How Does Plutocracy Reproduce? Imprinting, Selection. The Guard, Lagarde, and Von Leyen, As Examples

The two esteemed ladies, Lagarde and Von Leyen, are going to be the executive leaders of the EU, Lagarde at the Central Bank and Von Leyen at the Commission. They were selected by the European Council (the elected leaders of the EU, operating together as a presidency) and approved by the European Parliament. Now, make no mistake: this is all very plutocratic. How do plutocracies go on and on and on?

We know how viruses, bacteria, and rats reproduce. What about pluto-rats? Those undeniably reproduce, in first approximation, as rats do, through breeding (Ursula Von Leyen’s impressive pedigree would be an example). And like rats, they breed sometimes with strangers so anxious to join the oligarchy that their desire reinforce the high opinion the Pluto rats have of themselves and their all-encompassing greed. 

The background of Ursula Von Leyen, nee in the famous Albrecht family,  is positively ridiculously laden with all the privileges and nobility one can imagine, all the way to American slave masters! This is not an anecdote: Ursula adopted, for at least a year, the name of her slave master ancestors… Ursula’s father was a major EU administrator, and then a German politician, before becoming a CEO.  Ursula spent 4 years at Stanford as a wife and breeder to her tremendous noble husband who himself became a CEO. Her doctoral thesis was analyzed, finding more than 43% of it pure plagiarism (but an official finding of plagiarism was less than that, as she knew the authority who determined that…) She was Macron’s candidate, and naturally, plutocracy can’t view the ascent of one of their own, confirmed by so many generations, as a big worry.  

See where knowing how to synchronize your swimming leads to? The world we have. No bad isn’it? We have it, because we are everything, and we proved it and you are not much so we help you, because we love men. Lagarde on top of French Finance ministry, 2007, waiting for her helicopter… because above the worms she flies… This way, maybe, w

Let’s look at another example: Christine Lagarde, head of the International Monetary Fund, IMF, who will resign September 12, 2019, to become head of the European Central Bank, ECB. For 20 years, the 63 year old Lagarde has been at the pinnacle of global society. Her birth name is Lalouette, reminiscent of a French bird which is submitted to ridicule in a well-known, ancient song (L’alouette: Alouette, je te plumerai… Alouette I will pluck your feathers…). No wonder she switched to Lagarde, La Garde, The Guard… guarding, no doubt, the plutocratic order she has long been one of the top officers, for two decades.

Lagarde’s dad was just an English teacher (explaining her crisp English). Her mom taught Greco-Roman language and ways. When May 68 came around, Lagarde, instead of taking part in the turmoil and contestation (she was 13), took synchronized swimming. A team in which she was won major competitions later. The ability to swim with the (plutocratic) flow and in a way synchronized with others, showed all that Lagarde wanted to become a human robot serving established order ordained by higher-ups. 

Now, before I get rolling with more scathing innuendos and ominous implications, let me point out that I used to sneer about Lagarde for more than a decade… But I changed my mind because of her IMF leadership, which has been excellent. At the IMF, Lagarde insisted that, as bankrupt countries such as Argentina get IMF money, they do not cut crucial social programs (whether Lagarde acted from orders by hidden superiors is another subject). Moreover, Lagarde is obviously extremely smart, even philosophically so. We agree on feminism. A lawyer, Lagarde was told she would never make it as partner in a French Law Firm, so she joined the international firm Baker & McKenzie, where she rose to chairman of the board. She used the same title she took at the IMF: Madame Chairman. “Syntax” (sophisticated, but wrong word!), she explained at the time, is not the battleground on which the feminist cause will be gained or lost: “I didn’t want to find a feminine equivalent to chairman. Insisting on marking femininity by the gender of words is ridiculous.” Indeed. One of the thousands of non PC points I have been making too.

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I am very happy Lagarde will head the ECB (considering the proposed alternatives). She can go further in the easy money route timidly inaugurated by Draghi. From my point of view, the value of the Euro should be cut enormously (something that makes Trump howl, even before it happens). 

Graduating from high school in France, Lagarde travelled to the United States on an exchange programme of plutocratic origin, chameleonically claiming to be pro-French, called the (then called) American Field Service (as chameleons change colors, it changed its name since).  Lagarde was sent to spend a year at Holton-Arms, an elite private college preparatory school for girls in Bethesda, Maryland… to check for pluto compatibility and proceeding with further imprinting, no doubt. The synchronized swimmer was Pluto synchronized.

There, the awesome Alouette would make friends – and Pluto contacts – for life (she said it herself, may times). Other distinguished alumnae of the school include Jacqueline ­Kennedy Onassis, the “philanthropist”, that is plutocrat, Brooke Astor and Lagarde’s contemporary, Susan Ford, the daughter of the former, doubly non-elected US president, Gerald Ford.

An opportunity naturally opened up to serve in this satanic world of so-called politics. In 1974, Lagarde was given access to William Cohen, a lawyer from bread company owning parents, who became a Maine US Republican congressman. Cohen was gathering the evidence that would lead to the impeachment of Richard Nixon (supposedly) for his involvement in the ­Watergate affair (truly Nixon, having founded the HMO system, was past his expiration date, and made an excellent scapegoat to show the purity of the plutocratic system; Nixon ended the Vietnam war, and is unlikely to have started the Afghan war as his elected successor Carter did). Twenty years later, Cohen was Secretary of Defense of Bill Clinton: small world of plutocracy…

Lagarde, supposedly hired for her ability to communicate with Cohen’s French-speaking constituents in Maine, and officially not particularly so because she was a strapping swimmer with “nice shoulder”, who has shown ability to go from man to man, joined him as an ­intern.

“During that year, at Holton-Arms, with my host family and interning in Washington,” Lagarde told The Washington Post in 2011, “I learnt more, and it mattered more to me, probably, than any year of my life.” Could one be clearer on the importance of imprinting among, and by, the elite?

Revelations of the Nixon era, she said, “made me think about checks and balances. It was my first injection of political life, and to get that at age 18 leaves a mark on you.” No doubt being imprinted on the might and splendor of plutocracy at 18, forges you in a mighty instrument of the establishment. And Lagarde could see checks and balances were all about who gave the orders (she put that to good use, when, in recent months she told the wealthiest guy in Argentina, Macri, also president, that he couldn’t cut social programs as he got IMF money…) 

In 2005, domestic politics, called and she moved back to France to become the then prime minister Dominique de Villepin’s trade minister. Two years later, under Sarkozy, she became the first female finance minister in the G8 group of nations.

Lagarde has been married twice – in 1982 to the financial analyst Wilfred Lagarde, with whom she had two sons; and after their divorce in 1982, to businessman Eachran ­Gilmour. Divorced for a second time, her partner since 2006 has been the French businessman Xavier Giocanti.

