SO CALLED LIBERALISM IS AS LIBERAL AS AN OCCUPATION ARMY
***
Abstract: The meat of the so called Anglo-Saxon liberalism was actually a leveraged war machine that entangled finance and military. Forget misleading plutocratic propaganda. The invisible hand was more about war than it was about commerce. When Napoleon assimilated Britain to a nation of shopkeepers, he did not know what he was talking about, as he found out soon enough.
The Anglo-Saxon “liberal” model, is, first of all, a war machine of the few against the many. It worked, against France, from the eighteenth century, until the twentieth century, as I show, by evoking major historical facts which are generally superbly ignored.
Happenstance does not a logic make. Especially when the happenstance is military (England was lucky to defeat France), and the logic economical (there were other European economic models; that plutocratic leveraging defeated France at that particular moment of military history proves nothing in matters economic: if Louis XIV’s mighty army had invaded England, as Louis was begged to do, by the king of England, himself, none of this would have happened!)
The plutocrats’ greatest enemy is the socializing European Union. The EU is also turning into the plutocrats’ greatest source of profit, as they dismantle it. It is time for the Europeans to understand that they were naïve and self contradictory to build peaceful altruistic Europe as a servant of an economic model which rested on war and exploitation.
***
CELEBRATING THE ANGLO-SAXON LEVERAGE DEBT PLUTOCRACY IS CELEBRATING MILITARY VICTORIES:
What has the Anglo-Saxon economic model been successful at? How did it arise?
It’s a long story. It goes all the way back to when Julius Caesar and his generals were astounded by the immense Celtic, ocean going fleets which opposed them as they conquered “Long Haired Gaul” (“Gallia Comida”). These were the three quarters of present day France which were not part (yet!) of the Roman republic. The Romans invented technology to topple the tall Celtic ships, and won that war. Nevertheless, Ireland and Scotland escaped the Roman grasp… in a very long war.
Having the ability to navigate throughout and off the British archipelago stayed a must, though. Who dominated the seas, dominated the isles. The sea was how to invade, and how one got invaded. The Vikings demonstrated this, by eradicating many places, including much of Ireland.
It was nicer to make war on the continent than in the isles, if one were an islander. Thus, the nearly five centuries long “100 year war” was fought on said continent. By 1600, Elizabeth I had been seduced by the West Country Men, immensely nasty plutocrats who, after conquering Ireland, turned to North America.
Full leveraged, all-market, all plutocratic “Anglo-Saxon” finance is four centuries old (for the Plutocratic aspect) and three centuries old (for the leveraging aspect). It was devised not as a “free market“, because no market was ever free from the state. West Country Men used to line up their lawns with skulls, this is what they meant by “market“: abject terror. Neither was it “liberal”, because there is nothing very “liberal” at conquering half of the planet in 100 years.
In truth the Anglo-Saxon economic model’s military aspect was no accident. It was designed as a fiscal-military system. As I will explain, Europe, which has neither fiscal, nor military aspects, copied that system, apparently not knowing what it was for.
Elizabeth’s successor, King James I, closely tied to his co-investors, the West Country Men, hated the “vile custome of tobacco“, personally, and wrote scathingly about it. Although, all well considered, he lowered the tax rate on it, so as to maximize the tax revenue that tobacco brought. Tobacco made the American colony profitable. We all have to negotiate with evil, it seems, when profits loom.
***
NO WEST COUNTRY PLUTOCRATS IN JAPAN, ALTHOUGH THEY TRIED:
Ireland, North America, made the difference of Britain with, say, Japan. Japan tried the West Country Men trick, and shogun Hideyoshi invaded Korea with enormous armies comprising 200,000 Samurais. However, Korea, especially backed up by Ming China, was no push over. The Korean Navy was able to isolate and starve the Japanese into ignominious retreat, although the Korean population suffered enormous losses.
There was 8,000 years of civilizational progress between American Indians and East Asians. So the two tremendously expensive Japanese invasions failed. Japan stayed bottled up in Japan.
