Plutocracy’s Evil Bend Is Why California High Speed Train Not Built

California politics has been captured by plutocrats, and the high speed train disaster is a consequence. Plutocrats are devious: they support the cause of their enemies, with friendly, concerned faces, and new language, while giving them cancer. They kill with a pat in the back, smiling.

Initially it was simple and obvious: as direct as possible between San Francisco and LA: downtown SF to SF airport, then 92 bridge (an enormous existing bridge), then straight to Altamont Pass next to the enormous freeway, then all the way down the straight I5 freeway through cheap wasteland. This is the way the original high speed network, in France, was built: straight in the wilderness. 

And it was the original, voter approved plan, decades ago. 

However California NIMBYs transformed the plan into a (slow) commuter rail… arguably, they said to serve cities, but truly their motivation was to torpedo the project, by making it impossibly expensive, complicated, and taking away its main reason for being: to be faster than plane, city center to city center. 

That the motivation of Democratic donors and pseudo-environmentalists was evil is demonstrated by their resistance to train electrification, where they delayed matters by decades… Plutocracy is strong in California and plutocracy loves private jets, not successful high speed trains for common folks: that would introduce the nice life to the masses, who deserve to suffer. 

Let them fly private, say the plutocrats, and they chuckle. The private jet industry in the US employs one million workers, makes 1% of the CO2 emissions of the US, and is entirely taxpayer subsidized. Whereas no electric train is in sight in San Francisco (they were a century ago)… Private jets can be readily observed, flying all over…

Patrice Ayme

Altamont Pass (it really looks like this; sequoia forests are 30 kilometers to the west, in the direction of the windmills). Plutocrats didn’t want the train to go that way, because it would have passed through the East Bay, population 2.5 million… Instead of being used as a commuter train to bring servants to the hyper wealthy Silicon Valley

P/S: For further edification one can consult a long article in the NYT:

How California’s Bullet Train Went Off the Rails
America’s first experiment with high-speed rail has become a multi-billion-dollar nightmare. Political compromises created a project so expensive that almost no one knows how it can be built as originally envisioned. (By Ralph Vartabedian; Oct. 9, 2022.)

LOS ANGELES — Building the nation’s first bullet train, which would connect Los Angeles and San Francisco, was always going to be a formidable technical challenge, pushing through the steep mountains and treacherous seismic faults of Southern California with a series of long tunnels and towering viaducts.

But the design for the nation’s most ambitious infrastructure project was never based on the easiest or most direct route. Instead, the train’s path out of Los Angeles was diverted across a second mountain range to the rapidly growing suburbs of the Mojave Desert — a route whose most salient advantage appeared to be that it ran through the district of a powerful Los Angeles county supervisor. [Who made a deal with a plutocrat who gave him a lease… adds the NYT… “If I get my lease, you get my vote was the deal,” Mr. Bauer, the most influential member of the train board said.]

The dogleg through the desert was only one of several times over the years when the project fell victim to political forces that have added billions of dollars in costs and called into question whether the project can ever be finished.

Now, as the nation embarks on a historic, $1 trillion infrastructure building spree, the tortured effort to build the country’s first high-speed rail system is a case study in how ambitious public works projects can become perilously encumbered by political compromise, unrealistic cost estimates, flawed engineering and a determination to persist on projects that have become, like the crippled financial institutions of 2008, too big to fail.…

The state was warned repeatedly that its plans were too complex. SNCF, the French national railroad, was among bullet train operators from Europe and Japan that came to California in the early 2000s with hopes of getting a contract to help develop the system.

The company’s recommendations for a direct route out of Los Angeles and a focus on moving people between Los Angeles and San Francisco were cast aside, said Dan McNamara, a career project manager for SNCF.‌

The French company‌ ‌pulled out in 2011.

“There were so many things that went wrong,” Mr. McNamara said. “SNCF was very angry. They told the state they were leaving for North Africa, which was less politically dysfunctional. They went to Morocco and helped them build a high speed rail system.”

Morocco’s bullet train started service in 2018.

…But as with so many decisions on the project, other considerations won the day. There was heavy lobbying by Silicon Valley business interests and the city of San Jose, which saw the line as an economic boon and a link to lower cost housing in the Central Valley for tech employees. They argued for routing the train over the much higher Pacheco Pass — which would require 15 miles of expensive tunnels. [Instead of just half a mile with Altamont.]

XX = XY? Wrong! “Transgender”: Go For It. Trans-Karyotype: Can’t Be.

To subjugate women better, some men have  found a new trick: claiming to be women. And it one gets in the way of their male XY imperialism, they cry foul, while stampeding over science, reason, and evidence… secretly enticed by greed and the watchful plutocracy which never misses the latest trick to make fun of rationality.

A karyotypical female is XX, a karyotypical male, XY. (Rare) XXY & XYY generally show male phenotype. Call a woman what you want. Transgender is in the eye of the beholders, not in the karyotype. Con jobs claiming ain’t so, are most lucrative for many a low life: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/29/us/lia-thomas-women-sports.html 

These are simple truths. So low has reason got in the Commons, that we have to stoop to point all of this out…

Just as it is simple that, one a fetus is viable, it is a human being, thus a baby, and must, as all human lives, be sacred (except if the life of the mother is at risk, bla, bla, bla). 

Of course human lives can, and sometimes must, be sacrificed. 

For example fighting the potential nuclear war criminal, the insanely criminal tyrant Putin.

XY karyotype “Ms.” Harris, not so good against fellow men swimmers, but number one against XX creatures, has already declared “her” XY karyotype support for transgender athletes and denounced transphobia (whatever that is). In an interview, “she”, XY karyotype Harris, said that “she”, XY karyotype Harris, had replied that “she”, XY karyotype Harris, would not change rules in midseason. “Somehow,” a swimmer recalled, “the question of women in sport has become a culture war.”

***

Sebastian Coe, the Olympic champion runner, head of the International Association of Athletics Federations, which governs world track, speaks of biological difference as inescapable. “Gender,” he said recently, “cannot trump biology.”

When a body is flushed with male hormonal patterns during puberty, or, even, in the womb, irreversible physiological changes happen. Those changes do not just reflect that fact XYs evolved as warriors and greater physical power dispensers as human species progressed genetically in the last few million years. Apes already have these differences: male apes can be much more powerful physically than the females, as in chimps, gorillas and orangutans. So the difference is several dozens of millions of years ingrained. 

Individuals such as Lia Thomas, who looks more like a male silverback gorilla than Marylin Monroe, know all of this. They are just getting material advantage while they can. They are warriors out there to get their women, by claiming to be the real thing. They are frauds.

Yet, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) ignores science, that is knowledge. “It’s not a women’s sport if it doesn’t include ALL women athletes,” the group tweeted. “Lia Thomas belongs on the Penn swimming and diving team.”  

Well, let’s create: TRANS-SPORTS… Let’s transport them where they are going: in their own owrld, neither truly here, or there. (I am so funny, I hope everybody is laughing with me…)

When the first, “black woman” appeared for confirmation in front of the US Senate, she was asked what a woman was. She retorted she was “not a biologist”. Gee, millions of years of biology, just to get to the point of total judicial confusion…

US Senator XX Ms. Blackburn had brought up that XY swimmer who claims to be XX, as Judge Jackson’s first day of questioning was coming to a close, and asked, “Can you provide a definition for the word ‘woman’?”

