RAGFLATION: Inflating Poor In Rags, Wealthiest, Wealthier

RAGFLATION: A New Concept, Inflating Money And Rags: Let Them Wear Rags!

Markets expect inflation to subside within a year (there are markets of future interest rates). Central banks need to mitigate inflation. However, central banks must not create a recession. Yet, the Fed head claimed action which risked a recession was needed. For those who don’t know, central banks are cover-ups of unions of the wealthiest lending to states… So they are intrinsically plots of the wealthiest. The earliest ones in Florence and Britain, were devised for, and entailed much military action.

Thus, any central banks’ action is one directed by the wealthiest financiers plotting together in the name of the wealthiest crust of society. By yanking interest rates and loans (to the wealthiest) just so, and according to their latest plot, they can insure that the wealthiest get wealthier and the poorest more into rags. 

Correcting an error such as free money for the wealthiest, with another error, expensive money for the poor (after making the wealthiest wealthier) does not make a right… for society at large… although it makes still another right for the wealthiest.

The present day inflation was created by central banks, principally (complicating factors such as Putin’s Third World War made matters worse). The Fed not only annihilated interest rates and made massive qualitative easing, but also bought mortgage bonds to make mortgages loans dirty cheap, thus feeding a strong inflation in housing… In existing housing prices, not in creating new housing (the two concepts are antinomic to each other)… making the housing crisis worse.

This sort of torture through interest rates is called “sadomonetarism”, since Lady Thatcher, who practiced it. It inflicts pain to better society (supposedly).

Sadomasochism is fed by a deep tendency of the human mind… that of inflicting pain and extinction on other human beings. This instinct corresponds to the necessity of destroying other humans to save the ecology. In other words, lofty reasoning from revered experts may well hide the basest and worst instincts of destruction… which are millions of years old. When the chimps go kill all chimps in the nearest valley, they don’t act any differently.

Thus, the Fed, the central bank, which is stuffed with human beings with higher ambition, greater greed for domination than usual, as all the most powerful institutions tend to be, may well harbor, deep down inside, a strong desire for ragflation…. The will to reduce a significant part of the population to rags. To make the wealthy wealthier.

In the ultra wealthy San Francisco Bay Area, where I reside, one can see camps, some extending a mile along some freeways and interchanges, where people, some dramatically sick, live in rags. That, too, is part of the economy, and should be part of the Fed’s business, this ragflation, this inflation of rags and destitution, that the Fed fed, while ensuring that local homeowners enjoy multimillion dollar homes (even if they have just one bathroom) lowers the standard of civilization. It makes people inured to gross inequality, inequity and sadomasochism.

Sadomonetarism, making the wealthiest wealthier, is just one consequence of this generalized desire to inflict pain on others. Enablement, love and consideration for genocidal dictators such as Putin and Xi is another aspect, so is the devilish plot to support irrealistic “renewables” while nuking nuclear all with the practical effect of fostering fossil fuels.

The most effective manipulation of minds consists into doing something in order to achieve the opposite. 

Patrice Ayme

This is just a fractious of the Woodstreet Oakland Concentration Camp. In the distance, homes on the hills ar worth several million dollars each. Such camps are many in Oakland, and typically tucked along or below ten lane wide massive freeways or freeway interchanges with dozens of lanes..

US “Liberalism” As Plutocracy, Inaugurated By Genocidal Slavemaster Jefferson, #3.

The word “liberal”, from “liber” (free) entered usage to oppose tradition in the Fourteenth Century… top thinker, physicist and Paris university rector Buridan refused to be anything else than “magister in artibus”, as a frustrated Pope bemoaned. 

“Liberalism” was a driving thought of the Enlightenment. Yet, according to the Encyclopædia Britannica: “In the United States, liberalism is associated with the welfare-state policies of the New Deal programme of the Democratic administration of Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt, whereas in Europe it is more commonly associated with a commitment to limited government and laissez-faire economic policies”. In the United States the ideas of individualism and laissez-faire economics previously associated with classical liberalism became the basis of libertarianism and components of American conservatism.

Unlike Europe and Latin America, the concept liberalism in North America refers to social liberalism. Governing parties, the Canadian Liberal Party, and the US Democratic Party, are considered “liberal” in the United States.

I claim that American “liberalism” has been mostly fake since LBJ. Actually Clinton repealed the financial reform of FDR, the Banking Act of 1933. I have written thousands of pages on the subject, from many historical perspectives, going back centuries. 

American style fake liberalism was founded by Jefferson, the “founding liberal”. Jefferson was a great US president: he doubled the territory of the USA. Lofty words covered up his evil power (Pluto-Kratia). Exalted thoughts from Jefferson are all over Washington: all men are created equal… but may as well be his slaves, he had 200… 200 slaves, and never freed them.

Supremely exploitative mentality, then, by this Founding Father, covered up by big words to the contrary. Jefferson got in trouble with the police in Paris for keeping slaves (slavery had been unlawful in France for eleven centuries, since 657 CE!) Is that the “liberalism” the world needs? Talking gloriously, implementing genocide? Is that the American way? 

Jefferson purchase: Louisiana. He pushed maximally for expansion in the Indian lands beyond the 13 colonies. Not only the Natives were not consulted, but Jefferson established the blueprint of the plot to exterminate the “Indians”.(see below).

This is why “liberalism” got to mean very different things on different sides of the Atlantic. Organizers of the “Democratic” party were plutocrats such as the Harrimans, heirs of a railroad monopoly, decorated by both Stalin, and Hitler… for formidable help (think Baku offshore oil). 

The US never did one thing while talking the opposite under Roosevelt… thus making World War Two, its holocausts, and the “American Century”. possible. This will be scrutinized someday.   

The banking crisis of the late 1980s was a forerunner of the one 20 years later. More than 800 “thrifts” (a type of bank) and related institutions failed, plus more than 1600 commercial banks. The US gov took control of these institutions while their value was roughly zero (as happens in nationalization). However, by retaining an interest in asset portfolios, the Resolution Trust Corporation was able to participate in the extremely strong returns being realized by portfolio investors. 

Obama, instead, gave to the rich. Obama agreed to the Bush approved, Goldman Sachs devised, plan of transferring assets to rich people. Between TARP, Quantitative Easing and “Twist”, more than 5,000 billion dollars were transferred to the wealthiest people in the USA… by “liberal” Obama, asking for nothing in return… just because he was told what to do by the invader of Iraq? Or because he wanted to become wealthy afterwards, by pleasing the wealthiest?

I know Obama personally, as a friend for several decades, and can testify to the fact he just did what he was told, indeed, and understood very little beyond that. So he was completely manipulated in a totally illiberal strategy.

With President-elect Obama’s full approval, the Fed started to buy 600 billion of mortgage backed securities in late November 2008. Quantitative Easing finished in 2014, with gifts of 4.5 trillion dollars to banks… without anything in return (differently from the RTC 20 years earlier!)

US “liberalism” has a fundamental problem: its founding giants, Jefferson and Jackson were fully intent on removing the “Indians”. The “Removal Act” was actually passed in 1831, under Jackson… But the genocidal program had not been implemented earlier, i part from fear that the Natives Americans would constitute an alliance with European powers (UK, France, Spain).

Here is this little known aspect of Jefferson:

In an 1803 private, secret letter to William Henry Harrison, Jefferson wrote:

To promote this disposition to exchange lands, which they have to spare and we want, for necessaries, which we have to spare and they want, we shall push our trading uses, and be glad to see the good and influential individuals among them run in debt, because we observe that when these debts get beyond what the individuals can pay, they become willing to lop them off by a cession of lands…. In this way our settlements will gradually circumscribe and approach the Indians, and they will in time either incorporate with us as citizens of the United States, or remove beyond the Mississippi. The former is certainly the termination of their history most happy for themselves; but, in the whole course of this, it is essential to cultivate their love. As to their fear, we presume that our strength and their weakness is now so visible that they must see we have only to shut our hand to crush them, and that all our liberalities to them proceed from motives of pure humanity only. Should any tribe be foolhardy enough to take up the hatchet at any time, the seizing the whole country of that tribe, and driving them across the Mississippi, as the only condition of peace, would be an example to others, and a furtherance of our final consolidation.^[13][14]

Jefferson believed that this debt strategy would “get rid of this pest, without giving offence or umbrage to the Indians”.^[15] He stated that Harrison was to keep the contents of the letter “sacred” and “kept within [Harrison’s] own breast, and especially how improper for the Indians to understand. For their interests and their tranquility, it is best they should see only the present age of their history.”

