For A Republican Catalonia, For Some Small States, & Against Others

One has to consider history, in full, when one considers history: some European countries, such as present day France were already united more than 17 centuries ago (when the self-declared “Gallic Empire” was independent of Rome, while still in the Roman empire, sort of!).

The question of self-determination has been boiling hot, ever since Athens tried to impose her empire (which was a good thing), but did it wrong (which was a terrible thing).

US President Woodrow Wilson used self-determination to dismember the empires of old Europe and the French Republic did it, because it was viewed as an absolute good (French king Henri III had previously been elected king of Poland in the Sixteenth Century.

The French were perfectly aware that Poland was one of the oldest nations in Europe; arguably the same holds for Catalonia. And I have a map to prove it, showing how things were, 23 centuries ago: Catalonia is perfectly discernible:

Subdivisions of the Iberian peninsula, 23 centuries ago. If Carthage recognized Catalonia, how come the macaques at the head of Spain presently don’t? Because Carthage was, arguably, more of a democracy? (Carthage was ruled by “suffetes”, who were judges…)

Dismantling the horrendous rule of Germany over Eastern Europe was perfectly justified. However, there were Germans all over Eastern Europe, so German nationalists also had a good point! Yet, the German Second Reich, extending Prussian rule, was a racist fascist monstrosity (confirmed by Metternich who succeeded to make even Napoleon look good and enlightened!). It was not that justified in the case of Austria-Hungary (whose crimes were not as great, and it was a multiethnic place).

Vladimir Lenin promoted self-determination with the aim of destroying imperial “capitalism”. The United Nations wrote it into article 1 of its founding treaty. The right of peoples to self-determination has been a principle in international law since the Versailles Treaty and was confirmed as the basis for negotiations on a whole host of international negotiations as varied as Algeria, Kashmir in 1948, Vietnam in 1973 and the state borders of Eastern Europe in 1990.

However, the principle was often poorly applied, and became a way for some oligarchies to transmit power to other oligarchies/plutocracies, establishing the global plutocracy we now enjoy. The paradigm there is when “decolonizing” powers gave power to bad actors: much of Africa is an example, including Algeria (where de facto French dictator De Gaulle gave power to the FNL, which is not just still in place, but the present “president” was already a major actor in the… 1950s…). But there are even more devious examples…

The enslaved peoples of the former German, Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires, such as Czechoslovakia, Finland, fought for self-determination. The French Republic and crafty US president Wilson (a US white supremacist) forced the principle into the founding documents of the League of Nations (infuriating some Brits, such as Lord Keynes). The Bolsheviks, having recognised the right of self-determination in theory, realised that struggles for national sovereignty had the power to tear apart the imperialist powers which were invading Russia (1920).  The Comintern ordered communist parties around the world to support “national revolutionary movements” even where they were from the “left”.

Now than Lenin is long forgotten, the self-described “left”, is philosophically unprepared for struggles for democracy and social justice where nation and ethnicity, not class, is the driver. The EU is even worse. It is trapped by its own founding treaty which didn’t include the right to self-determination of peoples – preferring instead to give that right only to nations already recognised as states. So Slovenia, Croatia and the like had to go to war, and become internationally recognized, before the EU recognized the validity of their existence.

One hundred years ago politicians had a strong theoretical understanding of nationhood. . This is less true today, because most politicians today, like the king of Spain, or his PM, Rajoy, are, first of all tools and part of the global plutocratic orders, which view We The Peoples as tax cows, when not cannon fodder. The first cry these global supremacists hear, is the cry of banks.

Lombardy and Veneto voted for autonomy this weekend (at up to 95%, even better than Catalonia, but for “autonomy” alone!) The European parliament’s president Antonio Tajani berated them. He fears “the proliferation of small nations”.

That Italian politician said Europe must “of course fear” the proliferation of small nations, “that’s why nobody in Europe intends to recognise Catalonia.”

“Even (British Prime Minister) Theresa May, in the full throes of Brexit, said the United Kingdom would never recognise Catalonia… Spain is by its history a unified state, with many autonomous regions, with diverse populations who also speak different languages but who are part of a unified state… It is not by degrading nationhood that we reinforce Europe.”

Lombardy sends 54 billion Euros more in taxes to Rome than it gets back in public spending from the Italian state. Veneto’s net contribution is 15.5 billion. These are huge numbers.

“Fearing small states” is not an argument in international law. Soviet foreign minister Molotov used that exact argument with Hitler (!) about “fearing” Finland. Even the Nazis found it laughable. As it is small tiny states such as corrupt Malta and Luxembourg, in collaboration with international plutocracy and other mafias, are financially terrorizing the rest of Europe, with the complicity of the present “leaders”. And if one talks too much about it, and death threats are not enough, one gets bombed to death, as a famous journalist found in Malta last week (she had time to think about it: a first bomb made her car airborne, rocket like; another, later, blew up her seat).

Scotland was famously independent for around 17 centuries, having greatly, and successfully, resisted the Romans themselves. Similarly Northern Italy, colonized by Gauls 24 centuries ago, was dominant and independent from Rome for 16 centuries (in 390 CE, the bishop of Milan, Saint Ambrose, was not taking orders from Rome; actually he subjected emperor Theodosius!). Northern Italy was under orders from Rome for less than 5 centuries out of the last 3,000 years.

Catalonia was initially part of France, having been wrestled from Muslim rule. Then Aragon, another French creation, and Catalonia got associated. Together they pushed French rule out of Sicily and Southern Italy (where Anjou and Normandy had thrown the Muslims out). However, newly created Spain turned to Inquisition and fascism under Isabella of Castille, pushed by her husband king Ferdinand, of Aragon. Philipp II faced a rebellion in the Netherlands, as part of a two centuries long war with France. He was an extremely vicious, genocidal bigot, quite different from his father. He lost the Netherlands in 1581, although he kept Belgium which was recovered by France in the following century when she finally won the war.

Worse was to come: the grandson of the notorious anti=Protestant bigot, Louis XIV of France, was made into king of Spain (bringing the massively lethal and impoverishing “War of the Succession of Spain”, which ravaged Europe). The Catalonia army fought back, was defeated, and Catalonia lost her autonomy. Said autonomy was re-established, by the Republic, but was lost again when general Franco won, thanks to Hitler, Mussolini and a galaxy of US plutocrats.

Catalonia is not a province of “Spain”, whatever “Spain” means. Just as Canada recognized Quebec is, Catalonia is a nation within Europe, and should be at the very least, an autonomous region. Long part of its own Roman province, Catalonia was already independent under Carthage itself. If Carthage could let Catalonia be free, why can’t the present descendant of France’s Louis XIV ruling Spain? Catalonia should be what it wants to be, a republic. Let the rest of Spain enjoy the power of one.

Why are cities, regions, states and peoples beginning to re-pose the question of national self-determination now? Because they need to get things done. London is polluted, it cost 12 Euros a day to drive in the center. Tariq Khan, mayor of London, Labor and of Pakistani descent, just added to this a 12 Euros “T Tax”. “T” for Toxicity. Well, it’s good that he is free to do that. If he were not, Londoners would have good reason to be angry. Also Mr. Khan was elected locally, not one of these torturers Madrid intents to send to Catalonia to rule it, as threatened by Rajoy and its regal accomplice in crime..

For Spain and Italy it is clear: the mixture of austerity, corruption and political sclerosis at the centre has limited the reality of regional democracy.

What about the rest of the world? The anti-French crowd will roll out New Caledonia (which is due to an independence referendum in 2018). Well, I am against independence of any French rules territory (however I am for maximal autonomy). Same holds for any US ruled territory. I still think the two republics are better than any alternative, including independence. All the old French colonies would have been better off with maximal independence and autonomy (although the situation was inadmissible in Algeria, it has become even more inadmissible since…)

New Caledonia is an Australian target, and Kanaks should remember that Australia is less than 5% Aborigines, whereas New Caledonia is more than 50% so.

There are a few subtle, but all-important points here underneath, magmas for apparently peaceful volcanoes. Those points are highly NON PC. Military questions matter. They are even primordial: a French military effort, a successful war against the Jihadists who ruled the Iberian peninsula then, created Catalonia. European Catalonia was created by the sword, in the Eight Century. And that ignorance of military might is a problem in Europe, as small states are not part of European defense, which depends mostly upon the French Republic (as it has been since Consul Clovis, elected king, differently from the present king of Spain). That’s a huge problem.

The French Republic failed militarily around May 15, 1940, greatly because Belgium and the Netherlands (long parts of France, aka Bourgogne) had been treacherous neutrals, which unbalanced the French militarily (something Hitler counted on, deliberately  and for the record). Without the direct or tacit, active or passive, help of Sweden, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland,  the French Republic would have defeated Hitler with less damage than what happened.

So we can’t just have “neutral” Scotland and Catalonia hanging around, depending upon the defense system of the French Republic (and that of an undependable Britain).

Another huge problem is the question of “civilization”, for want of a better word. Barcelona is not less civilized than Madrid, quite the opposite (whereas, as Peter the Great would, and did, agree, London is still a bit more civilized than Moscow… ) “Less civilized” regions have interest to associate themselves with more civilized regions, it’s better for everybody, including in keeping in check the hubris of the more civilized (however NON PC the notion of “less civilized” is, it is, and that’s it). But Catalonia is not less civilized than Spain with its long litany of horrendously bloody dictators and inquisitors, all the way down to those who put the present regime in place. The “austerity” program was itself a subjugation to the very spirit, if not actual descendants, of those who put the Nazis and fascists in place.