The “virtuous” inferno of building a blue sea Navy to serve transoceanic plutocracy never developed in Asia, because Asia was all too developed everywhere and invading neighbors was unprofitable.
It would take three more centuries of breakneck techno-military “progress” for Europe to be able to dominate Asia by sheer force, easily and profitably (and that lasted only a few days with Japan in the 19C, when the American “Black Ships” showed up in Tokyo’s harbor).
Japan tried the West Country trick again in the late 19C, with Korea again, and Formosa. First it worked grandiosely. By the 20C Japan extended the method to Russia, then China, and French Indochina. It all ended in the terrible defeat of 1945, when the very spirit of Japan got so crushed that its population is now collapsing (like that of fellow fascist countries, Germany and Italy, but worse, as Japanese racism and isolationism are greater, thus offering no compensation through immigration; funny how the worms of defeated psychology multiply in time).
To serve the plutocrats, a strong Navy was a must, and the Bank of England was created to serve it: its profits were used to finance the Royal Navy. Thus a tight seal was created between the military and finance. That, in turn, allowed to use tremendous leverage in finance. Because there is nothing like an invasion to demolish markets.
The markets were secure, because of the Navy was there to repeal invasions, and the state of emergencies that the threat of such would bring, say in France (the plutocrats had conspired to double the Dutch invasion of England of 1688, with a coup, so that is the exception that reinforces the rule). Also, because the Bank of England, the lender of last resort, was, actually, the Navy, in a sense, top plutocrats had nothing much to fear. And it was clear who was giving the orders; admirals could be hanged, pour encourager les autres, as Voltaire noticed.
***
INVADING WITH LEVERAGE, SUCCEEDING WITH GUSTO:
When leverage succeeds, it succeeds like nothing else. After being injected the Dutch mania for leverage, the Anglo-Saxon liberal system became operative in Great Britain in the Eighteenth century. Plutocratic propagandists have hypnotized much into believing that it is economically superior. Militarily, certainly superior. As it turned out.
Military superiority makes an empire economically superior, if the military superiority is translated into ownership. The Anglo-Saxons, circa 1900 CE, and its extension, the American empire, circa 1950, owned, or controlled, more than half the planet, insuring wealth, in a way which has nothing to do with intrinsic economic superiority.
Within 150 years, a giant Anglo-American empire came to cover the planet. North America, Australia, among others, became Neo-Europes of the Anglo persuasion. At some point South Asia and other parts belonged to the British empire. The USA defeated Spain in the Philippines, and replaced it, to a great extent in Latin America, And so on.
Those empires were actually military empires, carefully financed. Careful financing is how Britain had, generally, a better, bigger Navy than bigger, better France. So the Anglo-Saxon financial system was actually a fiscal-military system. (Fiscal comes from Franco-Latin for “treasury”.)
That British system blossomed as a weapon against France, and then the world, both of them, much bigger, to start with. Hence the necessity of using leverage.
Ironically enough, it was rather curious that French socialists would adopt the Dutch-British financial-military system to found Europe in peace, union and prosperity. Even more curious, maybe out of abysmal ignorance, the makers of Europe adopted only part of the Anglo-saxon model. They forgot both one of its head, the fiscal part (the present European Union and Eurozone do not have a treasury, just a central bank). They also forgot its other head, the military one. What was left, it seems increasingly, was a spastic, decerebrated corpse.
So let’s recap a bit.
In the mid Eighteenth Century, Europe’s greatest power was France. France had more people than Russia, and three times the population of Britain. It was the most solid economic block in Europe, and the most developed in the world, with roads and canals all over.
(Unfortunately for French demographics, in a village called Condom, an artisan discovered a better realization of a new device; Condom denies it, although it is located on the river “Baise” (“kiss”, as an euphemism); what is sure is that the French population stopped towering because of contraception, and Napoleon’s devastation; all the growth came from immigration.)
