Voting Clinton Is Voting Trump

Why choosing Clinton as democratic candidate guarantees the election of Trump? There are two main reasons. The first is that Donald Trump is going to defeat Hillary Clinton. Trump, however, would be defeated by Bernie Sanders (and he knows it, hence the virulence of Trump’s attacks against Sanders).

Why would Trump defeat hillary Clinton? Just look at Hillary Clinton’s tax returns, if nothing else. In 2014, she made more than 24 million dollars, in 2015, more than twenty-seven millions. Who would not love to earn three million dollars more, from a year to the next? How did Hillary make this money? Through influence peddling, and the promise of more to come. By contrast, Bernie Sanders made less than 1% of what Clinton made.

Private (Including Corporate) Investment Versus Corporate Profits. Under Clinton-Obama-Establishment Rule, The Gap Between Monopoly Profits And Lack Of Investment In The Economy, Has Never Been So Wide. Can’t Accuse Bush, Reagan, and The Great bad Wolf Out There. The Wolf Has Been Obama’s Policy

Some will say Trump makes more than Clinton. Yes, but it’s the nature of their jobs, which differ. Donald Trump is going to accuse Clinton of corruption. Because that’s all what her immense fortune is about. When asked why he lived so modestly, ex-President Truman pointed out that, doing otherwise, using influence peddling, “would demean the office of the presidency”. And Truman was no shrinking violet: among other things, he dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (shortening considerably, by a psycho-political shock effect, a war that killed much more than 10,000 persons a day).

Trump also has favored single-payer, and, or, socialized medicine, in many declarations, for decades. He extolled the Canadian (single-payer) or Scottish (socialized) systems in the past, Hillary has declared that the richest country in the world could not afford either (differently from all other rich countries, and many, not so rich).

So Trump is going to run to the LEFT of Hillary. This is all the clearer as Trump declared, also many times that his friends in the financial industry should pay taxes at the same rate as anybody else (in particular Trump accused his friends, the hedge fund managers New York is crawling with, of getting an unfair break with “carried interest”).

Hillary, like Ted Cruz, is financed by the likes of Goldman-Sachs.

At this point, Trump is running fully on the right against the Goldman Sachs puppet who says things won’t be right “until the body of Christ rises agian”. I said in December Cruz was the true candidate of the plutocrats, and, indeed, here we are.

I used to consider, very long ago, Trump as the poster boy of what was wrong with the US banking system (long story). However, in the meantime, the Clintons got to power, and unleash the banks onto the world. The Clintons made finance so domineering that “Shadow Banks” sprouted all over.

And what of Obama, in all this. Paul Krugman himself, a strident Hillary partisan, admits, in his latest editorial, that Obama increased the powers of monopoly (in a similar vein, the New York Times admitted that Obama lowered the tax rates of the 400 richest US taxpayers by 20%, in 2009. Ironically, when I used to notice that, as it happened, I was taxed with racism, and the NYT censored my comments; this mentality of censorship of an inconvenient reality explains why said inconvenience was allowed to grow).

***

Anxious To Please Progressives, Krugman Suddenly Gets It:

In “Robber Baron Recession”, the hard core Hillary supporter opines that:

“ In recent years many economists, including people like Larry Summers and yours truly, have come to the conclusion that growing monopoly power is a big problem for the U.S. economy — and not just because it raises profits at the expense of wages. Verizon-type stories, in which lack of competition reduces the incentive to invest, may contribute to persistent economic weakness.

The argument begins with a seeming paradox about overall corporate behavior. You see, profits are at near-record highs, thanks to a substantial decline in the percentage of G.D.P. going to workers. You might think that these high profits imply high rates of return to investment. But corporations themselves clearly don’t see it that way: their investment in plant, equipment, and technology (as opposed to mergers and acquisitions) hasn’t taken off, even though they can raise money, whether by issuing bonds or by selling stocks, more cheaply than ever before.

How can this paradox be resolved? Well, suppose that those high corporate profits don’t represent returns on investment, but instead mainly reflect growing monopoly power. In that case many corporations would be in the position I just described: able to milk their businesses for cash, but with little reason to spend money on expanding capacity or improving service. The result would be what we see: an economy with high profits but low investment, even in the face of very low interest rates and high stock prices.”

I have, of course been saying this for years. I even saw in the root phenomenon of all this, the plutocratic phenomenon, the cause of the Fall of The Roman Republic, and thus, ultimately, of the Roman Empire.

Basically elites profit from the established order, and thus work against changing it, at all cost. Technology itself is disruptive (and, a fortiori, science), so they are limited as much as possible (while claiming to not being doing so).

So, in 2014, Paul Krugman wrote that growing importance of monopoly rents is producing a disconnect between profits and production. Is that new? No. Actually the word “rentier” was the number one class distinction in Nineteenth Century France. There was the “rentier” class, and the “working class”.

What we have here, though, is rentier monopolies. So the extent of the phenomenon is new.

Krugman:

“And such an economy wouldn’t just be one in which workers don’t share the benefits of rising productivity; it would also tend to have trouble achieving or sustaining full employment.”

What Krugman should have said here was: “quality employment”. There is plenty of employment in the USA, as there are in many a slave society. There USED to be quality employment.

Krugman: “… when investment is weak despite low interest rates, the Federal Reserve will too often find its efforts to fight recessions coming up short. So lack of competition can contribute to “secular stagnation” — that awkwardly-named but serious condition in which an economy tends to be depressed much or even most of the time, feeling prosperous only when spending is boosted by unsustainable asset or credit bubbles. If that sounds to you like the story of the U.S. economy since the 1990s, join the club.”

There are, then, good reasons to believe that reduced competition and increased monopoly power are very bad for the economy. But do we have direct evidence that such a decline in competition has actually happened? Yes, say a number of recent studies, including one just released by the White House. For example, in many industries the combined market share of the top four firms, a traditional measure used in many antitrust studies, has gone up over time.

The obvious next question is why competition has declined. The answer can be summed up in two words: Ronald Reagan.

For Reagan didn’t just cut taxes and deregulate banks; his administration also turned sharply away from the longstanding U.S. tradition of reining in companies that become too dominant in their industries. A new doctrine, emphasizing the supposed efficiency gains from corporate consolidation, led to what those who have studied the issue often describe as the virtual end of antitrust enforcement.”