Catalonian Republic, yes (within Spain, why not?). Much more Europe is necessary, though…

Patrice Ayme’

 

Neat Suggestion For Net Neutrality

Under Obama, the US spy networks were given full power. Paying no, or little taxes, with the full resources of the USA behind them, they were mandated, as modern-day corsairs, to seize the world. They did (in spite of the Snowden scare; Snowden revealed the entanglement between the imperial machinery of the USA and the US Internet companies).

This Internet coup is a Obama’s great achievement, proving how great and just the brown president has been for the powers that be, over the powers that don’t deserve to be.

Here is the market capitalization of the forty largest French companies (the “CAC 40”), versus that of GAFA (Google-Apple-Facebook-Amazon):

Thanks Oh Great, Wise, Respected Obama, For Having Made The USA Mightier Than Ever With Your Mighty Espionage Agents

[Was the satanic Bush a smaller devil? One shudders at the question. Just asking…]

As you can see, GAFA, those four companies, Google-Apple-Facebook-Amazon, under the presidency of Barack Obama, became everything, while the French Republic stagnated between being and nothingness. This is a general pattern, with all countries. It has to do with GAFA being above all and any local laws. And there are no global laws to speak of. (The Chinese joke that GAFA is the new world empire; well, new, not really.) In particular GAFA eschews most taxes, so stand above all and any companies and firms, worldwide.

Donald Trump, hated by GAFA, has said that he would make GAFA pay taxes. Said Trump, speaking of GAFA, and, in particular, Amazon:”Oh, God, would they have problems if I became president”. But what of the rest of the world? How can the world get out of this pickle?

First GAFA should pay taxes (France wants Google to pay billions in overdue taxes, Great Britain, though, asks for only a tenth of what the French Treasury is asking. Why? Because Great Britain is onto the plot, and understands that GAFA is one way for its overlord, the USA, to seize world control, and will be rewarded for getting on the program!)

To force GAFA to pay taxes, they should be threatened with exclusion. Now, of course, that would require guts. First, suffering of being accused of “anti-Americanism” by the soon to disappear in the oubliettes of history, Barack Obama, the great enabler of GAFA. (The US already makes war against the French economy, so it may as well come up to the surface!)

Unfortunately for, say, the French, GAFA uses massively treacherous countries without much industry such as Great Britain (full of subordinate tax havens, more than a dozen treasure isles which charge no income or wealth tax), and Ireland (top corporate tax rate, 12.5% in contrast with France 33% and the USA’s 35%!)

So going to war against GAFA means that the French would have to go to war with Ireland and the British Virgin Islands (hence the UK!) If the traditional parties don’t have this sort of guts, maybe Marine le Pen will… (She will be accused of dreadful “populism”, just as the Donald is, for doing something against the multibillionaire plutocrats of GAFA, and their demonic little helpers…)

Could we try something less bloody? Well, GAFA spy on people, and then tweak what they see on the Internet, accordingly. GAFA, and its ilk know you have a health problem, so they suggest businesses associated to treatment or relief from that condition. I have noticed search engines such as Google manipulate searches according to what they think i should see. Worse: Microsoft’s Bing censors completely some of my essays. For example “Violence In The Holy Qur’an” cannot be found on Bing (even looked directly by title and author) This sort of censorship is deliberate: the essay consists essentially of 10,000 words from quoting entire verses of the Qur’an. (The English paper, The Guardian, accused me to be someone who “blogged” the Qur’an, to justify censoring me!)

If these Internet manipulations were completely unlawful, all the time, the business model of GAFA and their ilk would collapse. Of course, one does not want to be that cruel (what would Obama do?)

But here is an idea nevertheless. Why are not GAFA (and its ilk) required, by LAW, to present a neutral web if asked to do so by someone using the Internet? As I said, one does not want to be too cruel with the corsairs of modern communications: after all, they have some public utility, as they (vaguely) innovate.

So, say, every time one turns on one of the GAFA, or other Internet manipulators, one should be offered, manually, the option of a neutral web.

Simple. Drastic.

The right to neutral information is basic to enable democracy. Without it, there is no democracy. The present rule of GAFA, and their present manners, is a complete denial of democracy. Time to fight. When the philosopher Demosthenes called the Greeks to fight the (gold mines propelled) the Macedonian plutocrats, who were quickly increasing in power, he was not listened to. It sounded alarmist to go fight the rich and nasty. When it turned out Demosthenes was finally observed to be right, it was too late. Democracy was destroyed in Greece, for the next 23 centuries. And it all originated from a philosophical debate where Aristotle was prominent.

We are what we know. And we are nought if we know not. The neutral Internet is not obsolete, it’s a human right. Are those obsolete? Hmm… Wait…

Patrice Ayme’

 

Luxembourg, Den Of Thieves

Send The Tanks?

Luxembourg is a nothing country. Yet, according to the World Bank and the IMF, the GDP per capita in Luxembourg was $117,000. That makes it the richest country in the world (omitting tiny tax havens such as Monaco). And more than half of it is stolen money. Nasty nothings like Luxembourg are, increasingly and subterraneously enraging We The People, all over.

Idiots say that Trump’s popularity is growing because of the color of Obama’s skin. In truth, the rage is growing because of the likes of Luxembourg. We The People has not understood this, because the Main Stream Media, owned and inspired by plutocrats, has made sure that We The People would not understand that. However, We The People is starting to guess what is going on, and it is my pleasure to help in this understanding. Here is an enraging picture:

Rogue Governmental Tax Thieves Are Stealing The Pillars Of Civilization, To Feed Plutocracy.

For 20 years, J-C Juncker led Luxembourg. Juncker made a business to betray the very foundation of Europe. The very foundation of Europe is the principle of SOLIDARITY. Then Juncker was selected to head the European Commission. The wolf was put in charge of the sheep (as Eva Joly, a Franco-Norwegian European MP who was presidential candidate and magistrate puts it). Unsurprisingly, Juncker himself is used as an argument against Brexit. Juncker is junk, the name of one of the greatest fraud ever.

People such as Juncker are toxic, even lethal: Juncker just re-authorized deadly chemicals such as BPA, an endocrinian perturbator who turns boys into girls, and vice versa, while giving them cancer. Lethal, and in more way than one.

[Computation by Gabriel Zucman in “Taxing Across Borders…”.]

In World War Two, Luxembourg just let itself be invaded, not even with a token 6 hours resistance like Denmark. Whereas France and Britain declared war to Hitler on September 3, 1939. Some will, naively, say that they don’t know why I talk about a major tragedy of history. But the reason I do is that we are going through a major tragedy of history now. The weakening of the tax base of the leading countries of the West has, in particular reduced their might and awe. As a result we enjoy the likes of the Islamist State, Assad… And many other tyrants whose activities are rendered possible, precisely because the leading countries have been weakened… and contaminated by the corruption of the likes of Luxembourg.

Now we are facing Brexit, a plot by financial pirates, brokers and professional tax evaders to have “The City”, an official plutocracy in London, to lead the gullible to tragedy.

We are facing Brexit in great part because of the plutocratic organization of Europe. And that plutocratic organization is gaining ever more power.

Jean-Claude Juncker, the very human (in appearance) and extremely plite and nice ex-Prime Minister of Luxembourg who heads the European Commission. He is the one who organized the

Paradoxically, the “Lux Leaks” scandal made advertizing for the mass, governmental tax thievery organized by… Luxembourg: business has never been better.

In “Lux Leaks” journalists from 40 international media outlets on Wednesday used leaked documents exposing tax avoidance by major international companies — like Ikea, FedEx, PepsiCo, and Amazon — in Luxembourg through secret deals between that rogue state and more than 300 multinational corporations.

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) examined over 28,000 pages of deals with hundreds of multinational corporations. Those allowed the companies to jointly

cut trillions from their tax payments worldwide.

Most of the documents were Advance Tax Agreements, or so-called “comfort letters,” which are rulings determining how businesses will be taxed by the rogue regime’s tax authorities.

Technically, Luxembourg is not an official tax haven, since it… does have taxes. (Places such as British tax havens do not have individual or corporate taxes outright.)

Luxembourg’s government] has developed a system of tax rulings, which are secret agreements between tax authorities and the companies.

Luxembourg has denied the leading countries which defend civilization part of their taxable base. Thus Luxembourg is an active enemy of democracy. Luxembourg is also a paradigm of tax piracy. It is followed by other scavengers such as Great Britain and the Netherlands (who also practice the tax haven trick, industrially). In 1914, and thereafter, the Netherlands collaborated with fascist Prussian-German empire.

A young Frenchman who came across documents of Pricewaterhouse Cooper showing the tax stealing of Luxembourg. He communicated them to a journalist who then contacted the afore-mentioned IJC. Both whistleblowers are on trial in Luxembourg, and they are threatened by ten years in jail. Meanwhile the bosses of the companies who stole billions of taxes are free to operate in, say, France.

This is the world upside down, and inversion of all values. Seeing tapes of J-C Juncker, tapping in the backs of presidents such as France’s Hollande, or Orban, the leader of Hungary, saying, with a big smile:”Hello, dictator!”, kissing other leaders on top of the head, etc. even a movie such as “The Godfather” feels quaint. And, indeed, although inspired by the Mafia, the GDP  used now with Rogue Government organized Dark Liquidity, Dark money, Tax havens, etc are orders of magnitude greater.