Roman emperors distributed life sustaining bread, US emperors distributed ruinous debts… the debt strategy is used to this day. Students with progressivist mentalities are encourage to undertake ruinous degrees of no market value in ruinous universities, saddling them for a life of servitude (the New York Times has dozens of recent articles on this, the one linked her is one of many!)

***

Forced Removal And Official Extermination Of Aborigines Inaugurated By Jefferson:

Jefferson believed for decades that “aboriginal inhabitants” should be exterminated or forcefully relocated and sent west.^[6] 

Jefferson’s first promotions of Indian Removal were between 1776 and 1779, when he recommended forcing the Cherokee and Shawnee tribes to be driven out of their ancestral homelands to lands west of the Mississippi River. Indian removal, said Jefferson, with consummate hypocrisy typical of exploitative mentality, was the only way to ensure the survival of Native American peoples. Jefferson’s first such act as president, was to make a deal with the state of Georgia that if Georgia were to release its legal claims to discovery in lands to the west, then the U.S. military would help forcefully expel the Cherokee people from Georgia. At the time, the Cherokee had a treaty with the United States government which guaranteed them the right to their lands, which was violated in Jefferson’s deal with Georgia.

As Jefferson put it in a letter to Alexander von Humboldt on December 6, 1813:

“You know, my friend, the benevolent plan we were pursuing here for the happiness of the aboriginal inhabitants in our vicinities. We spared nothing to keep them at peace with one another. To teach them agriculture and the rudiments of the most necessary arts, and to encourage industry by establishing among them separate property. In this way they would have been enabled to subsist and multiply on a moderate scale of landed possession. They would have mixed their blood with ours, and been amalgamated and identified with us within no distant period of time. On the commencement of our present war, we pressed on them the observance of peace and neutrality, but the interested and unprincipled policy of England has defeated all our labors for the salvation of these unfortunate people. They have seduced the greater part of the tribes within our neighborhood, to take up the hatchet against us, and the cruel massacres they have committed on the women and children of our frontiers taken by surprise, will oblige us now to pursue them to extermination, or drive them to new seats beyond our reach.^[17]

Jefferson told his Secretary of War, General Henry Dearborn (who was the primary government official responsible for Indian affairs): “if we are constrained to lift the hatchet against any tribe, we will never lay it down until that tribe is exterminated, or driven beyond the Mississippi.”^[18]

US liberalism double talk at its best… With a mentor like that, no doubt US progressivism could comfortably sink into unsuspected abysses. Jefferson did not just relocate and exterminate Indians. He taught how to make it look as if it were for their own good. Now we have had for generations plutocrats, who are typically monopolistic thieves, proclaiming themselves to be “lovers of man”, philanthropists… Some descending from the “most important” collaborators of the Nazis (Hitler dixit), became presidents (the two Bushes)….

Although all the preceding is in plain sight, US academia has been excellent at teaching how not to see it…. thus fulfilling its mission of molding sheep-like masses of uncurious gullible creatures. To feed on a prey, the predator need first to make it unconscious…

Patrice Ayme

INEQUALITY KILLS PROGRESS, The Force Which Gives Us Ever More Meaning

OUR ETHICAL CONTEXT:

The following sketch of the main forces of history is written with a maximally progressive motivation. That is only normal: humanity is progress personified. Still the “Democratic” Party, in power most of the time in the last few decades, has been, overall, very regressive… because it has been captured by plutocracy: top “Democrats” became filthy rich from their political careers. Corruption, in other words.

The problem has been that the Democratic Party pretends to be a left but actually implemented policies way right of Trump. The retort the “Democrats” give to this is that their policies were right wing because the “Republicans”, the GOP, forced them that way. This astounding reply is deeply disingenuous. In the beginning of the reign of Obama, there were at least 72 days when the Congress and Senate were in session and Obama enjoyed a “Supermajority”. To pass a drastic law in such a context, one needs minutes, not days. But the truth is, during the reign of Obama-Biden the single genuinely progressive law passed outlawed the exclusion of preexisting conditions in healthcare private insurance (a law that the GOP supports).

Doesn’t Biden support equality? Well he claims to, but his record is clear, loud and strong: Biden’s record is the exact opposite to an extent which is astounding. Biden is the first candidate to the US presidency known to have fostered, during his long career, the financial plutocracy and collaborated in a crime against humanity (the killing of millions in Iraq). 

What of Trump?

I can debate with my opponent, but not with a fake friend who backstabbed me. The enemy of my greatest enemy should be my ally.

The greatest enemy should be the Global Deep Plutocracy, which owns all the world media, thus our souls, besides an increasing majority of the world Gross Domestic Product (GDP owns the GDP). What we are witnessing is the rise of neo-feudalism.

***

WHY DID PROGRESS STOP?

In 1874 Félix du Temple succeeded the first powered take-off with a man on board. 95 years later, humans landed on the Moon. In this short period air travel became routine, human life expectancy doubled and thermonuclear fireworks were lit. Poverty vanished, everybody willing got a job, or a top quality free education.

Her Serene Princess Corinna zu Sayn-Wittgenstein fresh from cavorting with kings of Arabia and Spain, (yes, Wittgenstein, like the philosopher, same family) with Clinton, Princess Charlene of Monaco in between. All tax avoidance Delaware financial engineering style aristocracy Neo-feudalism is already here…

So more than 50 years ago a life form reached another celestial body, deliberately, probably for the first time in galactic history. So much progress in a few decades… And then… Fifty years of stagnation, or even decay: quality jobs vanishing, education, health care and housing getting too expensive, mathematics and reading scores going down, world ecology collapsing, religious madness growing, people getting killed for making jokes, unending wars… Why? What happened?

One has to find the most significant indicators. What could those be? Let’s take a sweep at history, on the grandest scale, to guess what the important notions were.

For millions of years, human populations were tiny and very diverse. But then human ancestors learned to master fire, more than a million year ago, and that was a force and capability multiplier: entire forests could be burned, creating an environment more human friendly. However, communications stayed very difficult. 50,000 years ago, Eurasia still had at least four human species… They used crucially life saving technology (tools, weapons, clothing, cooking of otherwise unedible plants). But progress was slow. Present humans resulted from interbreeding those species. 

Aside from fire, for millions of years human ancestors had only as much energy as what their muscles could deliver… until humans helped wolves evolve into dogs: suddenly human capability was very significantly enhanced: two top predators collaborating, and soon guarding herds of domesticated ungulates. Then, 10,000 years ago, the first cities appeared and the impact of humanity started to grow exponentially. New methods of harnessing nature, and new species, were created. Great human concentrations brought debate fostering innovation.

It is revealing that the progress of humanity was concentrated in space and time. For example the alphabet, the sexagesimal system, many crops, many democratic structures, and the first cities all appeared in an area less than 1% of the world’s continental mass… But smack dab in the Middle Earth, at the junction of Africa and Eurasia, where the trading of people and ideas was maximal, from Ireland to India. 

The conclusion is that Middle Earth had learned to learn. Global trade helped. More granular study shows that particular civilizations were highly innovative for often very short time, and then knowledge disseminated: Sumerian cities, Egypt, Crete, Phoenicia, Greek cities… 

What distinguished these particularly innovative societies? They have all one thing in common: the most innovative societies were more egalitarian, and less ruled as military dictatorships. Sumerian two chamber parliament cities, Cretan girl toreadors, the first dams in Yemen, with the first known queen…  Compare Sparta, the most racist, exploitative and iniquitous Greek city, which invented nothing, and Athens, the direct democracy which created an enormous body of knowledge, in a few decades. Equality fosters progress and the reason is obvious, as it fosters debate, thus intelligence.  

So what happened to equality? It went up and down, mostly down, but when it was up, progress was fast.

Equality, as in ancient Greece and Rome already, was a virtuous consequence of war. In the ancient world, hoplites armies, made of middle class citizens, were found most efficient militarily. The consequence was that citizens were armed and dangerous, and could not be subjected to a military dictatorship… because they were themselves the military. So democracy was an immediate consequence of switching from a military based on an aristocracy, to a military centered on a hoplite army. King Sergius Tullius made Rome switch to a hoplite army. Rome then turned into a de facto republic, and defeated her neighbors which had not armed the middle class. 

