Brexit Idiocy In One Picture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Right now Europe is suffering from three mentalities:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Will Europeans understand this?

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

Patrice Ayme’

 

Hope At Last?

The 99% were told that they were culprit of the ways of high finance. The 99% were told that, they profited from the financial crisis, and had to be restrained with “austerity” (now that all the money had to go to the bankers and other richest people in the world, to save those towering pillars of society from ruin under which we would otherwise be crushed).

That the 99% were culprit of the high leverage of the financial system, thanks to heavy “investing” in financial derivatives such as Credit Default Swaps, was an absurdity: most people had no idea, and still have no idea, that much money creation by bankers, head that way, towards planet finance, instead of planet Earth.

Men Of Wealth, Taste, Power & “Three Minutes” Women

Austerity, the claim that the 99% were too rich, and that this caused the crisis, after thirty years of “Trickle Down”, was, of course, insane. And therefore well received. The appropriate punishment was to insure that the richest would have the means to stay rich, and massive transfers of wealth to the richest people were implemented (even in Greece, where, last I checked, ship magnates were still not taxed!)

With the bleakest sense of humor, this Transfer of Assets to the Richest People TARP), was called… “TARP”, because it was the ultimate cover-up.

However, the economy has not recovered. So insane the gap between sacrifice and result, propaganda and observation, that even average voters are becoming suspicious.

In Spite Of Gigantic Sacrifices & Unemployment, “Austerity”, Spain GDP Not Recovering

[I exhibited Spain’s GDP, but it’s typical. Lest some hysterical Germanophile comes up screaming that Germany is doing well, let me point out that Germany grew not at all in the last decade, averaging… one third of one percent yearly, which is only compatible with a population decrease, as observed… Thus Europe is literally dying from austerity.]

To accuse the 99% of the violations plutocrats engaged in, and only them can, is becoming so egregious, that even political leaders on the pseudo-left, like the followers of Blair in British Labor, find difficult to hold that discourse nowadays, with a straight face.

So here we are. The pyramid of lies on how the economy works, by self serving politicians in bed with the richest people in the world, is starting to collapse. Worldwide, voters are starting to have their own opinions, and feel that they were lied to, at a nearly inconceivable scale. Voters don’t just repeat anymore what the media owned by the richest people in the world have told them to think. Maybe there is hope after all.

Jeremy Corbyn, a long-time leftist dissident, just won a stunning victory for leadership of Britain’s Labour Party. In an excellent editorial, Paul Krugman  Labour’s Dead Center observes that:

…”one crucial piece of background to the Corbyn surge: the implosion of Labour’s moderates. On economic policy, in particular, the striking thing about the leadership contest was that every candidate other than Mr. Corbyn essentially supported the Conservative government’s austerity policies.

Worse, they all implicitly accepted the bogus justification for those policies, in effect pleading guilty to policy crimes that Labour did not, in fact, commit. If you want a U.S. analogy, it’s as if all the leading candidates for the Democratic nomination in 2004 had gone around declaring, “We were weak on national security, and 9/11 was our fault.” Would we have been surprised if Democratic primary voters had turned to a candidate who rejected that canard, whatever other views he or she held?

In the British case, the false accusations against Labour involve fiscal policy, specifically claims that the Labour governments that ruled Britain from 1997 to 2010 spent far beyond their means, creating a deficit and debt crisis that caused the broader economic crisis. The fiscal crisis, in turn, supposedly left no alternative to severe cuts in spending, especially spending that helps the poor.

These claims have, one must admit, been picked up and echoed by almost all British news media. It’s not just that the media have failed to subject Conservative claims to hard scrutiny, they have reported them as facts. It has been an amazing thing to watch — because every piece of this conventional narrative is completely false.

Was the last Labour government fiscally irresponsible? Britain had a modest budget deficit on the eve of the economic crisis of 2008, but as a share of G.D.P. it wasn’t very high – about the same, as it turns out, as the U.S. budget deficit at the same time. British government debt was lower, as a share of G.D.P., than it had been when Labour took office a decade earlier, and was lower than in any other major advanced economy except Canada.”

The question boils down on why do people think what they do. Well, they think what they have been told to think. Krugman:

“…the supposed fiscal crisis never created any actual economic problem… there was never any need for a sharp turn to austerity.

In short, the whole narrative about Labour’s culpability for the economic crisis and the urgency of austerity is nonsense. But it is nonsense that was consistently reported by British media as fact. And all of Mr. Corbyn’s rivals for Labour leadership bought fully into that conventional nonsense, in effect accepting the Conservative case that their party did a terrible job of managing the economy, which simply isn’t true.”

Why do people do what they do? Well, most people basically try to survive honorably. However those with political aspirations are different. After all, they want to make a job of ruling us. Thirst for power is therefore, one may suspect, a prime motivation of theirs. And then the question is what do they believe they can get away with, on their royal road to domination? And what will be their justification for domination, which they will cover-up their thirst for power with?

Enter plutocratization, the general mood that the few, urged by the most basic instincts of domination, doing better than the many, is the best social organization for everybody. This “trickle down” theory has led the middle class down the road of increasing pauperization, even while global GDP was rising. Plutocratic media monopoly has insured that this mood became a modern religion.

Thatcher and Reagan were the modern instigators of plutocratization. Ex-British PM Tony Blair is a spectacular success of official corruption. Corruption by officials, of officials.  Blair helped to demolish Iraq to please oil barons (and American plutocrats). Blair sells his services to whoever it is most advantageous to sell them to. Piling up income from the likes of the dictator of Kazakhstan, he gathered in excess of 100 million dollars.

By now the middle class is starting to feel they were had by plutocratization. Methods of massive exploitation had to be changed. Enter the 2008 financial crisis. The “rescue” consisted in sending giant amount of money to banks and their managers. “Trickle Down” theory changed its face to “austerity”. The 99% were told that they were culprit of the 2008 crisis, they had to be punished. Completely brainwashed as they were, they welcomed their punishment.

Krugman: “Beyond that, however, Labour’s political establishment seems to lack all conviction, for reasons I don’t fully understand. And this means that the Corbyn upset isn’t about a sudden left turn on the part of Labour supporters. It’s mainly about the strange, sad moral and intellectual collapse of Labour moderates.”

In much of Western  society, in the last 35 years, political leaders got to power by undermining civilization, and Western democracy. They have been well paid for that: watch the fortunes past leaders have made, such as Major, Blair, Clinton, Gore, Chirac, and, of course, their families: Chelsea Clinton is very rich, but so are the brothers of past French presidents, although Chirac is worth only $10 million, roughly a tenth (Blair, Clintons) or a hundredth (Feinstein, Pelosi, Gore) of Anglo-Saxon politicians worth. Still remarkable, for someone such as Chirac, who was only an elected official all his life (in the USA, Reid of Nevada, head of democrats in the Senate, has a similar fortune and history; that brought charges of corruption, quickly silenced).

The British press is held by plutocrats, some Australian heirs (Murdoch, son and father of Murdochs), some even Russian “oligarchs”. This is where thinking has been coming from. And the charade will go on, until We The People think on their own. How soon? Can one think freely in a Mafia State? Certainly not in Russia. What about Britain? George Monbiot argues that Britain is also a Mafia State. Considering my personal experiences, I can only agree. Dawn is the coldest hour.

Patrice Ayme’

Wisdom Is Not An Itch, But Economy Hitching The Dark Side, Is A Gangrene

Is Philosophy Just An “Itch”? Far from it. Even if it were, as Wittgenstein had it:

“Philosophy hasn’t made any progress? – If somebody scratches the spot where he has an itch, do we have to see some progress? Isn’t genuine scratching otherwise, or genuine itching? And can’t this reaction to an irritation continue in the same way for a long time before a cure for the itching is discovered?”