Meanwhile, back in the USA, Obama urged at Howard University, an apartheid university for “blacks” to engage into a “more disciplined form of activism”. I guess they should do like him, and collaborate with the powers that be, those who animate the Junckers of this world. Instead of being undisciplined?

Patrice Ayme’

 

Heathen Tax Havens Top World GDP

The Prime Minister of Iceland just resigned. The right honorable PM did not have major funds in a tax havens. He asserted this to journalists. That was correct. His very rich blonde wife did have dark money funds in tax havens, though. This has been revealed in Tax Havens. And the PM had claimed she did not. And how did the wife get so rich? Like Chelsea Clinton? Becoming a hedge fund money manager in her early twenties? Just asking.

What’s a Tax Havens? A place with little or no taxes. By claiming residency there, individuals or corporations can escape taxes. Plutocratic corporations can claim their profits there. They do this by charging extravagant charges to their subsidiaries. Thus subsidiaries in high tax countries (such as the leading countries of the West: USA, Germany, France, UK, Italy, etc.) are not “profitable”, because they spent all their money paying a subsidiary in a

According to the IMF, there are around 60 Tax Havens around the world,  50% of world financial transactions pass through Tax Havens, for a grand total of 25,000 billion dollars ($25 trillions).

What Can’t Be Seen, Can’t Be Taxed. Or Why Dark Liquidity Grows Ever More, As Its Engine, Plutocracy, Grows

One should stop and meditate this number. The established mental order, in economy quantifies the performance of societies according to GDP (not Gross Demonic Product, but Domestic, supposedly). GDP is just the sum of all financial transactions.

So this means that the GDP of Tax Havens is $25 Trillion. By comparison the GDP of the EU is 18.5 Trillion dollars (a trillion dollar higher than that of the USA). It’s promised to a bright future: Dark Pool Liquidity is skyrocketing everywhere: even in Canada.

365 major international banks are involved in just the particular scandal at hand. The British centered bank HSBC alone is involved in 2300 screen societies managed by that law firm, Mossak Fonseca.

The idea of Tax Havens came from Great Britain, and initially was directed to the Anglo-Norman isles.

To be viewed officially as financially clean, that is, not a tax haven, a country has to make 12 tax treaties with other countries. Thus Panama has tax treaties with Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, etc.: tax havens, by signing treaties with other tax havens certify each other to not be tax havens.

Could the great leaders of the great democracies have ignored all the preceding? Sure. That’s what they did. David Cameron, the British Prime Minister, is an expert; he ignored his father’s overseas, false name accounts.

As The Guardian (a paper which censors me!) puts it:

“David Cameron’s father ran an offshore fund that avoided ever having to pay tax in Britain by hiring a small army of Bahamas residents – including a part-time bishop – to sign its paperwork.

Ian Cameron was a director of Blairmore Holdings Inc, an investment fund run from the Bahamas but named after the family’s ancestral home in Aberdeenshire, which managed tens of millions of pounds on behalf of wealthy families.

Clients included Isidore Kerman, an adviser to Robert Maxwell who once owned the West End restaurants Scott’s and J Sheekey, and Leopold Joseph, a private bank used by the Rolling Stones.

The fund was founded in the early 1980s with help from the prime minister’s late father and still exists today. The Guardian has confirmed that in 30 years Blairmore has never paid a penny of tax in the UK on its profits.

The prime minister’s spokeswoman said that Downing Street had responded to allegations about Ian Cameron in the past.

Asked if there was still any family money invested in the fund, she said: “That is a private matter.” She said the prime minister had “taken a range of action to tackle evasion and aggressive tax avoidance”.

The Panama Papers, 11.5m documents leaked from the offshore agent Mossack Fonseca, reveal the details of how Cameron Sr sheltered Blairmore’s profits with a series of expensive and complicated arrangements.”

How was all this possible? How come We The People have become so lenient for the crooks who govern us? How did we become sheep? Panem Et Circenses, the Roman historian and philosopher Juvenal put it, 19 centuries ago: bread and circuses. Distract people with distributions of bread and circuses. This can set a degeneracy of minds which can fester for centuries. Roman citizens did not revolt until the Nika Riots, four centuries after Juvenal. Those started after increasingly violent confrontations, years after years, of partisans of the “Blues” and “Greens” teams of charioteers. Roman citizens had lost all taste for politics. Actually this started a few generations before Juvenal wrote, when a  bunch of major plutocratic crooks such as Brutus (who, before becoming the assassin of Caesar, had been a major corrupt Roman official in “Asia”).

Under the second emperor (or “Princeps”), Tiberius, the Roman national assembly felt so irrelevant, that it fell in disuse. We The Roman People felt that governance had been completely confiscated by the major plutocrats, so why bother?

How not to fall in the same despondency? Well, by mustering some rage, or, at the very least, anger, as Senator Bernie Sanders has been doing, and showing. In a most timely, and wise, manner.

Patrice Ayme’

Revolution Needed, Vote Sanders

Clinton Would Be Another Obama to Nowhere:

Contrarily to legend, countries such as France, its scion, Britain, and their children, among them the USA, have been highly successful not in spite, but because of a succession of beautifully executed revolutions.

The level of inequalities of the planet has become so drastic, the economy is sputtering, the biosphere collapsing. Yet, the West’s leading grandiosely self-described “liberal with a conscience”, Krugman is in full Kliton, Clinton-for-president campaign. Not a day passes without another blast against Sanders. Oh, well, it was so good last time Clinton was president, the friends Krugman comes across all the time in New York, the financial plutocrats, got to seize the levers of the world, and fed Krugman lots of caviar and champagne, besides paying for 100,000 dollars a year to send the kids here Krugman and the like teach their erroneous discourses. (I am not saying Krugman is the worst; quite the opposite, he is the sweetest.)

During Obama’s First Four Years, Tax Rates on the 400 Richest Went Down 20%

So give me a break with Bush… Obama was Bush’s Third and Fourth term. Or shall we call it Clinton’s Sixth term? The point is that since the ex-chair of Goldman-Sachs, Robert Rubin, officially Secretary of the Treasury, started to tell a (swearing) Bill Clinton was he was going during his presidency, we have never looked back: the financial plutocrats, the sneakiest, sleekest, slickest and sickest of them all, have been in command. That command, they would lose if Senator Sanders became president (and, as far as they are concerned the arrogant Trump, a builder of real things, is as scary, he could do a Roosevelt on them…)

Says Krugman “How To Make Donald Trump President Step 1: Democrats nominate Bernie Sanders. I don’t think Sanders is unelectable, but…” The Krugman class, highly paid pseudo-intellectuals ambling the rich carpets of Davos and plutocratic academia, is aghast from the prominence of leading candidates who have been railing against Wall Street and for a dramatic overhaul of health care in the USA.

Krugman deliberately ignores the possibility that Ted Cruz, not Trump, is the real Republican nominee. Why? Ted Cruz is the Goldman-Sachs candidate, like Obama and Clinton before him.  

Trumped: Hillaryously Cruzing To Hell

The day before claiming Sanders would make Trump president, in the New York Times editorial, Krugman in “How Change Happens”, revived the old John Lennon’s spite for revolution:  …”there are some currents in our political life that do run through both parties. And one of them is the persistent delusion that a hidden majority of American voters either supports or can be persuaded to support radical policies, if only the right person were to make the case with sufficient fervor.”

Real weird a statement for a country which was founded in a revolution, and saw the most violent Civil War, this side of Rwanda.

Of course, nothing significant happened during the Obama presidency. (With the one single exception that, now, health insurance companies cannot just refuse to insure people, based on pre-existing conditions. To compensate, “Obama” instituted a color scheme for health insurance, where colored (“bronze”) plan is basically worthless. Is it a Freudian slip?)

Krugman, I love Krugman. Krugman is highly intelligent (many things are relative), so he can be used as a test bed of devious, not to say vicious, sophisticated logic. In particular Krugman presents us with the opportunity to dissect disinformative twisted logic:  radical policies have happened many times in the history of the USA. FDR was a case in point. But so was LBJ. More to the point, Paul Krugman served in the REAGAN White House, and Reagan (counter-) revolution was pretty much approved by voters. So was G.W. Bush let’s-go-invade-the-world, either-you-are-with-us-or-against-us, policies, which were also very radical (and not in a good way).

Krugman: “… on the left there is always a contingent of idealistic voters eager to believe that a sufficiently high-minded leader can conjure up the better angels of America’s nature and persuade the broad public to support a radical overhaul of our institutions. In 2008 that contingent rallied behind Mr. Obama; now they’re backing Mr. Sanders…

But as Mr. Obama himself found out as soon as he took office, transformational rhetoric isn’t how change happens. That’s not to say that he’s a failure…

Yet his achievements have depended at every stage on accepting half loaves as being better than none: health reform that leaves the system largely private, financial reform that seriously restricts Wall Street’s abuses without fully breaking its power, higher taxes on the rich but no full-scale assault on inequality… who can claim to be Mr. Obama’s true heir — Mr. Sanders or Mrs. Clinton? But the answer is obvious: Mr. Sanders is the heir to candidate Obama, but Mrs. Clinton is the heir to President Obama. (In fact, the health reform we got was basically her proposal, not his.)

Could Mr. Obama have been more transformational? Maybe he could have done more at the margins. But the truth is that he was elected under the most favorable circumstances possible, a financial crisis that utterly discredited his predecessor — and still faced scorched-earth opposition from Day 1.”