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So now Lagarde heads the ECB. We will see if she can make it so that the European economy gets enough money for Europe to keep its rank and a future. By rank, I am very general. I write this in Paris, as the temperature is climbing, and is expected to shatter the old record (from 1947) by no less than two degrees (Centigrades; 4 Fahrenheit!) I talked yesterday with an African from the Congo, who found the heat in Paris unbearable… and it was… I went running, as I used to grow up in the hottest part of Africa… I had to stop and remove my shoes: it was that hot, my feet were burning.

Civilization is confronted to the most acute biosphere crisis in 66 million years… Then (most probably) the driver of extinction was CO2: CO2 kills the oceans, by turning into carbonic acid (something asteroids or comets can do only under contrived circumstances). Consider:

TRAPPED BY SUPER TRAPS

We are getting closer, everyday, to a runaway CO2 crisis (where giant quantities of CO2 and CH4 are released by the global heating itself…) We have lots of weapons against the CO2 crisis… but they are not being deployed: plutocracy enjoy crises, as then it needs no more excuse to deploy its satanic means…

The way out of the crisis is industry. Being industrious. The technological means to get out of the enormous, gathering ecological crisis exist. They have not been deployed. In particular, they have not been deployed by the Europeans… Who should have been the first to do so, had they learned as much about history as basic morality requires.

Instead, the political establishment are just pawns of the established plutocratic order, which has only one idea in mind: extent its power, and finding robots to further that aim. The carefully selected pawns in place have no scientific formation (except for Merkel… who is on her way out, and didn’t react well to the Fukushima tsunami, turning it into a trick to please the fossil fuel establishment; others, from Trump, to Johnson, to Macron… make Putin look like a scientist…)

This is complicated by the fact that the establishment is made, in part, of the Deep State… which itself came up with grand ideas as turning the Internet into a giant spying mechanism to control the plebs, and imprint, or spy upon it, accordingly. This is why the wealthiest companies in the world were not just encouraged to trample the Republican constitution, but even to go tax-free… just as their plutocratic sponsors…

Sallust, a Roman historian close to Caesar, and a member of the Populares (aka “Yellow Jackets”, Gilets jaunes), depicted, 2050 years ago, the ravages of oligarchy, that he saw in his time, and which, just as yours truly, he traced to more than a century prior…

What is amusing, fascinating, but also a reason for hope… Is that we have seen it all before, as the Roman Republic crumbled. We have seen it all before, because the Christians, those instruments of rabid Roman plutocracy, didn’t destroy all the books (they destroyed all of Sallust’s books, but for two we have today)…

So we can still learn in time to save the highest values. But it shouldn’t rest on just the shoulders of two connected women, however nice…

Patrice Ayme

Selection Of The Dirtiest

Plutocratic Circus Blossoms As Greek Tragedy

It was not supposed to happen, but a woman in Washington, who used to head one of the world’s largest law firm in Chicago, closed all banks in Greece for a week, and made it so that Greek families now live on fifty Euros a day.

Is that democracy? Who elected that woman? Nobody. More exactly, a handful of guys, talking to each other behind closed doors. But not all is lost. Look at her superiorly tailored suit, her little diamonds, her pearl necklace. She belongs to the well dressed, Wall Street style elite.

A Face Of Evil: Wall Street Fascist Devices In Control Of Europe

[International Monetary Fund (IMF) executive director Christine Lagarde attends a news conference at the end of a Eurogroup meeting at the European Council building in Brussels, March 25, 2013. Elegant fox presides over the hens, to mandate their future.]

A gallery of abominable crooks who give themselves airs decides how to make an example of Greece. Hey, the Porto-Rico governor just announced Porto-Rico was not that rich, and its debt could not be repaid (proportionally, it’s higher than Greece’s). Quick, let’s starve to death a few Greeks! Kindly,  Paul Krugman in “Greece Over Brink” calls the monsters who preside over us “fantasists”.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/29/opinion/paul-krugman-greece-over-the-brink.html?

I will stick to the truth, as I have no reason to spare corrupt crooks who abuse their powers. Differently from Krugman, I don’t have to be polite with these sadistic monsters.

Some may raise an eyebrow: am I not overly critical against a particular individual? Yes, for cause: my scathing critique is directed to a particular criminal behavior. I have no problem hating particular individuals, such as Hitler and his ilk.

Condemning people for crimes they engaged in is the exact opposite from hating people for no good reason, such as where they come from.

Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely:

Why did the Eurozone bring the International Monetary Fund based in Washington, half a mile from the White House, into what ought to have been an internal European affair? Was it to make sure that Washington would rule the Eurozone?

Does that sound counter-intuitive? Not at all. It is something completely natural. The top European leaders are, or have been, all agents, top operators in, or completely obsessed by the American system.

It’s clear that Greece cannot pay the monumental debt it incurred when money was given to banks. And here the IMF has behaved atrociously: after the Greek government accepted all conditions last week, unbelievably the IMF came up with new orders, such as augmenting the Added Value Tax, higher up. Such an VAT strikes everybody, including the poorest of the poor. The standard rate of VAT in Greece is 23%. (Compare with California’s 10% sales tax!)

Christine Lagarde thinks the Greeks are children. But, when she was offering hundreds of millions Euros of public money to plutocrook Bernard Tapie, she did not mind to deal with a child. Why?

Probably because she is corrupt. Corrupt, some of the naive will say, smirking. Does not corruption imply giving money? Show me the money, and they cackle smugly. However, money is power, absolute money is absolute power, and it corrupts absolutely. Lagarde, an ex competitive swimmer, has enormous power, given to her by other politicians, themselves elected from, and by, money.

http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/jun/25/greek-crisis-20-key-moments-eurozone

Actually, it’s not a probability, but a certainty: absolute power corrupts absolutely. Lagarde, although the prime villain this week, is closely followed by the head of the EC, one of the world’s greatest engineers of corruption, ever, and the German finance minister (yes, someone already shot that one, that’s why he is in a wheelchair).

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Financial Terror Feeds Terrorism In General:

Muslim terrorism is, first of all, an intellectual phenomenon: terrorists just read a book written by generals in a time so primitive, the Arabic language did not fully exists, in written form. However terrorism is (partly) motivated, not just by the manipulations of plutocrats, but also by a legitimate rage against plutocracy.

Plutocrats know no bounds, such is their cruel nature. They belong to the most horrendous aspects of mythology. Indeed, the victimization of Greece is a case in point. Some of the most horrendous creatures are on the front stage, pontificating, making up stories that will be remembered for centuries.