It is not true that philosophy asks always only the same questions, and it is not true that philosophy has not progressed in 3,000 years. Philosophy has progressed enormously in 3,000 years. But short term, there is a lot of noise, and often, what passes for “progress” is truly regression (looking at Hellenistic regimes show much of thinking in regression, and that degeneracy accelerated after the fascist Roman empire and its corrupt officials (such as Cassius and Brutus) took control of Greece during the last century of the Republic… Let alone when Justinian closed the schools, five centuries later, in 529 CE, and this time, for good.

Instead the opposite is true. contemporary with Socrates was Xenophon, who named and defined “Economics”. Xenophon was student and friend to Socrates, a writer, historian, soldier, general, and retired as a horse breeder. Differently from Plato and Aristotle, Xenophon was not on the take.

Paul Krugman, appropriately surrounded by the Dark Sides. Krugman Is A Philosopher, He Rules The World Socioeconomy With His Insane Globalism. And Who Pulls His Strings?

Paul Krugman is one of the world’s most respected – and most feared – economists of our time. The illustration above is by David Simmonds.” – from Handelsblatt which adds: “Many think the U.S. Nobel Prize winner is the most influential economist of our time and a leading voice on the left. But many of his major ideas are controversial. And rightly so.”

I don’t know what the “left” is (although I know what it should be). But I certainly know that “Liberalism”, in the US manner is not from the left… Although common opinion in the USA at this point is that “liberalism” is not far from “socialism” (a huge mistake, and why dozens of millions of US citizens have no health insurance, after decades of “liberalism”).

Those familiar with my disagreements with Krugman know that we differ philosophically. Our differences are mostly about finance, banking… And especially believing that, if only bankers had even more money, through Quantitative Easing, the world would become richer, fairer, and more comfortable. That is anathema to me, for many reasons, including the fact I do not trust too much power in too few hands, whatever the reasons evoked, or even if one calls these people bankers, and even if Obama admires them very much.

Philosophy named and defined much progress.

Behind all and any empire is an economic organization backed up by a philosophy. Darius, founder of the Achaemenid Persian empire, changed economic organizations very quickly, according to circumstances, , from military to command and control, to building the world’s first fast road system, to libertarian capitalism.

It is possible to argue that the Greco-Roman empire failed, because it failed PHILOSOPHICALLY. Namely, its philosophy failed. It failed because the (Macedonian) military leaders got imprinted on the erroneous, despicable, and lethal philosophy of their friend Aristotle, itself all too inspired by Plato, Socrates, and other golden youth, or their fellow travellers.

One can view the Middle Ages greatly as a struggle against much of Aristotelian philosophy: not just against Aristotle’s physics, which was egregiously wrong, but also against his Ethics and his, related, preferred theory of government. Aristotle embraced dictatorship, also known as monarchy, hence theocracy.

In Socrates’ times, democratic institutions were, in many ways, brutally primitive and inappropriate for sustaining the Athenian Republic. These brought not just the death of Socrates, but were decisive to bring the defeat of Athens in the Peloponnesian war (which nearly brought the annihilation of Athens, and certainly an eclipse of democracy for more than 2,000 years). The People’s Assembly had decided to massacre entire populations (Melos), and brought hatred against Athens.

Much of Socrates’ work was about improving the Athenian democracy, and many of the philosopher’s critiques were addressed during the Middle Ages, by inventing new institutions.

So there has been progress in philosophy, and also considerable social and political progress in implementing progress in wisdom.

We need more. Behind Krugman’s vision of the world, lays a benign, naive trust in human beings benevolence. At least, that’s the excuse.

Friends, Not To Say Lovers Of The Same Values. How Far Are We?

Instead, I go further than “French Theory“. French Theory, generalizing Nietzsche’s approach, is suspicious of all and any institutions. I propose to remember what the Marquis De Sade implicitly proposed: those who take, those who are entitled, those end up being able to take decisions on behalf of the many, are, intrinsically, moved by the Darkest Side. Even if they did not start this way, the stress they are subjected to, insures that they end up that way.

Yes, Krugman is a philosopher, in the sense that his work, and advice, and popularity among, thus, power on, the mighty, depends upon his philosophical positions. Yet philosophers to the Dark Side, by their very presence where they are, embrace it.

This is not all just words. I love and respect Paul Krugman. in some ways. However, contemplate this: “Enron, a notorious corporation which conspired in organizing energy shortages in California, later to collapse in scandal and bankruptcy, employed Krugman. Paul’s fee? $37,000 for three days work. It provoked outrage. Wasn’t this excessive?. Mr. Krugman used his column to respond: not at all, he wrote. At the time his fee for a one-hour talk was $20,000. Enron got a deal.”

And the worst? Paul Krugman is very small fry, in the plutocratic world, as far as income is concerned. Donald Trump recently pointed out he “knew hedge fund managers. They pay no tax.” And some of those earn billions. General Electric got (60) billion dollars from the Obama administration, paid no tax for years, and then proceed to buy its French competitor, Alstom. Even the European Commission found that not kosher (although the plausibly secretly compensated by huff and fluff ,French government had approved).

Krugman at some point proclaimed himself the “lonely voice of truth in a sea of corruption”. The worst? It’s true. Because Krugman had dared to say the Obama administration was soft on punishing Wall Street after the 2008 corruption affair (the so-called “crash”), he was not invited to participate in said administration of the useless and redundant (as plutocrats connected to the so-called “Deep State” take all the decisions).

Handelsblatt: “Somehow Mr. Krugman’s fury keeps on growing. The source of this anger may be the man’s greatest enigma, since in fact worldwide there has never been as much Keynesian intervention as there is today…”

The answer to this, Handelsblatt, is simple: the crisis is getting ever worse. To the point the spectrum of war is rising. Even the Pope, noticed this.

Handelsblatt: “Since the crisis began, the largest central banks have flooded the world economy with liquidity, and brought their base rates close to zero. The governments of the industrialized world, with the exception of Germany, are still running huge budget deficits. They have put together enormous rescue packages, partly to rescue the banks, partly to bail out bankrupt states, partly to invest in infrastructure.”

Well, and this is my main difference with Krugman, rescue packages were all about the (“PRIVATE”) banks, and they bankrupt(ed) the states. To correct this, the entire banking system needs to be completely overhauled. In first approximation, the spirit of the reforms of president Roosevelt, ought to be re-introduced.

In Great Britain Jeremy Corbin, an anti-dictatorial (anti-monarchist) was elected to head Labor. Tony Blair, one of the world’s most corrupt politicians, ever (Bliar gets money from various dictator, including that of Kazakhstan) suggested that: “those who say their hearts are with leftwinger Jeremy Corbyn should ‘get a transplant’.”

Darius, like the Incas, like Diocletian’s Rome, or the Tang in China, or the empire of the Franks (which mutated into the “West”), or Themistocles Athens, let alone Stalin’s USSR, or today’s China, let alone the mercantilist USA, show that the primary actor, and author, of the economy is not the little capitalist, but the massive state. Handelsblatt claims not to understand this, and calls Krugman a fool.

However, the USA’s government institution revealingly known as the “Fed”, created more than 13 trillions (yes, that’s a t: trillion) dollars of money to inject in the economy, and the European Union, less than two trillion. And yes, that’s a problem: too much money chasing too few investment possibilities. So what ought government to do? Create more investment possibilities. Titanic investment program. As Darius did with his Royal road network. Now the Royal Road ought to lead to Mars. And the Quantum Computer. And Thermonuclear Fusion. And the Space Elevator. And a research program to fight aging (a major economic, not just military problem). Those who don’t want progress get regress, not to say egress.

Imagination, ladies and gentlemen, is more important than austerity, and not just in economics.

Patrice Ayme’

Greek Crisis, Or Greed Crisis?

“The Awesome Gratuitousness of the Greek Crisis” bemoans Paul Krugman. Really? Is not that a bit naïve? How does that fit with converting the Drachma at twice the rate, or Lagarde changing her music, after the Greeks had accepted her conditions? Does not it all look at a different plan of the “Deep State”? Like having just one boss, supposedly located in a White House?