Mighty Spain had been defeated by France, after 150 years of war. That 150 year war gave birth to the Netherlands, during the Eighty Years War of Independence of the Netherlands. Each time Spain had to repress its unruly province, it found itself at war with next door France. The Netherlands, ancestral homeland of the Franks, was too big to fail, as far as France was concerned.
And, of course, the Dutch came to understand that they were too big to fail, as far as France was concerned, and developed great taste for speculation and leverage. Thus the Low Countries, and independent part of France (the ex “Germania Inferior” of the Romans) learned to take great risks.
This may have created a moral hazard; the Dutch may have believed they could get away with anything, as long as they used massive leverage. Since big daddy France was always coming to their rescue, and they attributed that to their genius.
Finally France crushed the Spanish Squares, the elite Iberian army formations, starting with the battle of Rocroi.
Then the Dutch William Of Orange, unable to become king in his republican homeland, made an arrangement with bankers to put together a 20 miles long fleet and a highly professional army, and, after two Dutch-English sea wars, invaded England (November 1688 CE).
The main reason of state for the invasion was to prevent further alliance between England and France. After grabbing power, the Dutch proceeded to make a coalition, including England, to attack France. The Dutch bankers who had financed the army came with it. By 1700, the top two powers in the world were the Netherlands and France. That’s how the present British monarchy arose: Francophobic Dutch poodles. (Dutch politics had long been divided between a very Francophile faction, as, fundamentally, the Netherlands were a piece of Francia, and, of course, a faction opposed to that; the Anglo-French “100 year war” started there.)
The general coalition led to a succession of wars to prevent French hegemony. However, by 1714, the war of the Spanish succession, although it expelled France from the Netherlands, Bavaria, and Italy, ended curiously. As the late Spanish monarch had wished it, Spain, and her gigantic world empire, was ruled by a Bourbon. France was ruled by Bourbon too: Louis XIV. Philippe de France, grandson of Louis XIV, and second in succession for the French throne, became Felipe V, king of Spain.
In North America, French territory, from Louisiana, through Colorado, Canada to Quebec, a Franco-Indian alliance, completely surrounded the 13 white English colonies, and blocked their invasion of Indian lands.
The Anglo-Saxon, Bible inspired model of negotiations with the Indians was for government to offer money for their scalps.
In the second half of the eighteenth century something strange happened. Britain defeated France and Spain. It was a bit as if nowadays France defeated the USA and China, in a few decades. How were France and Spain thoroughly defeated by smallish England, within a few years? (Trafalgar in 1805, where the combined French and Spanish were sunk and Waterloo in 1815, were the final nails in the coffin of Franco-Spanish supremacy).
Great Britain was able to defeat France through financial engineering, extensive leveraging, a private-public devotion of the state to war.
The Seven Year War, a world war, was fought from India to the Canada. It is known in the USA as the French and Indian Wars (1754-1763). It was started by an officer in the British army, who doubled as a land speculator, George Washington.
Britain spent (the equivalent of) trillions to pay for her superlative Royal Navy, and for paying countries such as Prussia to attack France from behind. This was all financed by leveraged bankers who thought they would inherit the world, if they financed massively the upstart British. And they did.
By the time of the so called Napoleonic wars, the house of Rothschild financed both sides, a familial system that was duplicated by many other plutocratic families, many of them Jewish (gentiles did not care where the money came from, and the position of wealthy Jews, both in and out of the system, made them natural conspirators; from these incontrovertible facts the extravagant racist ranting of Adolf Hitler, his predecessors, and friendly non Jewish plutocrats originated, according to the false and misleading equation: Plutocracy = Judaism)… the same familial system of covering both sides was followed by Nazi supporters (example: the Thyssen family).
As Frederick the Great, king of Prussia, pointed out: “A financial system… constantly improved can change a government’s position. From being originally poor it can make a government so rich that it can throw its grain into the scales of the balance between the great European powers.”