Plutocrats hated Alexis Tsipras, the new Greek PM. They had to make him fail. Just when he had agreed to violate a bit the mandate under which he had been elected (his party, Syriza, controls 156 seats in Parliament), Lagarde and her abominable muses, sprang the trap: they asked for more from the (basically) innocent people of Greece. Specifically, they wanted an even higher VAT, as if 23% were not enough.

This, from crooks who fly in private jets.

Somer people will say that someone like Lagarde went from swimmer to head of the IMF on merit. There is another possibility, though: look at Heinrich Himmler. Did he get up there, at the head of the SS, on merit? Not really. Even fellow Nazis admitted he was not that bright (and joked that his brains was Reinhart Heydrich).  Himmler got up there because he was willing to do the dirtiest work.

In the end, Himmler, to advance himself in the rather difficult circumstances of the collapse and invasion of the Third Reich, had to save thousands of Jews (in cooperation with the Swedes, who were also anxious to paint themselves as the opposite of what they had been). Himmler did what it took to advance himself. Whatever it was. If it meant kissing and making up with the Jews, so be it.

So did Stalin: he used to rob banks, with maximum violence, at the head of a gang. So does Lagarde and her ilk. Such individuals will do whatever it takes to advance themselves. That’s why so many “leaders” got where everybody could look up to them. That’s why, and how, they ended, ordering tens of millions. It is the SELECTION OF THE DIRTIEST. Oligarchies all need goons to do the dirty work, just as they need janitors. The dirtiest goons take the decisions, their masters, the plutocrats, smile. The world we have.

Patrice Ayme’

Central Banking

What does a Central Bank do?

Plots with plutocrats. Plutoplots. Especially in the USA, where major plutocrats are Central Banks directors (and also private bank directors).

Seriously, Central Banks regulate the financial system and, thus, a large part of the broader economy. That means that the financial system is a public system masquerading as a private system (privateering system?)

Think of a financial system as an engine. The Central Bank (“Fed” in the USA, ECB in Europe) controls how much fuel there is, by manipulating its price. The Central Bank is also supposed to dictate the permissible uses of fuel. That latter mission has been completely forgotten under Clinton, the great demoncrat, that’s why plutocrats lov him.

Historically the Fed’s mandate was made very precise in 1979: “to maintain long run growth of the monetary and credit aggregates commensurate with the economy’s long run potential to increase production, so as to promote effectively the goals of maximum employment, stable prices and moderate long-term interest rates.”

What are interest rates in this engine?

The fuel of the financial system is money (generally under the form of credit). Central bank control interest rates, and those fix the price of money. The central bank raises and lowers the interest rates it charges banks when giving them money. When the central bank wants to slow down economic activity, it raises those interest rates, increasing the cost of borrowing money. Banks pass the augmentation to individuals and businesses: the latter borrow less and spend less, and economic activity slows down. When the central bank wants to stimulate the economy, it lowers interest rates.

So what happened under Fed Chair Greenspan?

In 1996, Greenspan said there was a bubble (some indicators were as bad as in 1929). However he refused to increase interest rates, because he claimed bubbles were self correcting (he read it in Ayn Rand). Yet when a fund of his friends crashed in 1998, Long Term Capital Management, he intervened (by giving enough money to friends in big banks to save his friends at LTCM and those in business with LTCM).

So Greenspan kept on piling up the fuel?

Worse than that. Under Rubin, Greenspan, Summers, in the 1990s, their boy Clinton allowed fuel to be freely used by the biggest banks to do things having nothing to do with the Fed’s mandate. Like setting fire to the entire economy and society, and then cashing in on the insurance.

Why did they allow this?

Because  the sums engaged, about ten times world GDP, or more, allowed outsize profits. They, their friends, families, and acquaintances, all made like bandits. Still do: dark pools are bigger than ever, and increase ever more every year.

After he retired, president Truman lived nearly at the poverty level. When asked why he would not cash in, he replied that he did not want to soil the office of the presidency. Compare with Clinton.

What’s your remedy?

I will come back to that. Outlaw all and any financial investment that does not benefit the economy directly (except for insurance, and some very restricted commercial derivatives, with sharp distinction between commercial operators and casino players).

Why hasn’t the Fed made larger cuts to consumer interest rates?

Because the financial system is run for profit. Lots of profits. and the financial, for profit system, is supposed to run the economies of the USA, and the EU.

That’s why some European Commissioners (Otto Rehn) are blue in the face at France for running an important socialist, not for profit economy. I mean, they are paid to be upset. When they come out of their stint at the European Commission, they expect a job at the like of Goldman Sachs.

Even Krugman has finally understood what they were up to, and condemned Rehn vigorously for the hypocrite he is; France is being attacked because it’s too much of a Republic, not enough of a plutocracy! (Basically Krugman dared to say this.)

Is the Fed powerless to reduce those consumer rates further?

There is what the central banks say they can do, and the reality that some of what they can do, they don’t even want to talk about. The Fed and the ECB have tried to distract us by a pair of novel strategies to drag consumer and business rates down. So they say.

One strategy is called Quantitative Easing (QE). The Fed has purchased more than $4 trillion in Treasury securities and mortgage-backed securities since 2008, driving up prices as investors compete for the diminished pool of available securities.

When investors pay a higher price for a bond, they accept a lower interest rate from the borrower. So the Fed’s purchases have helped to reduce the interest rates paid by the government and by home buyers. The Fed claims other interest rates are driven down, but that’s controversial.

Another campaign is called forward guidance. One reason for higher interest rates on long-term loans is uncertainty about the future level of short-term rates. The Fed has sought to decrease this uncertainty by declaring it intends to keep short-term rates near zero as long as the U2 unemployment rate remains above 6.5 percent.

Experts sing that these efforts have helped (at least a little). But, of course, this is all a sick joke.

Before you explain why it’s a joke, shouldn’t the Fed be worried about inflation?

Right now the problem is threatening deflation. All over.

Fed officials think they’ve got a clever new tool to prevent inflation. The money spent on bond purchases is credited to banks, but it is kept in accounts held by the Fed. The Fed recently started to pay interest on those accounts, giving banks an incentive to leave the money with the Fed. If the economy started to inflate, Fed officials say they can keep a lid by paying the banks higher interest rates to leave the money at the Fed.

In other words the fat cats of the biggest banks will keep on making ever more money.

President Obama said he wants no more asset bubbles like the housing bubble that caused the financial crisis. How?

Before the lamentable Greenspan, and since the bubble of the 1920s, that led to the 1929 crash, preventing bubbles used to be the Fed’s main job. As a Fed chief said generations ago, “by taking out the punch bowl when the party gets going“. This is done by rising interest rates. Volcker, named by Carter, brought interest rates up to 23.5%. That killed inflation (and the economy).