Judge Jackson dodged the question as outside of her role, with her sly “I’m not a biologist.” But US Senator XX Ms. Blackburn came in for the kill:

“The fact that you can’t give me a straight answer about something as fundamental as what a woman is underscores the dangers of the kind of progressive education that we are hearing about,” she said. “Just last week, an entire generation of young girls watched as our taxpayer-funded institutions permitted a biological man to compete and be a biological woman in the N.C.A.A. swimming championships. What message do you think this sends to girls who aspire to compete and win in sports at the highest levels?”

Descriptive concepts such as “biological woman” and “biological man” are central to discussing differences in performance. Many trans rights activists claim such expressions are transphobic. Ludicrously, they confuse biology and gender identity, using the latter, which is largely a social construct, to pretend that the former, biology, is also a social construct… while in fact it is a physical fact, like the Moon.

Right, someday we should be able to put an atmosphere on the Moon, and maybe someday, and that would be much harder, long after we have achieved eternal youth, we will be able to turn XX into XY, and reciprocally. However, meanwhile, that cannot be done with a knife, or the mouths of crooks. 

What is wise is to follow evidence, not posers. 

Implicitly claiming that XY individuals are XX is an attack against reason: this is why the plutocratic media likes this unreasonable equation of transgenderism and karyotype… because attacking reason is what plutocrats want, as there are no reasons for them, and plenty against them.

Reality is the target of those who claim XX = XY [1]. Thus they are not just sexist lunatics, but objective accomplices of the world’s plutocratic order, and civilizational doom!

They even help Putin, as the nuclear mass homicidal idiot and his accomplice the Patriarch Kyril, had an easy time condemning western transgenderization of reality. The Old Believers of the Kremlin rightly point out the madness and the fakeness of men who claim to be women to better oppress women… By making the West less crazy we pursue our objective better:

PUTIN DELENDUS EST!

Patrice Ayme

***

Lia Thomas told Sports Illustrated: “I’m not a man. I’m a woman, so I belong on the women’s team.”
Credit… David Walter Banks for The New York Times. It is the case of a XY he who wants to be call she… But this he-she is still XY.

[1] Kathleen Stock, a British philosopher whose work is grounded in her feminist and lesbian identity, wrote: “Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism”. She argues against the insistence that one’s gender identity is all. That is to miss, she said, the profound importance of the lived experience of being born a biological female.

“We are caught up in this fever dream,” she said in an interview. “How could it be that a social construct and not the material reality of being a woman is guiding our thoughts and our physical performance?

“I find it incredible that we have to point this out.”

Well, as I said, from my meta-philosophical point of view, this has all to do with the war of global plutocracy with reality. Just as, for 24 years, the atrociousness of Putin was denied, and instrumentalized, the unreal denial of the absurdity of XX = XY is part of the war on science and reason… Replacin g all by the wishfull thinking of low lives…

PUTIN, PLUTOCRACY & The WEST (Standard)

Putin played the West. But first the West played Putin. Or more exactly the powers that be in the West played Putin [1].  This deliberate instrumentalization of Putin by the West became obvious early on. 

A number of events, perpetrators and witnesses revealed that Putin an the secret service he used to lead, the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, lit. ‘Committee for State Security, FSB/KGB the Russian/Soviet secret security political police, had orchestrated the bombing of appartment building blocks in Russia.

Why?

The KGB/FSB had constrained (elected) Russian president Yeltsin to choose and nominate Putin as Prime Minister, first. Then Yeltsin made Putin President. The KGB/FSB had made Yeltsin an offer he couldn’t refuse, obviously. 

However elections had to be conducted soon and Putin was pulling only 2%. One factor that had humiliated and weakened Yeltsin was the first war with Chechnya, which Russia had lost, giving that Muslim country de facto independence. Putin accused Chechnya to have done these multiple apartment building attacks, which killed hundreds of Russians, and viewing this as a casus belli, Putin attacked Chechnya with maximal force…. Conveniently discarding all rules about civilized warfare… in the grand old tradition of Russian wars, especially those conducted in the Caucasus mountains. 

One Chechnen out of six was killed, the capital, Grozny was leveled, and Putin won totally over his imaginary enemy. Putin became wildly popular and got elected Russian president in a landslide. Considering how he got elected, though, we should not view him as a legitimate president.

Western intelligence knew all of this, and it was obvious Putin had orchestrated it, as Chechnya had no interest whatsoever to disrupt the status quo… whereas Putin had. 

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The West kept on shaking Putin’s hand, because the West knew the evil Putin did in Chechnya, and how he got in power, leveraging that. Knowing that he knew they knew, Western leaders thought Putin was their man, who would do their thing, namely a cheap energy policy. But minds, and, in particular evil, have an inertia of their own. So Putin kept on doing evil, what he did best, and the West kept hoping he was their man, providing cheap fossil fuel energy.

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Then Putin became the darling of the West. A genocidal mass murderer became central to world energy policy. At first sight, this is counterintuitive and paradoxal: how could a tyrannical murderous evil monster become the friend of representative democracies?

Well, what if these representative democracies are mostly only democratic in name, and mostly represent global plutocrats?

There is nothing new in this strategy: in the 1930s, the Western plutocrats did the same with Mussolini, Franco, Hitler, and, less well-known, Stalin. Hirohito got oil to invade China from US plutocrats. Plutocracy means evil-power. It was evil to enable these evil-doesr, but most profitable to Western plutocrats.

Plutocrats love evil tyrants: their kind, writ large.

The Putin problem is a plutocratic problem. It’s global plutocracy which played us, and Putin was one of its pawns, as Hitler and Stalin were. 

Patrice Ayme

***

[1] (The French secret services were ordered in the 1990s, by elected leaders, not to have anything to do with Russia anymore; source the “25 years in the secret services” of “Pierre Siramy”, a top DGSE operative, who thought in 2010 that the policy of ignoring Russia was the gravest mistake; it is likely the same order was given to their US and UK colleagues.)

***

P/S 1: The essence of this comment, that many of the world’s tyrants, in the last century, were instruments of global plutocracy, was censored by the plutocratic New York Times. Hundreds of innocuous comments were allowed, though.

I then sent another comment, not directly accusing global plutocracy, the one in italics underlined above. It was immediately published.

One has to understand that the descendants of those who crucially helped Stalin and  Hitler to get or stay in power, are themselves in power… And act through countless schemes, foundations, universities, think tanks, corporate boards, etc… All this held by anonymous corporations… 

***

P/S 2: Many naive and ill-informed left leaning individuals, following sheepishly the propaganda they are submitted to by their minders in the Kremlin, believe that Putin is an opponent of the “West”… because that’s what he says. Hitler also pretended to be a defender of minorities, and just like Putin, was an instrument of global plutocracy. Hitler knew this, and told confidantes he was exasperated with making nice talk with plutocrats… For example before a dinner in Italy he told Rommel he resented having to sit next to some extremely wealthy Italian aristocrat…

Naive leftists have then made a weapon of global plutocracy, Putin, into their hero. 