***

Krugman Then Dropped A Bombshell: Bad Obama

Obama, if anything, made monopoly powers greater than ever. A deer in the headlights is the charitable explanation. Here is Krugman again, suddenly coming over to the side of those who want justice, and wealth for all:

“… the Obama administration — preoccupied with the aftermath of financial crisis and the struggle with bitterly hostile Republicans — has only recently been in a position to grapple with competition policy.

Still, better late than never. On Friday the White House issued an executive order directing federal agencies to use whatever authority they have to “promote competition.” What this means in practice isn’t clear, at least to me. But it may mark a turning point in governing philosophy, which could have large consequences if Democrats hold the presidency.

For we aren’t just living in a second Gilded Age, we’re also living in a second robber baron era.”

So Obama was the Robber Baron-In-Chief, I presume? (I am very sorry… Barry, please, tell us it ain’t so…)

***

Brazil’s Standards Higher Than The US For Corruption?

The president of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff, has been impeached. The charge? Not personal enrichment, but cheating with the numbers of the Brazilian economy when she ran again for office (and was re-elected president). Hillary Clinton is an even bigger cheater, in the category of lying with the numbers of the government. But nobody knows about it, because nobody has called her lies.

Hillary, following Obama, pretends that the banks reimbursed 800 billions of TARP money. That’s technically correct. But a lie nevertheless. The Treasury was reimbursed TARP, modulo a Quantitative Easing program of many trillions which dwarfed TARP.  The Federal Reserve, another branch of government, bought Treasury Bonds, and Mortgage Securities from the banks at inflated prices (that what QE is).

Rousseff did not profit materially personally (whereas many of her accusers, about half of them, are under judicial examination for corruption!) The Clintons did, tremendously profit from the institutions they unleashed on the world.

The preceding reasonings are not too difficult: even New York democrats should be able to follow them, and even discover them, on their own.

Conclusion? All too many well-to-do New York democrats secretly, subconsciously, want to have Trump elected president.

And what is the “candidacy” most supported financially so far in these elections? Arguably the anti-Trump campaign paid by nominal Republican “PACs”’. Indeed, the Obama administration gave oodles of public money to plutocrats (in direct gifts, or taxes not perceived, or monopolies powers encouraged). Those plutocrats at the government teat want to keep it that way: that’s why their candidate is Clinton, not Trump (Cruz would be even better, because he is only a multimillionaire; not at the head of a 200 million dollar fortune as the Clintons are).

Trump has a long track record of suing the government, thus a rather adverse relationship with said government. And, whereas the likes of Elon Musk, Sergey Brin, Bill Gates, etc. can buy simple multimillionaires, they cannot buy a multibillionaire financed by real estate such as Trump. So they detest him, and this is why the anti-Trump movement is the most financed.

I worked for Obama two years before his first election. I recognize (now!) it would have been smarter to have Clinton as president, first, before Obama (Obama was promising, but proved too naïve). I recommended Clinton for Secretary of State. I recognize it is high time to have a woman president. I even appreciate many of Hillary’s smarts, and of her neocon ways.

However, it’s disturbing to see so many democrats have embraced obsessively sheer plutocratic propaganda, against Trump, or against Sanders. Indeed, crafty propaganda accusing Trump to be a “demagogue” or “populist” has been used to smear Sanders, in the guise of smearing Trump.

So here we are: New York democrats have a real choice. If they vote Sanders, they vote for the needed revolution (at least, the revolution in perception which has to precede the revolution in legislation). If New York democrats vote for Clinton, they vote for New Pork.

Patrice Ayme’

No Taxation Without Decision

Responsibility, Greeks, Jews, Nazis, Decision Making, Trans Pacific Partnership, Big Pharmaceuticals… Or All the Evil The Lack of Direct Democracy Fostered:

“Eugen Lowy”: Dear Patrice… The Greek economic problem is more a moral problem than an economic problem. The moral question is what responsibilities has an individual to take regarding the decisions of leading elites of community they belong to.”

I have thought of this problem deeply and forever, in light of the Nazi problem. When I was around the age of 6 (!), a cousin told me that Nazism was not the fault of the Germans, but of the crooks who had led the Germans. I did not believe it at the time, and I spent a lot of time demonstrating to my satisfaction that this was not true.

I do believe in collective responsibility. We are collectively culprit to let ourselves being abused by plutocrats and their giant corporations:

Banks: Mandated to Create Money. Money Farmers. Pharmaceuticals: Mandated to Create Health. Health Farmers. Media: Mandated to Create Minds. Mind Farmers.

The State and the Government is not just who We the People elect to be represented by. De facto.

I believe in the collective responsibility of those who accept wholeheartedly criminal systems of thoughts and moods.

To say: ”My leader was a liar and a crook, I disavow him (her)” is acceptable, and honorable. However, it loses all credibility if one still espouses the moods and ideas that made the leader what he (she) became.

There is plenty of evidence that, after the Nazis had been militarily extinguished, Nazi moods and thoughts survived in Germany for decades. In particular, Germans who had resisted, or fought the Nazis were viewed, then, as traitors. It took decades to honor those who had attempted to kill Hitler.

Young officers of the best lineage (Prussian aristocrats) who planned to kill Hitler, and survived the post-coup bloodbath of Hitler against his own officer corps (around 5,000 assassinated), were then blocked by top Nazis such as the famous Von Manstein, to have any influence on the Bundeswehr.

This only happened because tens of millions of Germans were still Nazis, for want of a better word. When the Nazi ringleaders (for example Von Manstein) died, moods and ideas changed: today’s Germany is much closer, in moods and ideas, to present day France than to the Germany of 1945.

Today Richard Von Weisacker died. He had been German president. His father, one of the top Nazis, got seven years imprisonment at Nuremberg. The president himself had served in Hitler’s army. Such people recognized their crimes, all the way to Jerusalem. However, only their deaths turn the page.

Here is another example: I was in the USA during the ramp-up and unleashing of the Iraq war. I saw “friends” and “family” lay on sofas, watching hours of American “Football” and basketball. They could not care less. They had no inclination to find what was going-on. It was all the way like that, throughout the media. The slightest murmur or comment against plutocrat Bush was viewed as an unpatriotic act.

That made them all, as individuals, accomplices of the killing of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis.

As far as the Greeks are concerned, it is obvious that the average Greek did not partake in the erroneous and criminal decisions taken by the Greek and European elites.

Eugen: “So the moral question is, who has to take responsibilities for promiscuous behavior? Should it be the Greek leading elites? The Greek people? Maybe the German and French banksters and their servants? Or maybe the moral responsibility lays on the shoulders of the descendants of the German Nazis? And then if the one responsible to be blamed will be finally found, what will be the right punishment for them?”