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/06/29/the-awesome-gratuitousness-of-the-greek-crisis/

Indeed, my dear Paul Krugman, the exact chronology of events makes one rather believe that [IMF Director Lagarde] is following her usual pattern: doing what she’s told to do, and taking the heat, as Dominique Deux, an esteemed commenter on this site, puts it. Dominique’s profession involves him with this sort of people, he is in a good position to know.

So is it a case that: “There are horrible people who, instead of solving a problem, tangle it up and make it harder to solve for anyone who wants to deal with it. Whoever does not know how to hit the nail on the head should be asked not to hit it at all.”

[Friedrich Nietzsche The Wanderer and His Shadow, aphorism 326, 1880.]

Well, I don’t think so. The Drachma was deliberately converted at twice its rate. Everybody knew it at the time. That was clearly a time bomb.

***

Paul Krugman’s Analysis Of The Raw Data, I Agree With:

“I’ve been looking back at the numbers, readily available from the IMF, and what strikes me is how relatively mild Greek fiscal problems looked on the eve of crisis.

In 2007, Greece had public debt of slightly more than 100 percent of GDP — high, but not out of line with levels that many countries including, for example, the UK have carried for decades and even generations at a stretch. It had a budget deficit of about 7 percent of GDP. If we think that normal times involve 2 percent growth and 2 percent inflation, a deficit of 4 percent of GDP would be consistent with a stable debt/GDP ratio; so the fiscal gap was around 3 points, not trivial but hardly something that should have been impossible to close.

Now, the IMF says that the structural deficit was much larger — but this reflects its estimate that the Greek economy was operating 10 percent above capacity, which I don’t believe for a minute.”

And Krugman concludes that:

“So yes, Greece was overspending, but not by all that much. It was over indebted, but again not by all that much. How did this turn into a catastrophe that among other things saw debt soar to 170 percent of GDP despite savage austerity?

The euro straitjacket, plus inadequately expansionary monetary policy within the eurozone, are the obvious culprits. But that, surely, is the deep question here. If Europe as currently organized can turn medium-sized fiscal failings into this kind of nightmare, the system is fundamentally unworkable.”

Well, the system was revealed to be unworkable, thanks to the 2008 financial crisis. States were asked to come in, and replenish banks stolen by plutocrats. Meanwhile, the taxing authority and capability of states had been stolen by the likes of Jean-Claude Junckers:

***

I Stole, Thus I lead:

The president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Junckers, speaks of “betrayal” (“trahison” in his native French). He should know about betrayal. Whereas the semi-mythical Corleone in the movie “The Godfather” stole millions, Junckers helped to steal directly hundreds of billions of Euros, and, indirectly, trillions.

When the Euro was conceived by Jacques Delors and his colleagues, it was supposed to stand on two legs, one financial, one economic. However, jealous national governments decided to do away with the economic leg. Only after the 2008 financial crisis was reluctantly built a partial banking union (with mutual insurance and inspection of the biggest banks).

In Greece, as elsewhere, governments saved failing banks with public funds. However, in Greece, the real deficit was higher than the official one, and Greece needed a supplementary help from foreign institutions such as the ECB, EC, and IMF (the “Troika”).

The Troika provided enough rope with its help, to hang Greece with, thanks to “austerity” measures.

***

Let’s Vote NO To Plutocrats and Their Obsequious Servants:

Here is Paul Krugman again:

….”acceding to the troika’s ultimatum would represent the final abandonment of any pretense of Greek independence. Don’t be taken in by claims that troika officials are just technocrats explaining to the ignorant Greeks what must be done. These supposed technocrats are in fact fantasists who have disregarded everything we know about macroeconomics, and have been wrong every step of the way. This isn’t about analysis, it’s about power — the power of the creditors to pull the plug on the Greek economy, which persists as long as euro exit is considered unthinkable.”

Indeed.

The ECB, the IMF and European “leaders” are not incompetent. They are extremely powerful, and thus extremely corrupt. What use is their absolute power, if they do not show they can use it absolutely? Should not they engage in the hard work plutocrats and banksters have entrusted them with? Otherwise why should they, or their relations, get rewarded when they come out?

What they want to hide is the nature of the financial crisis, and thus the nature of finance.

“Austerity” is another word for the plutocratization banksters have increasingly brought, over the last few decades. They define the rules, they write the laws. They are indignant that the Greeks vote, because the Greek elite ought to be mature enough to feel that Democracy, Demos-Kratos, People Power, is just a mask for the power of the few and well connected.

There is no reason for austerity whatsoever, if one lived in democracy.

Verily, there is plenty of money out there, among the filthy rich, and plenty of capacity to make money, as needed for We The People. What is in short supply is the will to provide money for We The People.

Alain Bauer, a top, world class criminologist who does not teach only in France but also overseas, for example China, Singapore, estimates that the total money hidden in tiny tax havens amounts to 70 trillion dollars. Even more money is hidden in plain sight, thanks to Delaware and Great Britain (the famous “Non-Doms”), and shell companies.

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2014/07/06/usa-financial-extortion/

***

Money Creation Is Diverted To Plutocrats, By Plutocrats:

It’s not different from Stalinism, fundamentally!

Even more money is created by the banks for financial derivative trading. The size of that trade, somewhere out there on planet finance is more than ten times world GDP (so it’s around 800 trillion dollars). How come most of the money created is created for the richest, by the richest?

Don’t forget that banks are given a public mandate to create most of the money. So, in a sense, bankers ought to be just what they are: public employees, the modern equivalent of those who struck coins for the government in the three thousand years prior.

It frequently happens in history that minor events act like the proverbial snowball. This, clearly, maybe one such case. It is, in particular, the IMF, based in Washington, last I checked, which is pulling the plug.

What is Washington doing in what ought to be internal European affairs? Well, demolishing a financially independent Europe. Agents of the USA such as the head of the ECB, Draghi, will be happy to oblige. Draghi got his Phd at MIT, and was later  vice-chairman at Goldman-Sachs a Financial Uber Conspiracy Katastrophe (with a telling acronym).

What could go wrong? Last time there was a catastrophe of financial type, banksters lost the banks’ money to plutocrats, and We The People was asked to reimburse the banks. Thus, overall, the wealthiest people and organizations came out of it even richer.

Now the Greeks are refusing to obey, and get ever poorer with their own agreement. Time for another catastrophe? If well done, the rich ought to get even richer. With a little bit of help from their friends at the ECB, IMF, EU, EC, and all these strings pulled from Washington and New York, etc.

http://baselinescenario.com/2010/03/15/senator-kaufman-fraud-still-at-the-heart-of-wall-street/

We have different hearts than those of Wall Street, and it is exactly what the Greeks are now showing for all to see.

Patrice Ayme’

Should The Most Violent Society Lead?

“International” authorities keep pressuring Greece to conform to “austerity“. But what does “international” mean? It means the domineering socio-economic order, inspired by? Inspired by violence. As I will show.

The basic story of the present Greek tragedy is the following: (some) plutocrats stole (gigantic amounts of) money from their accomplices the banksters. States and institutions (IMF, ECB, Fed, etc.) then stepped in, and replenished the banks which their own management, banksters, and plutocrats had just stolen. No attempt was made to recover the money from the plutocrats who had stolen the, now apparently, but not really, ruined, plutocrats (pulling the strings from behind).

Then the governments and said “international” institutions turned around and asked the Greek Public to compensate for all the money those worthies had given to the banks. The same request was made everywhere, thus all sorts of budgets, from social services, to defense, to fundamental research, were slashed (even in the USA; the big exception is… China, where bankers toe the line fixed by the state more carefully).

This replenishment of the banksters by the Public was, and is, the world’s greatest fraud, ever perpetrated. It’s closely related to the following. Where did the money go?

70 trillion dollars (70,000 billion dollars) of stolen money rest in Tax Havens (source: Alain Bauer, a renowned world criminologist). Not even counting the hidden money in the world’s two largest tax havens, Britain (Great or not), and the USA.

The worthies, our great leaders,  having bought their own elections, know the ropes… Or know enough about the ropes, not to ask too many questions. Clearly this situation, overall, this gigantic conspiracy, this cover-up, is, all together, an act of the greatest violence.