Just as Hitler, or Mao, or Hirohito, Putin, forgetting that he is where he is because of Western plutocracy, has gone rogue.

Amusingly the French secret services (DGSE) knew very well that, in the 1990s, Western ecologists were paid by Putin and his ilk, the Russian intelligence services. So follow this: Putin and his ilk are put in power by Western fossil fuel plutocrats, and then, on their (apparent) own, feed ecologists, who, not by coincidence, demolish nuclear industry and nuclear research (for better nuclear industry)… With the final effect of ostering fossil fuels domination by Western plutocracy and its proxies (say ARAMCO)….

Putin did this in Chechnya, here is Grozny, 23 years ago. Then he did it in Aleppo an ancient metropolis in Syria, then in many places over Ukraine. The point is that Western leaders knew very well about Chechnya… and it excited them… Western elected politicians are selected, then elected, becuase they are most qualified to represent eil power. In Putin, they seriously saw their man, and kept shaking his hand. And this is not just a case of the big bad evil US governing classes… German and French leadership obviously look at the Warsaw-Kyiv axis with a jaundiced eye. Those who know history well know that, for centuries, Poland, Ukraine and Lithuania were the same imperial power. Hence the diatribe of the French leader against the Polishone, and unfounded accusation of corruption against Ukraine on French “service public” TV… While the blatant corruption in France (how come the hyper wealthy pays no tax, and thus kept getting wealtheir and more influenctial?) is carefully not adressed…

Wisdom = Plutocracy? That’s What Plutocratic Academia Has Been Teaching By Example. Low Rung Academic Workers Exploited

US academia all too often looks like a criminal enterprise to rip off students with US government  complicity.  What a worthy educational system we have.  The depraved angle below I have long kept up my sleeve: I have extensive personal experience from it. I observed that most, otherwise tops, professors’ souls were ruined by it… Ruined souls don’t make for superior wisdom.

I was employed by US Academia and contributed financially, cognitively, and with my work to three prestigious universities (Columbia, Stanford, UC Berkeley). I was horrendously exploited… To the point it’s too painful to describe… But at least I can approach the subject… And I was not the only one, but more like the rule. Since those rough times, things have changed, the low rung employees of academia, after decades of struggle have finally been allowed to unionize. However the struggle is far from finished. The situation is so gory that even the Wall Street Journal, not usually tender footed about low lives, is indignant about it… and rightly so. 

Before showing the editorial of the WSJ, let me jump to conclusions: top academia is paid fortunes. One could say: because they are geniuses. However, closer inspections show that top academia is more into looking good than being good: much effort is spent socially rather than intellectually. Research papers and ideas often come from the lower rungs, not the gleaming summits. My opinion is that the system selects, all too much, for bad top academicians, deliberately, individuals more interested by greed than brains. My friend Feynman arrived at the same conclusion (and resigned from Academia)… A recent paper from PNAS (Academy of Science) showed that the flurry of papers in top fields produced increasingly bad research… Something known for a while: years ago, US biotech companies had found that only 11% of research results, in peer review, were reproducible.

This system is no accident. It is more like a vast conspiracy. As Major General Butler wrote in his 1935 book War Is a Racket…  Academia is a racket. Consider the following editorial of the Wall Street Journal:

“United Auto Workers of the Ivy League.

A brawl over pay at Columbia challenges academic solidarity with the working class. By The Editorial Board. Updated Dec. 18, 2021 4:22 pm ET

What do Deere & Co. and Columbia University have in common? Their workers are represented by the United Auto Workers and have gone on strike this fall seeking higher compensation. Yet the contrasts are instructive about the state of higher education.

Many Columbia class sections have been canceled since early November, and final grades have been thrown in jeopardy due to a seven-week strike by the Student Workers of Columbia-UAW, which includes 3,000 graduates and undergraduates who assist with teaching, grading and tutoring. Columbia recently told undergrads they could choose to receive a pass-fail in any course this semester in “appreciation of how difficult this term may have been for you.” …

While workers at companies like Volkswagen and Amazon have rejected unions, Big Labor is winning with university employees. Last week the UAW was recognized as labor representative for 17,000 student researchers at the University of California. About a quarter (100,000) of UAW members are university employees.

***

It’s worth reflecting on why unions are having more success on campus. No doubt academic workers are liberal. But it’s also true that they are often treated poorly by universities to support high-earning administrators and tenured faculty.

Consider Columbia, where many student workers earn little more than New York City’s $15 hourly minimum wage. Columbia this spring offered to raise its minimum hourly wage to $17, and the salary of doctoral candidates with 12-month teaching appointments to $42,350. Students rejected the proposal. Columbia’s latest offer is $20 an hour and $43,621 for full-year positions.

The UAW wants $45,000 for 12-month appointments and a minimum $26 hourly rate for non-salaried workers, with annual increases. The union says a single adult had to make at least $45,285 to live in Manhattan in June 2020—before this year’s inflation.

“Columbia made $3.1 billion in returns on its investments this past year alone,” the union says, adding that its demands for a three-year contract would amount to a mere “3% of its increase in net assets from investments.” Columbia charges $63,530 in undergraduate tuition and fees ($82,584 including room and board), which over four years is as much as the cost of a house. President Lee Bollinger earns roughly $4.6 million, and full-time professors make on average $268,400. 

It’s fair to ask why the university can’t afford to pay student workers—many of whom are being buried in debt that they may never be able to repay—more given they do much of the teaching and grading.

The university has nonetheless held firm and last week warned that striking workers might not be offered positions this spring. The union has accused the university of retaliation and filed unfair labor practice charges with the National Labor Relations Board. Columbia says it is offering PhD students “one of the most generous packages of any university in the country.”

… you have to smile at what the Marxists might call the contradictions of academic production. When Kellogg Co. last week threatened to replace striking workers, President Biden called it “an existential attack on the union and its members’ jobs and livelihoods.” Deere and Kellogg pay their factory workers more than Columbia does its academic grunts. Kellogg says most workers at its cereal factories earned $120,000 last year.

Democrats seem less perturbed by the Ivy League school’s hardball bargaining. … encouraging the university “to strengthen its efforts in good faith bargaining.”

Columbia’s faculty have also professed solidarity with student workers, which costs nothing. But they haven’t stepped in to help deliver the education for which undergrads are paying a small fortune. Deere and Kellogg used salaried workers to keep their plants running during union strikes. Is it too much to ask tenured professors to grade exams?

Companies that underpay workers and mistreat customers won’t survive long. But universities with brand names have a captive clientele as well as steady subsidies in the form of federal student loans. This is why many were able to get away with keeping classes remote last year without discounting tuition.

The next time you hear professors lecture about inequality in America, ask them about the state of the academic working class.”

Well, I have done just that when I was in the midst of it all. It were as if I lunched in public on dogs poop for all to see and smell: the repulsion I inspired was without compare with any sort of contempt I have seen anywhere… about anybody.

***

The main teaching of academia as a plutocratic system is to teach plutocracy is good. And the best way to do that is to teach by example… This is what Aristotle did, teaching monarchy (a sort of ultimate plutocracy and oligarchy) as the best form of government. 

Teaching that plutocracy is good means teaching that greed, inequality, inequity, oligarchy and the exploitation of lower classes by higher classes, are the essence of goodness. No better place to show that explicitly, and for all to see, than academia.