To determine responsibilities, one has FIRST to determine causalities. Most people do not have the faintest idea about how money is created. Bankers create money (through credit). Thus bankers have extraordinary, unworldly, undemocratic powers.

This fact, in turn, is carefully hidden by systems of moods and thoughts whose main role is to hide what bankers really do.

Eugen: “Then the other moral-political question is, what responsibilities shout carry the leading elites, who implemented, short sighted policy of greed, personal enrichment and deception and if they are punishable for their crimes.”

Before they can be punished, the crimes they committed have to be understood, and viewed as crimes.

An example is the Jewish problem.

Eugen: “For 2000 years the Jews were an easy target for persecution. They were pushed to the edge of the societies, dehumanized, marginalized, humiliated, closed to their ghettoes. Too many times the Catholic Church initiated their annihilation.”

This is case where the crimes committed have not been understood. Not only that, but the very semantics used is criminal. Anti-Judaism is described as “anti-Semitism”. That confusion, per se, is a crime. A crime against reason.

Judaism is the mother religion of Christianism, and, thus Islam (although there is also a direct filiation, dues to the Yattrib/Medina stay of Muhammad). Judaism became, at some point, more than 2,000 years ago, a religion, not just an ethnic group (one can argue this happened more than 25 centuries ago, because of the Babylonian captivity of some Israelis). Thus “anti-Semitism” is not an appropriate term.

After the demented theocracy that smothered the Roman empire, Franks re-established Pagans, Atheists and Jews to their rights. Charlemagne took himself for Israel’s King David (somebody famous for disobeying god’s criminally insane orders).

Christianism (= Catholicism for 15 centuries) eradicated, or try to eradicate, using methods that made the Nazis look like choir boys, all religions for 15 centuries. Then those rabid dogs had a go at each other, logically enough.

In particular, in the case of France, seven religious wars occurred, in short order at the end of the Sixteenth Century (meanwhile the Church was busy burning alive philosophers). Then, in the following century the Sun-Tyrant, Louis XIV, threw the Protestants out of France (as a result France started to lose wars and territory, surprise, surprise).

Jews had been living in France for 16 centuries, and Protestantism was around five centuries old (I consider the Cathars to be the most radical Protestants, ever).

Eugen: “In your essay you attack the multinational corporations and their unscrupulous tendency not to pay taxes. The problem of paying or not paying taxes is not a question of morality… but a question, who is better to allocate resources to create maximal well-being for the people of the states. I personally have difficulty to believe, that the government is the best tool to do it. I rather believe, that decentralization of resource allocation decision process, could be more effective than its monopolization in hands of the government. “No taxation without representation”, is a very relevant slogan in these days, when the political elites can do any kind of unscrupulous decisions without a need to pay for its to many times disastrous consequences. ( viz Greece above ).”

Part of this argument has been made by Bill Gates. And it’s as old as plutocracy.

“No taxation without representation” is itself a slogan that creates its own poisonous context. The context being “representation”. In the USA, as it is, around 600,000 people are “represented” by one person. The Greeks would have called that tyranny.

I propose instead: “No personal taxation without personal decision”.

In the 1790s, De Sade, eminent deputy of the far-left at the Constitutional Assembly, proposed not just that women vote, but that direct democracy be established. That was very sadistic of him.

Our leaders are ignorant little twerps. What they know best, is how to lie. Beyond that, they are at a loss. This is not surprising: the People is ignorant, ill-informed, and infantilized. An elite, mostly made of people with the worst motivations, takes all the decisions, and claims to have all the knowledge, and the wisdom.

In truth, they know naught.

The way to expose that is to establish a debate, that is, direct democracy. Out of the debate will come the intelligence.

Imagine the Nazis debating in public, with input from everybody, their “Final Solution” for the “Jewish Problem”. Imagine Putin having to explain in detail, in a debate, how the “volunteers” who stream into Ukraine are paid and equipped. Imagine having General Powel having to explain what exactly he meant with, and how he obtained, his little drawings of trucks converted into biological weapons labs. Powell, representing the USA, used these lies at the UN, but nobody was empowered to contradict him.

Entire nations ought not to be represented by real, or even potential, liars. It is high time for people to be fully informed, and fully enabled to take the fundamental decisions.

Are we getting more direct democratic? The decision of displacing a TGV (High Speed Train) in Eastern France’s Loraine is submitted to direct vote: very good. Meanwhile the TPP, the Trans Pacific Partnership negotiations are pursued secretly among plutocrats.

“Don’t Trade Away Our Health” whines the New York Times (where were you during the negotiations of “Obamacare”?)

Actually, I should not make fun of the author, Joseph Stiglitz, a good guy:

“A secretive group met behind closed doors in New York this week. What they decided may lead to higher drug prices for you and hundreds of millions around the world.

Representatives from the United States and 11 other Pacific Rim countries convened to decide the future of their trade relations in the so-called Trans-Pacific Partnership (T.P.P.). Powerful companies appear to have been given influence over the proceedings, even as full access is withheld from many government officials from the partnership countries.”

Compare with the Wansee conference, where the Final Solution for the Jews was elaborated: ”a secretive group…” Abomination and infamy always entail secretive groups, as De Sade pointed out.

Stiglitz points out that the bad guy there is the USA Trade Representative, who wants to increase Big Pharma’s” profits.

If Big Pharma spent its money on research, that would be OK, but it’s not the case, most of the money goes to corruption: advertising, so-called marketing, and extravagant salaries for the Plutos and CEO class at the top.

The USA Trade Representative will soon be rewarded, as a good pet, with extraordinary salary and compensation (as Obama comes and goes). Stiglitz:

“Historically, though, the trade representative’s office has aligned itself with corporate interests. If big pharmaceutical companies hold sway — as the leaked documents indicate they do — the T.P.P. could block cheaper generic drugs from the market. Big Pharma’s profits would rise, at the expense of the health of patients and the budgets of consumers and governments… If the United States Trade Representative gets its way, the T.P.P. will limit the ability of partner countries to restrict prices. And the pharmaceutical companies surely hope the “standard” they help set in this agreement will become global — for example, by becoming the starting point for United States negotiations with the European Union over the same issues. ”

Let me have Stiglitz say what I did for years. But it’s good to have a Nobel in Economics saying it:

“Of course, pharmaceutical companies claim they need to charge high prices to fund their research and development. This just isn’t so. For one thing, drug companies spend more on marketing and advertising than on new ideas. Overly restrictive intellectual property rights actually slow new discoveries, by making it more difficult for scientists to build on the research of others and by choking off the exchange of ideas that is critical to innovation. As it is, most of the important innovations come out of our universities and research centers, like the National Institutes of Health, funded by government and foundations.