Could it be related to the enormous violence of the country which leads this show? Here are some international comparisons; the USA leads in violence:

USA Violence Is Not Just About Guns. Jail, God, & Paying For Everything Is Also Part of It.

[Homicide by guns is just one metric of violence in the USA; there are worse ones, such as having to fork out 100K for a university education with the elite. Interestingly, there are no national statistics, in the USA, on police violence; judicial violence can be measured, by the millions which “justice” processes… violently; no such luck with those police processes… Or should we say, dispatches?]

Violence is both cause and consequence, feeding on itself. Violence is not just about killing people. Incarcerating them is also violent. Even The Economist recently observed that the USA was “Jail Nation”. Having a violent God, accepting money rules all, including elections, is also part of the violence.

No less than 8 million citizens of the USA are either in jail, or under suspended sentences, probation, etc. In a society with that much legal (and thus, police) violence it is only natural that it spills all over.

My point? Who controls, who has built, most of the world’s institutions? The USA (observe the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, and where the IMF and the World Bank sit: not even half a mile from the White House). So, if the ideology and practice of the USA is impregnated with violence, it’s an ideology of violence which controls everything, and especially economic theory.

Even Academia is hyper violent in the USA; to attend Harvard what you need is beaucoup bucks. Harvard and the like cost around 100,000 dollars a year. That’s why I call them “plutocratic universities“.

Obama himself pointed out last week that the homicidal rate in the USA is 49 times that of France. That’s satanic. I know many Americans are bad, but do they deserve to be eliminated at 50 times the rate of Frenchmen?

Homicides, guns and violence are related markers, and marks of society. There is a relationship with the Human Development Index. Notice, in all these comparisons, that small countries don’t really matter. Comparing republics such as France and the USA has meaning: both are republics, both have independent defense systems, and worldwide empires (France controls nearly 11 million square kilometers, the USA nearly double this).

However, a small poodle such as Sweden will follow the orders Washington gives, and Luxembourg, with less than 1% of the population of France, and no industry, but for corruption, follow the wishes of all and any plutocrat.

Main article: List of countries by inequality-adjusted HDI

The Inequality-adjusted Human Development Index (IHDI)^[9] is a “measure of the average level of human development of people in a society once inequality is taken into account.”

Note: The green arrows (), red arrows (), and blue dashes () represent changes in rank. The changes in rank are not relative to the HDI list above, but are according to the source (p. 168) calculated with the exclusion of countries which are missing IHDI data.

1.  Norway 0.891 ()
2.  Australia 0.860 ()
3.  Netherlands 0.854 ( 1)
4.   Switzerland 0.847 ( 3)
5.  Germany 0.846 ()
6.  Iceland 0.843 ( 2)
7.  Sweden 0.840 ( 4)
8.  Denmark 0.838 ( 1)
9.  Canada 0.833 ( 4)
10.  Ireland 0.832 ( 4)
11.  Finland 0.830 ()
12.  Slovenia 0.824 ( 2)
13.  Austria 0.818 ( 1)
14.  Luxembourg 0.814 ( 3)
15.  Czech Republic 0.813 ( 1)
16.  United Kingdom 0.812 ( 3)
17.  Belgium 0.806 ( 2)
18.  France 0.804 ()
19.  Japan 0.799 (New)
20.  Israel 0.793 ( 1)
21.  Slovakia 0.778 ( 1)
22.  Spain 0.775 ( 2)
23.  Italy 0.768 ( 1)
24.  Estonia 0.767 ( 1)
25.  Greece 0.762 ( 2)
26.  Malta 0.760 ( 3)
27.  Hungary 0.757 ( 1)
28.  United States 0.755 ( 12)
29.  Poland 0.751 ( 1)
30.  Cyprus 0.752 ( 1)
31.  Lithuania 0.746 ( 2)
32.  Portugal 0.739 ()
33.  South Korea 0.736 ( 5)
34.  Latvia 0.725 ( 1)
35.  Croatia 0.721 ( 4)
36.  Argentina 0.680 ( 7)
37.  Chile 0.661 ( 4)

Countries in the top quartile of HDI (“very high human development” group) with a missing IHDI: New Zealand, Singapore, Hong Kong, Liechtenstein, Brunei, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Andorra, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Cuba, and Kuwait

The most violent country ought not to lead: it’s as if one chose the local violent drunkard as the leader. However, it’s precisely because they are stupid and violent that bullies lead. Thus a paradox: the worst, are most esteemed.

Just after five Islamist attack in five countries around the old Roman Imperium, killed more than 70 people in 24 hours, including more than 40 in Tunisia, it may feel strange that I focus  on the USA. However, Americanism and Islamism are directly related, these days.

Islamism was quasi-inexistent in, say, 1948. It is the implementation of the Great Bitter Lake Conspiracy, a plot elaborated in Washington, and more exactly from the “democratic” advisers around president Roosevelt,  which fabricated the rule of Islamism (though the good works and financing of the Saudi plutocrats).

The mentality imposed by lords of the USA brought us Islamism, and the sort of tricks played on Greece. And they belong to a class. This so-called “Deep State” was animated, already a century ago, by individuals such as the Harriman brothers. (The Wikipedia link gives none of the savory details, where countries such as France, Nazi Germany, and the USSR figure prominently.)

There is a war against democracy, but its ways are subtle enough to escape the understanding of the baffled masses.

Patrice Ayme’

“New Economics” Europe’s Fraud

We, and in particular Europe, have been led by fraudsters. Sometimes it takes courage to say it, to denounce fraud. Ed Milliband, the Labor Leader just rightly accused the anti-European politician Lafarge (head of UKIP) to be a fraud, to his face, because leaving the European Union would ruin Britain.

Right. The problem with the EU, though, is that the politics there has been a fraud. Since the 2008 crisis, the USA government injected 8 trillion dollars in the economy. The Eurozone, with the same population, injected only one trillion (the UK did in between).

Europe Is Recovering Worse In the 2010s Than In The 1930s

Another editorial of Paul Krugman asserting that the USA pulled out of the 2008 crisis with standard economics (which Krugman and his kind call Keynesianism, although historical examples are as old as Themistocles’ Athens and even Darius’ Persia. The modern version is assuredly from Henri IV of France and his fiancé minister Sully, around 1600 CE).

“That Old-Time Economics

BRUSSELS — America has yet to achieve a full recovery from the effects of the 2008 financial crisis. Still, it seems fair to say that we’ve made up much, though by no means all, of the lost ground.

But you can’t say the same about the Eurozone, where real G.D.P. per capita is still lower than it was in 2007, and 10 percent or more below where it was supposed to be by now. This is worse than Europe’s track record during the 1930s.”

Says Krugman: “I’ve been revisiting economic policy debates since 2008, and what stands out from around 2010 onward is the huge divergence in thinking that emerged between the United States and Europe. In America, the White House and the Federal Reserve mainly stayed faithful to standard Keynesian economics. The Obama administration wasted a lot of time and effort pursuing a so-called Grand Bargain on the budget, but it continued to believe in the textbook proposition that deficit spending is actually a good thing in a depressed economy. Meanwhile, the Fed ignored ominous warnings that it was “debasing the dollar,” sticking with the view that its low-interest-rate policies wouldn’t cause inflation as long as unemployment remained high.

In Europe, by contrast, policy makers were ready and eager to throw textbook economics out the window in favor of new approaches. The European Commission, headquartered here in Brussels, eagerly seized upon supposed evidence for “expansionary austerity,” rejecting the conventional case for deficit spending in favor of the claim that slashing spending in a depressed economy actually creates jobs, because it boosts confidence. Meanwhile, the European Central Bank took inflation warnings to heart and raised interest rates in 2011”

One has to look at whom the “new economic thinking” profited: high finance, whose power and wealth has grown enormously.