Under Clinton, the corruptocrats connected to the plutocracy claimed that there were no bubbles, on the grounds that the price of an open-market transaction is perfect by definition. If they had eyes to see, they could have observed there is no free market, just a rigged market. Others simply denied that the Fed could identify or pop bubbles. Both imbecile statements.

Why did you say that the ways presently used by central banks to decrease interest rates were a joke?

The Greater Depression started in 2007-2008 has been triggered by a crisis of banking caused by the unsupervised power of the abusers of the fractional reserve system: central banks give money to private bankers, and the latter lend 30 times that to… their friends. This happened in several ways: USA subprime, derivatives (especially swaps), European investment in continent size corruption, etc.

For example those banks could be British, French, German, and the corrupt friends could be Southern Europeans, and other Irish. When the whole castle of speculation crashed, European governments were asked to save the banks on the front lines, crashing their own governmental finances.

The rest of society was left holding the bag, while the plutocrats are dining on caviar in their castles. Instead the plutocrats ought to have been expropriated, and the castles put for sale.

A beautiful example is Greece. All the aid programs to Greece, as I have said forever, were mostly aid programs to big Northern European banks. Said programs were paid by the Public (all over Europe). The International Monetary Fund just recognized this was debated secretly inside the IMF (October 2013!).

Most of the  money created by QE goes into the derivatives business and other shadow banking and associated dark pools. It does not go to the real economy.

Thus not enough money is available to the real economy, that’s why interest rates are still high, and part of the reason QE ends up just as a subsidy to the worst financial pirates. The financial fuel goes into burning the house down, not the cooking stove.

Hence the importance of nominating Janet Yellen chief of the Fed. If she is nominated, I will explain why.

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Patrice Ayme

Microbes Also Make History

BAD LEADERS CAN RUIN A CIVILIZATION.

Sarkozy Made Merkel Crucially Bad. Most Big Powers Despise The Biosphere Officially. Obama Loves Fire.

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Abstract: Three Italians named Marios have put Merkel on the ropes. It turns out, as the head of the German Socialists pointed out in parliament, six weeks after the presidency went to a socialist in France, conservative Merkel changed her music completely. She signed on measures she had insisted were against the German constitution. Such as the mutualization of the cost of defaulting banks (why should that be will be made clear below).

Not just that, but, having fallen in a trap the French socialists set for her, Merkel has already modified the German CONSTITUTION, to please them. Overnight, literally. (As I had predicted would happen.)

Americans don’t even remember when their constitution was changed last. Actually the USA does not change its constitution, just details, by “amending” it. The lack of change is built-in as the USA has NO constitutional court (strictly speaking, thus explaining SCOTUS‘ fear to be seen playing with the constitution). France and Germany, having learned from the past, have constitutional courts, and that is helpful as European construction requires continual constitutional changes.

There are broader lessons in this. If just one man, a small man who ran all the time, after his own legs, the French Nicholas Sarkozy, could, all by himself, put Europe and even the world, in a huge financial crisis, how many of these dangerous mongrels are out there?

If one lover of private bankers, Sarkozy, arrogant in his rabid stupidity, could, all by himself, keep hundreds of millions oppressed throughout Europe, how come more people are not waking up to throw similar rascals out?

It is interesting to observe that the dividing line is not so much between left and right, but between those who think the state should serve the richest folks for all to see, and those who aspire to more subtlety. The fact that the French socialists conspired instantaneously with the conservatives in Spain and Italy shows this.

What Sarkozy and Merkel did, was to enable further ruin of national states in Europe. As there is no European Federal state, that came down to transferring ever more power to those who manage the globally corrupt financial system and those who profit from it, the global plutocracy and its servants.

Similarly, the contempt of the most influential leaders for the biosphere, evident from their absence at the Rio United Nations Conference On Sustainable Development, is exemplary of their contempt for life. So what do they admire? As my essay “Sage of Obama” demonstrated, they admire the creatures who have sustainable power, even if based on criminal practice, upon most of the People (see also PM Cameron below for insufferable hypocrisy). This is another drawback of representative “democracy”: it selects the leadership of those who crave for power, amutually admiring society. 

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THOSE WHO ADMIRE CRIME SHALL LIVE AS SERFS:

As long as one insists that mafiosi are good fellows, one will not get rid of the Mafia. So it was in the USA: the mafia was flourishing, until a  number of movies (Including the aptly named “The Godfather“, and “Good Fellows“) demonstrated to the vast public that mafiosi, although charming in many ways, and craving for honor, were not just pillars of society, but disgusting criminals perverting all of society.

That new found revulsion gave justice and law enforcement the necessary context and encouraging mood to treat the criminals, as the criminals they were.

The same job remains to be done in global finance. As long as one insists that global finance mafiosi are good fellows, one will not get rid of the global finance Mafia. Justice will come, only after a mood of revulsion will set in.

The criminal problem posed by global finance is of course not of the same order of magnitude as the Mafia. The Mafia never brought the entire world economy to a halt, and never threatened the biosphere as we know it, with extinction. Global finance and its allies do. The danger they present is immensely greater. (I have also argued forcefully that global plutocracy was behind the various fascisms of the 1930s, including Stalinism, as Lenin himself foresaw!)

Some have made the additions, and found that the 2008 banking crash (which is still unfolding) was 100 times greater than the Savings and Loans banking crash in the USA under Reagan and Bush I. However in the latter case, more than 10,000 prosecutions and 1,000 condemnations against bank managers were obtained.

Under Obama, so far, none. Where there is a will, there is a way. However, microbes don’t even need a will to find a way.

Just watch most of the global finance loving leaders: they did not even bother to go to the Rio de Janeiro world ecological summit. Of the important world leaders, only the French socialist president Hollande showed up. The other permanent members of the UN Security Council do not worry about the security threat presented by the rising of the seas. Germany’s Merkel, anxious to build another 26 new coal plants, of course did not show up either. Fossil fuel Merkel will be fondly remember when Hamburg fights the rising ocean.

Thousands of the most important men in global finance should not be lionized as Obama did with Warren Buffet, or Dimon, or Rubin, Summers (See “Sage of Obama”). The mood of blind admiration for financial pirates has to be changed. By the way, such  a change of mood happened with piracy, four or three centuries ago.

Piracy had started honorably (lettres de marque, corsairs). Francis Drake, who discovered the San Francisco Bay and beat off the Spanish Armada, was, with his colleagues, a corsair, a type of pirate. 150 years later the mood changed, because the pirates had gone too far, taking over entire island, making trade difficult for everybody. Then the states actively suppressed piracy. It did not take long, once Britain and France took the decision to do so: pirates were found, and hanged, from the Carribean, to the Indian ocean.