Something similar happened in Europe and America in the first half of the Twentieth Century. To defeat racist German fascism between 1914 and1945, the democracies, led by the French Republic, had to go all out and muster enormous armies. In the period 1939-1945, 16.5 million men served in the US Army, 6.5 million in the French army, 3 million in the British army. Those men had been trained to kill in the name of democracy, equality, liberty … It would have been ill advised to deprive them of these afterwards (such a deprivation is actually how the Franco-Algerian civil war started…in 1945…). 

Thus the GI Bill, which provided America’s young, dangerous and idealistic men with all they could possibly want. Thus massive socialist programs in Europe, such as universal free health care, universal free education, up to the university. Massive construction programs rebuilt destroyed cities, factories or railroads… or established freeway systems (US). The rivalry with the socialist paradise next door in the USSR helped along. This all led to an explosion of knowledge and capability… for thirty glorious years concluding with the visits to the Moon… 

However, even then, young people in the most advanced countries realized they were submitted to exploitative oligarchies. In 1968, revolt spread, from San Francisco to Prague. The war in Vietnam showed that a small elite in the USA had conspired to make a war which killed three millions for no good reason. That became a teaching moment, worldwide. Twelve years after the invasion of Hungary, the invasion of Czechoslovakia confirmed that the USSR, far from being a paradise, was a malevolent back-stabbing empire even worse than the USA. France also revolted, as young people there realized in May 68 that too many structures had more to do with encrusted privilege of an elite than anything else.

As a consequence of 1968 a defiance of the governments installed itself. But it is important to realize that May 68 happened because the great egalitarian movement which had accompanied the Second World War was fully receding. 

May 68 was just a flash in the pan. Obvious irritants were removed. The elite pursued its ascending trajectory in a more stealthy manner. In the USA, plutocrat Kaiser persuaded his friend President Nixon to use the government to help establish the private Health Maintenance Organization (HMO) system. (Just one man revered by the Democratic Party, Warren Buffet, made more than ten billion dollars from HMOs; his friends and collaborators made much more.)

The lesson the elite got from Vietnam is that war was good, be it only for its distracting element, as long as one could hide who started it. Under “Democratic” president Carter a deliberate ultra secret plot launched a war in Afghanistan, to destroy the USSR by forcing it to intervene. It used proxies. The Machiavellian idea was to use Muslim Fundamentalism from Saudi Arabia and the ISI of the Republic of Pakistan to wage holy war against the secular republic of Afghanistan. It could be done cheaply by attacking little girls’ schools (the Prophet, who improved the condition of little girls, would not have been amused). The war in Afghanistan killed millions, and is still on, four decades later. But the USSR, which had been trying to reform itself, indeed collapsed.

The elite harnessed craftily the idea of freedom. Freedom would be found in private enterprises, a move led by Thatcher and Reagan. TINA, There Is No Alternative, they claimed. There was a lot of merit to the idea. 

But profiteering could not be applied to unprofitable infrastructure. So infrastructure went the way of the dodo when privatization was imposed. The psychiatric patients were released to the streets. Violent crime exploded. In reaction, 97 to 3, US Senators passed Biden’s Crime Bill, which was pitiless on people of color, sending millions to prison for nearly nothing (Biden recognizes it was a mistake). My spouse fought a year to get a father of four out of life in prison. He had got life, because of a little pipe in his pocket. Just a pipe. No drug. It required Obama’s presidential pardon, which was obtained (with thanks from the president and the AG!)

China, though, was not that stupid. China has invested in massive public infrastructure for 4,000 years, and China knew the importance of governmentalism, when the government actively steers the economy in the direction of maximal progress. China went on a rampage of industrialization, using lots of Intellectual Property gleaned from the West. Quickly, the wealthiest persons in the West, especially in the USA, realized they could make a business deal with China, similar to the deals they had made with fascists regimes after World War One. (Such deals are not in official versions of history; however, just on the question of oil procurement, Hirohito’s Japan, Stalin’s USSR, and all European fascist regimes, depended crucially on US oil men, their capital, companies or know-how.)

Top decision makers in the USA became mesmerized by a philosopher who told them that the secret of a successful society is the roaring individualist:

“[Dean] “My dear fellow, who will let you?”

[Roark] “That’s not the point. The point is, who will stop me?”

― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead 

Anything was permitted, then. Nobody could stop them. Constraints on finance installed under Roosevelt in 1933, were removed by Clinton. The 1920s were back, complete with a crash (2008). The situation was worse, though, as Western bankers in the increasingly infernal trio of UK, US and France, mostly invested in bets with each other called derivatives. 

Chinese bankers investing in derivatives, instead of material infrastructure, were encouraged not to pursue this, with a bullet in the back of the head.  

Thus May 68 only made the elite smarter. By then the elite had become fully hereditary protected by an arsenal of iniquitous laws (and not just in the US, led by Delaware: in France the hyper wealthy’s property is protected from otherwise punitive inheritance death taxes). 

Inequality grew, helped by the partnership with the Chinese dictatorship. Inequality itself is a dictatorship, so its relationship with the Chinese dictatorship justified its own existence and reciprocally. This sort of growth of evil has happened many times in history, in all locales. Under its metastatic form, it is called as it should be, Evil-Power, Pluto-Kratia, where it penetrates all of society.

****

WHY DO CIVILIZATIONS COLLAPSE? 

Because tiny elites, with their vicious, greedy minds, take them to the abyss. It is optimistic to hope that the Fourth World War will be fought with sticks and stones. The Coronavirus pandemic shows that the annihilation of humanity is possible. A lab in Wuhan made viral enhancement studies… next to the “Bat Lady”. 

Absent absolute wealth limit legislation, mathematics makes increasingly powerful elites dominate societies. Ruling the many by the few, is inhuman. Thus can only be enjoyed by ever more evil means. Rendering the population so stupid it can’t even take care of itself is a must. 

The Global Dark State of world inherited finance chose Biden, for decades a Senator of the world’s top tax haven, Delaware, the “den of thieves” (dixit the New York Times in 2008!) 

Free trade is neither free, nor a trade, for citizens living in the so-called democracies. Instead world globalization, as in the Roman globalization of 22 centuries ago, enables the wealthiest to escape democratic laws, taxation, minimum wage, laws against slavery. 

Collaboration with dictatorships such as China built networks of power around the world (the Epstein underage sex ring is a small example of this; Biden’s state of Delaware, another). So-called “Representative Democracy” rests on very few representatives, the families of whom can be bought. Global corruption in top politicians is generally legal and a world phenomenon. In the US, they don’t even hide. 

An example? Looking at costs, as percentage of GDP, and quality of care, comparing the US and the UK, one sees that at least half of US health care spending is sheer corruption. 

Trump ordered to crush down the price of medical drugs down to the lowest level of comparable countries. Congress found that U.S. drug prices were nearly four times higher than average prices compared to similar countries… Democrats did nothing about it, even when they had a supermajority House-Senate, or when Trump asked. So the question naturally arises: do most of the media hate Trump because he is too much on the left? That would make sense as all the media is owned by the world’s wealthiest families.    

Trump is hated for his climate positions. Yet the Paris Accord allows countries to pollute as much as they want. The scheme was just a way to extract money from the USA (as the WHO is). To prevent the catastrophic emissions of greenhouse gases (now above 500ppm of CO2, the highest level in 40 million years) will require new technology so good and efficient that all countries adopt it. Nothing less will do. This requires releasing the animal spirits, as Trump did. 

Under Obama, the Patent System was destroyed to insure the reign of the tech monopolies doubling as spy agencies and a new form of censoring plutocratically owned media. Obama committed the outrage of making it impossible for small inventors to make claims against monopolies stealing them.  

Contrarily to repute, Trump has signed on gigantic augmentations of the budgets in fundamental science and health research. But it does not matter: many (not all) of the world’s wealthiest people hate him because he threatens to break their power tool, world globalization. They also succeeded to make lots of the electorate hate him too, thanks to their ownership of the media.

The power grab of hyper wealth is frightening, but even more so the fact that the intellectual class has sided with the world plutocracy (which pays their salaries). A hope of this book is to expose enough deeply significant facts to make thinkers realize that the enemy, Trump, of their greatest enemy, world plutocracy, may not be their friend… But should be their ally. A good occasion to debate, therefore to learn better thinking.

Hatred is no way to progress. Nor can one progress if one cannot debate with someone in a basement. The connection between Biden and the hyper wealth secrecy of Delaware was never exposed for what it is. The Trump hating plutocratically owned media thrills its gullible public with tales such as Trump wanting to inject them with bleach. 