The European leadership, from the central bank to the European Commission, is full of people who made stints in High Finance hedge funds, companies (conspiracies such as Goldman Sachs: heads of the European Central Bank, and even Italy, and many EC commissioners, where partners there.) Or maybe they were in banks (such as Rothschild, see young Macron the French finance minster) , or hope to do so some day (and often, some more). This phenomenon is even more marked in Europe than in the USA.

Krugman is not as accusatory: he cannot insult those he meets all the time, and is supposed to mingle with.

“…while European policy makers may have imagined that they were showing a praiseworthy openness to new economic ideas, the economists they chose to listen to were those telling them what they wanted to hear. They sought justifications for the harsh policies they were determined, for political and ideological reasons, to impose on debtor nations; they lionized economists, like Harvard’s Alberto Alesina, Carmen Reinhart, and Kenneth Rogoff, who seemed to offer that justification. As it turned out, however, all that exciting new research was deeply flawed, one way or another”

We have seen that story before: in the 1990s, Harvard economists gave self-interested advice to Yelstin, which destroyed the Russian economy, and paved the road for Putin’s reaction.

In Germany, an aging population has built several causal loops favorable to the present situation of austerity. Some are major UN-SAID (French: Non-Dit, what is not said, religiously).

For example the (relatively recent) German European supremacy necessitates immigration, and the latter is (wisely) encouraged by the Chancellor (who is aware of the dearth of reproduction by Native Germans). So the real German discourse, behind closed doors, is different from the official one (which makes little sense, especially considering how poorly Germany was doing ten years ago; a super low Euro, and Germany running deficits above 3% then helped).

Hence imposing “new economics” on Europe was not due to chance, but to forces below the surface. They have nothing to do with better economics for the majority.

Empires have known, for millennia, that, to be prosperous, they need everybody to work. Europe does not want to know that, because it is not thought of as an empire. Instead it is still thought of as a “common market”, and a “free” one, at that. In the USA, the government governs an empire and knows unemployment is intolerable, no matter what. So the Fed gave enough money for banks’ lending.

What Europe needs right away, before switching to real, more direct democracy, is to get better leaders, such as Ed Miliband, the UK Labor Leader, who had the courage to tell the truth about Europe (Europe is good for Britain). We don’t need liars like the UKIP (UK Independence Party), or like the UK Conservatives (who want to conserve the money power for their call, by not taxing revenues of their own, as long as they are overseas, even when the overseas presence is just make-believe… Labor wants to change that).

Tax evasion by the hyper rich and their corporations is part of the reasons both necessary and sufficient for imposing austerity on those who are not hyper rich.

However, when the 99% shrink financially, economically, an in their democratic power, so does the economy, and the society. And the democracy.

Patrice Ayme’

France, Islamism: Garbage Above, Garbage Out

FRENCH GARBAGE BLOSSOMING, A SONG OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE:

Incredible garbage shown on French TV. The sides of some French roads, including the busiest freeway in Europe, look like dumps, before modern regulations, closed such dumps. It got dangerous: a passing car could hit discarded metal machinery.

The phenomenon is new. Last I passed through Paris, a few years ago, going to the airport, I was shocked to see so much garbage along the freeway.

This is unimaginable in California. It was unimaginable in France of decades past. Times are changing, they always have. After being at the forefront of civilization for centuries, with its own civilization, Carthage, Tunisia reached even higher heights under Rome:

Blatantly Islamophobic Roman Art From Bardo Museum, Tunis

[The Bardo Museum was attacked by Islamists last week. The 88 years old, democratically elected Tunisian president, condemned that “minority of savages who do not scare us.”

This is an attack similar to the two in France: a purely cultural attack. The chief ideologist of the Islamic State is 27 years old. And apparently interprets the Qur’an and Hadith literally. Just like yours truly. More below.]

But a few more words first, about French garbage. Garbage in the street is related to terrorism against civilization, the one and only, through war minded, austerity armed, all-encompassing plutocracy. Plutocracy is the crafty manipulator behind Islamism.

I can understand why the French dump garbage. It is not just symbolic. There are more and more laws in France about recycling and other silliness.

Meanwhile the air is not breathable in Paris, because scientific advice to the government was wrong, advising to decrease CO2 while augmenting more lethal tiny particles of hydrocarbons. The government just ordered alternated circulation, effective now. The air many people are forced to breathe in France is garbage, thanks to their government imbecility, over a period of two decades.

Normal people have found more expedient to dump garbage along roads than to respect all the ukases their glorified rulers have devised from inside their gilded palaces (the places of decision in France are literally covered with gold).

So the government is spending a measly 5 million euros to clean roads around Paris. You know, austerity, so that the plutocrats can roll in dough from their monopolies and paying little tax, if any.

A government official piously offered the hope that people who throw garbage along the roads will stiffen their patriotic spine and respect the law, looking forward.

But what’s the law? For the Commons, the Vulgar, the Middle Class, the law is that they ought to recycle, even if it takes hours, and that’s all the scientific law that children need to learn at school.

But that is only one side of the law.

The other side is that Bill Gates is one of history’s greatest monopolist, that he did not pay billions of euros of taxes he ought to have paid, but then he is the world’s richest man and one is supposed to admire his charity.

It also surfaced that the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) staff unanimously voted to prosecute Google on a number of charges. But then the commissioners voted, just as unanimously, against it (that is completely unusual). This is sheer corruption.

It is just the sort of corruption that is completely legal in the West. As Monbiot points out in The Guardian about the UK. (I have been saying this for a decade, glad to see it is finally reaching the MSM!)

So why should common French people spend hours a week respecting laws that, viewed as an ensemble, have been obviously designed to exploit and oppress them?

Brazilians have the same question. The Constitution of Brazil was designed according to Auguste Comte’s positivist philosophy. And now it turns out that politicians in Brazil just wanted to become as rich as they could.

Even “The Economist” had to admit to my point number two in politics. To put it my way: the Wisdom of the Crowds is greater than the wisdom of the few.

So the French will keep on throwing garbage out, wherever, at 2 AM. (They just gave the Socialist Party less votes than the National Front in elections today.)

How come the citizens of the USA do not do the same? Throwing garbage along the roads?

First, American citizens don’t feel oppress: that’s for “losers”, and whiners.

Second, if USA citizens throw a banana peel, the High Patrol will be happy to stop them, tell them to keep hands on the wheel (lest they want to be shot), check them out on the computer, call back-up, and, or, handcuff them as needed.

In any case, they will have a right to a jury trial somewhere out there, maybe tens or hundreds, or thousands of miles away from home. Or then they can pay $1,000. One thousand dollars is the standard garbage fine.

Unsurprisingly, garbage out is something very ordered in the USA.

If any of the preceding is not dissuasive enough, drivers can contemplate prisoners in bright orange uniforms picking up whatever garbage would still be present along the roads.

Having the world’s greatest incarcerated population has some undeniable advantages… And highly noticeable garbage picking by prison crews is a good pretext for reminding good, common Americans that the rule of law is absolute, and knows no decency.

The somewhat tyrannical rule of the law enables the USA to integrate immigrants relatively easily. Immigrants know they have to keep to the straight and narrow. If they don’t, law enforcement will fall on them as a ton of bricks.

Pseudo-intellectuals will scoff. But it works, and it was the essential insight of the Roman Republic: “Dura Lex, Sed Lex”, represented by the Fascses (still prominent at the core symbolic of the republics of the USA and France; other powers do not brandish the fasces, and it shows, not for the best!)

For the Republic to go on, the law has to be ethologically correct.

Plutocratic law is the exact opposite.

So the music has to change.

Voting for extreme parties is a solution, because the situation has decayed so much that only extreme solutions are reasonable. (In the USA there are no viable extreme parties, so the alternative is not to vote; the case of California is a bit different: it has a slightly more reasonable government, and continual referenda.)

Music is communication, with others, and other parts of one’s brain.

Politics is also communications (right now, it is soiled with power greed, but that can be fixed. At least, in theory.)

Meanwhile the French Prime Minister has been identifying the French left with Syriza, the main Greek Party which won power in January (when Manuel Valls started to run against it).