He should have known: he was financed by Britain, and by various exactions against Poles and Jews. Following Frederick upside down, one may deduce that a financial system, constantly worsening, can change a government’s position, from being originally rich to so poor that it become a grain of sand in history. This is where we are at.
In the Seven Year war, France lost Canada, part of West Indies, (rich sugar exporters), India…
The vengeful French counter-strike against Britain was thoroughly counter-productive: France, under the incoherent leadership of Louis XVI, created what would become for France an all too often fair weather friend, the somewhat ingrate USA.
Moreover something strange happened: France was ruined by EXACTLY THE SAME FINANCIAL MECHANISM which is ruining country after country nowadays. France had to roll her long term debt with short term borrowing. The War of Independence of America had cost (the equivalent of) trillions. If France had spent as much during the Seven Year War, she would have kept Canada.
By 1789, half of the French budget was going to paying interest on the national debt. In other words, what threatens to happen now to many powers, including the USA, happened then to the world’s greatest power.
Louis XVI ought to have refused to pay the plutocrats one more cent. Instead he wobbled, as usual, and convoked the General Estates, in the hope that the latter could somehow persuade the hyper wealthy to pay more taxes. The hyper wealthy had blocked for years attempts at fiscal reform by enlightened ministers of Louis XVI such as Necker (Adam Smith’s professor) or Turgot… They did it again, but the Third Estate had long lost patience, and now that it was all together in Paris, it could raise hell.
The Third Estate renamed itself the “Commons” (“Commune”) and proclaimed itself a Constituent Assembly (with the aim of writing an advanced constitution and defaulting on the debt). The incorrigible Sade, a victim of Lettre de Cachet, a resident in an apartment at the Bastille, screamed from his window that people were being murdered at his jail. Sade was believed by the rabble. It was a lie, but the Bastille was taken, and occupied by the outraged People. Louis XVI ordered the army to crack down. La Fayette, of American fame, prestigious head of the army, and a strong enemy of slavery, refused to fire on the People.
Three years later, Britain, Prussia, Austria, Russia and their fellow plutocrats invaded France, which reacted by proclaiming herself a republic, one man, one vote. The British invasion was repelled in Toulon, Provence, by a brilliant plan from an artillery captain, Napoleon. The Prussian were repelled by new, state of the art guns and explosives at Valmy, invented for the occasion (these innovative gunnery would help Napoleon’s victories).
Great Britain became a global hegemony in the 19C, with France playing second fiddle.
Thus an important paradigm was created, even among the victims and opponents of the leveraged financial system that Britain profited from: the rule of leveraged plutocracy and its fractional reserve system had brought economic supremacy. They forgot the important detail that this happened through the rule of empire imposed by maximum force, and the most vicious morality imaginable, that of the “Devil” (Pluto) unrestrained.
Tellingly, early American presidents knew how the sausage was made: after all German troops paid by Britain had fought against the Colonists. And after all, those colonists who opposed independence were the richest ones. American revolutionaries proposed to establish the “Order of the Leech” for them, or to honor them with titles such as “Their Rapaciousness”. The American rebellion is called a Revolution, because it was fundamentally anti-plutocratic.
The first American presidents were highly hostile to central banking and other plutocratic conspiracies of Rothschildian inspiration. To destroy central banking was viewed by Jackson, on his deathbed, as his greatest achievement, (although he had doubled USA controlled territory under his presidency).
This mighty aura of the invisible hand of financial leverage had infused the superficially learned minds of a core component of mostly French socialists. When they pushed for the European integration, they integrated in their model the very same system which had made Great Britain so powerful, thinking they would get powerful, like those savages who get strong by eating the brains of their enemies. Instead, they got kuru.
Indeed, so doing, though, they made the same mistake as the Islamists did in the Ninth and Tenth centuries. Islam had been conceived as a war machine against the Roman empire (Muhammad himself said). It was highly successful that way. But an ideology of conquest is not an ideology of peaceful progress.