We are in a similar situation with financial piracy today: if the states cracked down, it would be over in a matter of weeks.

Actually, come to think of it, there was an even more spectacular precedent. Under the late Roman republic, preoccupied by civil war between the Populares and the plutocrats, piracy grew in the Mediterranean, to the point that there were pirate cities, pirate islands, and trade was being extinguished. When finally the distracted Roman government was forced to focus on the problem, it gave full powers to a young Pompeius Magnus to clean the Mediterranean of the pirates. It took him only three months, to everybody’s amazement.

Something similar happened in the Mediterranean, again, when France and Britain, shamed by the Navy of the USA, also took action against the pirates in Algiers and Tripoli. It is important to remember that what the naive and ignorant describe as simple colonial adventures did not start that way at all, but instead as military operations against imperialism (Napoleon in Egypt!), or against piracy (US Navy against Libya, then, decades later, Royal Navy against Algiers’pirates, followed, finally, another decade later, by French invasion… Or counter-invasion, as the French argued they represented Rome, which had been chased out by the Arab invasion of the late 7C). 

So mankind has to learn to view financial plutocrats as the criminals they are. Common people do not know that global finance has set-up a machine to divert all of the world money to itself. Instead, in their naivety, they attribute what is criminal to a form of genius. One is reminded of the Bible, where the people chose to save the king of the bandits rather than the righteous Christ.

Common folks are mystified by global finance, as practiced today. They cannot know that it is just organized crime, because the machine is hidden behind non linear mathematics, and common people don’t know mathematics, even much simpler than that.

The Godfather, as incarnated by Marlon Brando or Warren Buffet has undeniable charm, the fascist instinct in man wants such a grandfatherly leader, but that’s exactly what the state of law is not.

The huge and prestigious banks Barclays, which has its own skyscraper in London, was found to have manipulated interest rates to its own interest, illegally. It was condemned to a fine of more than 360 million Euros. But its chairman stayed in place.  

Curiously the daemons at the head of JP Morgan and Barclays, are named Dimon and Diamond. The former went to the USA House and Senate with giant presidential cuff links. The questions were polite: the senators and Congresspersons are on his payroll. And the other daemon, Diamond, in Britain, made sure to give to charity, for schools, millions.

They steal billions from taxpayers, and then give millions, and get to be called “philanthropists”. Singer Bono, for example, is a philanthropist; he makes billions from facebook, while singing about the poor, to enrich himself, and showing off with the president and other friendly plutocrats and their obsequious servants.

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WITHOUT SARKOZY THE DISSEMBLER, MERKEL CRUMBLES:

Meanwhile the plutophile Merkel suffered a heavy defeat at the hands of the coalition led by Socialist France. Let me explain.

Mario Draghi was for six years a partner at Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs has been in the habit of making partners in its lucrative organization Europeans with high responsibilities (such as EC commissioners, some German, or central bankers, such as Draghi). This way they can be paid, for their attention while serving Goldman as apparently independent agents. Goldman thus rewards those who had its interests at heart.

The drawback for global finance, is that such officials, should they betray the criminals, know the method of the global financial Mafia, and where some the bodies are buried.

Draghi is now head of the ECB, the European Central Bank, and he suggested in June 2012 that a European Banking Union was needed. As it is now, when a bank fails the state the bank nominally belongs to, is supposed to step in. This is unrealistic, as the banks in Europe straddle borders heavily.

For example Italian banks owe more than 310 billion euros to French banks. German banks owe more than 200 billions to French banks, about what British banks owe to French banks, and French banks owe more than 125 billion euros to German banks. meanwhile British banks owe nearly 400 billions euros to German banks. Those who want to amuse themselves with these numbers can consult the BBC website (with its apparently misleading title, “Eurozone debt“, or is it a Freudian slip that, after all, to tell the real truth, Britain is in the Eurozone?).

Financial markets responded favorably to the June 28-29 maneuver, with Irish borrowing costs for 10 years dropping to their lowest level since the month before the November 2010 EU-IMF bailout.

The maneuver consisted into creating, soon, a European equivalent of TARP. So in the future, when a bank will fail, a common European fund will europeanize it (in contrast with nationalizing it).

“It is a first step to break the vicious circle between banks and sovereigns,” said European Council president Herman Van Rompuy.

Verily this circle is worldwide, even the Chinese Premier admitted that much… About supposedly communist China: he explained banks too big to fail, even in China, got their way, and that had to change.

***

MERKEL’S HUMILIATION:

The evening started badly for Merkel, who had hysterically celebrated the victory of Germany over Greece the week before (in the soccer cup). An Italian named Mario, black like charcoal, scored twice against Germany. Then he rushed to kiss his (white) mama, who had adopted him from Ghana at age two. Very touching.

Under Hitler, Germans whose fathers had been black French army soldiers, were forcibly sterilized to the German population’s rabid applause, characteristic of scared rodents. There were several thousands of those unfortunate mixed race Germans (as manly French soldiers occupied Germany a bit after the later refused to pay for its wanton and deliberate destruction of France and Belgium in 1914-1918).

Many Germans will say;”Oh, this was then, this is now, we Germans don’t revisit the past, and think guilt is passe'”. Well, now came from then. Some of what German officials said in recent weeks proved this again. Bundesbank official talked about the Greeks as if they were dogs. Just like then. Germans do not own the Greek currency anymore in 2012 than they did in 1941.

1941 was the year when Germany invaded Greece to extricate the army of the fascist Mussolini from its invasion of Greece in 1940, which had backfired. The Greeks were defeated by Hitler, but, just as the Battle of France a year earlier, the Battle of Greece caused enormous losses to the German armed forces. So, a few weeks later, it was a much diminished German army that attacked the USSR. For example the German paratroop corps was eliminated while taking over Crete, and would reappear, much diminished, only during the Vercors Battle of Spring 1944, the diversion insurrection that allowed D Day in Normandy to proceed (by diverting 20,000 elite German troops, including SS paratroopers).

There are human rights abuses in Germany now, some major ones, such as no minimum wage. One cannot claim to be superior when one uses slave labor, same as then. Does our children ever learn, as G.W. Bush, grandson of one of Hitler’s most famous collaborator, Prescott Bush, would say.

So back to Merkel. After the terrible black Mario had scored twice against the Mannschaft (“the team”), there she was meeting with the 26 other leaders of Europe. What an evening!

Suddenly, the conservatives in Spain and Italy made a united front. At 11pm, they said they were not signing the document they had in front of them. For all the talk of Germany’s crushing superiority, Spain’s Rajoy and Italy’s Mario Monti represent more than 100 million people, and more GDP than Germany.