Things have improved. When I was in academia I saw extreme abuse akin to slavery, chronically and systematically. All the way to murder (at Stanford, of all places!) I knew very well some of the victims and some of the perpetrators (some of whom got the highest honors, in more than one country). 

Perelman, the top mathematician who was involved directly with some of the same characters I initially innocently befriended, left mathematics as a result. He said he did not want to cause a scandal… (The article I linked to presented Yau and Hawking as friends… they were not. Yau despised Hawking… wrongly so, and i told him.)

In a sense I was even more silent… especially as nobody need to listen to me, nor wanted to. But now, if even the WSJ  talks about it… I may as well lift some of the veil.

None of this is an accident. The present university system is rotten to the core: it teaches delirious hypocrisy and exploitation is the way of wisdom, and to wisdom. No, it’s the way of plutocracy. But such is the goal of present day academia: teaching that plutocracy = wisdom. This is one of the reasons why major dangers, such as the rise of dictators (roughly equivalent and related to the rise of plutocracy), the danger of nuclear war, and the climate catastrophe, have been under-appreciated. This is also why major opportunities were passed… But it is not too late to learn… and the situation has improved: low rung educators can now unionize in top universities…

Patrice Ayme  

Exploiting intellectual workers out of greed is not wise, and the road to hell, because it ensures that it will select for the worst.

Frauds Claiming To Be “Progressive”, Vaccinate Against Progress. AOC Taxing Her Billionaire Heir Friends… Not.

RICH LIVES MATTER MOST, says pseudo-progressive Ocasio-Cortez… Taxpayers are not just ruled by the rich, they pay the rich to be ruled by the rich, and our pseudo-progressive tax the rich… by befriending them! Low lives do not deserve a face, they should be masked, and serve the rich. The rape of reason has his reasons that low lives cannot penetrate.

The famous Ocasio-Cortez, the US Congress’ most prominent pseudo-progressive, literally turns her rich white ass, slashed with red, on “Tax The Rich”… while conspiring with her friends the billionaires for the whole world to see… And insisting that what they see is not what is going on, she evokes “piercing a 4th wall”, and “intersection theory”. If she’d been afraid of the criticism and not worn the dress, she wrote, she might have been called “inauthentic” or “too calculated… But we all had a conversation about Taxing the Rich in front of the very people who lobby against it, and punctured the 4th wall of excess and spectacle,” she continued in the statement. In truth, the 31 year old AOC is extremely close to billionaire heirs, and it is unlikely that she will bite the hands which make her powerful now and even more, in the future. Her performance is first a violation of reason, where what we see is not supposed to be what we see, because so-called “Democrats” said so.

The Met Gala is widely regarded as among the most prominent and most exclusive “social” events in the world. “Social”, in the US sense, is not to be confused with “socialist”: tickets for the “Met” are US $35,000 a piece (2021). Above the cost of the meal, $250, everything is tax deductible… Thank you low lives who vote “Democratic”!

The Met Gala is one more of these events where the top politicians, our great leaders, meet with their once and future employers of the billionaire class… and they are billionaires often because past politicians made sure they enjoyed markets they provided them for (including war in Iraq, etc.), or monopolies (the likes of Google, Facebook, etc.). So they all together breathe, con-spirare… 

Red-hot “Democratic” celebrities such as Beyoncé, Rihanna, or politicians such as Clinton, Obama, Bush, Romney, Trump, attend or have attended. Plenty of billionaires were in attendance, including Blackstone Group CEO Stephen Schwarzman and Joe Gebbia, co-founder of Airbnb. Invited celebrities, including celebrity congresswomen like Ocasio-Cortez, Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.) , New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer and Mayor Bill de Blasio are part of the draw and attend for free. Ocasio-Cortez, and many other showy women, needed help to go up and down stairs. Ocasio-Cortez, long a bartender, is viewed as a leader of the progressives in the US Congress.  She retweets Biden, who writes, “It’s time the super-wealthy and big corporations pay their fair share in taxes.” 

It is all paid for by the American taxpayer. Taxpayer subsidies at the Met Gala are various. Tables for 10 go from $275,000 to $500,000: buyers may deduct that cost, minus the nominal cost of the meals, set at $250 a person. To become even more famous, which is lucrative, celebrities can pay the Met Gala a seven-figure sum to have their name up in lights for the night, as well as at the exhibition that follows. That is also tax deductible.

The pro-hyper-wealth IRS tax code clearly states that donors cannot get anything of value from their contributions, which is why they cannot deduct the meal portion of the ticket. In other words, the IRS tax code recognizes that it should cost nothing for the hyper wealthy to spend money to influence people, as long as it is of no other value. 

BILLIONAIRE Seagram’s heir Benjamin Bronfman, is dating Ocasio-Cortez dress designer, the Ghanaian-Canadian Aurora James (on the right of AOC in the picture above). He was at the Met, enjoying his tax deduction… Billionaires mixing with politicians give them the opportunity of together-breathe (con-spirare). AOC herself got gifts worth hundreds of thousands of dollars from hyper-wealth. Reminds me of Supreme Court Justice Scalia and his fancy vacations paid by hyper-wealth… A pair of sky blue pumps with Swarovski crystals and pearls by James costs $715. During an interview on the red carpet, Ocasio-Cortez said she and James discussed “what it means to be working-class women of color at the Met.” AOC’s basic salary is $174,000… She gets many official perks on top of that. She is not “working class”. She wears all the time designer clothing worth hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

AOC makes a parody of the progressive cause, and thus vaccinates against it. To have “progressives” attend a $35,000 per person event, with tables bought by Amazon and AirBnB for hundreds of thousands of dollars is an implicit admission that wealth matters primordially. Admitting this primacy of wealth, touting it as a worthy cause, a “charity”, supporting its tax deductible status, reinforces wealth as the skeleton, glory, brains and art of present society. Making wealth the backbone of everything, including protests, serves the politicians and billionaires who attend the Met gala: it proclaims to the world that rich lives matter most.

Meanwhile one of the world most visible prostitute will keep on getting ever more famous, changing people’s minds about wealth in ways they do not themselves understand… But which are sure to make AOC’s billionaire heir friends ever more happy…

Actually Biden’s proposed tax reform mostly increase taxation and (the implicit taxation of) inflation on the middle and lower classes, but of course he will not tell you that: like AOC, he is taxing the rich, for the whole world to see, thanks to plutocratically owned media who tell the middle and lower classes exactly what to see, and even what to feel…

Civilization is an ongoing work, and started more than 10,000 years ago… But it is an ongoing struggle against the plutocrats who want to destroy it… Starting by corrupting all minds with pseudo-progressives in their employ…

But I forgot, the rich have been taxed, it’s all written on AOC’s ass.

Building logic on lies is not possible. The disrespect of basic reason instilled by the so-called “Democratic” leadership is the fundament of the society they call for, one where their rich ass rests on rich lies, by the rich, for the rich.
This happened before: the Roman empire founded by Augustus, the Feudal System post 9th century…

Patrice Ayme

***

Notes: 1) Black Lives Matter Greater NY, accused the congresswoman of being “performative” and “not very socialist”, especially after protesters were arrested outside the Met.