This is rather curious.

The most outrageous demand of Syriza is that Germany pay 170 billion euros for its attack, invasion, destruction, deportation and execution of much of the Greek population.

Germany never paid any reparations to Greece.

(Although payments of 2.5 euros for each day passed in Auschwitz and the like, were made to some survivors.)

If Germany wants to talk tough about 65 billion euros Greece owes it, why can’t Greece talk tough too?

Because French and German banks hold tens of billions of euros of money stolen to the Greek People, by Greek plutocrats.

In Tunisia, Islamists attacked the Bardo Museum, to kill tourists (they chose the number one day, Wednesday, when cruise ships discharge their tourists). This is the second museum in Africa. It is 200 meters from the National Assembly.

The museum demonstrates that, before the Islamists invaded, Tunisia had a long and enormous civilization. So the Bardo museum is the very symbol of Islamophobia, and general contempt for the so-called “Messenger”. As far as Islamists are concerned.

There are, in particular, extensive Roman art works, unique in the world, inside the Bardo (see above, and notice the Islamophobic woman flaunting her divine status, and Allah given body).

One of the assailants of the Bardo looked completely normal, he lived in a good area, in a good house, and his extensive family was very surprised that he felt so strongly about following the Qur’an’s orders.

Why are people still surprised? Are not orders, orders? Orders from god, of all people! Why can’t those who are always so surprised, able to read the Qur’an? Violence in the Holly Qur’an make the best terror project anywhere.

Why so much denial about what is inside the Qur’an?

Because it has become a (lucrative) tradition. Many pseudo-intellectuals, instead of holding on principle (as De Sade, or Nietzsche did), sold themselves to whoever looked strong enough at the time (Stalin, Wall Street, Washington, etc.). Pleasing the strong made for a profitable career. So they defined any murmur against the Bitter Lake conspiracy propelled Islamist madness as racist “Islamophobia”.

Islamophilia is the worst enemy of the population of the Middle East, and thus the best friend of those who want to control the oil flow (lots of it right now, to bring various powers to their knees).

Meanwhile, back in Washington, Obama is seething against Bibi Netanyahu, for all to see. Whatever. Bibi has a plan, at least medium term (invade the West Bank with colons). Others do not have a plan. Not that Iran, long allied to Israel (much of the time secretly), minds.

The world is becoming a bit too complex. We have seen what happens in a case like this. In 1914. However, in 1914, the German fascists, who attacked, had a superior army (as their successors did, in 1940). A good way to prevent instability, is for the more democratic states to keep military superiority.

Lest I would be accused of rabid pro-Americanism, let me observe that, although the sides of roads in the USA are clean, it is not so inside many cities with the mentally insane. Whereas in Europe, such people (except if they are Rom, as Manuel Valls would probably notice) go inside hospitals, in the USA, since Reagan, they are free to own the sidewalks.

But let us have a bit more austerity in Europe, and all those who are not rich enough will be free to roam the streets. To mingle with normal youth suddenly turning to terrorism. Surprise, surprise.

Patrice Ayme’

No Force, No Republic

Humanity is force. This is what vegetarians, often, want to forget. It is no coincidence that Adolf Hitler was a fanatical vegetarian, at the cost of his health (too much pea soup, I am not kidding). Hitler was out to project a sensitive image of himself. Thus the Nazis passed laws against cruelty to animals, and instituted a policy of strict protection of nature.

When the Public goes together to form a republic, a Public Thing, force is what that thing is made around, just as in a baboon troop.

Forgetting force is forgetting the Republic. Marcus Aurelius, chosen future emperor when he was just 17, outright taught stoic philosophy (some thought it was conduct unbecoming an emperor).

However, Marcus Aurelius went over the Dark Side when he forgot that’s;

Stoicism without force is only ruin of the Republic.

This has always been true, and is truer now than ever before, because, now, it’s not just a matter of nations, religions and civilizations going down in flames. It’s a matter of the biosphere going down.

It will take some getting used to: the drought in California in 2014 was the greatest in at least 1,200 years. The latest modelling is much worse.

Eradication, Final Solution to Abomination

Israel used force to prevent the construction of nuclear reactors: in 1981, a raid by eight F16s and eight F15s, dropped 16 tons of high explosives on Osirak, a French made reactor (the site was flattened again by the Americans, ten years later). Israel repeated the performance in 2007, annihilating the Syrian nuclear reactor.

If Israel does not use force, Israel will die. Rome was so strong that it could afford to go catatonic on fascism, theocracy and terminal plutocracy… And still not die. (Rome is very much not dead, as all historians who have paid attention will tell you).

The Roman Republic grew, for five centuries not so much because it was greedy, but because it had to react to exterior aggression (I basically do not know a case where Rome really instigated the aggression, the war… Except for the Third Punic war, the Carthago Delenda Est war… But, when the Roman Republic went to war, it won’t let go.)

Marcus Aurelius poisoned the empire, because he did not use force where it mattered, close and personal.

True, Marcus Aurelius spent eight year on the battlefield, trying to prevent the Marcomanni and other German savages to cu the Roman empire in two.

However Marcus Aurelius was weak in more important respects.

He forgot that emperor Hadrian, the predecessor of his predecessor, decided to choose him and Antonius Pius as future emperors, while passing over his own two sons.

Instead, Marcus Aurelius would heap all possible honors, including Consul and Emperor on his own son, before he reached the age of 16.

Instead, Marcus Aurelius would have not enough money to pay for the army, and decisively defeat the savages. Why? Because the plutocrats, heavily taxed under the great emperor (an ex-general) Trajan, were not taxed enough under Marcus.

First the Republic has to be strong.

At this point if one is on the danger list of Israel, France, or the USA, one gets disposed of.

That does not rile up my democratic instinct. Our leaders should be elected mostly to execute the “basses besognes” (= )

In the past, determined assassins and the like could only kill a few, although, as most societies wee organized according to the fascist model, there was such a thing as striking the head, and changing it.

In Switzerland, with a rotating presidency of seven (soon to nine), there is no great change to be expected by killing one (but for augmenting an ambiance of terror).

The Islamic State does more by destroying antiquities which prove that their religion is junk.

So the only justification for so much power in so few hands in the leading democracies is that they do what is necessary.

One thing they did not do was to change the financial system. There is certainty (in the case of Obama) and a high probability (in the case of Hollande) that the gentlemen will be out of power in two years. So they need them, and all their cohorts of camp followers, to make sure that they ingratiated themselves with the powers that be.

Obama was again in San Francisco, begging for money and making deals, a week ago. Some of the most influential locals (such as Brown, an African American long mayor of San Francisco) are begging him not to come anymore (the ambiance of corruption is not improved by the traffic jams Obama causes).

Obama should stick to assassination, like Hollande, or Netanyahu.

Meanwhile, the Greeks won an important victory. Although it was more symbolic than anything else, as France (still protecting her giant banks) had been forced to win the battle for the Greeks, earlier.

***

AUSTERITY IS SYNONYMOUS WITH PLUTOCRACY:

When he ran for his presidency, Hollande, the present French president declared that “Mon enemi, c’est la finance” (My enemy is High finance). People elected him on this basis, instead of voting for the other one, whose obvious friend was High Finance.

However, Hollande behaved just the opposite, deciding, after all, not to tax the hyper rich, and finally choosing a hyper wealthy young 30 something investment banker as finance minister.

Hollande went down ever more in the polls, while the French economy kept on diving from being, to nothingness. Hollande’s polls approval reached 11%, the lowest ever for a French president.

Finally France reversed course.

The mighty French Republic finally decided to declare in advance that it would run a deficit fifty percent higher than the limit imposed by the law instituting the Euro, and this for two years in a row.

This had a number of consequences: bringing the Euro down, and also solving the Greek problem: if France was going to run a 4.5% deficit, why would Greece have to run a 4.5% SURPLUS?