The efforts to raise drug prices in the T.P.P. take us in the wrong direction. The whole world may come to pay a price in the form of worse health and unnecessary deaths.”

In 2013, 100 leading oncologists from around the world wrote an open letter in the journal Blood calling for a reduction in the price of cancer drugs.

Dr. Brian Druker, director of the Knight Cancer Institute, one of the signatories, asked: “If you are making $3billion a year on [cancer drug] Gleevec, could you get by with $2billion? When do you cross the line from essential profits to profiteering?”

None of this would happen without secrecy, and the very respect which is extended to the creeps who lord over us. Time for some audacity from those who ought to govern, us: We The People, not them the bosses.

All this evil is made possible by the concentration of decision making in a few hands. That is intrinsically plutocratic.

Absolute power corrupts and pollutes absolutely: when watching our dear leaders, remember, you are watching people who are absolutely corrupt. If they were not so before they got power, they sure are it, now. The very notion that a few are only habilitated to know all, and decide all, is sick.

No taxation without decision.

Patrice Ayme’

World’s largest pharmaceutical firms
Company	Total revenue ($bn)	R&D spend ($bn)	Sales and marketing spend ($bn)	Profit ($bn)	Profit margin (%)
Johnson & Johnson (US)	71.3	8.2	17.5	13.8	19
Novartis (Swiss)	58.8	9.9	14.6	9.2	16
Pfizer (US)	51.6	6.6	11.4	22.0	43
Hoffmann-La Roche (Swiss)	50.3	9.3	9.0	12.0	24
Sanofi (France)	44.4	6.3	9.1	8.5	11
Merck (US)	44.0	7.5	9.5	4.4	10
GSK (UK)	41.4	5.3	9.9	8.5	21
Astra Zeneca (UK)	25.7	4.3	7.3	2.6	10
Eli Lilly (US)	23.1	5.5	5.7	4.7	20
AbbVie (US)	18.8	2.9	4.3	4.1	22
Source: GlobalData

Google’s Page: Profits Are Saintly

When Pluto rises its ugly snout, it says whatever to gain even more power. Being grotesque becomes an instrument of domination.

Why is that? Reason is the greatest enemy of plutocracy. So reason has to be humiliated. As more of those who hate reason see reason been viciously, and successfully attacked, they join into the aggression.

After Putin told us that he got permission to invade Ukraine, but did not use it yet, the Google CEO, Larry Page, is coming up with an outrageously grotesque idea of his own. Please excuse him for his more modest proposal: he does not order around nuclear forces.

So Mr. Page informs us that for-profit corporations are intrinsically charitable when they profit from us.

Plutocrats are full of tricks.

Number one top priority of plutocrats is to praise themselves. Now our ignorance has been dispelled, and we learn that, when plutocrats profit, it’s by charity. Such outrages have become religion in the past.

Thus Constantine, the Roman emperor, having invented Catholicism (that is “universalism”) modestly observed that he was the “Thirteenth Apostle”. Hence Orthodox Christians cautiously celebrate him as a saint (do they also celebrate his recipe for live steamed wife?) Maybe it would be careful to make Putin into a saint, too?

Another plutocrats’ trick is to praise each other, as the greatest friends of man there ever were (that’s what “Phil-anthrope” means). Plutocrats from the USA are big on that one these days. Buffet said the Gates were geniuses, and he would give all his money to them. Meanwhile Bill Gates, thanks to all his charity, no doubt, became again the richest man in the world. The entanglement of the Gates Foundation with for profit corporations killing all bees and butterflies, such as Monsanto has born fruit.

Writes New York Magazine:  “Earlier this week, billionaire Google CEO Larry Page made a strange admission about how he defines philanthropy. In front of a TED audience, while being interviewed by Charlie Rose, Page confirmed what he’d said before – that upon his death, rather than giving his fortune to a nonprofit organization or bequeathing it to his heirs, he would prefer to give it to Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX and Tesla Motors. Musk, Page believes, is the kind of visionary whose ideas will do untold amounts of good for the world, and who could make better use of a gigantic money infusion than a standard charity.

“That’s a company, and that’s philanthropical,” Page said, according to Wired. He also apparently urged audience members to give their money to corporations rather than nonprofits.

This idea – that corporations make better vehicles for humanitarian change than nonprofit organizations – didn’t come out of nowhere. It’s related to philanthrocapitalism, the concept that has taken over the charitable giving world in the last decade, and which counts among its fans billionaires like Bill Gates, Pierre Omidyar, and Michael Bloomberg.”

It’s hilarious that Mr. Page uses as an object of desire, an example to behold, Elon Musk, a typical crony capitalist, who got billions of dollars from taxpayers, to set-up his for profit companies (both Tesla and Space X are on the dole).

Oh, in case Page is not knowledgeable enough to have noticed: Musk invented nothing big, such as optical pumping. Musk is just a user of other people’s breakthrough. Musk is to invention what musk is to a deer: it smells.

Optical pumping was discovered in theory by Einstein around 1921, and, in practice by Alfred Kastler at the Ecole Normale Superieure Kassel-Brossel lab, Paris, in 1953. That made masers and lasers possible.

Now that’s real genius. Now, that’s what create entire new possibilities for humanity, and, in particular, jobs.

The fact that people as gross and ignorant as Mr. Page have so much power because they have paid so little tax, proportionally, for so long, is just plain spooky. Hence, just as Putin, a fellow plutocrat, they feel more emboldened than ever, and want to hammer that in with the most grotesque ideas.

It is high time for free people to break that vicious circle of arrogance and oppression by the few, and worst.

Patrice Aymé

(Notes: I was told by a Silicon Valley insider that Tesla was rising production of the all-electric $80,000 Model S to 1,000 a week. And that Tesla was thinking of opening a factory in the EU. That’s a very good thing. Teslas are produced in the Bay Area, and the air ought to become more breathable, there are several in my neigborhood. However, all that I wrote above stands.

Thanks to Andy Outis from New York Magazine quoted above for alerting me to Mr. Page’s ludicrous confusion between profits and charity. The article has some other good, but rather obvious arguments I did not bother repeating, such as that a for-profit corporation fiduciary duty is profit, not charity.)