Here is again a piece of disinformation, which, actually, originated with Obama himself. Obama (for whichever reasons inside himself, probably greed) did not want to disappoint the powers-that-be (his considerable future income will depend upon them), nor his power base (60 million gullible voters, and your truly). So Obama pretended that the “rancor” (as he put it) of republicans prevented him to act. Parrot Krugman, following the choir of millions of pseudo-leftists, claims that “scorched earth” from the opposition stood in the way. Don’t worry: no luxury carpet burned at the White House.

We have heard this argument since day one of the Obama presidency: Obama could not do anything, because he did not control Congress (where the democrats had a majority), nor the Senate (where the democrats had a supermajority, more than 60 votes out of 100). So Obama, handicapped by his DEMOCRATIC majority and supermajority, had to kill time until he lost control of Congress, and lost his supermajority in the Senate?

Or is it that Obama was isolated among partisans of the status quo, immensely rich “democrats” such as D. Feinstein and Nancy Pelosi, who are extremely happy with the system as it is, and just want to tinker with it, to give the appearance of changing what they truly profit from and do not want really to be changed?

Using “Medicare For All” as a fundamental health system with private insurance add-ons is basically the way the French healthcare system works. The present healthcare system in the USA could be morphed towards such a French like system, without wrenching changes (whereas going abruptly to socialized medicine as in Britain, Sweden, or single payer as in Canada, Germany would be too brutal to be pragmatic, indeed).

In finance, Obama had a great crisis, thus a great opportunity to cut out all the abuse. The Roosevelt, FDR and Teddy made drastic reforms: on day one, FDR closed all banks. Instead, under Obama’s first term, the New York Times found that the 400 wealthiest taxpayers’ tax rates went down 20%… relative to Bush.

Obama is caviar left, Clinton is caviar left. But the biosphere was much warmer in 2015 than in 2014. Meanwhile giant amount of unhindered, plotting and conspiring “Dark Pools of Money” are sloshing around the world, constituting most of the world’s trades.

In the latest funny twist, the cost of a barrel of oil full of oil has become cheaper than the cost of the same barrel, once emptied of oil. I told you oil was dirty!

In Canada, said barrel, with the oil inside, cost less than five cauliflowers. Agriculture has been despised too long.

The rise of sustainable energy (including nuclear in India, China) has much to do with it. This, and fracking in the USA, and the lift of the embargo against Iran, broke the camel’s back. Revolutions may be unleashed in several countries (Venezuela, Arab oil producers, Algeria, Russia, etc.). If you add Trump and Sanders to the mix, many plutocrats are starting to seriously worry.

All the more as their old semi-enemy, the European Union, is at the crossroads between strength and weakness, between further crackdowns in all sorts of ways and further degeneracy.

So resist Krugman’s siren songs. Clinton is a plutocrat singing plutophile songs. Vote for real change, vote Sanders. Differently from Obama or Clinton I, Sanders has a very long track record, we know who he is. Differently from Clinton, although initially a genuine New Yorker, he is not on the take, something Hillary clearly is.

Patrice Ayme’

Global Corruption Mood

Corruption is not just a practice, but a mood, and it reaches heavens, when it’s made legal. Examples, especially global examples, set global moods.

An idiotic president spent his presidency visiting with plutocrats, begging them for money. A consequence of this highest example of triumphant corruption? The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) is now delving further into corruption and doping in the world of international athletics.

Who is leading the charge against corruption? The usual suspect. The French Republic. In Munich, Germany, Thursday january 14 “the criminal investigations into the IAAF (International Association of Athletics Federations) and its independent commissioner turned over information to the French prosecutor’s office” the Canadian reporting to WADA, McLaren, revealed.

Great Perspectives Elevate Moods. Base Examples, Lower Them. Mount Olympus, 2917 Meters, Greek Gods’ Heavens

It’s the second set of findings by the commission established by WADA. The first report released in November stunned the world of athletics by daring to reveal widespread, systematic doping in Russia, including the involvement of some employees of the Russian government. (Left unsaid was that, just looking at their results, countries such as the UK, USA, and Jamaica are just as drugged out as Russia is.)

Olympus gave its name to Olympia, where the Olympic games were held every four years, starting in 776 BCE. Olympia is actually in the Western Penepolese, a gigantic mountainous peninsula, far from Olympus in Northern Greece. So what’s the connection? Elevation of the human character, the will to come closer to the gods. Ancient athletes got no reward, but only symbolic ones, such as a crown of laurel.

Today’s Olympic athletes are only Olympic in name. Just like prostitutes they are led by greed to do what is too shameful, or even too illegal, to talk about. Including destroying their own lives through drug addiction, just to roll in dough.

In this hell, the elected politicians stand even lower. They have no shame, and have rendered legal all they do. [Although I make an exception for those who really fight for ideals, like politicians who campaign for socialized, or single payer medicine in the USA, such as Bernie Sanders, or against plutocrats, Sanders again. (And also the one whose name shall not be said.); or Catalan independentists, etc.]

IAAF suspended Russian athletes from international track and field competition. The question of whether they will be authorized to take part in the Rio Olympics is in the air.

The report brought a series of resignations of IAAF officials, including anti-doping director Gabriel Dolle and IAAF president Lamine Diack. Diack was jailed and is facing corruption and money laundering charges in France. Diack is accused of taking more than $1.55 million in bribes and taking money from athletes to cover up positive doping tests.

Diack’s sons were also paid by IAAF. One was convoked by French justice, but fled to Africa. France issued an Interpol warrant of arrest against him on Tuesday.

This is the sort of things, ladies and gentlemen, why global plutocracy hates France: France considers herself as the holder, beholder and defender of world justice.

What’s next? France issuing warrant of arrest against ALL international criminals? Will plutocrats be immune no more? Is France going to arrest all what makes London worthy, or, more exactly, expensive?

In the Swiss Canton of Ticino, Tessin, 24 global textile firms established themselves in the last two decades. Including North Face, Boss, Armani, Gucci, Versaci, countless Italian fashion houses, etc. The textile sector has become the main contributor to Ticino/Tessin taxes.

However their rate of imposition are kept secret. This sort of corruption is legal. However, it’s high time to put this sort of politicians and civil servants in jail. They often have, like El Chapo, the Mexican drug lord, the support of the local population. They are not any better.

Why not any better? Because by undermining the global tax base, they weaken global law enforcement, thus civilization, driving people crazy, and they turn to drugs to forget the whole mess. At some point, one will have to use force.

In Ticino, or Tessin, in the year 2012, the company formerly known as Pinault-Printemps-Redoute, headed by Pinault, one of the world’s top plutocrats, maybe the richest person in Europe, and who, showing up at the Elysee Palace could ask all present, including the so-called “President” to sit and stand-up, at will. Again and again. Of course, it won’t happen. It would break the Orwellian spell the Commons have been plunged into.

So Pinault the would-be Satanic changed the name of its tool: invisibility is one of Pluto’s assets. Changing names confuse critics. Instead of calling it as it was known, he called it “Kering”. Sounds seriously German, as serious as Volkswagen. Kering owns Gucci, Alexander McQueen, Volcom, Stella McCartney, Puma, etc.

An NGO got its hand on Kering’s accounting, and just revealed it. Kering has 600 employees in Switzerland. They make 70% of Kering’s profits (as least so Satan Pinault claims). In the rest of the world, Kering has 30,400 employees: they make only 30% of Kering’s profits. Making the computation, a Swiss employee makes 1.6 million Swiss Francs (roughly 1.6 million US dollars), and the average employee in the rest of the world, the thirty thousands, makes less than 14,000 dollars of profits. So a Swiss Kering worker makes more than a thousand times more profit than a Non-Swiss employee. They claim. And remember: we don’t know how small the taxes are on Pinault’s supposedly Swiss property. So instead of the French Pinault being taxed in France, or the rest of the world, he is “taxed” where there are no taxes. And the criminal ambles the world of the powerful, more powerful than them all, showing up at Davos, to plot with the other criminals. Hey, it was good to destroy completely the primary forest of Ivory Coast (thus spawning civil war there, when the economy tanked, as a result).

As the French magazine L’Express noted in 1986, “Bernard-Henri Lévy went all-out for his father. Did he intervene with presidential counselors to use the presidency’s African contacts to bump up the Ivory Coast’s debts to Bécob to top priority? BHL denies this intervention. However, he admits having contacted [then-PS Economy Minister] Pierre Bérégovoy to help his father.” Lévy also looked for help with the conservatives around Jacques Chirac, then mayor of Paris, and ultimately got an advantageous state loan after the personal intervention of President François Mitterrand.

Lévy’s firm also obtained an advantageous loan from François Pinault, a Gaullist politician, luxury firm executive, and today the 67th richest man in the world with a fortune of $11.5 billion.

Given Pinault’s bad reputation in business circles and his ties to far-right figures like Jean-Marie Le Chevallier and neo-fascist National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, L’Express notes, “Helping Bernard-Henri Lévy, a star of the intellectual left and leader of an already substantial network in publishing and media circles, was perhaps not such a stupid move. … The theory of a gesture by Pinault to win over BHL matches well, in any case, with subsequent developments: the turn of the [Pinault] group towards cultural industries and the birth of a ‘great friendship’ with Bernard.”

That was then. Now Pinault is much wealthier. Much powerful. By next year, he can ask Obama to lick his toes. In private.

Fiscal “optimization” has absolutely to stop. If nothing else, it’s weakening the West top military powers in their military capability. This is clear in Britain and France. (In the USA, the corruption affects military procurement: see the F35 scandalous catastrophe.)