2) AOC’s Instagram Post literally sent to for profit designer houses for the wealthy such as “starting her dream @brothervellies“. How much money or service is she getting for that? Isn’t corruption of an already repressed type?

3) Asked the question explicitly, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez agreed that “a system that allows billionaires to exist” is immoral. HOWEVER, she added: “I don’t think that necessarily means that all billionaires are immoral.” AOC made an exception for Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, explicitly, both of whom are major plutocrats keen to be known as philanthropists.

Gates is used to date Epstein, a well-known organizer of pedophilia and related activities to major politicians, including Bloomberg, Bill Clinton, Prince Andrews, etc… Gates’ wife mentioned this as a reason for divorce… In other words, the system is immoral, but AOC, on a PERSONAL basis, finds the worst of them… moral. Because they sustain her class. Another one, in this galaxy of evil, Simons, of Renaissance tech, a fast financial trader recently paid a seven billion tax fine to the IRS… For stealing billions to taxpayers, one would expect some prison… Bit not Simons. Simons is a major “Democratic” donor. Now much of what Simons does should be illegal… because he “leads” the markets, using hyper fast tech nobody else has… And so on. Pluto-Kratia = Evil-Power. AoC’s reply? “The medium is the message“

***

Those who know history well will remember that Marie Antoinette used to pose as a progressive… And she did indeed read Rousseau, who had just written the “Contrat Social“…. There is no evidence that AOC reads relatively as advanced critics of the present system…

 

Stupidity Is How Plutocracies Kill Civilizations

Civilizations are born as innovative republics, die as senile plutocracies. In particular they are born stoic (when all the population endures together) and die epicurean (historian Will Durant about the Babylonians)… the epicurean phase is actually more of renunciation of humanity when oligarchs addict We The People to bread and games, panem & circenses (Juvenal).. and when the civilization switches from popular and smart to oligarchic and dumb. 

Western and Chinese civilizations endured overall… for the same fundamental reason: more debate, thus superior thinking blossoming out…. 

Remember when Qin Shi Huang tried to destroy the “100 philosophy schools”? Qin was the first Chinese sovereign to proclaim himself “Emperor“, after unifying China in 221 BC. He ordered the books of the philosophy schools destroyed, since, presumably only the “Legalist” philosophy of the state of Qin should rule. However, the point that Qin failed to understand (and similarly, say, Domitian) is that the “100 schools” including Confucianism and its derivatives,Buddhism and what not, had enabled, through debate, to build the superiority of Qin’s Legalism. 

To construct a debate, and make it fructify, one needs opponents. Say the Taliban, the Talibiden and its Bin Biden… I would not hesitate to debate the Taliban. A French woman reporter interviewed a top Taliban chief. He looked at her just once., The rest of the time, he only looked at the interpreter, a man. It is hilarious to see a big bad Taliban being scared of a single French woman. But that’s French supremacy for you.

Western Europe (differently from China) was not submitted for 16 centuries. How? From its most significant supremacy… That means its superiority in most significant matters (like the outlawing of slavery). And first then, supremacy in matters intellectual (let hasten to add that this supremacy is in increasing doubt nowadays… For example, some “advanced” countries are more anti-vaxx than some supposedly little developed countries… This probably came from the fascist, and useless measures taken… in said advanced countries…)

Supremacy: a concept hated nowadays. That hatred is the deepest problem. Superior thinking, superior debate have been cancelled by cancellation of… debate.

European supremacy in metallurgy, weapons, food production, beans, domesticated animals, mechanical advantage, outlawing slavery, tyranophobia (Charlemagne was more of a first among his peers, a chief comrade, than a God-like Roman emperor; Frankish kings were elected). 

1,000 years ago, East Asian supremacy boomed demographically, from rice cultivars which one could plant twice a year, doubling productivity. 

This steam engine was demonstrated by Hero of Alexandria by 50 CE (who also engineered pumps making great jets of water for Roman firemen…). Papin in 1707 CE would go further and build a steam powered boat…)

Engineering professor Denis Papin demonstrated steam power along 100 kilometers of a German river, before his devilish invention got destroyed by monks in 1707. We need technological, intellectual supremacy more than ever, because of the confluence of several planetary ecological crises. The nature of what is superior, including superior thinking, needs to be examined carefully… to get us more of the good stuff we need, superior thinking. 

Mastering thermonuclear fusion would provide nearly free electricity, and solve the ecological crises. Electric chargers for car batteries will not. So when the Biden administration proposes 74 billion dollars for plugs, it removes money from the indispensable research into what would feed the plugs ecologically. 

Rome went down in part because it didn’t feed its technology with new science. The Roman anti-science mentality arose from tyranny’s hatred for debate, and deep thinking in general. Plutocracy lives from stupidity, thus killing civilization. 

So deep was the hostility of the Roman plutocratic oligarchy for innovation that by the time of firm installation of Augustus’ fascist empire, and then more so, the Roman deciders were mistrustful of technology. They only allowed it to proceed when it was long established, and had become traditional. That’s one reason why they did not do anything with the steam engine (that the fuels, wood and coal, were more abundant in the north, where Roman civilization was less intellectually focused may have to do with it.  

Neanderthals were first to use coal (80,000 BCE).  The Chinese were also using coal for heating as early as 1,000 BCE. Romans used coal, wood and charcoal for heating. Charcoal and coal burn at higher temperature than wood, so are best for steam engines. Charcoal is labor-intensive, so is best for blacksmithing, and running steam engines at high speed. The Romans were mining coal and using it to smelt iron in both the Rhineland and Britain by the late 2nd century BCE. In that process, the carbon in coal removes the oxygen in iron oxide, causing liquid iron to flow out…

Overall, though, the graphs are clear: Roman metallic industry collapsed spectacularly in the Second Century of the stupid empire. It had become too difficult to extract the ores. Mechanization, steam engine driven, was the way to continue exploitation of the ores. And this is exactly why the enormous mines of Rio Tinto in Spain stopped being exploited in the Second Century. At their peak, they had 10,000 slaves, and used (among other things) Archimedean screws to bring water out of the mines. The mines got relaunched in the Nineteenth Century… thanks to steam power.

Thus we see that plutocracy does not just make people stupid, by censoring debate, and just cancelling other minds. It also makes civilization go old, decadent, and unable to feed, or defend itself, by making it lose the intelligence which allows it, not just to rise, but to survive. 

Civilization is like a body. Can a body develop inequality, a few cells harnessing much more power than the others? Yes, and it’s called cancer…

Stupidity is entangled with plutocracy. Really intelligent civilizations are not plutocracies. Reciprocally, too much stupidity kills intelligence to the point that the civilization cannot adapt to the changing circumstances it itself bring. That’s how plutocracies kill civilizations

Patrice Ayme 

Cackling Kamala, Pseudo-Progressive Posers: Accomplices Of Plutocracy

The US “left” is a pseudo-progressive establishment, mostly composed of posers. Thus its inner sanctum does not have a “cackling Kamala” [as New York Times put it!], but nothing at all: the entire thing is empty at the core, which is full of contradictory notions. This happened before: the Communists of the 1930s loved Stalin, a fascist. When Stalin made official his alliance with another fascist, Hitler, the true nature of Stalinism became clear. 