Government Defines Profit

Abstract; Free market fundamentalists ignore a paradox of economics: defining what a “profit” is can only be done by the government! Thus, when only profit seems to reign, as now, the real government is hiding. Hiding in plain sight, just as the Saudi criminal organization, manipulating the absence of global legal jurisdiction to implement criminal propaganda, or grand theft. Thus, Apple, Google, etc. have all too much in common with terrorist networks. Understanding much of this, the Japanese PM is suddenly behaving as if he led China. (Precisely because he has his eye on the PRC…)

***

Sometimes progress is all about rediscovering what was known for millennia. Sometimes progress is all about unlearning outrageous propaganda. An example? The public is increasingly stuck in the West. From a very deep lack of understanding.

The richer the lords, the poorer the commons.

The degeneracy of the public is directly related to a lack of philosophical definition of what “profit” means. If one does not have a philosophical definition, one has no practical definition, either.

The graph of profits above is, in a sense, a joke; Apple, to single the typical case of the most prominent corporation, has tremendous profits in one sense, for would-be share holders, and none for fiscal authorities.

That lack of definition of “profit”, in turn leads to fiscal imbalances, that lead to rising plutocracy, its accompanying rising unemployment, and general impoverishment of the commons while our lords thrive ever more.

There are still more than four times as many long-term unemployed workers in the USA as there were before the 2007-2008 financial crisis. Europe’s economy is back in recession, and has grown less over the past six years than it did between 1929 and 1935 (yes, that includes Thatcherian Great Britain!), while hitting ever higher highs for unemployment.

Yet there is no major change in policy in sight. Savage, even criminal, austerity programs are imposed by Brussels and Berlin on the most indebted nations. Children go hungry, life expectancies are going down.

Why the unfolding disaster? The way the role of government in economics is looked at is key.

In his first inaugural address, Ronald Reagan said: “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. From time to time we’ve been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. Well, if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else? All of us together, in and out of government, must bear the burden.”

Neofascists have misused that quote ever since, extracting from it the aphorism that government was the problem. Worse: under Clinton, Bush Jr., and Obama, they put that scheme into action, deciding that finance would be self regulating.

Ever since the Medes-Persian empire of Darius and contemporaneous Athens, all serious countries acknowledged the overwhelming, domineering role of government in economics. The rise of Frankish Europe of the High Middle Ages, England 1066, or the Italian republics, France in 1600 (Henri IV’s “chicken in every pot”), or Great Britain, later, were all tied in to massive redefinitions of the socio-economy by the government.

(Anglo-Saxon academics love to throw in the word “Keynes” at this point, but Keynes’ suggestions were minimal relative to what serious governments have done in economics for millennia before him, or even since! The only thing about Keynes is that he lived in the 20C and spoke English, enough for simple minds to adulate.)

The government does two things, ever since serious civilization has been instituted: first, government insures enough fundamental economics, to make the basic functions of society possible: defense, police, justice, and basic food and water procurement possible.

Secondly, the government determines and regulates the arena of the “free” market. In other words, there is no “free” market, just a market the government decides is free.

Unfortunately, rogue economists, in the last 35 years have imposed a view, in South America, the USA, and the UK, and then Russia, and worldwide, according to which the free market determines everything, including the government, that it, somehow self generates. One may as well let a headless chicken guide us all.

Mr. Abe was Prime Minister of Japan seven years ago. Illness forced him to resign after a year. Now he is back, with more impulse. Although a conservative politician, he understands well that, when the economy is stuck it needs to be stimulated directly by the government. Abe’s 100 billion dollars stimulus would be equal to roughly 300 billion in the USA. That big stimulus does not contradict a loose monetary policy. Nor does it contradict extinguishing Japan’s more than 200% debt/GDP, because for governments, only growth (or default) can extinguish debt.

The first results of Mr. Abe’s policies have been very encouraging (after a 55% rise, a sharp correction in the stock market was caused by fears that the central bank would not keep on giving enough money to the financially starving economy.)

So why does not the rest of the Western world copy Mr. Abe? After all, is not Mr. Abe just trying to do what China has been doing ever since Deng Tsiao Ping decided that “getting rich was glorious“? That has worked splendidly: open the free market in full, and the governmental stimulus too. It’s actually what the Western governments did after 1945, for thirty years, when they were obsessed by growing the economy (before getting obsessed by fighting inflation).

Why is the rest of the Western world insisting upon guidance by the headless chicken of the free market? Simply because plutocracy is the new world order, and that’s best insured by restricting access to money to the very richest. Austerity is not about balancing the books, as much as it is about restricting the money going to the populace (hence the power it disposes of).

The “Chicago Boys” (followers of Hayek and Friedman) proclaimed that profit was the optimal organizing principle of society. Their students were the perfect decoys for neofascist plutocrats to take control in Chili, Argentina, Brazil. in the 1990s Jeffrey Sachs and Larry Summers went to Moscow to teach that greed was the royal road to progress, and they had an eager audience among the new potentates, who loved to hear that plutocracy was morally correct, and economically optimal.

However, this is all hogwash. The foundational work has not been done well enough.

“Profit” means augmenting “property”. Yet, “PROPERTY” CAN ONLY BE DEFINED BY GOVERNMENT.

For example, the Babylonian state, the Roman state, 15 centuries later, and the USA, 33 centuries after, allowed to own people as “property”. However the rights of those slaves were vastly different: Babylonian slavery was not “racially” based, and slaves could become immensely richer than their owners…

In the Roman Republic, for five centuries, “property” was defined as land, and as such, it was limited, by law. In other words, Roman plutocracy was strictly limited by law. Thereof the secret of the success and longevity of the Roman republic.

However, the rise to Rome into a global empire, beyond the jurisdiction of the city of Rome, exploded both the application of the law and its relevance. Plutocracy got unchained, and wrecked its natural enemy, the Republic.

The present situation is technically similar to what happened to Rome when it went global: armed forces, finance and the economy have gone global, but NOT LEGAL JURISDICTION.

Western civilization has got global, but not its root, the rule of democratic law. One may as well transplant a giant tree in the desert, leaving its roots behind where they grew. This is not going to work.

The problem of international terrorism has two faces: international finance and the bombs it (indirectly) plants.

Indirect action can be extensive, along vast causal chains. For example giant kelp forests are disappearing off Alaska. Why? Because of (over)fishing.

How does that work? Extensive indirect causality. Human overfishing makes orcas hungry. The killer whales then go eat sea otters. Then urchins, now uneaten by sea otters, proliferate, and eat the kelp. hence the apparition of a lot of clear coastal waters off Alaska. Pretty, but not what the ecology used to be.