Here is an illustrative anecdote, mostly based away from the US. The ex-king of Spain has a wealth officially in the 50 million dollars range (not bad for somebody who started with nothing). However the ex-king made two billion illegally, from moving bribes around discreetly thanks to the world financial system… the nexus of which is Delaware… The present king of Spain renounced his inheritance… Or so he had to say. 
Once the ex-king of Spain got one hundred million dollars from Saudi Arabia, and passed 65 million Euros of it to one of his mistresses, the Danish Corinna Larsen (who since changed her name in another marriage, and became “Her Serene Highness Princess” Corinna zu Sayn-Wittgenstein). She explained that “it was not to hide the money”, but “to win me back”. The mistress is tight with the Clintons, Prince Charles, top journalists, the top UK aristocracy, and is a star of the Paradise and Panama papers, with dozens of illegal offshore accounts. Who is arresting her? Nobody. In the US the black man with an empty pipe gets arrested, imprisoned for life, while princesses who have money laundered hundreds of million dollars, and everybody knows it cavort with the US aristocracy, and its media, serenely.

Why so? Because, per the intrinsic nature of the world’s representative oligarchy we enjoy, the political system obeys, and law enforcement negotiates, with those who have the power. Because power buys everything. In the last few weeks, Wall Street unleashed more than a billion dollars to support Biden (more than 30 times what Trump got)… as it buys itself a president they already know all too well…

Patrice Ayme

Hard Core Democrat Reich Recognizes Inequality Came From Bill Clinton, Obama

Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a hard core “Democrat”. He is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His next book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, will be out in March. Obama deliberately turned away from Reich and his ideas about not too much inequality and being guided by greed. Instead, like Clinton before him, Obama gave power to Goldman Sachs potentates (Summers, etc.). The same who helped set-up Google and Facebook.

I generally agree with what he wrote, except where I made (hopefully) nasty comments 

Robert Reich hopefully disingenuously asks:

“Clinton and Obama chose not to wrest power back from the oligarchy. Why?

In the first two years of the Bill Clinton and Barack Obama administrations, Democrats controlled both houses of Congress. Yet both Clinton and Obama advocated free trade agreements without providing millions of blue-collar workers who consequently lost their jobs any means of getting new ones that paid at least as well. Clinton pushed for Nafta and for China joining the World Trade Organization, and Obama sought to restore the “confidence” of Wall Street instead of completely overhauling the banking system.”

Obama augmented inequality drastically by engineering a fat cats rescue, with taxpayer money. Even Trump was not that bad, that way (as more recent graphs show)…

PATRICE AYME: It’s better than that: Clinton demolished president Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Banking Act of 1933. Obama refused to re-established it. Thus Clinton and Obama were not revolutionaries, they were counter-revolutionaries. For Clinton and Obama, it is not just that plutocrat FDR was not plutocratic enough. For Clinton and Obama, FDR was a dangerous revolutionary, a Bernie Sanders erroneously elected.   

ROBERT REICH: “Both [Clinton and Obama] stood by as corporations hammered trade unions, the backbone of the white working class. They failed to reform labor laws to allow workers to form unions with a simple up-or-down majority vote, or even to impose meaningful penalties on companies that violated labor protections. Clinton deregulated Wall Street before the crash; Obama allowed the Street to water down attempts to re-regulate it after the crash. Obama protected Wall Street from the consequences of its gambling addiction through a giant taxpayer-funded bailout, but allowed millions of underwater homeowners to drown.”

PATRICE AYME: Obama named ambassadors people who had given enough money to his campaign. All “Democrats” saw this. 

ROBERT REICH: “Both Clinton and Obama turned their backs on campaign finance reform. In 2008, Obama was the first presidential nominee since Richard Nixon to reject public financing in his primary and general election campaigns, and he never followed up on his re-election promise to pursue a constitutional amendment overturning Citizens United vs FEC, the 2010 supreme court opinion opening wider the floodgates to big money in politics.

Although Clinton and Obama faced increasingly hostile Republican congresses, they could have rallied the working class and built a coalition to grab back power from the emerging oligarchy. Yet they chose not to. Why?”

PATRICE AYME: Good question. My answer is well known, and it’s the roughest, the one all are afraid to profer, in a case of collective hypnosis: personal corruption. If one compares different countries in the “West” one sees that in some countries (USA, Britain, Germany) some leaders became immensely wealthy after their “service”. Famously, Truman refused to make money from his ex-position of US president. And he explained that making money from it would demean the office of the presidency.  

Instead of expounding the obvious, namely squarely asserting that the plutocrats in control found willing empty suits to do as they were told, Reich opts for euphemisms:

ROBERT REICH: “There is no longer a left or right. There is no longer a moderate ‘center’

My answer is not just hypothetical, because I directly witnessed much of it: it was because Clinton, Obama and many congressional Democrats sought the votes of the “suburban swing voter” – so-called “soccer moms” in the 1990s and affluent politically independent professionals in the 2000s – who supposedly determine electoral outcomes, and turned their backs on the working class. They also drank from the same campaign funding trough as the Republicans – big corporations, Wall Street and the very wealthy.

A direct line connects the four-decade stagnation of wages with the bailout of Wall Street, the rise of the Tea Party (and, briefly, Occupy), and the successes of Sanders and Trump in 2016. As Eduardo Porter of the New York Times notes, since 2000 Republican presidential candidates have steadily gained strength in America’s poorer counties while Democrats have lost ground. In 2016, Trump won 58% of the vote in the counties with the poorest 10% of the population. His share was 31% in the richest.

By 2016, Americans understood full well that wealth and power had moved to the top. Big money had rigged our politics. This was the premise of Sanders’s 2016 campaign. It was also central to Trump’s appeal – “I’m so rich I can’t be bought off” – although once elected he delivered everything big money wanted.”

PATRICE AYME: Well, agreed with the rest, BUT the last point is disinformation. “Big money” wanted to keep having its tax avoiding, law avoiding, unemployment fostering and disempowerment promoting globalization. Globalization is how Roman plutocracy created the sort of “Republic” they liked, one they owned. (Nevermind it caused unending civil war, degeneracy and decrepitude.)  The Davos crowd wanted Davos to go on and on, until they own the world for sure. Then came Trump…

ROBERT REICH: “The most powerful force in American politics today continues to be anti-establishment fury at a rigged system. There is no longer a left or right. There’s no longer a moderate “center”. There’s either Trump’s authoritarian populism or democratic – small “d” – populism.”

Democrats cannot defeat authoritarian populism without an agenda of radical democratic reform, an anti-establishment movement. Trump has harnessed the frustrations of at least 40% of America. Although he’s been a Trojan horse for big corporations and the rich, giving them all they’ve wanted in tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks, the working class continues to believe he’s on their side.

Democrats must stand squarely on the side of democracy against oligarchy. They must form a unified coalition of people of all races, genders, sexualities and classes, and band together to unrig the system.

Trump is not the cause of our divided nation. He is the symptom of a rigged system that was already dividing us. It’s not enough to defeat him. We must reform the system that got us here in the first place…”

Reich points out Democrats controlled Congress for 16 out of 24 years, prior to this. He lauds the “Affordable care Act” (Obamacare), which has been a disaster for nearly all, including the poorest (I was direct witness of this, because I know some of the poorest). Those who made like bandits were the healthcare industry, and their financiers. 

A friend of mine posted a lament about the failed impeachment of Trump, calling it a “day of infamy”, “never to be forgotten”. I pointed out that Biden and Pelosi were war criminals, that was really what “infamy” was. I put links to my supporting essays. He has a vast following, being owner of a Venture Capital firm in the Silicon Valley. He took out his Original Post, with plenty of Trump hating comments. Progress. However, this major “Dem” donor didn’t address the bottom line: Biden and Pelosi should be tried. The dereliction of the “Democratic” Party is not just Obama, Clinton, and their helpers and minders. Nor is it just Pelosi and Biden. Obviously Pelosi’s December 5, 2019, confession that she was a war criminal was a cry for help: she is a big time Catholic, she wants to make contrition before meeting God and Lucifer.

What needs to be examined most is the failure of analytical capability in so many US citizens claiming to be “good” while they fostered (be it only by supporting Pelosi and Biden) the war in Iraq, or inequality (by supporting Clinton and Obama). Right, I was a force helping Obama at a crucial juncture. But I recognize I was had. Although I knew, even then, that Obama was a quick buck artist. But I had not cynically anticipated how far he would go doing the opposite of what was convened.