The present US pseudo-progressives are, de facto, allied with history’s biggest plutocrats, among them, the monopolists of Silicon Valley… who came to exist thanks to… the “liberal” establishment, same as the plutocratic establishment. 

Look: the “liberal” president was long Senator of the world’s one and only top tax haven, Delaware.   

Loud pseudo-progressivism is pure as the driven snow, same as polar bears’ fur, to not be seen for what it is: the distraction and diversion from ever controlling contemporary plutocracy. Hence the obsession with Parliamentary elections in tiny Hungary. 

Some parliaments refused a flood of Muslims, and other gender crazy contradictions. Removing a “liberal” private university financed by one of the world’s wealthiest individuals, a US citizen ruling over pseudo-progressivism, made Hungary a target: what if all plutocratic universities died?

This is all imperialistic: plutocracy financed pseudo-progressivism accuses We The People of populism, racism, so that we will not see that hereditary plutocracy rules us bodies and souls.

As the CLIMATE CALAMITY enfolds, California burns (see the hellish smoke in the background of the picture I took two days ago… It has not improved since. The Dixie fire is 200 kilometers away… downwind!), real thinkers study Scipio Africanus, hero of the war against Carthage, 2230 years ago…

Notice the little red sun lost in the forest fire smoke… Yes, I read, hike and run, in the smoke, Air Quality Index 400, hazardous. On positive side, most animals seem to be in hiding, and trying to breathe as little as possible…

Patrice Ayme

***

P/S: The preceding post was read and censored by New York Times (8/8/2021). Hopefully, as the NYT writers have been doing it extensively, it can inspire them later, and they can plagiarize me more, faking creativity! Some feed songbirds, I feed vultures… Not by choice… I made an allusion to Soros, and its “Open Society”. Well, a really open society does not contain as wealthy and powerful as he is. Any allusion to Soros is systematically censored by the New York Times, a direct proof of Soros’ influence. BTW, I did not start as a Soros hater, I bought his books. Couldn’t read them, though: way to boring. Soros himself is a student of Popper, a fully decorated member of the (British) empire, and another self-aggrandizer. There, too I bought the books… Popper is famous for “The Open Society And Its Enemies”… He just forget to tell you one thing: the initial ideas came from a woman who lived 2450 years ago. Now that’s not just seriously dishonest…. It’s grand theft. So Soros is a the student of a thief, and NYT censors any evocation of Soros attempting propaganda in Hungary for its predatory society.

Why so much hostility on my part against Soros? Soros made his fortune by conspiring against the British Pound and forcing it out of the “European Snake” of the European currencies. That was the beginning of Brexit, and the hero of the New York Times made billions (in 2021 $) with his viciousness… Now Soros, having done Brexit does BLM, Black Lives Matter (and others don’t? Or remind me they matter?), a movement launched by multimillionaires and billionaires to show they care about US citizens they force to live in the world’s worst conditions…. Oh, by the way the City of Berkeley, the capital of pseudo-progressivism, was ordered by the California Supreme court to allow the construction of low income housing it has been blocking for more than a decade…

The Central Bank Cannot Be The Government

Pretending otherwise has been a pretext to plutocracy, because, intrinsically, the Fed is all about making the wealthy, wealthier.

The central bank, known in the USA as the Federal Reserve bank (“Fed”), centralizes banking policy. Banks provide financial capital which they typically charge with interest. The big banks are for profit, and on the board of the Fed. That’s it. Banks are not in charge of health, education, defense, energy policy, welfare, children, agricultural production, food distribution, empathy, etc.

As private financiers are strongly represented on the Fed board, individuals such as Jamie Dimon, JP Morgan-Chase CEO since 2005, one may suspect that the Fed is by the financially wealthy, for the  financially wealthy. Actually the rescue plan of the wealthy implemented starting in late November 2008, was elaborated by the ex-head of Goldman Sachs, then Bush’s Treasury Secretary… with the approval of president-elect Obama (a lawyer and senator, novice in financial matters).

The fundamental error in recent decades has been to delegate many governmental functions to a purely financial organization the composition of which is, at least in part, for profit… Although the Fed’s mandate is not for profit, its operators are mostly individuals whose modus operandi is to give others the means (financial capital) to work. Those individuals don’t work themselves: they make others work. Sociologically, they interact with the world’s wealthiest individuals, those who need gigantic amounts of capital. Small earners are not in their sociological or visual domain. It’s systemic class separation in decision and influence making.

In contradiction with the preceding, the Fed charter mandates that the crocodiles shall raise hens. That’s not how the universe works.

Patrice Ayme

***

Thank you Obama, you deserve the 100 million dollars we the wealthy gave to you to reward you for your work on our behalf. Notice that Trump helped a bit the wealth of the 50% lower half, demonstrating once again that he is, indeed, a hateful, despicable populist. (Graph from NYT using Fed data.)

P/S: Except for the first, and last two sentences, the preceding was a comment to the NYT. It was published within one second, and I am grateful… That’s the way my cogent comments should be published (instead of being blocked, or delayed three days… As the NYT generally does, especially in opinion pieces which are full of lies, dissembling and distortions)

Only the Rich Could Love This Economic Recovery

By Karen Petrou. July 12, 2021

Ms. Petrou is the managing partner of Federal Financial Analytics and the author of “Engine of Inequality: The Fed and the Future of Wealth in America.”

Conventional wisdom has it that the lower a central bank sets interest rates, the faster the economy grows. But the longer rates stay ultra-low, it’s not the economy that grows — it’s inequality.

There are signs of worsening inequality across the U.S. economy. But recent surges trace back to a major change after 2008, which transformed how America fights economic recessions.

The Fed, which controls America’s monetary policy, is mired in conventional thinking, even though its policy since 2008 has been unconventional in scale, scope and omnipotence. Adhering to its “lower rates are better” axiom, the Fed has kept “real” U.S. short-term interest rates at — or even below — zero, after taking inflation into account. The Fed now plans to keep rates ultra, ultra low until about 2023, even if inflation ticks up.

This results in even wider wealth inequalities as the gap between rich and everyone else grows.

Is the stunning growth in U.S. inequality all the Fed’s fault? Of course not. Tax policy has favored the wealthy and corporations for decades, to name one other cause. But income and wealth inequality result from who gets the money. And the Fed has unrivaled power over who gets the money across markets, communities and even families.

***

I have been saying this for a very long time, and when I say it, or roll out numbers, critters come and contradict reality (the facts) in the guise of criticizing yours truly… But here are the facts and their numbers:

***

Karen Petrou:

The Fed controls the flow of money, and it flows to the wealthy

The Fed’s main tools for fighting recessions are twofold: those ultra-low interest rates and a policy known as quantitative easing, or Q.E. Q.E is what happens when the Fed buys up assets, like bonds, which keeps money flowing and gives banks lots of liquidity that is supposed to make lending easier.

To get an idea of the magnitude of the Fed’s role, take a look at its portfolio. Assets the Fed has taken out of the economy as part of Q.E. now stand at $8.1 trillion, or about one-third of gross domestic product.

A growing portfolio: To stimulate the economy after 2008, the Federal Reserve increased its balance sheet and slashed interest rates. The current coronavirus pandemic sent that strategy into overdrive, creating the largest balance sheet on record and the lowest interest rates in modern U.S. history.