Indirect causality chains relate and entangle religious and financial terrorism. And they have a common cause: no global legal jurisdiction.  

Consider Salafist terrorism, as exemplified in Toulouse, France (killing of Jewish children and adults by a Salafist fanatic), or in the USA (killings by Salafist fanatics within the army, or in Boston), or in London (several times). How is it related to the tax terrorism practiced by Apple Inc, or Google, IBM, etc.?

In all these cases, it’s the limitation of legal jurisdiction that allows the growth of the criminal activity. The Salafists get their ideas according to what plutocrats in Saudi Arabia want them to have. The ideas the Saudis, a family of gangsters who have given their name to a country, wanted people to have are conveyed by considerable amounts of money. The Saudis pose as the guardians of Salafism (the way of the old ones). They actually seized power, 90 years ago, by spilling oceans of blood.

The promotion of bloody ideas and ideals the Saudis extol should all be illegal, and those instigating plutocrats ought to be put in prison. However, Western law does not reach within Saudi Arabia, for the exact same reason that it does not reach within global corporations.

The Saudis are, arguably, the world’s largest and most criminal corporation. (Qatar is only an also ran.)

Global corporations’ main business model consists in claiming to have no, or little, profits, outside of tiny jurisdictions that basically don’t tax them. Others claim to be made of subsidiaries that are citizens of nowhere (that’s Apple’s method).  Apple ferries more than 100 billions of profits through the British Virgin islands. The British Virgin islands have 20,000 citizens, and more than 500,000 global companies registered there.

As the Wall Street Journal just noticed, global corporations are now even hiding the thousands of subsidiaries they own, and through which they ferry profits, thanks to new USA laws. Many of the biggest USA companies have removed hundreds of offshore subsidiaries from their publicly disclosed financial filings over recent years. They are taking advantage of SEC rules that demand disclosure only when subsidiary operations are “significant” (meaning siphoning 105 of the business)

Oracle, for instance, disclosed more than 400 subsidiaries in its 2010 annual report. By 2012 the list had been whittled to eight—five of which were located in Ireland. Similar decreases in the number of disclosed subsidiaries were found in filings by Google, FedEx, Raytheon and Microsoft. Presto, no more traceable profits!

In the European Union alone, tax evasion by large crooks is evaluated at more than a trillion dollars, much more than all the national deficits combined.

Apple makes billions in the United Kingdom, while using services there provided by British society, still does not contribute to pay for any of what it exploits. It apparently pays a 2% global tax in Ireland alone. Amazon does something similar, paying basically no tax, while devouring local bookstores, which, submitted to local jurisdiction, pay huge taxes (thus have to sell their books at a much higher price).

Governments, all over the West, having learned their masters’ lesson well, have defined profits of said masters are inexistent, fiscally, while the masters are making the greatest profits ever, and unemployment is at a fifty year high in the West.

 It’s also striking that, although the greatest heists ever, have been revealed since 2007, no one, absolutely no one, has gone to jail for this. A striking example is the LIBOR CONSPIRACY. Many billions were stolen, however, none of the bosses of what is, therefore, twenty of the world’s largest criminal organizations, went to jail. It seems the largest thievery is perfectly profitable. 80% of financial derivative trading is through tax havens, and thus is hidden too.

Who profits from the new world order is becoming something to hide, and that has gone deep underground, all the way to Hades. The Sicilian mafia does not behave any differently.

Thus one can see that the neoconservatives advocates of predatory finance harbor contradictory notions; they claim profits should rule, but then their heroes, wealthy corporations and individuals, hide them as much as they can, just as predators hide their excrements. So what are profits about? Heavenly stuff, or something one cannot speak of?

The economy should not rest on what its beneficiaries want to hide.

***

Patrice Ayme

The Principle Of Plausible Public Utility

 

AN APPLICATION: REMOVING BANKERS’ DEMENTED PRIVILEGES.

In 1902, Lenin published "What is to be done?", a book in which he set up his blueprint towards his sort of revolution. He was later on able to make it work, with the indispensable help (I claim) of imperial Germany (this assertion with make howl old style "Marxist-Leninists").

At the times most of the intellectuals in Europe agreed that some revolution needed to be done. Even presidents of the USA such as the Roosevelts not only agreed, but implemented a lot of the elements of the proposed revolution.

Teddy Roosevelt acted against Rockefeller and other monopolists, simply because they controlled too much of the economy. Franklin Delano acted against who he denounced as "banksters"; he separated "Wall Street" and banking, because an obvious conflict of interest: one could not be in trust with the public’s money, supposedly, and then lose it all in Wall Street’s casino.

Europe sometimes preceding (German health care, French paid vacations), and sometimes following (governmental work programs) the USA, pushed further the revolutionary program (mostly as part of the renaissance of Europe after WWII). The European welfare state realized a lot of the most revolutionary ideas of the intellectuals of the past, and even of the most extreme of them. So it was in the USA, until Nixon started the counter-attack of privilege (he is the one who started the state financing of private health profiteers, creating HMOs; the fractional reserve banking system is also a similar state financing of private banking profiteers).

Interestingly, nowadays intellectuals to not seem to agree about what is going on. The indignation of the People in general seems ahead of the indignation, if not the imagination, of intellectuals.

So let me enounce once again what is wrong in a few words: some non elected individuals, the big bankers, were endowed, by the state and the supine nature of the People, with powers only sovereign states were endowed with in the last few millennia of civilization.

Those private, unelected individuals, the “bankers”, direct most of the existing capital towards not only the casino of Wall Street, as they did in the 1920s, but they direct most of capital a version of it on steroids, the casino of "derivatives", a casino in the sky that produces, and does nothing, except, at most, and very inefficiently, profits and bonuses, for the bankers and their accomplices.

For millennia, the STATE controlled the currency. Now, though, most of the currency is controlled by a few private individuals, the bankers. The fractional reserve system is set up that way. This is actually a devolution of civilization.

A comparable financial devolution of civilization in a sophisticated society has happened before: the French Ancient Regime let private individuals be in charge of taxation. The idea was simple: private individuals, motivated strongly by the profit motive, would raise taxes. They would extract bonuses, at their discretion, as the money passed by. Thus motivated by the profit motive, they would perform better. Those "tax farmers" were called the Fermiers Generaux ("General Farmers").