So we need authenticity. In his anti-establishment rage, certified since he fought Reagan, Trump brought some deep down authenticity. So, of course, does Sanders, long what Trump calls a “Communist”…

Curiously, and let me jokingly feed a baby conspiracy theory here, the fact that the Iowa caucus results were delayed… doesn’t look like an accident, on the face of it. A firm tied to Hillary Clinton, herself tied to Biden (as Kerry and Bloomberg, both billionaires, are, at least in spirit) set up an app which conveniently crashed. Hence the fact Biden was severely rejected in Iowa is masked by this delay: Biden doesn’t seem to have finished among the top third, and is slugging it out with Senator Klobuchar…

What is clear is that Sanders’ greatest adversary is not Trump. Oh no. Trump is actually running a strident anti-drug companies advertising, explaining to “Americans” that they pay much higher prices than any others around the world for the same exact drugs. The exact sentence used by Trump was used by a progressive such as yours truly, for years. So yes, Trump is a so-called “populist”, so is Sanders, and the establishment hates them, because they will reduce how much money flows to the greedy elite….

So, yes, it looks like an accident favoring the established Elite. But conveniently the fact Biden lost is drowned by a talk about an app… How many accidents do we need, before we suspect a conspiracy?

Patrice Ayme

Vote For Better Ideas, Not Just The Same Old Clowns, Or Their Clones

Biden-Obama Versus the Perspective of Real Change For the Best

The New York Times accepted the following comment of mine on Up, Up, Up With Elizabeth Warren (in seconds: things have changed!)

Biden was the closest associate to Obama. And being associated to Obama’s rule of hypocrisy, dissembling, and raising inequality is why, more than any other factor, Clinton was defeated (careful post-election studies have shown this). So Biden would be defeated by Trump, for the same reason Clinton was; the global oligarchic multinational oligarchy and plutocracy has to be rolled back. 

Another advantage of pushing Warren’s candidacy is that she fights for progressive ideas, not just for acquiring power for herself, personally. Even is she would be defeated by Trump, her defeat would make these progressive ideas advance in the collective consciousness (and that’s sorely needed).

A careful examination of the graph above is revealing: first the previously quick augmentation of US life expectancy was curbed by plutophile Reagan… And then life expectancy started to go down outright big time under Obama: it turns out that Obamacare took care of you the way the Mafia usually takes care of the commons…

Whereas we saw the Obama-Biden work before: nothing happened, except a direct continuation of George W Bush’s, and Clinton’s main thrust, more efforts to push for GAFAM monopolies and to give away ever more power to multinationals such as the Trans Pacific Partnership, decimating US jobs, and laws… 

It is better to fight the good fight, for progress, rather than giving one’s fate to the usual back-stabbers… if nothing else, the latter strategy has been tried since 1980, and the result has been ever more inequality in nearly all ways, and now even reducing life expectancy. If one wants a new and better country, one will need a new and better mind, this is what Warren offers, and Biden doesn’t.

Patrice Ayme

Politically Correct Famous Democratic Economist Admits To Treachery of Political Leaders After 2007. Good. Yet, Why Just 2007? To Laud Plutocratic Clintonism?

It seems obvious to me that the official economic doctrine is the theoretical justification of plutocracy. Roman emperor Constantine used what he called Catholicism, his invention, to justify his increasing plutocracy. Nowadays, plutocracy is haughtily brandishing the philosophy of “economic science”. Now a famous economist looks at that, and blames everybody else. Mr. Delong is a friend and colleague of Krugman, and their ilk. We are talking here of the mainstream ideology of the self-declared “left”… Which is just stealth plutocracy: a definition of plutocracy is inequality. Inequality increased under Obama, when it reached its highest level ever (as measured by looking at the top 1%, or top .1%, etc.) Right, it’s probably getting worse under Trump… But Trump never claimed to be “left”.

***

Inequality augmented under Obama. Here is the slice 2013 until 2016. This was caused by the fact Obama helped most the bankers, hence the wealthiest…

“Blame the Economists?

Nov 1, 2018 J. Bradford Delong

Ever since the 2008 financial crash and subsequent recession, economists have been pilloried for failing to foresee the crisis, and for not convincing policymakers of what needed to be done to address it. But the upheavals of the past decade were more a product of historical contingency than technocratic failure.

BERKELEY – Now that we are witnessing what looks like the historic decline of the West, it is worth asking what role economists might have played in the disasters of the past decade.”

Unsurprisingly, famous economists protect Clinton from any blame. When, in truth, Clinton demolished the New Deal most effectively. Learning from Goldman Sachs, even before he was elected president, that, if he wanted to be re-elected he would have to do as he was ordered to, by the wealthiest men, Clinton told Robert Rubin Goldman CEO:”You are telling me by reelection depends upon fuckin bnd traders?” (Nowadays, the once famous quote has disappeared from search engines: no accident.)

Brad Delong: “From the end of World War II until 2007, Western political leaders at least acted as if they were interested in achieving full employment, price stability, an acceptably fair distribution of income and wealth, and an open international order in which all countries would benefit from trade and finance”

Patrice Ayme: Not true: Clinton, a so-called “Democrat” ruined the separation of banking and speculation (installed by president Roosevelt and Congress in 1933). Instead of serving all, banks were reset to serve mostly the wealthiest. Moreover Clinton enabled so-called “financial derivatives” with total free rein. Even more serving of the wealthiest, enabling them to leverage themselves tremendously. That led to the 2008 crisis, when a bank dealing mostly in US Treasury Bonds and an insurer, AIG, got acutely bankrupt from derivatives… with nearly all other major banks, just as bad. Bush, in accord with Obama, and then Obama alone sent to the banks all the money they needed and some.

Brad De Long: “Then came 2008, when everything changed. The goal of full employment dropped off Western leaders’ radar, even though there was neither a threat of inflation nor additional benefits to be gained from increased openness. Likewise, the goal of creating an international order that serves everyone was summarily abandoned. Both objectives were sacrificed in the interest of restoring the fortunes of the super-rich, perhaps with a distant hope that the wealth would “trickle down” someday.”

PA: Right. So why do we still call individuals like Obama, “Democrat”, and act as if they were,  when all they did was to serve the wealthiest, the plutocrats (feeding them ever since)?

De Long: “Others, like me, understood that expansionary monetary policies would not be enough; but, because we had looked at global imbalances the wrong way, we missed the principal source of risk – US financial mis-regulation.”

PA: One reform is necessary: banks are there to serve We The People and the real economy serving We The People. Banks should not serve speculation to make the wealthiest wealthier. Plutocrats hate it, so so-called “economists” can’t understand its utility (to themselves!)

De Long: “Between the financial crisis of 2008 and the political crisis of 2016 came the presidency of Barack Obama. In 2004, when he was still a rising star in the Senate, Obama had warned that failing to build a “purple America” that supports the working and middle classes would lead to nativism and political breakdown.

Yet, after the crash, the Obama administration had little stomach for the medicine that former President Franklin D. Roosevelt had prescribed to address problems of such magnitude. “The country needs…bold persistent experimentation,” Roosevelt said in 1932, at the height of the Great Depression. “It is common sense to take a method and try it; if it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.”

The fact that Obama failed to take aggressive action… With policymaking having been subjected to the malign influence of a rising plutocracy, economists calling for “bold persistent experimentation” were swimming against the tide – even though well-founded economic theories justified precisely that course of action.”

PA: Need one say more? Delong congratulates himself with the present state of affairs. But actually US society became much more unequal under Obama. Rising inequality brings the collapse of civilization: such is the lesson of history. One can’t get a worse result than collapse. Time to redefine “left” in light of increasing potential collapse..

That collapse didn’t happen yet is why we can still talk about it.

But never, in the history of humanity, has collapse seemed more likely, long-term. In no small measure, because of the cecity of official economy, which is more focused in increasing inequality than in realizing that this is another name for rising plutocracy.

Economists, like most of those working in the media, are just employees of the world’s wealthiest men. Directly, or indirectly through plutocratic universities. Plutocratic universities are not universal.

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2015/04/03/plutocratic-universities-are-not-universal/

Nor is the present economic theory resting on a universal foundation: it rests only on pleasing plutocracy. Economy will become universal when it rests on energy itself, more exactly, Absolute Worth Energy.

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2008/01/03/energy-is-the-fundamental-unit-of-economics/

Meanwhile, let those who managed the increase of inequality under Clinton, Bush and Obama blame others: that’s what they do best.

Patrice Ayme

“Philanthropy”: Propaganda For Plutocracy. No Less!