Many times in history an ideology of conquest was unable to switch to a sustainable state. The Mongols presented with an obvious example, and not just in China, but all over. As the Yuan, they were able to hold onto China for just a century (1271 to 1368 CE).
Islam was a perfect war ideology tuned to defeat the Greco-Romans, and time was of the essence, Muhammad explained. In a few decades, Islam conquered most of Greco-Roman territory (before being stopped on the sea by Constantinople advanced technology, and on land, by excellent Frankish steel).
Once installed, Islam turned to increasing fascism and theocracy (the Qur’an and the “Sharia”, were invented twenty years, and a full century, respectively, after Muhammad’s death; it’s probable that Muhammad would not have been amused).
As centuries passed, the countries Islam had subjugated, converted increasingly to the Muslim faith, and senseless Sharia. Left to its own instruments, Islamist civilization stagnated ever more (this happened in several distinct, unrelated places, demonstrating the limitation of overwhelming theocracy).
In total contrast, the Franks who took power in Gaul around 480 CE, were able to marry an ideology of conquest with one of bon vivant (the good life). In the end, they proved the successful nemesis of military Islam.
Similarly the great Anglo Saxon financial machine was conceived, under Dutch influence, as a war machine against France (ironically, as France saved repeatedly the Netherlands from Spanish occupation, as I said, creating a massive moral hazard, which adversely affected France in the 18 C).
The French socialist builders of Europe, which is extended France, used, to build Europe, the so called free market. It is a free market, because it is free for plutocrats. On the free market, the European states were also supposed to shop for money, as if states had become housewives. Now they are desperate housewives.
A system which had been built for war, against, well, not just the world, but, first of all, France, was adopted enthusiastically by somewhat demented, and certainly deluded… French socialists, probably self congratulating about their own openmindedness of borrowing tenets of “capitalism”.
And those forward looking Europeans did on the ruins of Europe, destroyed, well, by fascist regimes financed and organized by Wall Street in the 1920s and 1930s. (I include in the concept of “Wall Street” corporations such as Texaco, and Standard Oil, IBM, Ford, GM, etc.; I conflate finance, the CEO class, and corporations)
In other words, from lack of historical knowledge, or outright corruption, the builders of Europe established their house for the hens to be guarded by the foxes.
Why? Because, naturally, the states leveraged themselves as much as they could. That came to mean that they would borrow more to pay interest on the preceding debt. This could be survivable only if that debt shrank, relatively speaking. That can happen with high growth and high inflation, as the debt would become small relative to (nominal) GDP.
But the European Central Bank got the mandate of little (2%) inflation. And high growth became impossible as the population aged. All the more since the initial debt was used for current spending, by the… states (which acted like crazed consumers with many credit cards, using the latest to pay the oldest, a Ponzi scheme onto themselves).
Debt is a good strategy if, and only if, the capital it brings allows to indulge in some activity that brings in much more revenue than the interest on the debt one has to service. Spending debt on welfare is not so, except if the money is spent on potentially revenue enhancing research, and, or on revenue enhancing education (of the young).
The small croc is eaten by the big one. This is where we are at. A naïve attempt at beating them by joining them, and only ruin to show for it!
***
EUROPE’S ORIGINAL SIN: KNEELING AT THE FOOT OF THE GOLDEN CALF:
It is traditional among Anglo-Saxon historians and economists to celebrate the Anglo-Saxon economic model. They do not realize that they are congratulating themselves about a piece of military history rather than a piece of economics.
What came to be identified (unfairly) as the Anglo-Saxon financial system has been much admired, because it has been so successful. This is said, again and again, and taken for granted.
So successful that model was considered to be that French socialists, such as Delors, and other forward looking Europeans, adopted it for the whole of Europe. The “free market” could do no wrong. And they made the free market the enabler of the European currency union. Namely they decided that European countries would purchase money on the free market… of money.
That was, of course, a total surrender of sovereignty. Indeed, the number one prerogative of the state, since times immemorial, has been to strike coinage. That had the distinct advantage to make the adoption of their European integration project more savory to wealthy supporters and banks.