At that point, unheard of in a European Union summit, ever, a leader rose and left. French president Hollande stepped out, in an implicit support to Spain and Italy. Merkel could not call on her mighty ally. She was all alone. where was Sarkozy the plutophile, when she needed him?

Several hours later, Merkel, and the plutocrats she represents, capitulated. Banks in need will henceforth be Europeanized, getting money directly from the ECB (thus not increasing the debts of states such as Italy or Spain anymore). Hollande came back, and signed. Merkel looked haggard. Two defeat at the hands of “super Marios” in 12 hours…

When Merkel went back to her Parliament to get the two thirds majority she needs to change the German Constitution, the (physically large) chief of the Socialists (she needed to sign on) ironically observed that what she declared, two weeks earlier, to be anti-Constitutional, now that the French socialist controlled the National Assembly, she pushed to make it into law.

Evil men can hide behind regulations, or lack thereof, but they can’t escape the justice of history.

To tell us there are no banksters does not help. One cannot stop the Mafia, if one call Mafiosi, good fellows.

***

WE CONSPIRE & HATE THE BIOSPHERE, What’s Your Problem?

If just Sarkozy could prevent progress on a banking union, what can a conspiracy of anti-ecological leaders do? At the Rio ecological summit, where the subject was saving the biosphere, none of the most major leaders were present, except, once again, France’s socialist president Hollande.

Dr. Merkel went back to Germany, busy, as she is, to build 26 new giant coal plants. Australian leaders did not show up: after all Australia lives off coal sold to Asia. Putin runs a petro-gas state. China breathes coal and the mercury vapor burning coal provides with, perfumes the atmosphere, forgive our mental retardation. Obama beams from fracking and the plutocrats he feeds, just as they feed him.

British PM Cameron is beyond any decent description: he now fights what he calls a “culture of entitlement“, by removing subsidies to those who cannot afford lodging. I guess, he fights himself, as he was born with ten gold spoon in his mouth. PM Cameron inherited a considerable entitlement, he is in the know. And see: he does not need help, this is the proper culture of entitlement.

Cameron’s father was a stock broker and then an off shore fund manager, presumably not to pay more taxes; an ancestor was king; the Sunday Times Rich List compiler Philip Beresford, said: “I put the combined family wealth of David and Samantha Cameron at £30 million plus. Both sides of the family are extremely wealthy.” Yes, let’s fight the entitled, Camie boy!

Meanwhile the USA is experiencing record high temperatures, fires are burning, Obama shows off with the muscular firefighters among the smoldering ruins. No need for a carbon tax, we are already burning. Pathogens make history. The Arctic icepack is tracking at record lows. The poles are melting, the plutocrats are reigning, what could go wrong?

***

Patrice Ayme

Europe, Victim Of Plutocracy

SOVEREIGN STATES USE FORCE AND FIAT MONEY.

Rapid Reaction Force: Fighting Krugman’s Plutophile Disinformation.

***

EUROPHOBES DON’T KNOW MUCH:

Another day, another misleading editorial from Paul Krugman “Greece As A Victim” (NYT, June 18, 2012). As all good propaganda, there is lots of truth therein, just as in all good poisoned beverage, there is much goodness, to make sure the victim drinks it all. So Krugman piles up the truths, all to better lead to the same old stinger, down with the euro:

“…many things you hear about Greece just aren’t true. The Greeks aren’t lazy — on the contrary, they work longer hours than almost anyone else in Europe, and much longer hours than the Germans in particular. Nor does Greece have a runaway welfare state, as conservatives like to claim; social expenditure as a percentage of G.D.P., the standard measure of the size of the welfare state, is substantially lower in Greece than in, say, Sweden or Germany, countries that have so far weathered the European crisis pretty well.

So how did Greece get into so much trouble? Blame the euro.”

“Blame the euro.”: this is Krugman’s sing song. He has used different words to sing the same underlying music. But he, naturally, does not find the right reason to be against the present organization of the European Monetary Union, namely that the EMU was installed as a plutocratic device (by French socialists, of all people, 30 years ago!)

Krugman explains that Greece was doing fine, then it got in the Eurozone (soon he will explain to us that it was doing fine under the American sponsored dictatorship of colonels!). Here is more Krugman:”Then Greece joined the euro, and a terrible thing happened: people started believing that it was a safe place to invest. Foreign money poured into Greece, some but not all of it financing government deficits; the economy boomed; inflation rose; and Greece became increasingly uncompetitive.   

Please remind me of this next time: if people come, bearing gifts to the Greeks, it’s a terrible thing.

Krugman omits an important fact here, a fact that I have never seen mentioned anywhere, except by yours truly. A fact all European authorities want to forget, because they are entirely to blame: the Drachma, the old Greek currency, was converted at TWICE its true rate. It was a question of national pride for the Greeks, etc. Other countries (including Germany) thought that was cute and innocuous.

So the Greeks became TWICE richer than they should have been, just by replacing drachmas with euros, at the rate decided by the ECB. Hence one way to look at the present crisis in Greece is that Greece is readjusting down to what should have been the correct conversion rate of the Drachma.

Why were the Germans so anxious to accept Greece in, while making it artificially rich by a factor of two? The answer is obvious. So that the Greeks could afford to buy Porsches, of course. The way the Germans looked at it then, no harm done, all goodness to Germany in general and VW in particular. This explains also why the German authorities, including at the Bundesbank, are so anxious to blame the Greeks: to deflect the revelation of their own instigation of the whole machination of the Greek mess.

***

PROFITABILITY IS WHAT THE STATE DECIDES, NOT THE “FREE MARKET”:

Krugman, mentions “productivity“, which is, fundamentally how much one’s work is valued. Valued by whom? Well, maybe by the politicians one rigged the system with. For example in the USA, most of the wealthiest people pay little (Romney’s tax rate: 13.9%) or no tax at all. Contemplate the tax bills of most Silicon Valley titans:  they borrow their spending money, and don’t touch their financial assets ownership.

And as far as the so called “market” valuing things properly, some the hedge fund managers have “made” (for themselves) up to 5 billion dollars, making them the most “profitable” members of the biosphere. Part of how they make their money is by selling short entire countries, after careful conspiracies which seem to have the support of the president of the USA (as he sings the praises of the most successful conspirators, the so called “Sage of Omaha”: different countries have different notions of wisdom).

Of course, if the empire was different, hedge fund managers would be rewarded by expropriation, and long jail sentences. The argument can also be made that modern bankers are, by the standard of the Imperium Romanum, and direct descendant regimes, a period of more than two millennia (Roman republic-SPQR-Imperium Francorum-Imperium Romanum-Francia, etc.), simply counterfeiters, a crime punishable by being boiled alive, and slow, under the Franks.