The concept of “Philanthropy” is a disguise, & an insult. Of course we all love (phil) man (anthropos). It’s not just the hyper wealthy who “love man”. But they are that vain and stupid, and semantically challenged, that they don’t even know that they insult us all, the 99%, while gorging themselves on their moral superiority, being, that way, like all ridiculous tyrants of old…Or then maybe as the main dish? Verily, the word “philanthropy” hides the reality of the .1% preying on the rest of the planet!

From the World Economic Forum, in other words, “Davos”, today:
World Economic Forum‏ Verified account @wef
The impact that the global age of #philanthropy is expected to have on the world https://wef.ch/2G0lndz 

This is an amazing graph, but the comment of the WEF, not perceiving that they implicitly and unwittingly identify “philanthropy” and gross inequality, is even more priceless!Something has to be done to stop the evil philanthropists: Global Laws

Quoting from the WEF:

“As the rich get richer, the world has entered an “age of philanthropy”, with education the most popular focus of some 260,000 foundations globally, researchers said on April 26.

Increasing numbers of rich individuals, families and corporations are setting up foundations for social investment amid persistent inequality, said study author Paula Johnson of Harvard University’s Hauser Institute for Civil Society.

“(Due to) the rapid growth of wealth around the world, more individuals and families (have) the ability to create philanthropic capital,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

The richest 1 percent of the world’s population owns half of its wealth, up from 43 percent in 2008, propelled in part by gains in financial assets, like stocks and bonds.

Many super rich Americans have set up foundations which run their own programmes or give grants, including Bill Gates of Microsoft, Warren Buffett, who heads the Berkshire Hathaway conglomerate, and the industrialist Koch brothers.

There are more than 15 million millionaires and close to 2,000 billionaires in the world, while 10 percent of the population live on less than $1.90 a day, said the report, which was funded by the Swiss bank UBS.

Globally, foundations have combined assets of $1.5 trillion – slightly more than the U.S. federal government’s 2018 budget – the report found in an assessment of 39 countries around the world, including in Asia, Latin America and Africa.

The sector is notable for its youth and recent growth. Almost three-quarters of 80,000 foundations that gave their age were started in the last 25 years, the report said.

“We indeed live in a ‘global age of philanthropy’,” it said.

“If this trajectory continues, philanthropy will be poised to have an increasingly significant social and economic impact.”

What could go wrong? When what is already wrong is viewed as the ultimate friendliness to the human genus?

Foundations pay no taxes. Does that ring a bell? The definition of super rich, nowadays means: little taxes paid, plenty of wealth and power (like free travel for “business”).

Want to fight inequality?

North Korea, Iran, Trump: time to get global! Time to enforce civilization globally. France arrested one of her most famous plutocrats, for violating, corrupting, bleeding dry, two African countries. A good first step towards the refugee crisis! All plutocrats violate. If not local laws, or their spirit, then decency and civilization.

Meanwhile, Trump nominated Gina Haspel a 33 year veteran of the CIA, to head the agency (she was second in command under Mike Pompeo, now Secretary of State, visiting Pyongyang, North Korea), Gina is a woman, first of her gender nominated as head of CIA. “Democrats” are giving her a hard time, especially the billionairess Feinstein (yes, billionairess, with a b, although she pretends she is not, by committing her husband fortune, acquired when she negotiated with China, while he traded there…)

Kamala Harris, Verified account a young chick who is the ever cute “junior” Senator of California now endowed with gigantic powers, is proud of her own moral cluelessness:  

@KamalaHarris:  “Earlier today I asked CIA director nominee Gina Haspel if she believed enhanced interrogation tactics like waterboarding were immoral. It was a yes or no question. She refused to answer.”

I made an effort to educate unsophisticated Kamala… Although I don’t think gigantically powerful people, such as our elected and selected “representatives” can be educated, they are too full of themselves, they are too unequal in powers to ours, and they are there because they are ambitious for the sort of money political power can bring… And when to live the high life, as Obama does! So I wrote:

Was 9/11 moral or not? Why not ask CIA Haspel that? For Sheikh Mohammed, who planned 9/11, 9/11 was moral. CIA “waterboarded” him. Real question is not whether “enhancement” was “moral”, but whether it was smart. Middle Ages stopped using torture because it was very ineffective!

No doubt Ms. Haspel is the most qualified nominee to the CIA in ages. And she is a woman! Quit the sexism, and confirm!

Patrice Ayme

Flawed Philosophy Is WHY CARTHAGE FAILED

Remember Carthage!

Superficialists will tell you Carthage failed, because a Roman army destroyed Carthage in eight days of door to door fighting. That is correct and true, but the consequences of greater causes. The real philosophical question is how did it come to that, this genocide? All the more as the Roman imperator (top general endowed with imperium) commanding said army, was psychologically devastated by the horror unfolding under his eyes. Scipio Aemilianus was enacting the orders he got from the Roman Senate. He cried as his own troops engaged in the carnage, and he became conscious of the enormity of what was happening: the destruction of a civilization. Scipio realized that it was not just Carthage which was being destroyed, but Rome itself.

Scipio, “reflecting upon the inevitable fall of cities, peoples and empires” said to Polybius that “I feel a terror and a dread, lest someone someday gives the same order about my own native city“, i.e. Rome. By city he meant state and civilization.

The answer to how the situation got to being that extreme is philosophical, yet of extreme importance, looking forward in the present situation of civilization.

Some Traits of Carthage’s Extreme Plutocratic Philosophy Were So Wrong, That Carthage Failed. A lesson to meditate!

Carthage was one of the most striking civilizations, ever. Differently from Sparta, which did not contribute much to civilization (even considering the 300 stand at Thermopylae, which was later thoroughly eradicated with extensive collaboration with fascist imperialist Persian juggernaut).

Carthage made present-day Tunisia bloom. It was never again so agriculturally productive. In 300 BCE, the part of North Africa Carthage cultivated was as great as the private farms, and the Ager Publicus of Rome, and all the area of Italy cultivated by Rome’s allies. In other words, Carthage’s resources were enormous.  

But not just that. Differently from a land power such as the richest of them all, agriculturally wealthy Egypt, Carthage mostly lived of maritime trade. She controlled the Western Mediterranean, all the way to tropical Black Africa, except for Phocian Marseilles’ own little Greek empire, and Magna Grecia (Great Greece) in southern Italy. 

Partial view of Carthage’s famous Cothon: the commercial harbor is rectangular, the circular inner harbor is military, and could hold 188 trireme warships, each in its own shelter. Cap Bon at the horizon. Contemporary Tunis, population, one million, is to the right.

Carthage established far-out trading posts in Africa, starting the idea and practice of the direct collaboration of Europe, and the Middle Earth, collaboration with Black Africa (something erroneously called “colonization” by politically correct, cognitive dwarves … The notion of “colonization” being all the more dumb as it went both ways, see the Almoravids.)

Carthaginian agricultural science was so advanced that the Romans preserved a book describing it. It was the only Punic book Rome preserved. Others were destroyed when the insane, scared and vengeful mass murdering Roman plutocracy annihilated the North African Punic metropolis. If the West and even the Arabs, or Persians, could colonize desertic areas so well, thereafter, it’s in no small measure thanks to Carthaginian agricultural science.

Carthage was much admired by Aristotle, for its “mixed constitution” (monarchy + aristocracy + democracy). That was viewed by Aristotle and his Middle Ages’ followers, to be an ideal balance bringing stability (Aristotle’s excuse for monarchy). Except for Sparta, Greek City-States were notoriously unstable.  Sparta, like Rome, and Carthage, also had a “mixed” constitution (and was much admired by all too many of the Socrates-Plato-Aristotle-Macedonia clique… that much admired clique which ended democracy in Greece).

***

If Carthage was so great, why did it fail? Too much oligarchy, not enough citizenship:

Carthage’s plutocratic oligarchy was avaricious with citizenship… Avaricious with citizenship were also the Romans, some will argue, instinctively inappropriately comparing with modern melting pots states like the Western democracies. Well, one has to start somewhere: ur meltingpotness comes from Rome. Rome was the original melting pot. Right, Roman avarice in the way of citizenship is why the “Social War” of the First Century BCE occurred: Rome was defeated, and had to accept to share its citizenship. 

The fact remain that Rome grew into a metropolis by absorbing all the Latium and then Etruria. Whereas etruscan cities remained independent city-states in a sort of spiritual confederacy of various political systems, Rome slowly incorporated its neighborhood, enabling her to constitute a massive hoplite army: similar to that of the largest Greek city-states, but even bigger.