(The greater demand imposed by France can be qualitatively evaluated, considering the relative sizes of economies and deficits: it is as if France was going to run (15)x(1.5) above the limit, when Greece was looking only for 2x(1.5) relief. So the French violation is much greater… and was agreed to… a day or so after the Greeks won).

Paul Krugman agrees that the Greeks won. In “What Greece Won”.

As Krugman explains:

“Well, if you were to believe many of the news reports and opinion pieces of the past few days, you’d think that it was a disaster — that it was a “surrender” on the part of Syriza, the new ruling coalition in Athens. Some factions within Syriza apparently think so, too. But it wasn’t. On the contrary, Greece came out of the negotiations pretty well, although the big fights are still to come. And by doing O.K., Greece has done the rest of Europe a favor.

To make sense of what happened, you need to understand that the main issue of contention involves just one number: the size of the Greek primary surplus, the difference between government revenues and government expenditures not counting interest on the debt. The primary surplus measures the resources that Greece is actually transferring to its creditors… If you are angry that the negotiations didn’t make room for a full reversal of austerity, a turn toward Keynesian fiscal stimulus, you weren’t paying attention.

The question instead was whether Greece would be forced to impose still more austerity. The previous Greek government had agreed to a program under which the primary surplus would triple over the next few years, at immense cost to the nation’s economy and people.

Why would any government agree to such a thing? Fear. Essentially, successive leaders in Greece and other debtor nations haven’t dared to challenge extreme creditor demands, for fear that they would be punished…“

Let’s not forget greed, either…

Plutocrats are those who use power, generally through the money they command, to achieve satanic aims. Generally self–aggrandizement by commanding more is a primary obsession.

Central to this strategy is the tactic of making money ever more expensive, and reserved to the hyper wealthy. The less money We The People have, the richer plutocrats have.

Instead, to operate an economy effectively, one needs enough money to conduct all and any transaction that benefits the society at large. That’s a necessity.

Rome failed in that respect in the Third Century, because it ran out of precious metals, and also of enough internal force to impose a FIAT currency. The Franks remedied both problems.

The Franks  got the precious metals in Eastern Europe (a place the Romans had not conquered, per order from Augustus, and lack of oomph from not taxing plutocrats enough, thus having too small an army).

The Franks mixed the silver they mined with less valuable metals. and enforced the value of money: faux-monaieurs, the counterfeiters, were boiled. Alive.

Who are today’s counterfeiters? Who else but the money changers? The banksters.

All this because those who have power abuse it. And not using it is also abusing it. So when the inheritance of humanity is destroyed by Islamists, and nothing is done to stop it, not enough violence is used. Obviously.

So surrendering to the austerity is not just a weakness and a madness, it is a system of thought to submit societies ever more to the plutocratic madness, a much worse prospect.

Patrice Ayme’

Europe’s Greek Tragedy

Finance Without Morality, Is Only Ruin Of The People:

People like a good cliffhanger. It beats difficult analysis, any day. Will Greece be pushed out of the Euro? Everybody wants to know.

The answer is simple: no. Before I explain why, let me point out that Paul Krugman, over the years, said many silly things about the Euro. However, he is learning, and his last effort, “Europe’s Greek Test”, is pretty good.

“In the five years (!) that have passed since the euro crisis began, clear thinking has been in notably short supply. But that fuzziness must now end. Recent events in Greece pose a fundamental challenge for Europe: Can it get past the myths and the moralizing, and deal with reality in a way that respects the Continent’s core values? If not, the whole European project — the attempt to build peace and democracy through shared prosperity — will suffer a terrible, perhaps mortal blow.”

OK, Krugman should not call it the “euro crisis”. It’s not anymore a “euro crisis” than the related 2008 crash was a “dollar crisis”. And the point is not to get “past moralizing”, but to get, precisely, in the thick of true moralizing.

Krugman: “But doesn’t Greece have an obligation to pay the debts its own government chose to run up? That’s where the moralizing comes in.” And the moralizing is not just the way plutocrats and their parrots claim it to be. Krugman has finally discovered that only one side is submitted to beating until the masters’ mood improves:

“It’s true that Greece (or more precisely the center-right government that ruled the nation from 2004-9) voluntarily borrowed vast sums. It’s also true, however, that banks in Germany and elsewhere voluntarily lent Greece all that money. We would ordinarily expect both sides of that misjudgment to pay a price. But the private lenders have been largely bailed out (despite a “haircut” on their claims in 2012). Meanwhile, Greece is expected to keep on paying.”

Paying for what? Banksters! Krugman has finally come across the great truth of the so-called rescue of Greece:

“…to oversimplify things a bit, you can think of European policy as involving a bailout, not of Greece, but of creditor-country banks, with the Greek government simply acting as the middleman — and with the Greek public, which has seen a catastrophic fall in living standards, required to make further sacrifices so that it, too, can contribute funds to that bailout.

One way to think about the demands of the newly elected Greek government is that it wants a reduction in the size of that contribution.”

Krugman concludes:

“Objectively, resolving this situation shouldn’t be hard. Although nobody knows it, Greece has actually made great progress in regaining competitiveness; wages and costs have fallen dramatically, so that, at this point, austerity is the main thing holding the economy back. So what’s needed is simple: Let Greece run smaller but still positive surpluses, which would relieve Greek suffering, and let the new government claim success, defusing the anti-democratic forces waiting in the wings. Meanwhile, the cost to creditor-nation taxpayers — who were never going to get the full value of the debt — would be minimal. 

Doing the right thing would, however, require that other Europeans, Germans in particular, abandon self-serving myths and stop substituting moralizing for analysis. 

Can they do it? We’ll soon see.”

The usual moralizing analysis that is done is not just completely wrong, but thoroughly superficial: the average Greek has been punished for a crime she and he did not commit. They are been punished with their lives. Meanwhile, the culprit bankers are not giving back their mansions.

So Germany is going to become reasonable about Greece. Why? Because it is co-responsible: the Drachma was converted into Euro at twice its real value. Germany agreed to this. That instant wealth for Greece was going to bring a lot of purchase of German luxury cars by wealthy Greeks, and it did. So the average Greek was set-up by wealthy and controlling Germans, whose influence made German economists consent to malversation.

Another point: Germany saw its debt cut down four times during the Twentieth Century, and the last time was in 1953. Basically Germany did not have to pay for Nazism and reconstruction.

If Germany did not have to pay for Nazism, why should Greece have to pay for German bankers? (Hmm… Wait. It actually makes sense…)

In particular Germany did not pay in any commensurate fashion for the Greeks it killed in World War Two. How many Greeks did Germany kill when it attacked Greece in Spring 1941, and for the next four years of brutal occupation, complete with sending tens of thousands of Greek civilians to extermination camps? Or killing them on the way?

So many Greeks were assassinated by the Nazis that one does not know how many died. Up to more than eleven percent of the population. Scaled up to the present population of the USA, that would be around 33 million dead.

33 million dead, and now you ask for more?

The sort of governments which has been in power throughout the West, has been serving the wealthy capital class, from the USA to Greece. It’s not just the Eurozone.

The British Royal Mail was evaluated by some financiers at 12 billion Euros. But the “Conservative” government sold it 4 billion. In a few hours of trading, the privatized company gained 60%, making a lots of instant wealth for investors.

Plots everywhere by the plutocrats, what could go wrong? A Great Bitter Ocean to drown in.

Some ponder the nature of man, the Dark Side French ex-justice minister Badinter spoke about.

Yet, that’s another mistake. One does not avoid cruelty by just becoming a vegetarian, or a vegan. Actually, it’s easy to argue that this is an immoral mood.

Instead, blame General Economics.

It has been thoroughly documented that, in national parks such as Amboceli, elephants kill goats and cattle, just because they don’t like them crowding around water holes.

MORALITY HAS TO REACH ACROSS CENTURIES:

Spain, now followed by Portugal, has decided to allow Sephardic Jews to return. Five centuries after throwing them out. This is worth pondering as a morality play. After 381, the Catholic Church became not just a terrorist organization burning libraries, but an officially sanctified one lethal one killing all groups it did not like, and, first of all “philosophers”. The Church came close to annihilating the Jews, but then the Franks took power and re-established the civil rights of non-Catholics. In the following centuries, many Catholics converted to Judaism: whereas the Pope and his goons always threatened to burn alive miscreants, Judaism was more relaxed.