***

THE STATE IS A FORCE THAT GIVETH MEANING:

Krugman explains that the USA holds together because of transfer payments: “Ask yourself, why does the dollar area — also known as the United States of America — more or less work, without the kind of severe regional crises now afflicting Europe? The answer is that we have a strong central government, and the activities of this government in effect provide automatic bailouts to states that get in trouble.”

Well the truth, historically, is that the USA stayed in one piece because of the application of massive deadly force. When the Confederacy seceded, Lincoln resisted, and won, by killing more than 850,000 people in the process. 850,000 dead is the latest lower bound in the number of death out of a total population of 31.4 millions in 1860, including nearly 4 million slaves. One can round that up to 3% dead (as the stats are known to be underestimates). This was the deadliest civil war known in the West for at least three centuries.  

The second reason the USA is together has to do with being a sovereign state, and that, as in all sovereign states through history, means that the USA has the ability to give money to whoever it pleases, in whatever amounts it pleases.

Krugman will not tell you this, because it is embarrassing for its cherished Wall $treet, and for the policy he has been promoting, Quantitative Easing. In a way a toddler can understand, the policy consists in using the state to give money to friends.

Under Bush II and Obama, the government of the USA, through the central bank, transferred in excess of five trillion dollars of “monetary base” to a handful of very big banks managed by whom Obama calls “friends” (yes, at least a third of GDP). For three quarters of his administration, Obama loudly called Jamie Dimon, head of JP Morgan, a friend and confessed he could never managed the immense and glorious portfolio of Dimon (who used to live in a 20 room mansion in Chicago). Now the Main Stream Propaganda has been busy forgetting these facts (because said facts show that Obama did more, so far, for plutocracy, than Romney ever did!)

So, considering this enormous conceptual picture he royally ignores, why is Krugman “blaming the euro”?

***

500 BILLIONS KRUGMAN DID NOT HEAR ABOUT:

It used to be that europhobic Americans such as Krugman accused the Eurozone to not be an “optimal currency area“.

But, it turns out that “productivity” varies just as much in various regions of the USA. So that reasoning was so specious, that the most sophisticated Europhobes were called back to order, and changed their music. So what’s their latest music? Their new music is all about the lack of redistribution in Europe (as it is the EU redistributes only 2% of the total EU GDP). Yet, in truth, redistribution is not, by far, the proximal problem in Europe.

On the face of it, Krugman’s ignorance is mind numbing. Krugman should learn that the total aid to Greece is in the process of passing the 500 billion dollars mark (yes, 500 billions, a total aid of half a trillion). After Krugman integrates that notion it will be interesting to see if his “non redistribution” music changes! Krugman is the plutocratic canary, singing deep in the mines of the subservient soul to reassure the slaves of the established order that Europe is at fault.

***

PROBLEM WITH EMU; IT CANNOT CREATE FIAT MONEY:

“Blaming the euro” is the usual anti-European condemnation by innuendo.

So what is the real problem? In truth, the problem is how the European Monetary Union was exactly set-up. The EMU generalized a French law passed by the pro-plutocratic government in 1973 (president Pompidou had been head of the Rothschild bank). The law forbade the French state to borrow from the Banque de France. Thus, similarly, states of the EMU were forbidden to borrow from the ECB. They thus lost their Fiat Money capability.

So what happened? All states use rolling debt. The plutocrats, using a worldwide conspiracy, with the rating agencies (owned by Buffet) and Goldman Sachs (on and off owned by Buffet), and the likes of Buffet and hedge funds (shorting the sovereign debt of states, just before their rating agencies lower their ratings!), have cranked up the interest rates (up to and beyond 100% for Greece). That is why Italy, which has no primary deficit, is now in trouble.

The usual explanation is that the lenders are afraid. But that explanation is all too charitable for the wealthiest people and organizations on Earth. The non charitable explanation is that these wealthiest of the wealthy are maximizing their profits. They do this by using all the tricks they can find, as they operate in a (deliberately organized) judicial vacuum. One of the tricks is simply to blackmail states, by having organized an enormous conspiracy to jack up the interest rates European states have to pay. They will not try the same trick to the USA, because that would be do it to themselves, and Obama has drones, plus the taste to be judge, jury and executioner.

That is why they conspired successfully to force Spain, which has much less government debt relative GDP than Germany, to pay ridiculous high, debt augmenting interest rates, well above 7%. Greed. The striving towards a new feudal order.

Krugman dislike the EMU, while protecting the vast plutocratic plot, because Europe is too socialist and that means too anti-Wall $treet. He wants Manhattan to gleam in the sun, and his mansion well furnished.

It was not the arrogance of European officials that led to the present EMU mess, as much as a silent coup by the pro-plutocratic forces. Now the French socialist, who set-up this mess in the 1980 have the occasion to undo it, and do the right thing, namely gives the ECB all the prerogatives of a central bank, such as creating Fiat Money. Interestingly Milton Friedman would agree to that. Thus the present plutocratic system is amazingly to the right of Friedman!

With Fiat Money, all the European interest rates could be brought down to basically zero, as in Britain, USA, Japan (although Japanese debt is 236% of GDP, much higher than Greece).

***

FOLLOW CAESAR AGAIN, & INTEGRATE GERMANIA IN THE GRECO-ROMANO-FRANKISH IMPERIUM:

When Octavian, the grand nephew, and heir of Caesar, took power, he established a plutocracy, and was called Augustus (the one who augments). Later three of his crack legions, plus auxiliaries, and support personnel were annihilated in a three day running battle in Northern Germany. Maybe 50,000 dead, many tortured in gory sacrifices.

Augustus enjoined his successors to leave Germany alone, and keep the limes where it was, awkwardly following the Rhine and then the Danube. There is a gap between both streams, and through it, German invaders would strike again and again, as the centuries flowed. (Germanicus could have fixed things, but Tiberius feared him, and the assassin Consul Sejanus may have poisoned him, as he did Drusus, Tiberius’other son, consul, and expert general!)

Finally the Franks, the hard core of the last two centuries of the Late Roman empire, took power in their own name. The Franks, who were Romanized Sea Germans (the Salian Franks spoke Old Dutch, and wrote in Latin) followed the wise instinct of Iulius Caesar, the assassinated head of the Populares, uncle to the plutocratic Augustus, and decided to conquer all of Central and Western Europe. The Franks did most of Germany in a few years, by crushing the Goths and the Alemanni (“All Men“, French “Allemands”). To finish the task Caeasar had decide upon, took the Carolingians, three centuries later (when the roman Empire, Imperium Romanum, was officially re-established in Pars Occidentalis).