But I am sure many officials in Ticino live very well, and, just as Nancy Pelosi only ever earned at most 160,000 dollars a year, her great leftism and democratism insures that Pelosi has now a personal fortune “between $42.4 million and $199.5 million in assets in 2013, which was enough for Bloomberg Business to deem her the richest member of House leadership from either party. By 2014, she and her husband, investment banker Paul Pelosi, were doing even better: She reported between $43.4 million and $202 million in assets”.

A report from Associated Press indicated that six years ago the IAAF knew of the widespread doping. Two internal IAAF papers before the London Olympics proposed not publishing doping sanctions for lesser-known Russians. Other officials claimed the IAAF was “one of the largest criminal organizations ever revealed”. Although some insisted that FIFA was still in the lead in that horse race.

In these matters, as in many others, the self-declared leading country leads. Obama just explained in his SOTU that the world wanted the USA to lead. Maybe it’s the world of the corrupted, corrupting global plutocrats which wants the USA to lead. In the USA many completely unethical practices, such as mass concussions for the youth, to serve “bread and circuses”, and make the youth unthinking, are perfectly legal.

Many so-called universities, “prestigious”, “excellent” and all that, get most of the profits from…concussion sports, with thoroughly drugged out young athletes (as shown by their dismally short lifespans). Is not that a new sort of slavery?

If the French prosecute, and jail them all, no doubt, after a while that the dreadful examples coming from the other side of the Atlantic will have to be put to the question.

Want to put a stop to the preceding? Campaign and vote for Senator Bernie Sanders, Clinton’s opponent. Although not the far left “populist” plutocratic media claims he is (him and Donald Trump!) Sanders, differently from the Obama, I helped so much eight years ago, is a known quantity in politics with an extremely long track record (yes Bernie likes guns and the F35… But he has to, as the Senior Senator from Vermont, a state heavily in guns and the F35). On the record both “populists” are very much against the tax advantages given to world’s richest people. Sanders is no doubt sincere. And Trump changes the mood, by condemning vigorously the practice (which Klingonic Clinton condones).

Clinton got $600,000 in speaking fees from Goldman Sachs is one year. G-S is an investment bank who got $60 billion from Obama in 2009… Goldman Sachs paid 5 billion dollars in fine for breaking the law. Not one G-S executives was prosecuted while kids who smoke pot go to jail. I have long condemned such facts. Now B. Sanders talk about them. They have to be carefully considered.

Clinton’s reply? Clinton accused Sanders of wanting to “start a contentious debate on healthcare, repel Obamacare”. All lies. Sanders wants MEDICARE FOR ALL.

Changing moods is the most fundamental step to take towards a necessary re-evolution. Yes, some of the world’s wealthiest, most powerful men, are the most corrupt. They are like the stem cells of a metastatic cancer of worldwide corruption. What happens in sports is just symptomatic. The stem cells of worldwide corruption have to be extirpated. Time to tax them, with more than taxes. Contempt should be high on the list, and the awareness than their behavior entails major capital crimes, not just ecological devastation.

Patrice Ayme’

Plutocracy Rising Through Tax Avoidance

The New York Times discovers the obvious:

“For the Wealthiest, a Private Tax System That Saves Them Billions: The very richest are able to quietly shape tax policy that will allow them to shield billions in income.”

Incoming tax policies will save the “very richest” billion more in taxes. But they have already saved hundreds of billions in taxes, if not trillions. In the USA alone. And we have to thank, in particular, the great so-called democratic leaders for that (some of the most prominent ones, like the adored Nancy Pelosi, hero of Obamacare, made hundreds of millions of dollars, while in politics: a successful political career is the safest way to make a fortune.

Bill: “Hey, Donald, We Gave You Everything, It’s Our Turn To Lead the Low Lives Again!” Donald: “You Mean the Idiots?” Hillary: “Oh Donald, Don’t Speak Like That!” [Then She Hilariously Bleats Like A Goat.] Donald, Less Amused: “Can You Believe These People? They Are So Greeeedy!”

So it is all over the so-called democratic West. The situation in France does not differ from that in the USA, it is actually in some ways, much worse. Two-thirds of France’s largest companies (CAC 40) by market capitalization are held by families (the equivalent consideration with the USA’s 500 largest market cap companies shows “only” 20% owned and controlled by families).

How is this all possible? Both the French and U.S. tax codes exclude the wealthiest from much, if not all, taxation. The French tax code does it glaringly (but the ). The tax code of the USA does it both glaringly, and obscurely.

In either case, the plutocratically owned Main Stream Media (MSM) never reports it . Or then they report it the way the New York Times did: by omitting a lot, if not most.

But let the New York Times’ Patricia Cohen and Noam Scheiber tell it their way:

“WASHINGTON — The hedge fund magnates Daniel S. Loeb, Louis Moore Bacon and Steven A. Cohen have much in common. They have managed billions of dollars in capital, earning vast fortunes. They have invested large sums in art — and millions more in political candidates.

Moreover, each has exploited an esoteric tax loophole that saved them millions in taxes. The trick? Route the money to Bermuda and back.

With inequality at its highest levels in nearly a century and public debate rising over whether the government should respond to it through higher taxes on the wealthy, the very richest Americans have financed a sophisticated and astonishingly effective apparatus for shielding their fortunes. Some call it the “income defense industry,” consisting of a high-priced phalanx of lawyers, estate planners, lobbyists and anti-tax activists who exploit and defend a dizzying array of tax maneuvers, virtually none of them available to taxpayers of more modest means

In recent years, this apparatus has become one of the most powerful avenues of influence for wealthy Americans of all political stripes, including Mr. Loeb and Mr. Cohen, who give heavily to Republicans, and the liberal billionaire George Soros, who has called for higher levies on the rich while at the same time using tax loopholes to bolster his own fortune.”

Something the New York Times does not mention at all: it is talking here only about the money wealth, and income that one can see. However, MOST OF THE WORLD’S WEALTH IS HIDDEN IN DARK POOLS.

And there is worse: money is power. Money gives power. The interest of money is that it enable the owner to have others do what she or he, wants.

But Bill and Melinda Gates don’t need to spend any money to have Obama giving them the power of molding the educational system as they see fit: they just show up, and make suggestions. Obama and his court immediately give Bill and Melinda the reins, because they want a job in 13 months, when they dismal tenure expires.

And so it is all over: when Bill and Melinda take the reins of tens of countries health care systems, and, still hiding behind their “love of man” decide that healthy policies will favor Monsanto (with which their “charities” and investments are entangled), and its wonderful Genetically Engineered wellness. But back to the New York Times’ more prosaic considerations:

“All are among a small group providing much of the early cash for the 2016 presidential campaign.

Operating largely out of public view — in tax court, through arcane legislative provisions and in private negotiations with the Internal Revenue Service — the wealthy have used their influence to steadily whittle away at the government’s ability to tax them. The effect has been to create a kind of private tax system, catering to only several thousand Americans.

The impact on their own fortunes has been stark. Two decades ago, when Bill Clinton was elected president, the 400 highest-earning taxpayers in America paid nearly 27 percent of their income in federal taxes, according to I.R.S. data. By 2012, when President Obama was re-elected, that figure had fallen to less than 17 percent, which is just slightly more than the typical family making $100,000 annually, when payroll taxes are included for both groups.

The Greatest Drop Of Tax Rate For the Wealthiest Was Under Bill Clinton

The ultra-wealthy “literally pay millions of dollars for these services,” said Jeffrey A. Winters, a political scientist at Northwestern University who studies economic elites, “and save in the tens or hundreds of millions in taxes.””

A year. For each concerned.

A characteristic of the truly wealthy is that they give to politicians of all stripes. Left unsaid, in their “negotiations” with the IRS, is that tax inspectors know that, be they good boys and girls, they may end up with way more cushy jobs. Actually, the negotiators they speak to often happened to have climbed that ladder. The new York Times still believe, though, that plutocrats have political inclinations aside from their true calling, hell itself:

“Some of the biggest current tax battles are being waged by some of the most generous supporters of 2016 candidates. They include the families of the hedge fund investors Robert Mercer, who gives to Republicans, and James Simons, who gives to Democrats; as well as the options trader Jeffrey Yass, a libertarian-leaning donor to Republicans.

Mr. Yass’s firm is litigating what the agency deemed to be tens of millions of dollars in underpaid taxes. Renaissance Technologies, the hedge fund Mr. Simons founded and which Mr. Mercer helps run, is currently under review by the I.R.S. over a loophole that saved their fund an estimated $6.8 billion in taxes over roughly a decade, according to a Senate investigation. Some of these same families have also contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to conservative groups that have attacked virtually any effort to raises taxes on the wealthy.”

The Wealthiest Have Captured Tax Legislation To Make Themselves Untaxable

The google guys, when outside of their personal jumbo jets once fueled by the government (at NASA’s Moffet Field, personal observation), like many other Silicon types, claim to be “progressives”, “liberal”, etc. But actually they finance the far right too. Just they do it secretively. PPP Notice Tax Rates Of the Wealthiest 400 Taxpayers Went Down Dramatically Under “Democrat” Clinton. Also Notice Dip Under Obama.

Of course the topmost wealthy don’t even pay tax, while they contemplate stolen, world famous art in their redoubts. Under Obama, there was a tiny crack-down on the expansion of the wealth of the wealthiest:

“In the heat of the presidential race, the influence of wealthy donors is being tested. At stake is the Obama administration’s 2013 tax increase on high earners — the first substantial increase in two decades — and an I.R.S. initiative to ensure that, in effect, the higher rates stick by cracking down on tax avoidance by the wealthy.