However, for a number of reason, such as Saint Bernard, Saint Louis and the like, and the death struggle against the Islamists who occupied most of the Mediterranean, the Catholic Church and its Inquisition came back in force.

Millions of Jews were thrown out, or forced to convert to Catholicism, or terrified, tortured to death, burned alive. Even towards the end of the Eighteenth Century, Voltaire condemned the execution of a young Jewish girl, burned alive in Portugal, just because she was a Jew.

Well, last week, a ten year old Nigerian girl was covered with explosives, and detonated in a market place, by Boko Haram, an Islamophile terrorist organization.

That would have been unimaginable in Nigeria, sixty years ago (you know, under the dirty colonialists). But now, it’s happening, and it’s the leaders of the world who are culprit. Because that’s the world they organized. With their lies.

So let’s talk truly now, and start with Greece. When one of the world’s most despicable men, Jean-Claude Juncker, a tax evasion specialist serving plutocrats for decades, enabling trillions of dollars to be stolen from the people, say that Greece, the Greek people, should pay, we should retort.

Retort that it is his kind that should pay, so we can start to put an end to the systems of moods and lies they set in place.

Plutocrats and those who enable them, have been full of audacity, for decades. But, without audacity, you cannot save the Republic. Because the world, or at least the ecology, always moves on.

Ah, and of Greece and the Euro?

The Greek Central Bank can actually print all the Euros it needs. So the charade in Greece was made possible by the complicity of the ruling elite. Syriza can put an end to that.

And what of Germany forcing Greece? How? By bringing back the Schliefen plan, and swinging millions of robotic soldiers, through France, as in 1914? Hahaha. Sorry, I am obnoxious. Not likely, anyway, as 98% of the military muscle in Europe is held by France and Britain.

The Euro is the Greek currency. Germans can’t change that. It would be easier for them to adopt the rubble of the Rouble as new German currency instead.

Not that force should not be used. Banksters and their accomplices should be made to regurgitate the ill profits they made from Greece and other places they victimized.

Patrice Ayme’

Hope FROM Greece

Not Just Hope FOR Greece, But For Us All:

Man is a force which revolts against fate.

The revolt against Nazism was too late. The revolt against the austerity imposed by plutocrats and other lootocrats is none too early. Greece just voted for revolution, after years of exaction by the wealthiest and their obsequious servants. Finally. Hopefully, the rest of the West will follow.

AUSCHWITZ WAS NO ACCIDENT:

“One must crush infamy!” said Voltaire. It has to be done every day, even before breakfast. Infamy, indeed, never stops. Seventy years ago, the Auschwitz extermination camp was liberated. Auschwitz was just one camp out of thousands. It happened to the most literate country: it’s not how you learn, it’s what you learn, which makes a monster, or an angel.

Auschwitz was surrounded by an archipelago of secondary camps and factories where slave labor was exploited (some were managed by Americans, like the famous Prescott Bush, founder of a dynasty). Auschwitz had a much nicer sub-camp, just made for the Red Cross to visit.

Nazis Couldn’t Beat The World Champion, Victor Perez, So They Shot Him To Death.

Auschwitz was evacuated ahead of the Red Army. The idea was to duplicate the sort of trek that had proven so useful to exterminate American Natives (Tocqueville witnessed the death march of the Cherokees). A prisoner who marched, with his brother, had been the youngest world boxing champion ever. The French Victor Perez was shot January 22, 1945. The camp commander had organized hundreds of bouts with Perez, and the small Franco-Tunisian defeated many times enormous Nazi specimens.

In Auschwitz itself, more than a million died. But the Nazis preferred to kill people here, and there, it was harder to document. Many died on the Auschwitz evacuation march.

The Nazis had lost the war, but hatred is a force that keeps on going, especially when hope is long gone. Hate is a frenzy which makes its own heaven for twisted minds.

Germany was full of hate: that was communicated from the very Prussian mood, and institutionalized with hate and fascism specialists such as Kant. By 1815, when the French got defeated with their Enlightenment, hate and apartheid against Jews and Slavs was re-established, and the road to Auschwitz re-opened.

The number one lesson of Nazism is that it originated with moods and systems of thought which ruled Germany by 1816.

STARVING THE GREEKS WAS NO ACCIDENT:

The Greek nightmare is part of the general nightmare: the wealthiest and most powerful control the money making system. They bet with each other. When some of them fail, they ask taxpayer to make up for their losses.

It’s simple, yet efficient. It’s obscene, yet the way.

This is why, when the budget of Greek science was lowered by 75%, the Troika found it normal. That is why, when the public University of Crete was given a total budget which was just twice its electric bill, the Troika found this normal. The University of Crete is among the top 50 universities in the world by some criterion.

But the Troika meant to punish normal people, and especially brains: after all, that’s where the critiques come from.

Meanwhile, the largest class of Greek plutocrats (sheep line magnates and the Church) went tax free.

Everywhere, it has been the same: world GDP (the sum of all real economic activity) is 60 trillion, financial derivatives trades total 800 trillion. So most of the money in the world is created, so that plutocrats can trade with plutocrats. When some of them lose, as they did in 2008, taxpayers and the general public are supposed to pay. Pay with more austerity.

In truth, the leadership of the West is not just ethically corrupt, but even cognitively corrupt. They don’t understand the monstrosity of the decision and economic system they have created. The way out is to do like the Greeks, and revolt.

And enough to point an accusatory finger at the Euro: it has little to do with what is going on. The Troika would still be there, even if the Euro was not. What is going on is that plutocracy, worldwide controls all the major decision, and its mood is to bring ever more gloom and doom to the little guys. This process will go on, until people revolt, as they just did in Greece. What is needed is for the Greek revolt to propagate.

Krugman’s Ending Greece’s Nightmare explains the situation pretty well (except at the end where is anti-Euro mania resurfaces). Here he is:

“Alexis Tsipras, leader of the left-wing Syriza coalition, is about to become prime minister of Greece. He will be the first European leader elected on an explicit promise to challenge the austerity policies that have prevailed since 2010. And there will, of course, be many people warning him to abandon that promise, to behave “responsibly.”

So how has that responsibility thing worked out so far?”

Well, it was all a gigantic theft: Greece was lent money to reimburse private banks (many not based in Greece). The very principle of the ting was a crime: why would people have to take a loan to reimburse banks that had nothing to do with?

On top of that, the terms of the loans made them NOT reimbursable. (Technical details omitted this time, some are in Krugman). It was like a loan from the Mafia… For the good reason, that it was exactly what it was. Global Plutocracy is just a generalization of the Mafia (and, as they order the USA Army around, watch it!)

Krugman works for the plutocracy too, so he ends his editorial with the usual call to end the Euro (so king Dollar can keep on reigning!)

But the plutocrats have their fingers all over the planet, in all the pies. Even The Economist spoke in its last issue of “America’s New Aristocracy”.

The way out is to tax the wealthiest 93% as Eisenhower did. No exception. The 93% tax ought to be determined not just on income, but on potential income, and on spending. Worldwide. That will turn around the loopholes. The 93% tax ought to kick in at the level of one million a year, or so.

Taxes (and things that act like taxes, but have different names) on the middle class ought to be lowered.

Maybe Syriza and its coalition, elected today, will want to try that in Greece? An advantage is that it would help bring the Euro down where it belongs, somewhere around 80 cents to the Dollar… How? Because the Plutocrats would be terrified, that high taxation will come to destroy their little heaven of hell on Earth, and they will pull their Dark pool money out of Europe frantically…

Hope allows to have a nice life without having worked hard for it. If we want to work hard, at this point, following Syriza, we have to rebel. And let no German come up with Auschwitz related objections. And remember: the Nazis killed around 800,000 Greeks…

Patrice Ayme’