After the immensely ruinous French war for making America an entity independent of Great Britain, plus a bad eruption in Iceland, of the mighty volcano Laki (which caused crop failures), France’s financial situation became precarious, saddled with crushing debt. The hatred against Fermiers Generaux knew no bound, and led directly to the French revolution of 1789.

Now, again, a similar set-up has been pushed on people, on a world basis (it’s not just France). Private, non elected individuals, supposedly better motivated, because motivated by profit, have been put in charge, not just of grabbing people’s money (taxation) as the Fermiers Generaux were, but, better, to outright create People’s money, leveraged from the money deposited in banks (some deposited by common people, some from central banks, themselves supposedly expressions of People’s power).

The Roman emperors would have been mesmerized by this, and would have insisted that this could not possibly work, so much power in a few unelected individuals… besides being antagonistic to the basic principles of the republic.

But nevertheless, here we are. As is the case now, bankers create the currency, and lend it to their friends and themselves, with the connivance of the government, artificially boosting GDP, joining insult to injury.

In particular, all get starved of capital: employees, employers and industry, and also the People in general, and even vital equipment such as public goods and commons (hospitals, communications means, energy production, roads, railways, etc.).

Lenin and other revolutionaries complained about the exploitations of workers by employers. How quaint. At this point, what we have is exploitation of everybody, even employers, by a small number of individuals who ought to have only one right, that of disappearing. Also exploitation of the entire biosphere, to death, soon.

To make the outrageous, unwarranted, anti-democratic power of bankers disappear, in first order, one has to look at the global theory of derivatives. In truth, there is no such a thing. Why? Because it would easily show that the derivatives’ market ought to be mostly OUTLAWED.

Derivatives can be useful, but mostly only in the way they were initially set-up, to insure commercial operators (initially Middle Western farmers, hence the connection with Chicago). On a crowded planet, any state or private activity ought to satisfy a Principle of Plausible Public Utility. Anything else should be outlawed, according to the Principle of Precaution.

An example of this is Iranian nuclear power of enrichment of uranium: it does not satisfy the Principle of Plausible Public Utility (because it could lead to a local enrichment, hence nuclear bomb race, with its attending nuclear strikes, which would not be in the best interest of the region).

Left unregulated, the concept of derivatives would end up, and has ended up, sucking up most of the world’s imaginable capital, and even much more than that: the global derivative market is about twenty times world’s GDP. It’s sheer insanity.

A first obvious reform would be to outlaw the leveraged usage of derivatives for non commercial operators. That would force bankers to leverage themselves only in industrially and commercially profitable ventures.

Enough is enough.

Now, of course, derivatives is not all what is wrong with the financial sectors. Bankers are actually, just as the Fermiers Generaux were, AGENTS OF THE GOVERNMENT. Just as the Fermiers Generaux, they are in connivance with that exploitative government, and they finance it, just as the Fermiers Generaux did.

The way out of this, just as was done with the Fermiers generaux, is to recognize that bakers are actually, and ought to be formally, agents of the government.

That would allow to direct capital towards the economy, instead of the casino in the sky. That is exactly what the US Federal Reserve had to do on an emergency basis (other countries’ central banks also did the same; Paul Krugman calls this "Bernanke banking").

The financial crisis is not the only dimension of the world economic crisis. By itself, it would be enough to cause a catastrophe (as it did in 1929-1933). But there are other dimensions to the economic catastrophe that is slowly taking shape.

There is a global economic crisis due to globalization (a form of re-colonization; not that colonization is bad intrinsically, but, misused, it is indeed terrible). There is also an economic crisis caused by increasing energy and ecological problems (carbon is the only cheap energy readily available, if one neglects its biosphere killing effects). Related to the preceding crisis is one caused by insufficient technological and scientific progress, considering the piling up of problems, and one caused by the related dissemination of Weapons of Mass Destruction. Now the fact that world capital is controlled by only a few unelected individuals devoured by the profit motive, the root of the financial crisis, spills into the other dimensions of the economic crisis.

For example problems with batteries could be solved with massive investments in nanotechnology, but, if most of the capital is up in the sky, in the imaginary casino, it is not on the benches of primary, secondary and tertiary schools, and, without super minds, there will be no super technologies.

As it is all the super minds there are, go to Wall Street, where they become even more moronic than inferior schools had made them to start with.

After all, what is the main force behind the financial profit motive? Not common good, but nastiness personified. Philosophers (such as the famous Dr. Bernard de Mandeville), starting in the 17C, argued that nastiness could be made to operate for the common good (Adam Smith abstracted this two generation later with his theory of the "invisible hand"). Sure. But nothing beats direct common good, and the nobility and honor of the human spirit. Nowadays, what the future elites are taught is that GREED IS ALL THE GOOD THERE IS, and that good, if any, assuredly came from greed. Besides, there is no higher motive than to have property that the others do not have.

So not only did the big bankers steal the financial capital to set-up their infernal machine in the sky, but they have stolen humankind standard moral capital, decapitated our will to be better than greed, and made smarts into farts.

Wall Street society is what we have. We can do better, and we will, lest we disappear.

Patrice Ayme

***

P/S 1: The political process in the French republic already uses massively and explicitly the Principle of Precaution. Why? Because technology, the risks it can present evolves so fast nowadays that it is more prudent than ever to be extremely cautious. For example, although I am fanatically for the development and deployment of nanotechnology, studies to look into the safety of the various nanotechnologies ought to be financed massively in parallel.

The Principle of Plausible Utility ought to be added to the Principle of Precaution. It presents with its own hierarchy. For example DERIVATIVES HAVE PLAUSIBLE UTILITY IF AND ONLY IF THEY REDUCE THE VOLATILITY OF MARKETS. So, whenever a derivative is introduced, or a new usage of a derivative is contemplated, the primordial question ought to be: ‘Does it reduces overall markets’ volatility, especially in extreme situations?’ If not, the Principle of Precaution says that it ought not to be allowed.

***

P/S 2: The infection by private, unelected banksters is worldwide. Their headquarters are in Wall Street. In the 1920s, that happy crew financed and leveraged itself with the installation in Germany of a revenge machinery (by financing, for example the monster monopoly of I G Farben).

So it was only natural that Wall Street would make American lives into a profit center. On the face of it, this officialization of "Your money, or your health, or you life!" in the USA was only natural for those whose parents, or grand parents, spiritual or physical, financed those who killed people for money (as the Nazis did, by the millions). Not only that system of thought prospered at the time, but when Nazism was defeated, it was not condemned. (It’s only recently that research has established that a lot of the Nazis’ extermination program was motivated by PROFIT.) Thus this infernal system of thought kept on going, and came to thrive under Nixon (who created HMOs, and used the monopoly of the US Dollar as an economic weapon, although it had been forced, supposedly in trust, by the USA at Bretton Woods at the end of WWII).