While Democrats like Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton have pledged to raise taxes on these voters, virtually every Republican has advanced policies that would vastly reduce their tax bills, sometimes to as little as 10 percent of their income… “There’s this notion that the wealthy use their money to buy politicians; more accurately, it’s that they can buy policy, and specifically, tax policy,” said Jared Bernstein, a senior fellow at the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities who served as chief economic adviser to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. “That’s why these egregious loopholes exist, and why it’s so hard to close them.”

Not really. The truth is that most people don’t care, because all they obsess about sport scores, same as the Romans of 19 centuries ago. So only a few “leaders” care, and those are easily bought, being few in numbers. A revolutionary mob can be misled, but it’s hard to buy. Meanwhile, tax avoidance of the hyper rich has become an industry:

“The Family Office

Each of the top 400 earners took home, on average, about $336 million in 2012, the latest year for which data is available. If the bulk of that money had been paid out as salary or wages, as it is for the typical American, the tax obligations of those wealthy taxpayers could have more than doubled.

Instead, much of their income came from convoluted partnerships and high-end investment funds. Other earnings accrued in opaque family trusts and foreign shell corporations, beyond the reach of the tax authorities.

The well-paid technicians who devise these arrangements toil away at white-shoe law firms and elite investment banks, as well as a variety of obscure boutiques. But at the fulcrum of the strategizing over how to minimize taxes are so-called family offices, the customized wealth management departments of Americans with hundreds of millions or billions of dollars in assets.

Family offices have existed since the late 19th century, when the Rockefellers pioneered the institution, and gained popularity in the 1980s. But they have proliferated rapidly over the last decade, as the ranks of the super-rich, and the size of their fortunes, swelled to record proportions.

“We have so much wealth being created, significant wealth, that it creates a need for the family office structure now,” said Sree Arimilli, an industry recruiting consultant.

Family offices, many of which are dedicated to managing and protecting the wealth of a single family, oversee everything from investment strategy to philanthropy.”

Real philanthropy would consist into paying taxes, of course. What plutocrats call “philanthropy” is just tax avoidance combined with influence multiplier.

…”tax planning is a core function. While the specific techniques these advisers employ to minimize taxes can be mind-numbingly complex, they generally follow a few simple principles, like converting one type of income into another type that’s taxed at a lower rate.

Mr. Loeb, for example, has invested in a Bermuda-based reinsurer — an insurer to insurance companies — that turns around and invests the money in his hedge fund. That maneuver transforms his profits from short-term bets in the market, which the government taxes at roughly 40 percent, into long-term profits, known as capital gains, which are taxed at roughly half that rate. It has had the added advantage of letting Mr. Loeb defer taxes on this income indefinitely, allowing his wealth to compound and grow more quickly.”

Partnerships obscure who owns what, and make it impossible to collect taxes:

“Organizing one’s business as a partnership can be lucrative in its own right. Some of the partnerships from which the wealthy derive their income are allowed to sell shares to the public, making it easy to cash out a chunk of the business while retaining control. But unlike publicly traded corporations, they pay no corporate income tax; the partners pay taxes as individuals. And the income taxes are often reduced by large deductions, such as for depreciation.

For large private partnerships, meanwhile, the I.R.S. often struggles “to determine whether a tax shelter exists, an abusive tax transaction is being used,” according to a recent report by the Government Accountability Office. The agency is not allowed to collect underpaid taxes directly from these partnerships, even those with several hundred partners. Instead, it must collect from each individual partner, requiring the agency to commit significant time and manpower.”

Meanwhile, charities are most giving, most giving to the richest of the wealthiest (and then the rabble thank the great Lords of tax avoidance, for their generosity):

“The wealthy can also avail themselves of a range of esoteric and customized tax deductions that go far beyond writing off a home office or dinner with a client. One aggressive strategy is to place income in a type of charitable trust, generating a deduction that offsets the income tax. The trust then purchases what’s known as a private placement life insurance policy, which invests the money on a tax-free basis, frequently in a number of hedge funds.”

Taxes cannot be collected, because the IRS officially does not have the brain power (in truth, top employees of the IRS may be unwilling to think too hard; the NYT will not say that.)

“Many of these maneuvers are well established, and wealthy taxpayers say they are well within their rights to exploit them. Others exist in a legal gray area, its boundaries defined by the willingness of taxpayers to defend their strategies against the I.R.S. Almost all are outside the price range of the average taxpayer.

Among tax lawyers and accountants, “the best and brightest get a high from figuring out how to do tricky little deals,” said Karen L. Hawkins, who until recently headed the I.R.S. office that oversees tax practitioners. “Frankly, it is almost beyond the intellectual and resource capacity of the Internal Revenue Service to catch.”

The combination of cost and complexity has had a profound effect, tax experts said. Whatever tax rates Congress sets, the actual rates paid by the ultra-wealthy tend to fall over time as they exploit their numerous advantages.”

Where Even The New York Times Discovers That Obama Is A Plutophile:

Obama is a great democrat, revered for Obamacare, first of all a trick to direct more money to the health care plutocracy (although it did a few good things to sugar-coat it). However, under Obama, the richest of the rich got taxed less, and this is even the New York Times which now admits it. And the problem is not the famed 1%, but the really nasty ones, the .1%, the only ones Obama cares about:  

“From Mr. Obama’s inauguration through the end of 2012, federal income tax rates on individuals did not change (excluding payroll taxes). But the highest-earning one-thousandth of Americans went from paying an average of 20.9 percent to 17.6 percent. By contrast, the top 1 percent, excluding the very wealthy, went from paying just under 24 percent on average to just over that level.”

Actually, the .1% hide behind the 1%. As I have explain before, and will explain again in the future, the main interest of taxation is to prevent the richest to gather ever more riches, at an ever faster rate, just because they are the richest.

This is what is precisely failing in the West right now. Thus the most important function of taxation, progressive taxation, what differentiated the West from the rest, is failing:

“We do have two different tax systems, one for normal wage-earners and another for those who can afford sophisticated tax advice,” said Victor Fleischer, a law professor at the University of San Diego who studies the intersection of tax policy and inequality. “At the very top of the income distribution, the effective rate of tax goes down, contrary to the principles of a progressive income tax system.”

This, as have argued many times, is how the West, and not just the West, has fallen many times. New York Times:

…”the Managed Funds Association, an industry group that represents prominent hedge funds like D. E. Shaw, Renaissance Technologies, Tiger Management and Third Point, began meeting with members of Congress to discuss a wish list of adjustments. The founders of these funds have all donated at least $500,000 to 2016 presidential candidates. During the Obama presidency, the association itself has risen to become one of the most powerful trade groups in Washington, spending over $4 million a year on lobbying.

And while the lobbying clout of the wealthy is most often deployed through industry trade associations and lawyers, some rich families have locked arms to advance their interests more directly.”

“Some of the most profound victories are barely known outside the insular world of the wealthy and their financial managers.

In 2009, Congress set out to require that investment partnerships like hedge funds register with the Securities and Exchange Commission, partly so that regulators would have a better grasp on the risks they posed to the financial system.

The early legislative language would have required single-family offices to register as well, exposing the highly secretive institutions to scrutiny that their clients were eager to avoid. Some of the I.R.S.’s cases against the wealthy originate with tips from the S.E.C., which is often better positioned to spot tax evasion.

By the summer of 2009, several family office executives had formed a lobbying group called the Private Investor Coalition to push back against the proposal. The coalition won an exemption in the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform bill, then spent much of the next year persuading the S.E.C. to largely adopt its preferred definition of “family office.”

So expansive was the resulting loophole that Mr. Soros’s $24.5 billion hedge fund took advantage of it, converting to a family office after returning capital to its remaining outside investors. The hedge fund manager Stanley Druckenmiller, a former business partner of Mr. Soros, took the same step.”

Then the New York Times explains that the part of the IRS after taxpayer earning more than ten million dollars of income a year has been decimated, gutted, with reduction of personnel in some cases going down to zero.

“Several former I.R.S. officials, including Marcus Owens, who once headed the agency’s Exempt Organizations division, said the controversy badly damaged the agency’s willingness to investigate other taxpayers, even outside the exempt division.

“I.R.S. enforcement is either absent or diminished” in certain areas, he said. Mr. Owens added that his former department — which provides some oversight of money used by charities and nonprofits — has been decimated.”

[The Wall Street Journal, owned by the global plutocratic family Murdoch, has a greater distribution than the New York Times. It immediately ran a lead article to counter any damage to the top 400 which the NYT may have visited on their aura: “Tax Rates For Top 400 US Taxpayers Climbed in 2013“.]

Sometimes, in history, a revolution is needed. In Europe, a revolution was needed as early as 1089 CE. But it took seven centuries to come.

However, England was more  lucky. Notice that, when the Duke of Normandy and his Frankish barons invaded England, in 1066 CE, he was able to consolidate power because he organized a Revolution, top down. The Duke, now King, outlawed slavery (standard Frankish law; 20% of the population was enslaved). The new King also made the relationship between King and People direct, and established Parliament.

In mainland France, the Revolution came in only in 1789 CE (although there was an important attempt in the middle of the 17 C, just when two Revolutions, and an invasion in quick succession, modernized England; Revolution is contagious: the English “Glorious Revolution was imported from the Netherlands, itself a rogue part freed from Spain, mostly by French military intervention).