No one else could own that much, meaning no one but the Fed has so much power over the economy’s winners and losers.

The Fed’s approach is premised on trickle-down expectations adopted, following Reagan and his advisers, by the… Democrats, starting in the 1980s…

***

Karen Petrou:

U.S. central bankers believe the higher that markets fly and the more that the wealthy spend, the better that everyone else will be.

In truth, this policy works only for the wealthy.

Although the Fed’s huge Q.E.-based portfolio initially prevented still worse economic mayhem when the 2008 and 2020 financial crises struck, its benefits over time were 10 times greater for stock-market prices than for overall economic prosperity.

Ultra-low interest rates are meant to spur growth. But they stop having a beneficial effect when they dip so low that they distort savings incentives and instead drive speculative investing, like in Bitcoin or GameStop, to cite two current examples.

Savings, home values and stocks are up — but these also favor the rich

Many Americans own stock, but most stocks – 54 percent – are owned by the 1 percent and much of the rest by the next 9 percent.

The same can be said of real estate. Low interest rates set by the Fed spur lending, creating more demand to purchase homes and forcing prices higher. Rising equity is great for existing homeowners, but richer Americans who own property are the ones who benefit most.

***

Karen Petrou concludes, observing that the Fed charter mandates that the crocodiles shall raise hens:

“What is the Fed for?

The Fed’s role is spelled out under its statutory charter, which establishes the road map for unraveling the inequality it helped create.

The charter’s first goal is “full employment,” meaning pretty much everyone who wants a job has one. This would get a meaningful, immediate boost if the Fed reversed its cheap-debt policies that lead companies to take out debt to fund investor profits, instead of funding new plants or products.

Another goal is “price stability,” best measured by what it costs for a middle-class household to make ends meet. The measure the Fed uses misses the cost increases obscuring a household-to-debt build-up for all but the wealthiest. The Fed thus misses the long-term risks this debt poses to financial security, home ownership, and a secure retirement.

The law has a third Fed goal: “moderate” interest rates. Rates below zero after taking inflation into account are anything but moderate, so they must be gradually raised, starting now.

The current recovery is being driven not by the Fed but by the stimulus bills passed by Congress. After that spending fades, we will be a nation in which at least a quarter of middle-class households still can’t even afford the medical treatment they require, lower-income millennials have student debt equal to at least 372 percent of income, and still more won’t be able to handle even a $400 unexpected expense.

This is wealth without prosperity, a violation of every tenet in the Fed’s statutory mandate. Instead of regretting inequality even as it makes inequality worse, the Fed can and must quickly rewrite policy with a new goal in mind: shared prosperity, measured by how most of us do, not by how high the market flies.”

So why is it that officials and opinion makers believe that the Fed’s crocodiles can should, and do raise hens? Plutocratic information and opinion making control, in an awesome colluding conspiracy is the answer. Roman emperors ruled, because they had made the people ignorant, stupid and gullible.

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!)

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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

The 1609 Project: Cancel Culture And People, Maximize Profits

… Profits for the few that is…

Identity politics is tribalism by another name. Tribalism is as old as apes cancelling others for territory. Tribalism fosters simple-mindedness, cancellation, alienation, hatred, annihilation. Jane Goodall found it was systematic when chimpanzees interacted with other groups. Tribalism is the opposite of the open society and the most human activity, debate. It’s as inhuman as it gets.

As I show here, identity politics covers up its true aim, the advancement of the mentality that institutionalized the worst angels of our nature in the US power structure.

Identity politics built the US. In 1609 the English colony was a venture capital firm with state military assistance, the aim of which was gold and extermination of the Natives. Tobacco rendered profitable by inhuman slavery made the English colony profitable in the first half of the Seventeenth Century, creating a virtuous circle calling for ever more slaves. 

The English colony divided the population into indentured servants, red, black, white, slaves, slave owners, Protestants, Catholics, Jews, property owners, and “races” with no rights. Punishment was severe: English colonists going to the Indians were condemned to death, executed by quartering alive. 

The “Market” was “free” to proceed with “creative destruction”, buying and selling people and territory which white men did not own (that tradition continued until the late nineteenth century, when the US offered lots of 10,000 acres next to railroads, to… white men). Result? The American Natives were mostly exterminated… Exterminating most of the Natives is something that happened nowhere else in the world to that extent (except in Australia, also a British colony; in Tasmania, the Natives were exterminated to the last). 

Romans said:”Divide et impera”… Divide and command absolutely. Alienating and alienated identities divide. Who rules and commands (impera) then? The wealthiest families, controlling, and, or, owning all the media in the USA in particular, and the West in general, including Internet social networks. Liberty, Equality, Debate are their enemies.

Identity politics is how the USA was won: by cancelling the “wrong” “identities”, increasing the profits, thus the power, of the exterminators. It is the opposite of how France was created, 15 centuries ago. The Franks, who were originally German, integrated all the Gallo-Romans, accepted all religions and identities, equally, and then outlawed slavery.

The present cancel culture festering in the USA is more of the same alienation, tribalism, violence and destruction, to serve the owners. Far from being a rebellion against the established order, it serves it.

Patrice Ayme

1619. Coming of Africans. But whites and natives had been enslaved and exterminated in the prior decade, setting the tune.

Slavery in the USA, to the extent it happened, was a unique phenomenon. Thus, to speak about a European slavery problem is to divert attention to a secondary problem: although some European slave traders profited from the slave trade, and all Europeans enjoyed tobacco and sugar (and thus shortened life spans from these drugs), most of the profiteering from slavery and its institutions and associated constitutional structures was by white English speaking Americans… the same descendants of whom are giving lessons now.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/maps-reveal-slavery-expanded-across-united-states-180951452/

***

P/S: A much milder version of the preceding comment was sent to New York Times in answer to:

Is This the End of French Intellectual Life?
The country’s culture of argument has come under the sway of a more ideological, more identity-focused model imported from the United States. By Christopher Caldwell. (Mr. Caldwell is a contributing opinion writer and the author of “Reflections on the Revolution In Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West” and “The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties.”)

Mr. Caldwell did not publish my comment, nor any of the short and factual answers I made to other comments. This is a deliberate usage of vicious power to kill debate, which should be illegal (the NYT has state given privileges). Including the following correction, after it was asserted that France did not have female intellectuals:

There are several famous contemporary French intellectuals who are women, including the president of the French academy.

France has of course an immense tradition of female intellectuals, including the most important head of state ever:

@ES The French monarch, Queen Bathilde, outlawed slavery in 655 CE. As the “Renovated Roman Empire” of the Franks conquered Europe, slavery was outlawed all over Europe.