By contrast, although Carthage controlled a greater agriculturally productive domain than Rome, Carthage had much fewer real citizens. Moreover the latter were city-dwellers, poorly trained in war.

Thus Carthaginian armies had not much in common with Roman armies, which were full of healthy and wealthy Roman farmers. By 400 BCE, Roman farmers serving in the Roman army were paid a stipend; the end result is that Rome was able to field the largest national armies in the Ancient Mediterranean World; Persia could field larger armies, but, like the Carthaginian armies, they were multinational armies of mercenaries.

The all too small full citizenry of Carthage meant that much of the “Libyan” population Carthage administered did not have a full stake in the fate of the metropolis. Carthage drafted them during wars, but also paid mercenaries, many of them from Spain or Gaul.

After the First abominable “Punic” war with Rome (which started in 265 BCE), Carthage suffered a striking revolt of an army of its own mercenaries. By contrast, Rome’s core legions were made of full citizens, superbly trained and equipped… Even when the Roman legions rebelled, centuries later, they rebelled against each other, to seize power, rarely against the City of Rome herself… and, even then, barely, and more directed at the Senate than at the population.

***

It was cruel to deny citizenship to stakeholder, so Carthage became ever more cruel:

Carthaginian cruelty was legendary. Crucifying generals, to encourage the others, was common (whereas Rome, in 22 centuries of Roman history, never crucified a single general).

3,000 years ago, human sacrifice of children was still practiced: consider the Bible and the famous would-be child killer Abraham. 2,800 years ago, queen Dido founded the Phoenician colony of Carthage. Phoenicia, the cities of the present-day Lebanese litoral (Tyr, Sidon, Byblos, etc.) was most advanced: it created the alphabet (and books, bibles, from the word “Byblos”). Phoenicia practiced child sacrifices. Thus, so did Carthage.

However killing children became uncool in the Middle Earth: it was a big civilization there, and some of the national civilizations, such as Egypt, had never practiced child sacrifice. Those nation-civilizations were in competition and trade with each other, and child killing was no advantage. In the end, Phoenicia dropped that monstrous religion.  

But Carthage kept it.

Why? Because Carthage ruled North Africa, and had no competitors (Numidian kingdoms were clients and supplicants, and allies against Rome). Carthage’s absurdly obsolete cruelty would have been a lethal disadvantage further east. But, in North Africa, overlording the savage Numids and Libyans, it was rather a way to awe them some more, and thus to rule them, sort of.

And Carthage kept killing more and more children.

Why? Because denying citizenship to stakeholders was cruel, and needed cruelty to keep on going. And the more it went, the more cruel Carthage got.

Thus the more wrong it was about citizenship, the more cruel Carthage got (to impose that inequality ever more). Doing so it weakened itself in two ways: too small a citizenry (especially with all those dead kids), and Carthage put herself in the moral crosshairs of Rome (which was notoriously antagonistic to human sacrifice religions).

In the end, Carthage became much more democratic, infuriating and alarming Roman plutocracy ever more. Out of this fury, Roman plutocracy got ever more mileage. Indeed, the annihilation of Carthage by an unhinged Roman Senatorial class was an unmitigated disaster. It’s not just that the greatest Semitic civilization which ever was disappeared. It’s also that Carthage gave an excuse for the Roman plutocracy to get completely mad, insane, unhinged, and thus able to vaporize Roman total democracy (which had been growing, prior to the Punic wars).

***

Many are the lessons’ from Carthage:    

We saw above that the growth in inequality is justified, and accompanied by a growth in cruelty. This was true both on the Carthaginian and Roman sides. After 146 BCE, when Rome destroyed with extreme cruelty free city states in Spain and Greece, and annihilated Carthage, Roman cruelty turned against the Roman population itself.

This was of course insane, and the more insane it got, the more cruelty itself was used as an excuse and occasion for further madness. In the end, Rome found itself ruled by a plutocratic clique among which emperors were selected. This concentration of power among few hands and brains made Rome increasingly stupid (just as Carthage had become increasingly stupid). The result was a degeneracy of the state in a theocracy symbolically led by a crucified, and thus crucifying, messiah, Jesus his name.

Republics such as the USA and France also have a mixed constitution (the presidents have the powers of elected kings, the politicians, in combination with the plutocrats who feed them, make oligarchies, etc.) The US and France are the paradigms of today’s “republics”.

Still the same psychological laws which led Carthage and Rome down the abyss, are in place. Thus history can teach us how to avoid the pitfalls.

***

What Should Carthage Have Done?

The Punic wars started as a three-way struggle for Sicily, between Carthage, Greek tyrants, and the rising Roman power. Retrospectively, after a Greek tyrant landed in North Africa on the prominent cape next to Carthage (Carthage got rid of him with difficulty), Carthage should have extended her citizenship to Libyans, and grow to cover North Africa, imitating the Roman Republic, which was closer to a total democracy, then, than to a plutocratic oligarchy as Carthage was.

Thus Carthage could have grown organically, as a civilization (as Rome did). In particular, child killing would have disappeared, because Numidians and Libyans would not have acquired with enthusiasm Carthaginian citizenship, if they thought it meant their kids may have had to be thrown in the fire.

Carthage: it is alarming to see that a civilization so splendid, so smart and so advanced could be so wrong, and so retarded. But cruelty has a beauty that the herd often indulges in.

Patrice Ayme’

Eight Billionaires As Rich As Half The World, Thanks Obama!

What does Obama have to do with it? All the men below are globalocrats: they earn locally, avoid taxes, globally, and thus are used to the outlaw lifestyle. For example Bezos owns Amazon. Not making any “profits”, forever, he destroyed bookstores, worldwide, while being protected by his servants in the White House. Unsatisfied by this global heist and destruction, he bought for himself one of the four “newspapers of report” in the US, the Washington Post, violating antitrust laws more than a century old (he may have a problem after Friday, when Trump becomes president, as he is in The Donald’s crosshairs…) 

Thanks to Obama’s Cultivation of The Richest, the Situation Has Got Much Worse Than This Prediction Of 2010

Indeed the richest men exploit the mood of tax evasion, beyond tax evasion: that mood has mushroomed into legal evasion in all ways.

Most of the men below cooperate with the governments, to augment their power and influences, sucking on the health care system, or providing the governments with industrial strength spying, or acting as corsairs (say Gates doing business with Monsanto’s GMOs, and pesticides, worldwide), One can say they have captured the governments.

https://www.oxfam.org/en/pressroom/pressreleases/2017-01-16/just-8-men-own-same-wealth-half-world

I will have a trick question. One can guess what it is, by scrutinizing the list. Here it is:

The world’s 8 richest people are, in order of net worth:

1. Bill Gates: America founder of Microsoft (net worth $75 billion)
2. Amancio Ortega: Spanish founder of Inditex which owns the Zara fashion chain (net worth $67 billion)
3. Warren Buffett: American CEO and largest shareholder in Berkshire Hathaway (net worth $60.8 billion)
4. Carlos Slim Helu: Mexican owner of Grupo Carso (net worth: $50 billion)
5. Jeff Bezos: American founder, chairman and chief executive of Amazon (net worth: $45.2 billion)
6. Mark Zuckerberg: American chairman, chief executive officer, and co-founder of Facebook (net worth $44.6 billion)
7. Larry Ellison: American co-founder and CEO of Oracle  (net worth $43.6 billion)
8. Michael Bloomberg: American founder, owner and CEO of Bloomberg LP (net worth: $40 billion)

Oxfam’s calculations are based on global wealth distribution data provided by the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Data book 2016

The wealth of the world’s richest people was calculated using Forbes’ billionaires list last published in March 2016.

Remarks: Bill Gates’ wealth has been evaluated higher: 90 billion dollars. On top of that, Gates controls the Gates Foundation. The influence of that Foundation is well beyond 50 billion dollars.

Indeed, and moreover, passed some wealth, the influence of wealth is well beyond its mere size. At least three of the men above, and maybe four, are (extremely well paid) spies for the US government, operating worldwide. (When this was revealed in some of its full glory by E. Snowden, the US establishment went bersek: US high officials’ future salaries depend fully in keeping this sort of police and spook state not just secret, but unimaginable.)

The Facebook guy is under investigation in Germany for not removing death threats, holocaust denial and hate speech within 24 hours, as required by law (that case has been brewing for years). So are some of his multi-bilionaire underlings. They don’t care: evading the spirit of the law is their business model (as it is, for all the others!)