After 1789 CE, French plutocracy regrew quickly. In the USA, plutocracy was present in miniature all along, thanks to the existence of slavery. It started to blossom only after Carnegie (who himself was a scathing, and sincere critique of it!). It went on haltingly, as plutocrat Teddy Roosevelt (another enlightened Pluto!) cut down, as president, the most outrageous monopolies.

American plutocracy then focused on Europe, from Franco to Stalin, without forgetting Mussolini and Hitler. The Second World War itself could be fought only with huge manpower, and those more than ten million soldiers, all them trained killers, had to be pleased after 1945, lest they revolt. A time of increased equality ensued, all over the West .

But now here we are: plutocracy is completely out of control. The New York Times article focused only on what can be seen, thus, potentially, taxed. However, most of the money escapes detection outright.

That the New York Times does not seem anxious to focus on. Nor does Hillary Clinton, or even Bernie Sanders. And in Europe, don’t worry, none of the political parties, not even France’s National Front, or the Communist Party, or the New Left, has called on changing the tax structures which exempt the .1%.

However, I claim they are draining the socio-economies. Not just through sheer tax avoidance, but also through the atrocious mental influence they exert. It’s not just the “austerity” insanity, but also the sport score insanities, and other mind numbing and civilization destroying strategies and love fests (complete with adoring Islamism, something which has recently backfired).

If you want humanity, you will have to deprive of power Pluto and its emulators, admirers and other imitators. If you don’t want humanity, you will lose the biosphere, to start with. Shortly before the return of cannibalism, and other discomforts.

Patrice Ayme’  

Christian Civilization Never Existed

Many fanatics, Christian or Muslim, insist that there was a “Christian Civilization”. Well, no. It’s not because people with vested interest repeat always the same thing, that it is decisively supported by the facts. It is not because some aspects of a civilization are of such and such a nature, that one particular aspect defines the whole thing. The philosophical, legal and behavioral foundations of the West were not “Christian”. Christianism was the fig leaf thrown, by the Roman plutocracy, over the apocalypse it preferred to the taxing continuance of civilization.

Although something called “Christianity” contributed to civilization considerably, the Christianism of bishop (Saint) Jerome, a “Founding Father of the Church“, in 400 CE Milan, was very different from the idiosyncratic Pagano-Christianism of Consul (and king of the Franks) Clovis in 500 CE (who re-invented Christianism thoroughly).

As so-called “Christmas” approaches, it’s good to remember that the Winter Solstice feast was Greco-Roman, and preceded the displacement of “Jesus” birth to the Winter Solstice, by more than a millennium.

“Christian” Hatred Of The Body Was Rejected By The Popes Themselves

[“What spirit is so empty and blind, that it cannot recognize the fact that the foot is more noble than the shoe, and skin more beautiful than the garment with which it is clothed?” Michelangelo.]

Christianism initially hated the body, in opposition to Greco-Roman civilization: love the body, and soon you will love the mind, and will want one of your own.

So Christianism closed and destroyed the baths (thus promoting devastating, civilization destroying, epidemics among the 99%) and longed for the Apocalypse (generously provided by the telling collaboration of Roman plutocrats and invading barbarians: the analogy with Islamism now is uncomfortable! Our plutocrats have been busy plotting with Islamists ever since before the Great Bitter Lake Conspiracy!)

Although some lunatics tried to force an authentic Christian civilization, it became, literally, a Non Sequitur: it’s now called the “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”. When one wishes for the Apocalypse as Christians and later Muslims, wished, it should be considered synonymous to the decline and fall of civilization, society, population, reading skills, security, economics, and all and any standards of sophistication.

See Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Pakistan, Sudan, Yemen… (And yes, Somalia, Sudan, and more specifically Yemen, can be compared to say, Ethiopia, which is doing incomparably better.)

What do I mean by the non-existence of “Christian Civilization”? Consider the tyrannical, self-obsessed, much adulated cretin, Louis XIV of France, the self-described, self-adoring “Sun-King” (a bloody dictator much celebrated in France this year, as he croaked 300 years ago, justly covered by gangrene, from his toes, to the top of his head. Louis’ painful and disgusting three weeks of gangrene is the only indication from his reign, which I can discern, that there may be, after all, a God).

Louis XIV tried to make France into a Catholic society, by revoking the Edict of Nantes of his excellent grandfather, Henri IV. That was more than weird: a century earlier, under Catherine of Medici, queen of France, a similar episode had been launched, the Massacre de la Saint-Barthélemy. Not only did that surprise assault in the middle of the night, killed immediately 30,000, and most of France’s intellectual elite (which could only condemn and despise Catholicism), but it launched no less than seven religious wars in 36 years, bleeding France, killing up to more than 20% of the population (so Syria has a way to go! By the way, those who wonder where the French hostility to Abraham’s god comes from, should study this).

I repeat: in less than 40 years, wars among Christians in France, killed more than 4 million people (and terrorized everybody).  Nor was it the first time: more tan a million Cathars, and all their works were annihilated by Christians around 1200 CE. And, in the Fifteenth Century, Protestants were hunted like wild beasts by Catholics (to the point Louis XI had to intervene, reminding all that killing people for religious reasons was against the law, and sending the army!)

How civilized is all that Christianism? When Rome was far removed from Christianism, no such massacre ever happened.

So here was that bloody imbecile, Louis the Blood King, trying the same trick all over again, all by himself (and his fanatical wife). It is still a great disease that such a creep is revered abjectly, by the French elite.

Thus Louis The Pervert threw out and abominably abused millions of Protestants. Many Protestants fled (that’s why there is winemaking in South Africa, and why so many Germans have French names). As protestants tended to be smarter, their flight made France much more idiotic, and thus more hospitable to Louis the Pervert and his vicious entourage of ill disguised monsters. Thus obnoxious critters make an environment hospitable to themselves

There is something in common between that so-called “Sun King” and the unfortunate fiction of Camus, Mr. Meursault, who kills an Arab, just because he can, and got too much sun, and could not care less. Louis XIV was the real life Meursault, and Camus channeling unconsciously that abomination of French history. Louis XIV killed the Protestants, just because he could, could not care less, and had too much sun.

Too bad Meursault and the Sun-King are still revered: it’s a sickness of the mood.

Christian propagandists always insisted that there was such a thing as “Christian Civilization”. But there was not.

The West was NOT A CHRISTIAN CIVILIZATION. It looked like one twice: around 400 CE, and around 1400 CE. But, in either case, although an attempt was made, the basic law was NOT Christian, but Roman (or the Salic law of the Franks, which was Roman written).

The attempt around 400 CE, a government of bishops, petered out right away. True Milan’s Saint Jerome, the most prominent “Founding Father of the Church”, had emperor Theodosius begging forgiveness (for some massacre). But then the Roman State, short in cash, put the Franks in charge of defending the North West “Limes” (frontier).

A century later, having established a huge “Imperium” (= Roman military command), the Franks sort of converted to Catholicism, modifying it extensively in the process, and submitting the Popes, for centuries to come.

The Franks re-established Roman (Late) Republican tolerance for ALL religions.

In other words, the empire of the Franks, the “Imperium Francorum” of 600 CE, was much more civilized than today’s Saudi Arabia. Arguably Arabia of 600 CE was more civilized than today’s Arabia, in the sense that Christianism, Judaism and the Cult of the Moon in Mecca, were all practiced without known religious massacre (the first religious holocaust was Muhammad’s personal annihilation of a Jewish tribe, a bit later; Muhammad is on the record as of the opinion that whoever insulted him should die, a tradition Muslims are keen, to this day, to carry forward, in the name of their Rophet; don’t ask me what a Rophet is).

The tolerance was extended to much more than Jews, Pagans (the Franks were de facto Christianized Pagans for centuries), Muslims, etc. By 800 CE, the “Renovated Roman Empire” led by Charlemagne, was at peace and the world’s richest

The “Final Solution” was Nazi (although I have accused many times Christianism to have inspired it). The “Manifest Destiny” was not particularly Christian (Founding Fathers and their preceding generation were very anti-Christian, and for “Nature’s God”). The Crusades were, mostly, a counter-attack (although I am very anti-crusades, that’s what they were in first order).

The annihilation of the Natives did not have to be a consequence from the Christian nature of the invaders. A very good example is the French, who never eradicated a population of Natives (and that’s why they lost America!)

“Secular ideologies” may have been by far the biggest mass killers…. Because they suppress everything else. In primitive societies the kill ratio is more like 50% (or at least 25%), whereas the two World Wars killed rather around 2% to 4% (at most, directly and indirectly, through famines and diseases they contributed to)

The preceding has to be kept in mind when inanities about Islam, and an “Islamist Civilization” are proffered, just because people are conditioned to mouth them, and believe it’s the truth, because everybody says it. It’s not because all the sheep bleat the same, that bleating is the truth.

This being said, because of the insistence of raw Islam to apply Islamist Law, instead of secular law, made “Islamist Civilization” much more of a reality. Islam wants to be everything, leaving no space for anything else. Islam wants to be all of society, and even to occupy visual space. Islam wants to be more than a civilization, it wants to be an obsession.

However, an inspection of history shows that all period of really shining civilization under “Islam” seemed to have involved see through dresses more than niqab, chador, and other attempts to make women into something that should be hidden.he vast body). Contributions by non-Muslims (Jews and Christian) tend to dominate (they were the majority for centuries).

