it at that? For the same reason that California doesn’t just trade with the Union. Or that Sichuan does not just trade with Guangdong. There are plenty of obstacles to trade which need to be overcome by laws and regulation. That’s what empires are for. And no, empire doesn’t contradict democracy. Just the opposite. Athenian democracy built an empire to protect itself. When the Athenian empire failed, so did Athenian democracy.

The next thing which happened is that Rome, which was the next most democratic polity after Athens, also created an empire, for the same exact reason as Athens created an empire: for the protection of its democracy. Hence, the Roman empire was mostly created under the Republic. Or from the momentum given by the progressively degenerating republic (there were plenty of democratic and republican elements, say under emperor Trajan (~ 100 CE), when the empire was at maximum extent, such as scholarships for meritorious youth; it was not just about free bread and circuses).

Thus empire and local democracy are not incompatible, just the opposite. California is clearly potentially more democratic than any European country, Switzerland excepted. Because of those referendums (there are plenty locally, for example to decide upon financing school operations and construction, buy parks, etc.).

Brexit tries to break soft matter which smells particularly bad, full as it is of the most proliferating nightmares from the past. This gleeful manipulation of mental excrements pollutes everything, not just the Irish border, with its devolution of desires down to the most beastly kind.

The pseudo-left, just like the Brexiters, reject a European empire (Federal Europe). However, all the leading countries worldwide are empires: USA, China, India, Brazil, Russia, Canada, even Australia (which controls an entire continent, and its surroundings). What Brexiters say, is that they prefer to be controlled by Washington, than having a say,and being able to debate, in Brussels, Strasbourg, Berlin, Paris, Rome, and all around Europe. They want enslavement: their choice. The US food plutocracy, angry at the EU for imposing food sanity, has already announced that the Brits will have to accept hormonal, antibiotic laced US chicken, if they want to trade with the USA. Bon appetit.

Brexit wants to break, what should be flushed down the toilet. It’s intrinsically disgusting.

Down with the Brexit circus.

Patrice Ayme

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P/S: An indirect proof of concept above is Great Britain itself… in the past. While Britannia ruled the waves, and quite a few places (like most of North America until US president Polk grabbed everything below latitude 49 degree; and also the Raj… namely the Indian subcontinent), Great Britain was the most democratic place in the world… with the exception of France and the USA… both of which, no coincidence, were huge empires.

Why the connection? As I said above!

Democracy is expensive, and has to be stronger than autocrats, tyrants, and various plutocracies, and evil empires. That’s why it needs to be itself imperial (and no, Switzerland is no counterexample; other independent Alpine states were reabsorbed, by Rome or France, or Austria… The Swiss got lucky, and knew how to please… All the way down to Hitler, and now the EU, and the US).

 

How And Why The Rebellion In France Is Depicted As Nasty And Venomous, By Its Enemy, Global Plutocracy

“GILETS JAUNES”: CARE AND EMERGENCY (France). “YELLOW JACKETS”: CLEVER, VENOMOUS INSECTS (Global Plutocratic Media).

The rebels  in France call themselves “gilets jaunes”. A “gilet jaune” is the sort of reflecting yellow vest used by personnel rescuing or repairing, and is also worn, in France, by automobilists in distress (it’s mandatory to have one in each car in France). So the feeling conveyed by “gilet jaune” in France, and in French, is care, distress, accident, rescue.

Amusingly, “gilet jaune” got mistranslated in English as “yellow jacket”, true on the face of it, but also the common descriptive of wasps. So the feeling conveyed when considering “gilet jaune” in English is that of a venomous insect potentially deadly (by 12/13/18, after 4 weeks of the rebellion, 6 “yellow jackets” have been killed, typically in collision with irate automobilists).

The symbolism of gilet jaune is about care and love, the symbolism of yellow jackets is about venom and hatred.

A revolution led by those who usually never rebel: elder, lower middle class citizens with jobs… and senior citizens who had voted for the traitor.

Amusing to call “gilet jaunes” “yellow jackets”? Not only: also viciously underhanded. English speaking media plutocracy wants to emotionally paint the “gilet jaunes” as nasty (‘emergency jackets’ would have been more correct and reflective of the intended meaning). Why the hostility?