Buffet has long been interested by health care, and he has defended the health care plutocracy of the US, for decades. He is also a main pillar of the so-called “Democrats”. Guess what? He made more than ten billion in health care alone (some of it through HMOs).

Thus, do you notice anything?

Five of the eight richest men in the world are US citizens and were very much, and very loudly anti-Trump in 2016. (2017 will of course be the opposite story: since they couldn’t beat him, they will try to join him.)

Only fools will think that’s a coincidence.

Patrice Ayme’

PLUTOCRACY: EPIGENETICS, Not Just Wealth And Democide

CHOMSKY FINALLY Agrees With Patrice AYME: AMERICAN DREAM DIED BECAUSE OF PLUTOCRACY… But Chomsky does not go as far as using the word. And that makes him, and his devoted followers, miss the most sinister aspects of it all, and the reason why it is so hard to fix plutocracy, the EPIGENETICS OF EVIL. Thus they complain about the fleas, not the wolf carrying them. Details about how that instrument of US plutocracy, Nazism, came to be, thanks to US plutocracy and its banks, illustrate the demonstration: as long as something that big in the calculus of evil is altogether missed, there is little hope…

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English America did start as a plutocracy in the sense of an extremely wealthy class of the wealthiest investors sitting in England, after having ravaged Ireland. Jamestown was like that, Yes, it was a tiny hamlet fortress, but then the colony grew, mostly from using slaves for tobacco farming. Then England, wrecked by civil wars and revolutions, lost control of its American colonies until the 1700s. Attempts to make Lord Penn the ruler of Pennsylvania ended up in the American Revolution.

Washington, Jefferson, and Al. were very wealthy and somewhat satanic, as they held slaves, and killed Natives, but they were small fry relative to blue blood European plutocrats, who were much wealthier, and thus had to be much more satanic to stay in power.

So the English American republic became a not very plutocratic republic (if one doesn’t consider slavery, and the massacre of Native Americans, two huge ifs…) And on it went. The rebellious Confederacy was to some extent a plutocratic revolt centered around the idea of buying, selling and abusing people as if they were chicken: it failed.

The first US billionaire was Carnegie. Carnegie was far left, by today’s standards, advocating 50% tax on the wealthy, and punishing estate taxes. His widely advocated ideas brought a mood conducive to the passage of the anti-trust act under President Teddy Roosevelt. Here is how the top 0.01%, the top 30,000, are doing in the USA:

Inequality Fosters Plutocracy, The Rule, Not Just Of Wealth, But evil & Bad Genes

So when did the US democracy go bad? JP Morgan, a banker, escaped the anti-trust thrust.   Dr. Schacht, a German banker cum economist joined the Dresdner Bank in 1903. In 1905, while on a business trip to the United States with board members of the Dresdner Bank, Schacht met the famous American banker J. P. Morgan, as well as U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt. Schacht  became deputy director of the Dresdner Bank from 1908 to 1915. Meanwhile, when Wall Street collapsed in 1907, JP Morgan “bought all of it” (or at least a big part of it), bringing the market around.

By 1914, US plutocrats, and the racist president Wilson, conspired with the German Kaiser, enabling the Kaiser to hope to destroy his personal enemy, and the enemy of German, if not American and British plutocracy, the French Republic. That magnificent plot backfired on Germany when Great Britain declared war to the Kaiser within days of its attack on France.

But it did not backfire for the USA, just the opposite: the US supported the Kaiser for three years with ammunition components, etc., while the UK and France piled up debts to the USA. More exactly, US plutocrats made a fortune, while putting the UK and the French Republic in their debt.

In 1919, US plutocrats made it so that German fascists could have another go at the French Republic, by brandishing, of all things, the concept of peace.

Remember, for US plutocrats, the motto of the French Republic, Liberty, EQUALITY… sounded like a funeral bell tolling. They absolutely had to remove that menace: at the time, the French empire was larger in population and extent, than the USA itself, and had the world’s most powerful army and air force (yes France was then mightier than the USA in several ways).

While arguing that Germany should be protected from France, the US requisitioned giant amounts of German private property, then transferred that, with characteristic generosity, to US plutocrats, finishing the deal, by burning the records of these chummy transactions, in a highly convenient blaze, which made the transfer of these properties safe from retrospective consideration. I am not joking: the cause of the burning of the Commerce Building on January 10, 1921 was never determined: rats, smoking were excluded, and electric wires kept new and perfect. The fire started in the file room, was all over said room in a couple of minutes, and lasted five hours.

In any case, the US became the de facto overlord of the so-called “Weimar Republic” (the official name was “Second German Reich”; Hitler changed it to “Third German Reich” in 1935). That enabled US plutocrats (some of them Jewish) to turn around the US antitrust law.

The symbiosis between Nazism and US plutocracy was total, including the latter giving birth to the former. Dr. Schacht was central in this (and that’s why he was judged and exonerated, as one of the top 24 Nazi war criminals in 1945 at Nuremberg).

To win the war, the US became, de facto, a sort of social democracy. It slowly went back to plutocracy when Nazi operators and collaborators such as the Dulles brothers, took control of the USA in the 1950s. A quick learner and follower, Richard Nixon, became president in 1969, setting up the HMO system, while making an alliance with the Chinese dictatorship.

Ford, Carter, Reagan, ramped up the plutocratic pressure. The dam broke under Clinton, who actually dismantled the MOST IMPORTANT legislative piece of president Franklin D Roosevelt’s long presidency: the Banking Act of 1933 (“Glass Steagall”).

The Deep State, suitably plutocratized then established a number of evil corporations which were used as intelligence agencies (internally and externally). This is when Sheryl Sandberg was parachuted from the Treasury Department where she was the official girlfriend of Lawrence Summers (successor of R. Rubin, ex- Goldman Sachs chair) to Google and then Facebook (she will meet with Trump Wednesday).

Inequality grew.

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Chomsky, A Crow On Its MIT Branch, Crowing Lugubriously:

That was for the causes. Chomsky started to condemn the “financialization” of the USA for the acceleration of inequality in 2013, under Obama (Patrice Ayme explained that it was caused by the abrogation of the Banking Act, already more than 10 years ago; Chomsky vaguely describes, Patrice explains…).

Here is Chomsky’s latest description: “The ‘American Dream’ was all about class mobility. You were born poor, but could get out of poverty through hard work and provide a better future for your children. It was possible for [some workers] to find a decent-paying job, buy a home, a car and pay for a kid’s education… It’s all collapsed — and we shouldn’t have too many illusions about when it was partially real… The so-called American Dream was always based partly in myth and partly in reality.” Chomsky said, noting that Americans are losing their hope due to “stagnating incomes, declining living standards, outrageous student debt levels, and hard-to-come-by decent-paying jobs.”

“The inequality in the contemporary period is almost unprecedented. If you look at total inequality, it ranks amongst the worse periods of American history… However, if you look at inequality more closely, you see that it comes from wealth that is in the hands of a tiny sector of the population…

The current period is extreme because inequality comes from super wealth. Literally, the top one-tenth of a percent are just super wealthy,”

Chomsky describes. One of my trusted commenters asked me recently what I thought of Chomsky. A philosopher is not just a botanist. A philosopher would explain, and suggest new explanations. Chomsky also avoid to use the concept of “plutocracy”. He describes it, he describes how wealth, being powerful, grabs power… But he doesn’t label it… which prevents him to go at the bottom of things, as he usually focus on “imperialism”… a completely different notion (imperium, that is military command, may happen with or without plutocracy; initially the concept was from the Roman Republic, which was not a plutocracy). 

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Plutocracy, Epigenetics of Evil:

However, that comes short. Very short. Chomsky does not dare to cross the semantic Rubicon of calling it for what it is, plutocracy, the evil power, the genetics, and epigenetics, of evil.

This is why Chomsky clings to the idea that the American Founders debated what is at stake now. Now, they did not: the Internet has changed everything, starting with the minds, the moods, hence the genes, or the genetic expressions, to be a bit more precise. We know that fishes in a changed environment, change genetically. Females can become not just males, but super males.

Plutocracy is not just the rule of wealth. We know, from studying epigenetics in other species, that animal behavior influences genetic, let alone neurohormonal expression.

The absolute power of enormous wealth does not just corrupt absolutely, it corrupts genetically.  

Complaining about the fleas is good, but seeing the wolf carrying them, better. Wisdom is not just about seeing what’s wrong, but doing better what can be improved.

Patrice Ayme’