Regimes which interpreted the Qur’an literally were highly successful, especially initially, thanks to ruthless surprise: initial conquest, from Spain to Central Asia, assaults of India, Indonesia, conquest of Anatolia by the just Islamized Turks, and a reconquest of Spanish Caliphate by savage, Fundamentalist Muslims from the desert. It ultimately backfired (except in the case of the Turks, arguably). For example the re-reconquest of Spain, made the “Reconquista” by the Catholics much more savage and thorough…

Many supposed “characteristics” of “Christianism” were established centuries before Christianism was imposed on the Greco-Roman world by emperors from Constantine to Theodosius, in the fateful Fourth Century. For example welfare and scholarship for worthy students was established by 100 CE (under emperor Trajan).

The Roman world kept on going, even, and especially after the Decline and Fall of the Roman imperial state. When Saint Louis, a Christian Fundamentalist and Jihadist (“Crusader”) of the Twelfth Century expressed, in writing his burning desire to “plant a knife in the belly of a Jew or Unbeliever” (“nothing would please me more”) he recognized he could not do it, because, well the (Salic and Roman) Law forbid him to do so.

Sharia Christian, or not never ruled the West very long (although, sometimes, it made sparks: see Bruno being burned alive). We are not going to start now.

Patrice Ayme’

Tech, Science, Thinking, Stalled By Plutocracy

TECH STALLED BECAUSE SO IS SCIENCE, & THINKING, AS OUR MASTERS DESIRE

Technology, Energy, Science, Economy all entangled, & Stalled:

Some have observed tech is bringing up more hype than progress: we did not get flying cars, but 140 characters. Productivity is stagnating. The Internet hype led a devolution of thinking, for all to see. Some sites seem popular, mostly because they induce a parody of thinking (even on “academic” sites).

Against the will to stupidity, genius roars in vain.

So much of the “high Tech” is not truly high tech, or at least new tech. It’s no big deal, indeed. The “high tech” monopolies, with their “big data” will allow to make with robots what our ancestors used to have with domesticated animals (an ass, horse, or an ox are clever, and respond to voice commands, like the day after tomorrow’s robots).

There is not enough financing of the possible avenues of futuristic research. Here is one:

Real high tech would mean progress in energy production: this is the core of what defines our species. An obvious possibility, indeed, is thermonuclear fusion. H-Bombs work splendidly, and are very small. Making a thermonuclear engine has been difficult, but propulsion in space could turn around a lot of the difficulty we presently have.

Krugman noticed some of this in “The Big Meh” [I sent wise comments, therefore all censored by the New York Times; the Times later sent me kindly an unsolicited letter to justify its censorship; there is no excuse: the New York Times should not censor serious and cogent comments, this is a misuse of technology].

Krugman: “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”… began with some technology snark, dismissing Earth as a planet whose life-forms “are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.”… Since then we’ve moved on to much more significant things, so much so that the big technology idea of 2015, so far, is a digital watch…

O.K., I’m snarking, too. But there is a real question here. Everyone knows that we live in an era of incredibly rapid technological change, which is changing everything. But what if what everyone knows is wrong? And I’m not being wildly contrarian here. A growing number of economists, looking at the data on productivity and incomes, are wondering if the technological revolution has been greatly overhyped — and some technologists share their concern.”

We evolved as a technological species: weapon and tool usage precedes the apparition of Homo:

Technology preceded the apparition of Homo Erectus, two million years ago. So we can only conclude that technology, and its attached science, and scientific method, created the ecological niche in which Homo, even homo Erectus, evolved.

The fundamental evolutionary niche our very distant ancestors, pre-Homo Erectus, chose was to improve the quantity and quality of energy at our disposal. They went to explore, far from trees and cliffs, armed with stone tools and weapons, with a bias towards a much more carnivorous diet.

Technology and science are us. This is as human as we get. That does not mean anything goes. Just, that’s how humanity gets going.

Thus, our very evolution is entangled with our mastery of energy. Neanderthals used coal (lignite!) already 80,000 years ago. When our ancestors learned to domesticate animals and then invented agriculture, we improved our mastery of energy considerably. In the last 2,000 years, wood was progressively replaced by fossil fuels.

However, fossil fuels have become unsustainable. It is not just that they have put so much CO2 in the lower atmosphere, warming it, melting the ice, rising the seas, and into the ocean, making it acid.

The Return On Investment (ROI) of fossil fuels is now terrible. Major oil companies do not make much profits on new fields: they cost too much to find and exploit. Fracking makes money, but only because the states, and others, pay the price. Remember: 5.3 trillion dollars of fossil fuel subsidies out there.

However progress in economic matters is all about ROI in energy. Without energy we have no food, no shelter, we die.

We don’t have flying cars because we did not improve our mastery of energy as much as that would require (the very first plane, part of a French military program, did not fly very far: it used a heavy steam plant; shortly after, the internal combustion engine allowed to take-off more clearly; right now Airbus sells an electric plane, and intents to develop that technology much further).

Fundamental progress in energy technology has been stalled by lack of advances in fission, fusion, and batteries. Only solar photovoltaics is making really spectacular progress.

This stalling of major technological progress where it counts, in energy management is why society, and the planet, are threatened. This stalling is directly related to a dearth of fundamental research funding, itself related to the rise of a non-tax paying plutocracy. We are in whirlpool of disaster, and the greed of an oligarchy is its nature.

Patrice Ayme’

P/S: Latest News: Amazon Inc. just announced it would stop hiding its European profits in Luxembourg, and would set-up tax paying subsidiaries in various countries: it was threatened by incoming British and French laws. However, skepticism is widespread about the fine print in Amazon’s proposal…

The future was not stalled in the past: Contrarily to what happened around the era from, say, 1900 to 1970, when many futuristic technologies were researched; the USA operated nuclear rocket engines, France flew a “statoreacteur” (“ramjet”) plane, etc.; the inception of motorized flight, from the French steam plane, all the way to jet engines, took around 50 years!

 

The Art Of Plutocracy

Paintings, and sculptures just sold for unprecedented amounts of money. In a world of deflation, “art” has been increasing in value at 12% a year. A Picasso was sold for 179 million dollars, illustrating the increasing might of plutocracy.

As I have been trying to explain, as recently as yesterday, the wrong obsessions act as cover-ups for the real levers of power (yes, the Atlantic Slave Trade was abominable, but arguably not as much as the alternative). People look at beautiful paintings, and do not realize that they are valued, not at all for themselves, but as UNTAXED CURRENCY.

Hyper expensive art is mostly about tax evasion. Not just about rising inequality.

Nice. Yet, I Can Do Just As Well, But It Would Not Be A Currency For Plutocrats

One can buy a million dollar painting, pay with cash, and it’s not written down anywhere in a financial system, or documented to a tax authority. Hyper expensive art provides with tax free exchange among those who can afford it. Let’s consider the usual suspects.

In Socialist France, “art” escapes most (colossal) taxes on inheritance. As simple as that. How come the so-called “French Socialists” did not notice, nor any other French government in the last few decades? (That is similar to no USA government having noticed that the USA is the greatest tax heavens, anywhere, thanks to the enormous tax code subtleties…)

“Some people use art, especially expensive art, as a form of money laundering,” said Nouriel Roubini, famous for predicting the housing crash, and now a professor at New York University. Some people, yeah. In truth, most plutocrats use art as bin Laden’s Al Qaeda used diamonds: untraceable mean of exchange. A parallel currency, bit-coin for the haves.

It is actually even worse than that: art can be exchanged “in kind” and thus be used as an OFFICIAL NON TAXABLE CURRENCY.

(That “in kind” transactions are NOT taxable is the number one subtlety of the USA tax code system, an exquisite knowledge reserved to plutocrats and their attendants…)

And, once again: how come nobody has noticed? (Go ask the sort of “authorities” who systematically censor my comments at the New York Times… It’s not because what I say is false, or irrelevant; it’s the exact opposite: I get censored because what I say is true, and relevant. Yet dangerously destabilizing as some plutocrats told me to my face.)

Paul Krugman and associates are starting to notice this, that a certain naivety on the part of self-described “progressives” makes progressivity a joke. How can one “progress” when one does not know what is going, nor, even what has been going on?

See Krugman’s post: “Fighting For History”. By manipulating how the past is perceived, minds can be changed in the present. For example, much of American plutocracy aided and abetted Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. This is revealing upon the nature of said American plutocracy.

In 1953, the Bush family was actually paid a gigantic amount of money for managing the American-Silesian company (13 million in 1953 dollars, and that is 125 million in 2015 dollars). Adolf Hitler viewed American-Silesian as the “Reich’s most important defense company“. The Nazi dictator explained to Prescott Bush that he had to nationalize the company, but would he please stay as the excellent manager he was, as he would be fully reimbursed after the war, no matter what. (Prescott Bush had to resign in August 1942, under the pressure of the government of the USA, which nominated him to the U.S. Senate in compensation.)

Had these facts been known by the public, would it have been possible to elect any Bush to the presidency? Or the Vice-Presidency? Or allowed to head the CIA? Of course not. “Progressives” do not study history enough.

Recently organizations representing American Jews asked the French SNCF, which suffered hundreds of its employees executed at the hands of Nazis for acts of resistance, to pay reparations (for having transported Jews who were assassinated).

How come they have not asked something similar from the Bush family?

Not just because they really absolutely do not know.

But because the powers that be know that the questions one asks have to do with the power one wants.

To sort out the plutocratic art problem, the answer is the same as for Greece’s main problem. Determine who owns what, and tax accordingly. Worldwide.

Patrice Ayme’