The article and its comments accused France of racism. The question is not whether racism was a force in the past. In truth, racism is, institutionally speaking, an English, and by extension, and reinforced, US invention. Neither Rome nor France had racist laws (with the ephemeral exception of laws passed against Jews under Saint Louis, Louis IX… Ironically and tellingly enough)  

The following comment was also blocked:

@rlschles Allegations of racism  against France have been used by the racist US elite, which ruled thanks to racist laws (that France never had). The US elite is much more abusive than the french one, and is afraid of LEF, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. Hence its drive to disparage France (which does not have slavery since 655 CE, 14 centuries ago, at least formally)

What is going on? The New York Times is at the core of the US plutocratic establishment Its principal enemy is then LEF, Liberty Equality Fraternity. France was against the invasion of Iraq, and tried to block it. There was then a war between the New York Times and France. Now that the Iraq invasion president is ruling the USA, the New York Times is redoubling its efforts to destroy LEF. Catwell knows very well that I am for LEF, so he bans me. This is serious, it’s a war. It looks superficial like that, but, as during World War Two, it could end up with dozens of millions killed. No, the USA is not going to attack France. But the US elite is making it so to encourage others to go tribal, and that’s where future war lays. The NYT is telling Xi, the Chinese president, implicitly: go ahead, go tribal, you have the support of the USA… Go invade Taiwan… That’s your “identity right”. Then of course, there would be a big war. Guess who would come on top? Yes, the US plutocratic class, same as in 1945…

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Here are extracts from the NYT article describing what is, from my perspective, triumphant intellectual, political and economic fascism:

After waging a decades-long twilight struggle against these movements, Le Débat has lost.

Intellectuals of all persuasions have been debating what that defeat means for France, and they have reached a conclusion: The country’s intellectual life has come under the sway of a more ideological, more identity-focused model imported from the United States.

Le Débat was always resistant to American imports. It never fully made its peace with the free market in the way that self-described social democrats in America did under Bill Clinton. Nor did it climb aboard the agenda of humanitarian invasions and democracy promotion, as left-leaning American intellectuals like Paul Berman and George Packer did. That was all fine.

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The NYT turns me into an ally of Macron (should be rather vice versa, as I started decades ago…)

NYT: “Many French people see American-style social-justice politics as a change for the worse. President Emmanuel Macron does. In the wake of the death of George Floyd in police custody last spring, protests and riots across America brought the dismantling of statues and other public symbols — sometimes on the spot, sometimes after further campaigning and agitation. Aware that such actions had found a sympathetic echo among some of his fellow citizens, Mr. Macron warned that France would not follow suit. “It will not erase any trace or name from its history,” he said. “It will not forget any of its works. It will not topple any statues.”

By last fall Mr. Macron was also inveighing against foreign university traditions. “I’m thinking of the Anglo-Saxon tradition, which has another history, and it is not ours,” he said, before singling out “certain social-science theories imported from the United States of America.””

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Debate is directly under attack, as a mental principle:

NYT: “To look at how Le Débat unraveled is to see that these tensions have been developing for years, if not decades. They bode poorly for the future of intellectual life in France — and elsewhere.“

Not all what the NYT says is incorrect. The best lies are made with lots of truth therein. NYT: “Marcel Gauchet, is a philosopher of democracy and a historian of religion. Totalitarianism, and how to find a politics of the left that avoided it, absorbed Mr. Nora and Mr. Gauchet both.

Mr. Gauchet, for instance, has studied with alarm the slow ouster of democratic principles by the very different principles of human rights. “The touchstone in the system,” he warned in 2007, “is no longer the sovereignty of the people but the sovereignty of the individual, defined, ultimately, by the possibility of overruling the collective authority.” Human rights, often imposed by courts or centralized administrative bodies, could wind up pitting democracy against itself. 

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Another perspective that is entirely correct is found in the NYT analysis. NYT: “The first sign in France of a politics focused on minority groups came in 1984. Activists close to the government of François Mitterrand sought to address the complex problem of assimilating France’s mostly North African immigrants by founding an American-style activist group called SOS Racisme. Le Débat reacted in 1993 by publishing a skeptical book by the sociologist Paul Yonnet. SOS Racisme was not replacing a stuffy idea of race with a hip one, Mr. Yonnet argued; it was introducing race theories into a country where they had lately been weak or absent, ethnicizing newcomers and natives alike, and encouraging the French to look at the minority groups in their midst (Jews, in particular) as somehow foreign.”

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NYT:”Mr. Gauchet, Ms. Agacinski and many others in their intellectual circle have not changed their politics. Rather they have been outbid by radicals offering a more exciting, if not necessarily more rigorous, critique of society.“

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NYT:”One questions the “legitimacy”… Where did this very un-French attitude come from?… an answer: America. A few days after announcing that the review would publish no more, Mr. Nora spoke about its closing on Alain Finkielkraut’s radio show. Mr. Finkielkraut was pointing to disturbing tendencies in French intellectual life, but Mr. Nora wanted to take the conversation in a different direction: to the “mouvements à l’américaine” that start on campuses across the ocean and tend to show up in France. “What they call,” he said, “to follow the argument to its logical conclusion, cancel culture, which is to say the extermination of culture, the will to. …”

Here Mr. Nora paused before continuing: “Anyway, I daresay some of us are old enough to have echoes in our heads of Goebbels when he said, ‘When I hear the word “culture” I reach for my revolver.’”

[Actually it was not Goebbels, but in a Nazi play with the following memorable: “No, let ’em keep their good distance with their whole ideological kettle of fish … I shoot with live ammunition! When I hear the word culture …, I release the safety on my Browning!” Notice that the gun is a US made gun, a “Browning”, because it’s US plutocracy which armed the Nazis, with contraband weapons”]

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Cluelessly the ignorant brutes at the NYT observe: “The Goebbels quote may be apocryphal, but it is worth pausing to ask why Mr. Nora — born in the first half of the 20th century and preoccupied with the moral legacy of World War II — should call such a name to mind when discussing the influence of American culture on his own country’s.“

Yes, vicious idiots, it is your party, the US plutocrats, the equivalent of whom the Romans used to call the “Optimates”, the “Best”, which gave the weapons to the Nazis! Precisely! As I just said. But of course the NYT blocked hundreds of my comments explaining this, so it can keep on pretending that only idiots would say this.

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NYT: ““There is a mighty ideological wave coming from the United States,” the philosopher Yves Charles Zarka wrote last fall in an article about the death of Le Débat. “It brings rewriting history, censuring literature, toppling statues, and imposing a racialist vision of society.” Nor is it as iconoclastic as it looks, according to Luc Ferry, a philosopher and conservative columnist. “However anticapitalist and anti-American they may think themselves,” he wrote last year, “these activists are only aping whatever has been going on on campuses across the Atlantic over the last four decades.”“

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And the lying plutocratic New York Times to conclude, mixing the true, the ludicrous, the vicious, the real and the imaginary:

The shoe used to be on the other foot. The United States used to learn a lot from France. Until a generation ago, into the age of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, one could say America deferred to France on matters intellectual. It doesn’t any longer. The demise of Le Débat was marked by not a single mention in any major American newspaper or magazine.

There are still lessons Americans can learn from France, provided we approach it with the right questions in mind. A good one to start with might be whether the American academy of recent decades — with the culture it carries and the political behaviors it fosters — has been, in the wider world, a force for intellectual freedom or for its opposite.

Well, dear fascists, and obscene censors, what you are doing called intellectual fascism, and the day you see thermonuclear suns rising over your cities, don’t say the others came for you, they came from you. In particular, you are teaching Mr. Xi that he is right, and democracy is wrong, that the debate is wrong. There is only one way out of that: violent mass death.