And indeed, the later can celebrate: not only they have the Greeks on their knees, but now even the French and the German taxpayers.
***
LATEST MISLEADING IDEA FROM SOPHISTICATED PLUTOCRATIC PROPAGANDA:
Paul Krugman, who hates the idea of European Union in general, and the euro in particular, now is trying to extract himself out of his own contradictions in Original Sin And The Euro Crisis by claiming that:
“how can I reconcile my scorn for warnings about bond vigilantes with what is happening to Italy?… developing countries were especially vulnerable to financial crises because they borrowed in foreign currency…. The key point is that by joining the euro, Italy took a bite of the apple — it converted its advanced-country status, as a nation issuing debt in its own currency, into original sin, with debts in someone else’s currency (Europe’s in principle, Germany’s in practice). That is the root of its new vulnerability.”
Well, this is silly. The only reason why German GDP is larger than French GDP is that the German population is larger (a bit more than 80 million, against France’s 66 millions). But, at this point, the German population is sort of shrinking, whereas France has the highest birthrate in Europe, enough to grow, even without a legal immigration of 200,000 a year. Relatively soon France ought to be larger than Germany. Now if one adds the population of Italy (60 million), and Spain (40 million), one clearly sees that Germany is no giant of the euro zone.
There is a problem with the price of bonds, true. But who controls this? Well, not Germany. The “bond vigilantes” Krugman claims to scorn, most of them capitalists operating from their Anglo-Saxon dens, in other words the leveraged plutocrats, control the price of bonds.
So Krugman’s latest blast against the euro is another devious viewpoint. Krugman is paid for his nationalistic, plutocratic serving stance. This is how he started his career, as an extreme leftist serving Marxist president Reagan, hand in hand with democrat Summers, as twenty year old geniuses who brought us the economy and finance we have now (Marxist by today’s standards, of course).
The worse part is that Krugman has achieved the status of Very Serious Person. He goes to europe and injects his venom. Last he talked in Mainz, next to Frankfurt. In Frankfurt sits the European Central Bank, the ECB, which refuses to use Quantitative Easing (which means that it leaves that monopoly to the American central bank, the Fed, and leaves total freedom for derivatives armed speculators manipulating bond prices). Who heads the ECB? Or, more exactly, what?
Not too hard a question. Of course. A ex senior partner at Goldman Sachs, Draghi, now heads the ECB. Draghi: what a drag, what a lousy joke. Draghi will drag Europe under Goldman Sachs.
In truth, those who hate always find a reason to hate. All the more when they have interest to do so. In all this, we are very far from the anti-plutocratic roots of the French and American revolutions of 1789 (when the constitutions were written).
The Dark Side is how humanity has moderated its own worse demographic and ecological excesses, as it evolved, over millions of years.
Except, nowadays, with high technology, everything has changed. We need new wisdom, not to go back to an economic model equipping the few with immense wrath, and whose greatest gift has been the extermination of entire continents’ populations.
Europe was supposed to introduce new wisdom after the disaster of fascism unleashed in the period which one hoped had ended in 1945.
Instead, Europe embraced the very ideology and financial system that caused the terrible wars between 1754 and 1815 CE. And caused the repeat of roughly the same, between the 1860s (when the wealthy landowner, the plutocrat Bismarck, guide of Prussia, went on a rampage, starting with Denmark) and 1945 CE. Stupid.
A leveraged fund, MF Global, founded by an ex governor of New Jersey, Corzine, who used to head Goldman Sachs (strange that name is all over, from Greece to the white house) just failed. Its leverage was 100. Its real assets were 1/100 of what it theoretically “managed”. With leverage like that, the debts of countries such as Greece or Italy are easily manipulated. Don’t expect Krugman to focus on that anytime soon, he is supposed to divert attention towards other things.
Leveraged finance, pushed to its extreme, leads to leveraged war. Time for a re-think.
***
Patrice Ayme
Patrice Ayme's Thoughts 