The profiteering and grabbing of outrageous privileges by unelected individuals happen in private health "maintenance" and "insurance" in the USA. Just as in banking. President Barack Obama is now subscribing to this courageous thesis.

President Obama:

"This is the unsustainable path we’re on, and it’s the path the insurers want to keep us on. In fact, the insurance industry is rolling out the big guns and breaking open their massive war chest – to marshal their forces for one last fight to save the status quo. They’re filling the airwaves with deceptive and dishonest ads. They’re flooding Capitol Hill with lobbyists and campaign contributions. And they’re funding studies designed to mislead the American people. […]

It’s smoke and mirrors. It’s bogus. And it’s all too familiar. Every time we get close to passing reform, the insurance companies produce these phony studies as a prescription and say, “Take one of these, and call us in a decade.” Well, not this time. The fact is, the insurance industry is making this last-ditch effort to stop reform even as costs continue to rise and our health care dollars continue to be poured into their profits, bonuses, and administrative costs that do nothing to make us healthy – that often actually go toward figuring out how to avoid covering people. And they’re earning these profits and bonuses while enjoying a privileged exception from our anti-trust laws, a matter that Congress is rightfully reviewing."

President Obama has finally mobilized against the health care profiteers. Similar arguments hold against the banking profiteers. But to battle on all fronts requires concentrating all of one’s forces in turn. The beauty of it, though, is that the democratic machine deployed against the health vampires could be used nearly word for word, weapon for weapon, concept for concept, against the financial vampires.

***

Extinguishing The Carbonivores: Profitable.

 

IT’S PROFITABLE BEING GREEN.

American politicians often talk as if it were the essence of the USA to anchor the entire value system on profitability, something defined by Wall Street according to bonus. Taking into consideration the irresistibly rising seas, it may be timely to modify this fundament of the American Way Of Life.

Paul Krugman points out in “It’s Easy Being Green” (NYT, September 25, 2009) that “saving the planet won’t come free (although the early stages of conservation actually might). But it won’t cost all that much either.”

France emit less than one third of CO2 per unit of GDP that the USA require. That restraint on the spewing of carbon allows the French to live better.

Spewing carbon requires energy, literally, and rewards people with time spent in traffic jams, and other wasteful activities, plus higher rates of all sorts of debilitating and ultimately lethal diseases. While, on the bright side, one gets to make war in Afghanistan for a crucial pipeline, which will allow to spew even more carbon found deep underground in Central Asia.

The logic of mixing carbon and happiness needs to be carefully re-examined. Indeed, casual observation shows that the French, with first class basically free health care, a pretty good free educational system whose grandes ecoles compete in the technological know how they provide, with the best anywhere, plenty of interesting things to do during their extensive vacations, an excellent retirement system completely protected by law, and a country which is both high tech, a museum, and the most visited in the world, for obvious esthetic reasons, would not exchange their way of life with the increasingly declining and pathetic American one, steadily devoured by Wall Street’s profit-above-all morality.

In France, gasoline is about eight dollars a gallon. This is mostly tax: the intrinsic cost of oil is not any higher than in the USA, since it is shipped from relatively shorter distances. Still one can observe French youth going up mountains in powerful motorbikes on single track paths (although it’s forbidden). Conclusion: the price of gas is still too low in France. And indeed, serious studies have shown that individual consummation still augmented, in the last year, even after the French government’s last hike in fuel taxes.

France will implement a carbon tax in January 2010 (the price of carbon will be 17 Euros per ton, 20% above the free market, with the idea of rising it by 100% soon). The French carbon tax is the fruit of a political consensus, taken by all candidates before the last presidential election. In France the increasing consensus is that IT’S PROFITABLE BEING GREEN. This is also more or less the official line in Germany, and the new line in China.

France has forced that, by law, the carbon emissions from cars are always lower in the European Union (and China, among others, is now carbon copying the French/European strategy, from high taxes on gasoline, to the exact same CO2 tailpipe exhaust enforced in the EU).

It is now agreed that the soon to be implemented latest CO2 emissions from cars in the European Union will be a third of the ones in the USA (right now, they are half).

It’s no accident that the French car companies have the lowest fleet CO2 emissions, worldwide: it’s profitable to produce efficient cars. No accident, either, that BMW and Mercedes are on the ropes (and BMW is allying itself with Peugeot, developing new engines with the French firm’s know how; Peugeot SA being not only the world’s most efficient car company, but also just the double winner of the 24 hours of Le Mans with two turbo diesel cars…)

The CARBONIVOROUS class is not interested to pay for the mess it leaves behind, and all the lives it destroys: if it did, carbon could not compete, it would be too expensive (except for aircraft fuel, since algae fuel has not been massively developed and deployed yet; astonishingly, algae are such that they have a negative CO2 contribution).

Using carbon when not necessary, does not just threaten the climate, but everybody’s health: applying to carbon the same criterions of safety that are applied in the nuclear industry would be immensely costly for the carbon industry, it would be unable to compete with renewables, and nuclear. Civilian nuclear energy killed many only in the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster (which was easy to avoid, and would not have occurred, if only the insanely conceived reactor, of a type that ought not to exist, had been surrounded by a containment building of Western mandatory standards: the explosion would have stayed inside!)

Carbon energy, even when neglecting the effect on climate, even when restricted to Europe and America, kills orders of magnitude more people, year after year, than Chernobyl did (at least several hundred thousands are killed by carbon, each year, and a few hundreds, once, at Chernobyl, an accident that had more to do with Stalinist methods than anything else).

Carbon burning consists into exploding in the air 400 million years of buried geology in a few decades: it is a truly absurd form of geoengineering. It has no future. So the CARBONIVORES will fight to death: after all, they fight to prevent their own extinction.

Patrice Ayme

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com

***

P/S: So the argument above was that saving carbon saves health, lives, and energy. For the former, life, it may not be a coincidence that the French average hospitalization rate is 40% of the one in Manhattan. (So Manhattanites get hospitalized 2.5 times more.)Although cars are less used in Manhattan than in the rest of the USA, the life style in Manhattan is clearly unhealthy and unsuitable by French standards: as a lot of Wall Street money escapes to Connecticut, not enough is left to insure French standards of health and comfort, in Manhattan itself. Wasting carbon encourages wasting standards of living all over.