Do I need to ask? Global plutocracy wants slaves everywhere. A big country with an attitude like France, where We The People has not realize it should shut up and work ever harder, for ever less, is a major problem. So such a rebellious country needs to be completely unpowered. Here comes Macron, thereafter to be named according to the way he acted, Manu I, elected king of France. Manu I was central to this (although he is probably not aware of what he is exactly doing; I give him that). Manu I was brought to the finance and economy ministry to do this, unpowering France (Manu, a merger banker, replaced the social-nationalist Montebourg, a lawyer). There Manu didn’t disappoint the global financial establishment which had sent him, and he became the enabler of global plutocracy, in France.

The violence was not started by the rebels, but by the traitors who lead France in the name of global plutocracy.

Well, Manu I, the elected French dictator, was well on his way to destroy the French social model: said French social model is the great fear of the global plutocracy… Is there anything more frightening to global plutocrats than “Medicare For ALL” spreading to the USA?

When Macron was savagely interrupted by those “yellow jackets”, his work of destruction met an unexpected resistance. In the USA, starting during the last years in care of Obama, the social decomposition was so deep, that US life expectancy started to go down. The controlling class was all for it, just as the “Occupy Wall Street” movement died innocuously, this decrease of life expectancy stayed hidden by lots of talk about grotesque Obamacare.

Destroying the French social model is a must for the global plutocracy. Should social models survive in France or the USA, historically the two leading republics, it would be a terrible example for the rest of the world.

Trump, although he said he would do so, is not taxing the GAFAM much… For US leaders, taxing the GAFAM is taxing a US world superiority tool. It’s taxing a US comparative advantage. No wonder there is no motivation to do so. Trump is forced to be nice to Bezos, head of Amazon, because Trump is a US nationalist, and US nationalism has no weapon more formidable than Amazon. 

However France, as a nation, gets no advantage from being submitted to the GAFAM: it’s the opposite, France gets a comparative disadvantage. As French engineering built, industrially the first transistors, the first CPU and the first personal computer (in two ways, as Pascal did so already in the 17th Century!), France is perfectly capable of fabricating, inside France,, everything that the GAFAM does. France is still capable (but maybe for not much longer… if things keep on heading where they are…) But France doesn’t anymore have the will to be at the forefront of technological progress. Or at least its leaders don’t. 

Why? Because the elite has been sold on the global plutocracy dream, an attempt to build a new world “aristocracy”, centered around said “elite”. Thus Manu I, elected king of France, burnished his credentials relative to the global plutocracy, prior to his election, when he gave Alstom, a unique heavy industry company in France, to its US competitor, General Electric. General Electric used US public money (previously given by Obama) to “buy” Alstom: the US generates public money at will, whereas France doesn’t anymore (thanks to the EU plutocratic system).   

When the US owns the major French heavy industry, that can be dismantled, weakening French power, hence the French social model, by as much. Now the Manu’s government minsters go around saying France can’t afford Chinese made solar panels… Why not French made? What happened to import taxes on strategic materials? Why not 25% importation tax, as the USA is doing?

Because it would reinforce France, hence her social model, hence be a violence against global plutocracy, the unsaid emotions looming in the backgrounds of the souls of our corrupt “leaders”?

Weakening the French social model goes with calling French rebels nasty names, such as “yellow jackets”. Thus it makes the rebellion in France an object of fear and spite. Emotionally speaking, that is, at the deepest logical level.

Well, let’s embrace the notion. You want us nasty? Let’s welcome the notion. As US president Roosevelt said of banks:”I welcome their hatred!”

Revolutions are there, they exist to kill old worlds, old establishments, old emotions. Yellow jackets can kill, indeed. What needs to be killed, is the social model proposed to us by global plutocracy: slaves everywhere, plutocrats to the stars…

Patrice Ayme.

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P/S: [By 2019, eight weeks into the movement, much Anglo-Saxon media switched to “Yellow Vests” instead of the more picturesque “Yellow Jackets”… Making one of the themes above obsolete… Yet the nasty sting against the amply justified French rebellion should persist…]