After getting their hands on Eastern European silver, the Franks were able to re-establish enough of a currency for prosperous trade (the Later Romans, like the Chinese, chronically, had run out of enough precious metals to run their economies with free markets).

Unfortunately prosperous Europe attracted invaders and scavengers (in chronological order: Muslims, Avars (a type of Mongols), Vikings). Those powerful and simultaneous invasions forced  the Franks to establish a war society, the feudal order (my analysis is very different from that of Karl Marx; Marx considered feudalism within a purely economic model, preliminary to capitalism, proving he knew ver little history, and that of Rome, not at all!).

This exhausting war, democratic forces against plutocrats on a rampage is still on-going: the French led war against the plutocracy in Libya was nothing else (hey, for once that Sarkozy did something right, we may as well celebrate…) Re-establishing a republic in Syria would be more of that reconquista of democracy…

The feudal order, in turn, led to a split of the Imperium Romanum (Charlemagne’s official name of his 300 counties imperium). Rich Francia went on to reconquer Britain, while the relationship with the rest of the Imperium Romanum became murky. Sometimes differences were settled on the battlefield, sometimes the French king-“emperor in his own kingdom” would support his candidate to lead the Imperium Romanum (the addition of “Sacrum” to “Imperium Romanum” came in a superstitious period, centuries later).

That’s how Barbarossa became emperor: he was the candidate of Louis VII of France who wanted to use him against several of his uppity vassals, such as Savoyards, or Normands, the later ruling over Aquitania, England and much of Italy. Soon the splits turned into outright fragmentation. In Barabarossa’s time the feudal order had broken up Germania in 1600 states! Italy and France were not doing much better, with many independent, or quasi independent nobilities and cities. The French king would support English princes living in France in wars against their father the king living in London, etc.

As European states grew in power, one thing became clear: that growing power could be used for unending, ever growing wars. The (civil) war between France and England lasted nearly 5 centuries (from around 1320 CE to 1815 CE). The war between France and Spain around 150 years (from around 1520 to 1666 CE)… within the later was the 80 years war to create the Netherlands, which used to be the old heart of Francia known as Flanders. And so on.

The mood conducive to conflicts reached its absurd conclusion in 1945. after that a different paradigm was increasingly imposed. It is this paradigm that people such as Krugman try to understand, while not doing a very good job.

Europe is a small place. It has space for just one state, Europe. That is what Caesar thought, and Caesar was right. Caesar, arguably the best general who ever was, was also the chief of the anti-plutocratic party. Not a coincidence. So why did the French socialists set-up the European Monetary Union is a way so friendly to plutocrats? Well, maybe some who went along were just stupid, or corrupt. But maybe some were very clever, and set-up an elaborated trap according to Machiavellianism 101. Now the German mammoth has fallen in the trap. Its struggles are mighty. But in vain.

***

MACHIAVELLIAN POLITICS: CONSPIRACIES WITHIN, AND NOT WHAT THEY APPEAR TO BE:

To the discharge of the French socialists who set-up the EMU, maybe they thought that is all they could get from the Germans, at the time. Now Germany has swallowed the bait, and France’s position, in spite of Sarkozy selling the country to international plutocracy, is stronger than ever. France is the country of the future, Germany the country of the old. France has 35% more young people than Germany. The two most represented age slices in Germany are the scared, fat 50 to 60 year olds Merkel incarnates so well. Mr. Hollande, the socialist French president, has four adult children. Ms. Merkel, clinging to a past she neither master, nor understand, and rules which are beyond her, has no children.

Europe was built mostly by intellectuals who conspired to create situations where the easiest solution would be to “come out by the top“. The Steel and Coal Union between France and Germany (1948) was conceived to make war between France and Germany impossible, and so on.

The French Socialists are now in command of 21 of France’s 22 regions. They also control the French senate, the French National Assembly, the French presidency, and most significant cities. Even 8 of 11 MPs for the French living in foreign countries went to the Socialist Party.

In 1914, as the plutocrats, fascists and militarists in Germany marched towards war, the German SPD and the French socialists planned a general strike. This faltered as Jaures, the intellectual French socialist leader was assassinated. This time, though, as the plutocrats further their conspiracies, the socialists are in total control of France, and can plot the overthrow of the plutocratic order incarnated by Merkel with the SPD, Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands.

Granted, when plutocracy is at bay, plutocracy is at its most dangerous. The real reason the plutocrats in Germany went to war in 1914 is that they felt at bay, hounded by the SPD, which was asking for more power for the parliament. Dubious encouragement from Colonel House (photo therein the link, interesting in other ways too!) persuaded the Kaiser the USA would support him against France, and Germany’s army attacked an astounded world in august 1914.

Well, it won’t happen again. Greece is a victim of plutocratic plots, not of “the euro”, as Krugman would have it. I say plots, in the plural, because the richest people and organizations in Greece made a tax code which excludes them from taxation.

For example, Greek ship magnates own more than 3300 vessels, 15% of the world’s total. They employ 200,000 people, in Greece alone. Shipping is an example of the globalization of plutocracy. As a major shipping plutocrat, Victor Restis, put it:“Sure tax me. Find me.” He means that nobody can find him, as his life style is global, overseas.

Such plutocrats say that, if the European Union tax them, they will go to Dubai and Singapore. I say: it’s time to use force. French, British and American police and the military could find them, worldwide. Satellites and drones can be used. Ships can be impounded. Magnates can be arrested, expropriated, judged, condemned, jailed. Or then they can restrict their trading between China and North Korea.

France, by the way, just judged and condemned Somali pirates, arrested on the ground, by helicopters, within the country of Somalia (not just the high seas). Somalia pirates are easy to avoid; don’t come next to the Horn Of Africa. But financial pirates are worldwide, they cannot be avoided.

Lincoln is revered in the USA, not because he averted his eyes from infamy, but because he used force, in the name of goodness.

Plutocracy also uses force. When the interest rates the Spanish state is forced to pay reach 7.25%, as it did June 18, 2012, force is being used against the Spanish People, thus against Europe (Spain has a much smaller government debt than Germany). It used to be that finance grabbed 8% of the profits. Now it’s 40%.

The French socialist foreign minister, the extremely experienced Laurent Fabius, an ex-PM, has called  Assad of Syria, an “assassin”. The French want to use force in Syria. Very good, once some secular precautions are taken. However, there is an even more crucial need to use force against “le monde de la finance”. As president Hollande said: “My true enemy has no name, no face, no party… He will not be elected, yet he governs. It is the world of finance.”

The state, thus democracy, rests on force, be it only to resist plutocracy. So it has been ever since civilization exists. Time to be reminded of this basic fact.

***

Patrice Ayme